Stevenson had other handicaps. He should have been dueling with Eisenhower, not Truman and Nixon. But the President had taken a lofty stance above the battle. Like President Roosevelt, he wouldn’t let his opponent come to grips with him. When not preoccupied with the deepening crises abroad, he ran serenely on the GOP’s bland campaign slogan, “Peace, Progress, Prosperity.” Nixon, meantime, had discovered what would later become one of his most familiar political stratagems. Confronted by alternatives, he would choose the popular one while insisting that it was really the harder of the two. It would be “easy,” he said, for him to endorse an end to hydrogen bomb testing, as Stevenson was urging. Then, his voice vibrating, the Vice President announced that his conscience compelled him to defy public opinion and call for continuing tests. Actually it was Stevenson who was taking the hard road; few votes were lost that year by demanding bigger and better bombs. Nixon was having it both ways, pleasing the majority while winning marks for audacity.
The professionals in Stevenson’s camp warned that the testing issue would alienate large blocs of Democrats, especially in ethnic and blue-collar neighborhoods. He knew it, and his decision to plunge ahead anyway, insisting that what he had to say needed saying, was an example of true political courage. In such moments the gallant candidate of 1952 could still be seen. He hadn’t lacked heart then and didn’t now. His difficulties were with shrewdness and native cunning—small virtues, perhaps, but essential in a political leader.
To laymen, Eisenhower’s testing argument—that improved bombs must be built so that the U.S. could “negotiate” from a “position of strength rather than weakness,” that “the only way to win World War III is to prevent it”—sounded persuasive. While time would later vindicate Stevenson, elections are not won by such moral victories. The cold war was still a formidable reality in 1956. Stevenson misjudged its impact, and not only on the question of testing. In the middle of one address he declared that it was time to take a “new look” at American defenses and to consider “ending the draft.” So many voices were raised in protest that he was thrown on the defensive, never a good stance for the challenger.
As November approached, Stevenson’s campaign became wobbly. He was tired, he was careless, and in his election eve telecast he was guilty of bad taste. Repugnant as the matter was, he said, “I must say bluntly that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard M. Nixon would probably be President of the country within the next four years.” It was true. Saying it in a nationwide broadcast was another matter. It jarred Stevenson’s followers, and it was an unhappy note upon which to end a brave battle against odds.
The dimensions of the second Eisenhower avalanche were awesome. He won 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 72, amassing a triumphant margin of nearly ten million votes. For the first time in a quarter of a century, Negroes were voting Republican. The President had won two-thirds of the nonunion labor vote and 45 percent of the votes of union members. He had swept all the new suburbs. His plurality was 16 percent, just two points behind Hoover’s in 1928.
This time Eisenhower celebrated in the presidential suite of Washington’s Sheraton Park. By 9 P.M. what little suspense there had been was over. Sherman Adams was sitting on the floor staring rapturously at a small TV tube. Jerry Persons called out in his Alabama accent: “I want all of you to know that the cradle of the Confederacy—Montgomery, Alabama—has just voted for a Republican for the first time in its history!” Ike led the cheering. To Emmet Hughes he said, “There’s Michigan and Minnesota still to see. You remember the story of Nelson—dying, he looked around and asked, ‘Are there any of them still left?’ I guess that’s me. When I get in a battle, I just want to win the whole thing… six or seven states we can’t help. But I don’t want to lose any more. Don’t want any of them ‘left’—like Nelson. That’s the way I feel.”
All in all it had been a tedious election. Yet there had been one exciting moment at the Democratic convention. Declining to select his running mate, Stevenson had announced that the delegates would make the choice, and in the ensuing turmoil the watching nation had been given a glimpse of the future.
The scramble was between Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore, Robert Wagner, John F. Kennedy, and—the only man who had come to Chicago as an avowed vice-presidential candidate—Hubert Humphrey. Kefauver won, but Kennedy, in nearly beating him, had made a greater impression on the watching audience. The nomination had seemed to be in his grasp after Senator Lyndon Johnson came out for him, shouting tremulously, “Texas proudly casts its vote for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle,” but at that moment Missouri switched from Gore to Kefauver. Next day the New York Herald Tribune’s convention story began, “The famous Kennedy luck ran out today.” Actually, losing the vice-presidential nomination was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to Kennedy. He had appeared on the rostrum to make a short, charming speech of concession, and his winning manner had created an instant Kennedy constituency. The country was now aware of him. As James MacGregor Burns noted, “Kennedy’s near-victory and sudden loss, the impression he gave of a clean-cut boy who had done his best and who was accepting defeat with a smile—all this struck at people’s hearts in living rooms across the nation.”
That was half of it. The other half was that since he hadn’t made the ticket, its subsequent defeat couldn’t be blamed on him or, more especially, on his Catholicism, which had been regarded as a crushing political handicap since Hoover’s rout of Al Smith in 1928. Shortly after the election Kennedy was told that he would easily win the vice-presidential nomination in 1960. “I’m not running for Vice President any more,” he said crisply. “I’m now running for President.”
TWENTY-THREE
The Pursuit of Happiness
The Eisenhower siesta, as it may be called, extended from the Korean armistice in 1953 to the autumn of 1957, when Americans who had assumed that their technical supremacy would never be challenged were dismayed to learn that rocketeers in the Soviet Union had stolen a long march on them. After that, the country’s self-confidence was never the same. Ahead lay a frantic hundred-billion-dollar scramble to reassert the U.S. technological lead by exploring the stars while, year by year, disheartening developments on earth were causing a new and different erosion of American pride. To those who had cherished it, the 1953–57 breather would come to be remembered as an uncomplicated, golden time, mourned as lost childhoods are mourned and remembered, in nostalgia, as cloudless.
If it was never that splendid, neither was it as flatulent as its intellectuals made it out to be. In their view these were dreary, complacent years of an all-out, pedal-to-the-floor materialistic binge in which mass society bred alienation, conformity, facelessness, and moral emptiness; a frivolous boredom and a joyless vulgarity; a time of rootlessness, when small-town hotels were being replaced by 41,000 motels, at the more pretentious of which you could, for a quarter, lie on a bed and have your erogenous zones jiggled. The disillusioned saw America as a country in which religion had been reduced to Dial-a-Prayer, Modern Screen’s series on “How the Stars Found Faith,” and prepackaged sixty-second solutions for every spiritual problem. In this judgment the mid-1950s were entirely lacking in merit, with status being represented by the key to the executive washroom, virility by the Mennen After-Shave Club, democracy by a vote for Miss Rheingold, decor by the knotty pine rumpus room, and economics by You Auto Buy Now.
There were a lot of gadgets. Technological change had never held a greater fascination for Americans. Men talked wonderingly of transistors, those slivers of germanium or silicon no bigger than a shoelace tip which, when not running tiny radios like Congressman Hebert’s, were powering hearing aids so small that they could fit in the frames of spectacles and lightening the load of fighter planes by 1,500 pounds. But all the gadgetry wasn’t necessarily bad. Only an ascetic crank could despise the Simmons Company for promoting king- and
queen-sized Beautyrest mattresses. If it was absurd to find strips of paper across motel toilet seats reading “This seat has been sterilized for your protection,” the fact remained that too much cleanliness was preferable to too little. And after Los Alamos and all that it was rather engaging to find that American technologists were now making life more comfortable.
There was nothing inherently wrong with the innovations, though their sheer number was sometimes bewildering: central vacuuming, vinyl flooring, push-button phones, stereo FM sets, washer-dryers, automatic transmissions, drive-in shopping malls, air-conditioned buses, electric blankets, electric floor polishers, electric pencil sharpeners, electric can openers, and electric floor waxers, to name only the most conspicuous. One by one they appeared, were assimilated into the general experience, and became a part of the average middle-class American’s routine. And little by little the more practical innovations altered everyday existence. At one time or another in the mid-1950s millions of men and women of the swing generation realized that in countless little ways life had become easier, more tolerable, more convenient, more interesting—in a word, more livable. At about the same time they remembered the Depression. With a sense of awe they realized: It’s gone.
And so it had. Evidence of a surge to abundance was everywhere. The boom arose from many springs; natural resources, global politics after World War II, demography, the altered economy of Western Europe, and Americans’ love of work. The United States was producing half of the world’s goods. Since the war the Gross National Product had doubled. (By the early 1970s it would double again.) U.S. investment abroad had increased from twelve billion dollars to eighty billions. The budget of one firm, General Motors, had grown to the size of Poland’s.
The consequence of all this was a standard of living beyond the comprehension of the rest of the world. Nearly 60 percent of all American families were reporting wages in the middle-class brackets. Just since the late 1940s the median family income had risen from $3,083 to $5,657; even when corrected for inflation this meant a rise of 48 percent. America, in Adolf A. Berle’s phrase, was in the throes of “galloping capitalism.” The proletariat was being transformed. Assembly line workers with working wives were driving expensive new automobiles and buying stocks. Fortune in May 1954 suggested that it was “time to change the stereotype of the American middle-class consumer. He is hot, and has not been for some years, a small landlord or drugstore proprietor. If any stereotype at all is meaningful, it might be the machinist in Detroit.”
No sooner had the Depression survivor comprehended the new prosperity than he became obsolescent. Economic prosperity had been the impossible dream of his youth. His fiscal instincts were timid, defensive; if he could get a hundred dollars together, he squirreled it away. But thrift had suddenly become old-fashioned. Americans who had come of age since World War II, who had no memory of the lean years, were spending every cent they could lay their hands on together with other income they wouldn’t earn for a long time to come. “Big spender” became a term of approbation. The spenders were living on credit and buying on margin like the speculators of 1929, except that they were acquiring consumer goods, not securities. Life for them was life on the installment plan. Between 1952 and 1956 consumer debt in the United States increased from 27.4 billion dollars to 42.5 billions, or 55 percent. Installment credit grew 63 percent and that for automobiles almost 100 percent. Though these were boom years, disposable income for individuals increased by merely 21 percent. The new Americans were in hock to the future, and they were plainly enjoying it. They spoke with easy confidence of “debt consolidation” and revolving credit plans. A new profession, debt counseling, sprang up to advise them on ways of handling their credit.
Even the big earners among the new suburbanites saved little. In both Long Island’s Levittown and Illinois’s Park Forest, the average bank deposit was about $300. Accustomed to tax withholding and packaged mortgages, the young couples were indifferent to rates of interest. Installment buyers asked of a new purchase only the size of the monthly payments. They actually seemed to find security in the entrapment of bank loans, in the obligations of coupon books with specified payments and debts. And the banks were delighted to oblige them. “Instead of merchandising the idea of saving,” William H. Whyte Jr. observed, they were providing “the apparatus of it.”
Grasshoppers, their scandalized parents called them. Older brothers and sisters were also shocked. Over and over one heard couples in their thirties say of those in their twenties, “When we were that age we wouldn’t have dreamed of going into debt.” But in the past Americans had lacked the protection of such institutions as hospital insurance and expanded social security. There were fewer reasons for nest eggs now. In a short-term emergency the new people could always float another loan. That clearly violated the precepts of rugged individualism—what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic—but it was individualism, the young hedonists in the developments pointedly replied, which had led to the Depression. In ads one noted a decline in the very vocabulary of the Protestant ethic: such verbs as “compel,” “force,” “climb,” and “control” had become unfashionable. Spending was not only more fun, the young argued; it was more sensible. Some thought it more patriotic, too. One radio station recorded a five-voice choir singing a jingle which ended, “Buy, buy something that you need today” and played it seventy times a day.
Even if you didn’t need what you bought, you were still fueling the boom. Any tendency to go the other way was considered alarming. One New York newspaper reported that a “rise in thrift” was “disturbing the administration.” Madison Avenue quoted Samuel Butler—“All progress is based upon a universal desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income”—and a researcher for the J. Walter Thompson agency came up with an indulgent quotation from, of all people, Benjamin Franklin: “Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labor and industry?… May not luxury therefore produce more than it consumes, if, without such a spur, people would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?” (In the ad citing this reflection the agency said that it “appears to be a mature afterthought, qualifying his earlier and more familiar writings on the importance of thrift.”)
John Kenneth Galbraith maintained that talk of customer sovereignty had become nonsense. Demand was managed; consent was engineered; the public was being subjected to organized bamboozlement. This was consumership, as essential to an understanding of the evolving new economy as Dullesship was to an understanding of American policy abroad. In the packaged suburbs it was called the “good life.” It meant the gratification of acquisitive desires—the split-level home, two cars in the two-car garage, a boat, a place at the beach, more new possessions as old ones wore out or became unfashionable (which was often, thanks to the wizards of planned obsolescence), and, somewhere in the nebulous future, college educations for the children, who would then begin to repeat the process. But the prosperity psychology was not confined to the suburbanites. It was meant to include everyone in the growing middle class. It had to be; mass production assumed mass consumption. Farther down the status ladder, Americans whose lower incomes would not permit a move to the Park Forests, Park Merceds, and Drexelbrooks (that is, an income below $4,800 to $5,200) participated by buying other wares, notably those hawked in television commercials: beers, dentifrices, pain-killers, rinses, cake mixes, laxatives, detergents, razor blades, skin conditioners, cigarettes, and—the big purchase for most families—new cars. In the relentless propaganda for goods in general, viewers were ceaselessly urged to be on the lookout for advertised brands, to get them, to incur debt with approved finance companies if that was necessary, and to participate in the huckstered vision of the good life or risk the loss of everything they prized, including their own sense of identity.
The concepts of consumer exploitation and manipulation were not new to the mid-1950s, but widespread awareness of them was. Motivational research, wi
th all it implied, was becoming highly sophisticated. Its seductive presence was felt in virtually every walk of life. The candor of advertising’s chief legerdemainists was sometimes breathtaking. They gloried in building empires on the smell of soap, the texture of its suds, the whiteness of textiles. At their wish, they boasted—and they had polls and sales figures to confirm them—buyers from Oregon to Cape Cod switched to Marlboros, discarded their undershorts for jockey shorts by Fruit of the Loom, or made pilgrimages to the loan companies so their wives and daughters could answer affirmatively the famous question which, Philip Wylie had said, was inherent in all ads beamed at American women: “Madam, are you a good lay?”
Of the creative pitchmen A. C. Spectorsky said:
These people, God save us all, set the styles, mold the fashions, and populate the dreams of the rest of the country. What they do will be done, a few weeks or months later, by their counterparts in Lake Forest and Santa Barbara and on the Main Line. What they decree, via such esoteric channels as the “People Are Talking About…” feature in Vogue, will all too often be picked up and actually talked about, in Beverly Hills, Grosse Pointe, and Sewickley. What they tell us to buy, by God, we buy.
Spectorsky was fascinated by these transactions. Others were more judgmental. The deliberate encouragement of irrational behavior and impulse buying constituted an invasion of privacy, they said; people were being victimized. The creation of wants was a form of enslavement, and the critics believed that they could detect symptoms of profound disturbance beneath the prosperous surface of Eisenhower America. The figures on alcoholism and addiction to the new tranquilizers were alarming. By 1957 drug sales had increased sevenfold since the end of the war. There was much more shoplifting. In one Illinois community the average shoplifter was not, as might be expected, a figure of destitution or even want. She was, the chief of police said, a housewife married to a junior executive making $8,000 a year; she was a churchgoer, active in the PTA, a member of a bridge club, and a consumer with about $50 a week to spend.
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