Henry R. Luce, editor-in-chief of Life, explained in his foreword to the book version, which appeared later in the year, that, “more than anything else, the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose.” Providing a sort of Norman Rockwell touch, he wrote that “a group of citizens may begin by talking about the price of eggs or the merits of education, but they end by asking each other: what are we trying to do overall? Where are we trying to get? What is the National Purpose of the U.S.A.?” America had become “the greatest nation in the world.” But the questions of the day were about what America would now “do with the greatness” and whether it was “great in the right way.”
Luce was one of the most influential opinion shapers in America, perhaps the most influential for the rank and file of the reading public. He was the head of a publishing empire that included not only Life but also Time (the most widely read print newsmagazine in the country in an era when print still held its place as the most respected medium), Fortune (the leading business weekly), and the new Sports Illustrated. Luce, a Yale graduate and the son of Presbyterian missionaries to China, was a wide-ranging and inventive thinker in his own right. America was his mission, and he tended to see the interests of God and country as going hand in hand. He invented the phrase “The American Century” in 1941, having prophesied prior to America’s entry into the war that the nation was destined to become the leader of the free world. Americans had taken up that task and warmed to it. Now, almost twenty years later, the nation seemed to be drifting, and Luce wished to clarify where it should be heading.
The immediate context was that 1960 was an election year, and it was not clear exactly where the nation was headed. The recent years had been the first in a generation when the nation’s purpose had not been clear. In the 1930s, the nation had the clear goal of recovering from the Depression. Then came World War II, postwar rebuilding, and the Korean War. Ike had been president since 1953. He had led the “Crusade in Europe,” as he had titled his World War II memoir in 1948, but his presidency had been marked by his efforts to fend off the efforts of others to create a crusading or crisis atmosphere. Early in his presidency he had faced a challenge led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had attempted to turn anticommunism into a major domestic purge of anyone who had ever had leftist affiliations. The Cold War was at its height, and one of Ike’s goals was to dampen the kind of zealotry that might lead to World War III. Moderation, however, came at a price: it could seem like lack of direction. Ever since the Soviet Union had launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, critics of the administration had complained of a missile gap, saying that America was losing the space race. On the domestic front, there was a great deal of anxiety as to whether unprecedented prosperity and shallow popular culture might be causing the nation to lose its moral bearings as well.
In the original Life version of the series, the magazine’s chief editorial writer, John K. Jessup (Yale ’28), set the stage for the discussion. Amid lavish color illustrations of national icons, Jessup guided readers through the high points of American rhetoric, from the Declaration of Independence to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The American project of building democracy had become, as Woodrow Wilson had declared, an international project of “making the world safe for democracy.” Yet the Cold War world of the 1950s seemed anything but safe, and Americans seemed to be faltering on sustaining the first principles upon which democracy was built. “Self-government” had been a perennial American goal, he said, but today that idea, “that men can govern themselves in freedom under law,” might seem “too 18th Century for the world’s needs today, or America’s complex relation to it.” Furthermore, Jessup argued, “democracy . . . is not the highest value known to man.” Rather, it works only because it is grounded in “higher allegiances,” allegiances, that is, to “moral law.” Americans, he affirmed, have a “public love affair with righteousness,” because “our very right of self-government is derived from ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’” If Americans were to answer communism around the world in an effective way, then they ought to be able to provide a new articulation of John Locke and the founding fathers’ principle that freedom is grounded in rights to property. But Jessup recognized that Americans had lost such a clear sense of purpose. He quoted a letter from a US Air Force lieutenant to Time: “What America stands for is making money, and as the society approaches affluence, its members are left to stew in their own ennui.”
James Stevenson, April 30, 1960, The New Yorker
Most of the other eight contributors to the Life series expressed concern that something like the lieutenant’s views represented the national mood, or even the reality, all too well. Walter Lippmann, who had just turned seventy and was still widely regarded as America’s wisest commentator, had been one of the most influential voices in saying America had lost its sense of purpose. Part of the problem, said Lippmann, was that earlier national purposes had been fulfilled. “We have reached a point,” he wrote, “in our internal development and in our relations with the rest of the world where we have fulfilled and outlived most of what we used to regard as the program of our national purposes.” The nation was like a man who had set out to cross the continent from New York and had gotten to Chicago, but was not sure which route ought to be taken from there.
Always one to keep the big picture in mind, Lippmann observed that “in the 15 years which have passed since the end of the second World War, the condition of mankind has changed more rapidly and more deeply than in any other period within the experience of the American people.” Among the most worrisome problems were world population growth, “a great and threatening agglomeration of people in cities,” and a “swift and radical change in the balance of power” that might foster worldwide revolutions. At the same time, people everywhere were experiencing “radical change in the technology of war and in the technology of industry.” The ever-present threat of the obliteration by the bomb immensely raised the stakes in the discussion. On the home front, technology had changed almost every aspect of life. The advent of new mass media was particularly momentous, he said, “because it marks a revolution in popular education and in the presentation of information, and in the very nature of debate and deliberation.” It was thereby profoundly altering the assumptions on which a democratic society might be built.
Historian Clinton Rossiter framed the problem much as Lippmann did, suggesting that America was suffering from lost glory. “In our youth,” said Rossiter, “we had a profound sense of national purpose, which we lost over the years of our rise to glory.” Our “youthful sense of mission” was “in fact fulfilled nobly.” One only had to look at all the constitutional democracies in the world to see the truth of this claim. Now, however, America had become middle aged, Rossiter observed; striking a chord that resonated throughout the series, he added, “We are fat and complacent.” Whereas once we were a people “on the make,” now we were a people who “‘has it made,’ and we find it hard to rouse to the trumpet of sacrifice—even if anyone in authority were to blow it.”
John Gardner, president of the Carnegie Foundation, did not think Americans had lost their ideals, but nonetheless conceded that there was “a danger of losing our bearings,” and that “part of our problem is how to stay awake on a full stomach.” The distinguished poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish saw the crisis as more deeply rooted, but he agreed that Americans still had a sense of purpose. “That something has gone wrong in America,” he began, “most of us know.” The problem was our riches. “We have more Things in our garages and kitchens and cellars than Louis Quatorze had in the whole of Versailles.” Yet, despite “the materialism about which we talk so much,” our unease with it was a sign of hope. That was true especially among the “intelligent young,” whose current favorite whipping boys were the Madison Avenue ad men, who were said to “persuade us to wallow in cosmetics and tail-fin cars.” MacLeish added presciently, “We may be drowning in Things, but the
best of our sons and daughters like it even less than we do.”
Billy Graham warned that the nation’s flaws were potentially fatal, and he challenged the widespread view that the problems might be self-correcting. America, he began, was like a man with whom he had played golf a few months earlier, who had appeared to be healthy, but since had died of cancer. In the midst of affluence, “America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth.” That emptiness was reflected in youth culture in which “rebels without a cause” were rebelling from conformity for the sake of rebelling. Only change from the inside out, or Christian conversion, could transform people in the way that was necessary to renew the culture. Then Americans could recapture their individualism, patriotism, discipline, and courage, qualities that had “made us the greatest nation in the world.” Ultimately, though, America’s strength must be used for altruistic ends. The nation must share its wealth, said Graham. It should attack “the worldwide problems of ignorance, disease and poverty.”
One of the most striking features of the series was how many of the authors worried that Americans’ self-indulgent materialism might be making them unfit to be leaders of the free world in the fight against communism. That fight, after all, provided the most urgent context for the anxieties over national purpose. Graham quoted the famed diplomat George Kennan to make the point that a country “with no highly developed sense of national purpose, with the overwhelming accent of life on personal comfort, with a dearth of public services and a surfeit of privately sold gadgetry” could simply not compete with the Soviet Union. Adlai Stevenson quipped, “With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purposes and inspiring way of life?”
In offering solutions, most of the authors agreed that the national ideals themselves were adequate and that there was no easy fix for the perils of prosperity, but that what was needed was a sort of pragmatism that would rely on practical problem-solving rather than on grand ideological abstractions. Clinton Rossiter argued that in the face of the nuclear threat “it has now become the destiny of this nation to lead the world prudently and pragmatically” toward a world “government having power to enforce peace.” Albert Wohlstetter, of the Rand Corporation, the one scientist in the group, who had recently been scientific adviser in arms talks with the Soviets, was skeptical of the talk about “national purpose,” because there were multiple purposes. For example, the nation needed both economic growth and nuclear deterrence. Wohlstetter went on to show how these two objectives could be compatible. James “Scotty” Reston, whose New York Times editorial on the topic was added to the original nine in the book version, best stated the need for the primacy of pragmatism, saying, “If George Washington had waited for the doubters to develop a sense of purpose in the 18th century, he’d still be crossing the Delaware.” Reston proclaimed that he was “all for self-direction and self criticism,” but in fact believed it was more urgent to address the nation’s practical problems. America still had the ideals and resources it needed to solve them. Things got done with effective leaders. And the upcoming election, he reminded everyone, would provide the country with the opportunity to find such a leader.
ONE
Mass Media and the National Character
The Life magazine symposium on “The National Purpose” exemplifies a well-remembered feature of the 1950s: the effort to build a national consensus in the face of the Communist threat. Adlai Stevenson and Billy Graham could bat in the same lineup. They, along with business leaders, journalists, scientists, and other scholars, could join in a single national conversation. Looking back, we may be more likely to notice those who were left out, but at the time it seemed that leaders from many areas of American life, as well as most of the rank and file, were at least standing on common ground. Despite ominous fault lines and sharp differences about specifics, they seemed to find enough common ground, formed by shared “American” assumptions, to talk meaningfully together about “our” heritage. In fact, the degree of public consensus in the 1950s, whatever its limits, distinguishes the era from many other times, before and especially since.
At the same time, one of the areas of agreement revealed by such discussions was that there was a lot to worry about regarding the quality of American civilization. For instance, one of the recurrent themes in the Life series was the danger that prosperity and new technology might lead to moral erosion of the national character. This danger was a much-discussed anxiety of the day. The nation’s wealth was a major source of America’s strength as a bastion against the Soviet Union. But analysts of the nation’s character seemed to agree both that material strength was not sufficient in itself and that unprecedented prosperity might be loaded with unprecedented perils.
The danger of new riches was an old story, but the best cultural observers of the 1950s interpreted that story with a modern twist. The next two chapters recount some of that analysis in order to provide a sense of the characteristic outlooks and assumptions of the times. These ways of thinking about American civilization differed in some significant ways from most thinking about the same topic today. For one thing, mainstream commentators widely agreed that for America to flourish it was essential for it to carry forward whatever was the best of a highly valued heritage of “Western civilization.” They also thought of the challenges to American civilization in terms of the recent crisis and near collapse of Western civilization and the rise of totalitarianism. America stood for democracy, but democracy in the twentieth-century world had proved alarmingly fragile. The United States was also hypermodern, and with all its new mass-produced technologies it seemed more modern by the month. Yet, since World War II, this hypermodern nation had been thrust into the position of being the chief guardian of the Western “free world.” A natural question to ask was whether there was something about the forces of modernity that might undermine something about the character of a citizenry that was necessary to sustain a free and healthy society.
Garrett Price, September 3, 1955, The New Yorker
Nothing elicited so much concern about the possible threats of modern technology to the quality of civilization as did the sudden advent of television. In 1947, most Americans had seen television only in store windows. By 1954, as many as 50 million people had watched some episodes of I Love Lucy. Suddenly television was dictating how most people spent their leisure time. In part because TV was dominated by the three almost identical national networks, it was creating a common culture to a greater extent than even radio and the movies had in previous decades. In the 1950s, more than in any era before or since, most Americans were watching the same things. The worry was that the culture of television was nationwide but an inch deep. TV seemed to have a mindlessness of its own.
The responses of leading American cultural observers to this perceived crisis offer a window into the time. The rise of television was part of the larger phenomenon of mass media, including radio, film, and mass-marketed print, that already had been reshaping twentieth-century life. But the abruptness of the TV revolution and its revolutionizing impact in changing the lives of almost everyone in the country was something that demanded reflection. These reflections provide a sense of how the media revolution looked at the time. They also reveal some of the common assumptions of the era, particularly the assumptions of public intellectuals, academics, and artists.
The sophisticated analysts were by no means alone in worrying that television was contributing to erosion of the national character. Late in the decade almost everyone seemed to join in as a media frenzy erupted over what might otherwise have been considered a fairly harmless TV misdemeanor. In 1955, CBS launched a new quiz show, The $64,000 Question, based on offering what at the time were enormous cash prizes to the contestants who survived the many rounds and weeks of questioning. The program soon gained nearly 50 million viewers, and the other networks followed suit
with various imitations. For the next several years, these shows continued to garner huge audiences. But evidence was accumulating that the shows were rigged, and that contestants were routinely being prepped on their answers. By 1958, the story had become a national sensation. Rather than dismissing the manipulation as just “show business,” the press covered it as a major national scandal that reflected something wrong at the heart of the culture. One participant later compared the coverage to that of the Watergate scandals of the 1970s.
By 1959, the investigations had been taken over by a congressional committee, and in November of that year the inquiry reached a dramatic climax: Charles Van Doren, the most popular and most respected of the contestants, confessed that he was indeed guilty of receiving prior answers. Many others were involved, but it was the corruption of Charles Van Doren that created by far the greatest consternation. His guilt was widely seen as symbolic of how deeply corruption had struck into the heart of the culture. Van Doren was not a greedy small-time operator off the street. The soft-spoken and winsome young man was from one of the leading literary families in the nation. His father, Mark Van Doren, a revered teacher at Columbia, had won a Pulitzer Prize, as had his uncle Carl. The young Van Doren, an instructor at Columbia himself, was highly educated in the best of the Western cultural heritage—a heritage that was supposed to be the antidote to the tawdry shallowness of popular culture.1
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment Page 3
