American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  And looking out over the social and physical landscape surrounding the cities, critics felt they had plenty to worry about. Huge eight-lane highways were grinding their way through the working-class sectors into the greener areas beyond, bringing in their wake concrete cloverleafs, shopping malls, towering apartment houses, and—much further out—suburban ranch houses complete with swimming pools, manicured greens, picture windows, and outdoor barbecue pits. These were the baronies of the new middle classes, “from the managerial employees and the ‘idea men’ in the talent professions at the top,” Max Lerner wrote, “to the file clerks and sales girls at the bottom: a formless cluster of groups, torn from the land and from productive property, with nothing to sell except their skills, their personality, their eagerness to be secure, their subservience and silence.”

  The new middle classes, bursting with achievers and achievers-to-be, with postwar “baby-boomers,” with creative skills, with ladders of upward mobility, were the source of enormous energy and talent in the America of the 1950s, and a source too of social and political equilibrium. But critics, even aside from the intellectual disdain for picture windows and barbecue pits, worried about more than dreary suburbs and empty lives. They fretted over psyches. A central fear carried over from earlier work by Erich Fromm, a German philosopher and psychoanalyst who had emigrated to the United States after Hitler’s seizure of power. In 1941 Fromm published Escape from Freedom, which held that, upon the lifting of feudal ties and hierarchy, Protestantism had produced fearful and alienated persons, that industrialization had forced on such persons competitive, insecure lives that left them fearful of economic crises, loss of jobs, and imperialistic wars, and that the outcome was a tendency to submit to authoritarian leaders who offered them feelings of involvement, security, and power. This was the road to fascism. While Fromm feared these tendencies in all strata, he and his followers saw the middle classes—especially the lower middle classes—as most vulnerable to the appeal of fascism.

  Other social critics eschewed such apocalyptic visions but they had major concerns of their own. In 1950 David Riesman, a University of Chicago social theorist still in his thirties, gained almost instant attention with The Lonely Crowd, a study of the “other-directed” personality that had replaced the “inner-directed” product of the Protestant ethic, which earlier had superseded the “tradition-directed” member of a hierarchical society held in the family embrace of clan, caste, and castle. In the affluent, leisure-minded postwar era, Riesman’s other-directed man, anti-individualistic, group-centered, and conformist, put social solidarity and harmony over his own individuality and was ready to market his personality rather than his skill or creativity. The Lonely Crowd was studded with memorable phrases and insights: the oversteered child—from Bringing Up Children to Bringing Up Father—from craft skill to manipulative skill—from the bank account to the expense account—heavy harmony and lonely success— the automat versus the glad hand—captains of industry and captains of consumption.

  In this book and in Individualism Reconsidered, a collection of essays, Riesman explored the implications of the new conformity for freedom. The pressure of the group on most individuals was so profound, he contended, that they doubted both their ability and their right to stand on their own. How then to protect the freedom of the individual, especially for the solitary man? Only by an appeal to resources within the person, to a heightened self-consciousness, an awareness of potentials and inadequacies, the will to exercise a freedom to make choices in a realm somewhere between anarchy and conformity. Ultimately Riesman sought to find a balance between individuality and comradeship.

  Another social critic, William H. Whyte, Jr., wrote even more urgently about the influence of the scientific managers, the recruitment bias toward team players and mediocrity, the corporate demand for togetherness, adjustment, compromise, and conformity. A Princeton graduate and longtime Fortune editor, Whyte followed the spoor of his Organization Men in multiversities and suburbia and their flowering in the hierarchies of corporation boards, law factories, hospitals, banks, the military, education, and organized religion. The old-fashioned boss wanted only a man’s sweat, he wrote, the modern boss his soul. “Group-think,” company loyalty, committee decision-making were the order of the day.

  Whyte’s central concern was over the personal freedoms of individuals, their liberation from the group, the office, the organization. His solution, like Riesman’s, was to appeal to the individual to be an individual, to broaden freedom within the group or organization. Nonconformists, however, must recognize the genuine needs of the organization even as they explored crevices, escape mechanisms, room at the bottom. Was this enough? Even Whyte seemed unsure.

  Hailed as the latest in social criticism, the work of both Riesman and Whyte had old-fashioned assumptions and goals. Their appeal to the individual to win liberation from group, community, and office was hardly more than a sophisticated modernization of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century search for liberty from church and state. Such Bill of Rights liberties were fundamental but were they enough? What was freedom for? Released from their social or other bonds, how could human beings define and achieve more positive freedoms—even those as simple and fundamental as FDR’s Four Freedoms? Riesman and Whyte and their colleagues grappled with this kind of question too, but at best they could foresee some kind of murky balance between autonomy and togetherness. Hence they appeared to leave humankind in an existential predicament.

  Herbert Marcuse did not share such intellectual inhibitions. Borrowing heavily from Hegel as well as Marx, he explored the interiors of freedom and proposed a dialectical consciousness able to perceive an alternative to any given reality and to use reason to judge between true and false needs. To think dialectically was freedom itself, the vital creative act. Marcuse wanted theory geared to human needs; he wanted the productive system to serve the needs of the entire society; he wanted people to test all the possibilities of erotic and intellectual fulfillment; he wanted them to convert their bodies into instruments of pleasure. But the means of reaching this Utopia he left fuzzy.

  And so the acolytes of Freedom argued and agonized over its meaning in a modern age. If intellectual progress seemed slow—if the very terms were misty, if the content of Freedom was so comprehensive as to seem all-inclusive, if the priorities among types of freedom lacked precision, if the ways of expanding freedom ranged from the overly utilitarian to the foolishly Utopian—if all this was true, at least the theorists and practitioners of Freedom were bumping up against its wider and deeper dimensions, organizational, industrial, psychological, cultural, and sexual.

  At the very heart of the American idea of freedom were still the noble “First Freedoms” of thought and speech, press and religion. And of these freedoms none was more vigorously pressed and expressed in the fifties than the right of newspapers and other media to offer information and opinion without interference by public authority or hostile group. Even as the press proclaimed and practiced freedom, however, the media faced threats to their liberties far less from outside foes than from internal tendencies toward consolidation and conformity.

  Automation continued to transform the production of newspapers as it did other industries. Mergenthaler’s Blue Streak Comet bypassed the venerable Linotype keyboard by using teletype tape for matrix assembly. Harris-Intertype’s Monarch speeded up slug-casting by tape that performed over ten operations per second. Old-time newshawks, weaned on their Linotype, looked on in amazement as tape-triggered brass matrices streamed into the assembly, “making a clinking rhythm like that of a poker player at Las Vegas riffling silver dollars,” Editor & Publisher reported, “and quicker than you could say ‘aces back-to-back,’ column-width slugs lined up at the rate of fourteen per minute.” Technology continued apace. By the late 1950s Interstate’s Fotosetter, arraying characters by photography on acetate film for the printing plate, was offering a variety of type sizes. Even the larger dailies were now using the wire servi
ces’ teletypesetters that transmitted tape ready for the composing machines.

  Enormously expensive, the new machines called for heavy investments that in turn encouraged newspaper consolidations. William Randolph Hearst’s death at the start of the decade and the succession of his five sons as heads of Hearst Consolidated Publications were a reminder that consolidation was one of the oldest habits in the newspaper game, even under the aegis of flamboyant tycoons like the erratic crusader and art collector of San Simeon. By 1960 hundreds of newspapers were organized in “groups,” a term the trade preferred to “chains.” The new Hearst—but far more reserved in manner and provocativeness—was Samuel I. New-house, who controlled the Portland Oregonian, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and over a dozen other major papers and magazines. Newhouse astutely combined mergers and cost-cutting techniques. The extent to which consolidation led to conformity—or on the other hand provided papers with the financial capacity not to conform—remained a simmering issue in the newspaper world.

  What was not in dispute, however, was that newspapers had become big business—and were assuming the views that went with it. The great majority of newspapers—and an even larger proportion of total newspaper circulation—had been Republican for so long that people took the one-party press almost for granted; some analysts concluded that many readers simply discounted the conservative bias of editors and columnists. More insidious and hence more influential was the press’s tendency toward conformity. By using a term like red, Marxist, socialist, or reactionary, Max Lerner wrote, the newspapers “cast it outside the pale of discussion. By a black magic they place a taboo on it.” Equally insidiously, many newspapers played it safe, featuring comics, crossword puzzles, and games and dramatizing sensations of crime and sex at the same time that their editorial pages were monuments of insipidity.

  In the decade of the growing cold war the most marked effect of press conformity was to rally around the cold war. A Protestant magazine article charged that the press and radio “first lay down a terrific barrage against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of substance shriek of atom bombs, or plots to overthrow our government, of espionage, of high treason, and of other blood-curdling crimes.” This was the prelude to labeling all opposition as “red.” A longtime press-watcher, Curtis MacDougall of Northwestern University’s journalism school, noted that when an Associated Press correspondent found no war fever in Moscow, his dispatch was buried in inside pages; if he had reported the opposite, it would have been headlined. Polls indicated that the percentage of Americans who viewed a third world war as inevitable rose steadily from 32 percent in late 1945 to 73 percent in early 1948. Many Americans, influenced both by official and press hysteria and demagoguery at home and by events abroad, obviously did see a red menace.

  Later it seemed apparent that most journalists were not biased in their reporting but rather, emerging as they did from the same class and cultural environment, shared cold war assumptions that dominated their perception of events. These assumptions made it more tempting for journalists not only to report happenings but to take part in them. The austere Walter Lippmann had a notable role in conceiving and shaping as well as reporting and analyzing the Marshall Plan. Some reporters complained of being “used” by government, others boasted of it, but in fact officials and reporters were each using the other, for their own purposes. This intertwining of government and press became so close during the 1950s that Douglass Cater, a journalist himself, described the press as the fourth branch of government, full of journalistic brokers and middlemen, compartmentalized much like the government itself, trading information with publicity-seeking politicians, and exerting an influence on government that astonished visitors from abroad—especially British journalists, who generally maintained a certain deference toward the cabinet government in London.

  It was not an era for journalistic innovation. Would-be enterprisers in publishing could hardly forget the sad story of the newspaper PM, which had risen in the early forties and then fallen despite the brilliant editorship of Ralph Ingersoll, heavy advances by Marshall Field III and other investors, and reporting by a stable of top-flight writers. FDR himself had welcomed the new paper, in part because its refusal to take advertising, Roosevelt wrote Ingersoll, “appeals to me as a new and promising formula for freedom of the press.” Strident, opinionated, ranging in its collective views from left liberal to liberal left, PM had to abandon its policy of not running advertising and then was itself abandoned by Field. The Chicago publisher had other problems. He had started the Chicago Sun in 1941, purchased the Chicago Times six years later, combined the two—and found that McCormick’s Tribune had a lock on newsstands, the best comics, and Associated Press membership.

  A brilliant innovation of the 1920s, however, was more prosperous—and more controversial—than ever thirty years later. Time magazine’s circulation soared during the 1950s from 1.65 million to 2.54 million at decade’s end. Life, launched by Time Inc. in 1936, with its circulation base up to 5.6 million by the mid-fifties, belonged to the elite family of mass-circulation magazines: Reader’s Digest (10.4 million), which had begun to take advertising; The Saturday Evening Post (4.8 million); Look (4.1 million biweekly); Collier’s (3.8 million biweekly); Woman’s Home Companion (4.1 million monthly). It was estimated that advertisers had put well over a billion dollars into Life during its first twenty years. By 1960 the total assets of Time Inc., which now included several magazines and a variety of other enterprises, had risen to $230 million, almost a tenfold increase in twenty years.

  Preacher and sermonizer, innovator and enterpriser, moralizer and manipulator, Henry Luce ran his empire with a sometimes imperious, sometimes gentle hand. He delegated considerable authority to his subordinates, but the compelling suggestions, pithy comments, and measured exhortations that streamed from his office, along with his custom of directly editing each magazine for a week or two while the managing editor stood aside, brought his forceful presence into every editorial department. Luce made no secret of his own political views—he was for God, country, the OOP, free enterprise, and Yale, not necessarily in that order. All the editorial convictions of Time Inc., Luce wrote his editors in a paper titled “The Practice of Freedom,” could be summarized in one word, Freedom, by which Luce meant the Bill of Rights, representative government, and competitive free enterprise.

  Luce played high politics in the Republican party, throwing his own and sometimes his magazines’ weight behind favored candidates such as Wendell Willkie. But like many an American President, he saw far less power looking out of his office than others saw looking in. Many of his best writers and editors were New or Fair Dealers. Most could easily find jobs elsewhere. And to the “top performers,” as John Kobler wrote, “Luce developed a strong, deep, possessive attachment.” He would brook considerable independence before he would let go a man like Theodore White, who came to differ with him sharply over China policy, but in the end, of course, it was never Luce who went. Life itself seemed indestructible until it was challenged by a medium that was bringing pictures—up-to-the-minute moving pictures—into the nation’s living rooms.

  Television was only beginning to come into its own by 1950, but one thing was already clear—the new medium would be a commercial proposition. Just as a small group of teachers, parents, and others had tried to salvage radio for educational purposes and failed, so in the 1950s a comparable group strove to hold a number of channels for higher intellectual levels and standards of taste. Indeed, in that decade television achieved a kind of “Golden Age” as artists and intellectuals experimented with innovative forms of entertainment, featured Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now on CBS and NBC’s Today Show, and premiered Laurence Olivier’s feature film Richard III before it hit the movie-house circuit.

  But even the most optimistic innovators in television could not ignore the millions of “little black boxes” that by the mid-fifties sat in most American homes—radio sets that were also chambers of horrors to the cr
itics. The listener could turn the knob from station to station and hear the same programming—endless popular music dispensed by jabbering disc jockeys and punctuated by a profusion of commercials along with a few news snippets. By 1960, with over 500 commercial television stations, TV appeared to be headed in the same direction that radio had taken. The reformers could not overcome the combined power of advertisers and broadcasters, who resisted invasion of their immensely profitable turf by invoking both the spirit of free enterprise and the sanctity of free speech.

  A pervasive complacency, a burgeoning middle class, suburban togetherness, automated workers, widespread anomie and escapism, media pitched to the lowest common denominator, trivialization of thought—all these in different ways helped produce a politics of blandness, conformity, and consensus during the 1950s. To be sure, President Eisenhower had begun his Administration in 1953 with constructive purposes, buttressed by Republican majorities in House and Senate. On the domestic front he had created a new department, Health, Education, and Welfare, established the Air Force Academy, replaced mandatory farm price supports with flexible supports based on “modernized parity,” won a housing act that somewhat expanded public housing and eased the burden of home mortgages, and signed legislation establishing a thirteen-year construction program for a 41,000-mile interstate system of highways. On foreign policy he sought to carry on a bipartisan approach, working with leaders of the Democratic minority like Senator Walter George of Georgia, just as Truman had collaborated with Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg.