by Norman Stone
Alfred Chandler analysed the success story — two men at the top, one a chairman, complementing each other; both, products of the business itself, and sometimes with a very lowly start in it; a readiness for long-term thinking rather than short-term profits. A rule was ‘one man, one boss’; employees would be given as good a guarantee as possible of long-term work: the middle manager was seen as the ‘keystone of the managerial arch’ because, through him, information could be collected and passed up. The great companies survived the 1930s because they had carefully avoided debt; they were able to shift resources towards the new products that distinguished that decade, despite the general blackness: radio, telephones, commercial aircraft, electrical goods. The Slump stimulated them as slumps are meant to do — ‘the only cause of prosperity is depression,’ said the economist Clement Juglar, a student of the business cycle. They cut costs and made intelligent adaptations towards new goods. IBM did not borrow on any scale until the 1970s, and Gillette had an office in an old factory with bare brick walls. When it came to war, there was further extraordinary adaptability — a peacetime economy created aircraft-carrier-borne fighters that outdid the Japanese Zero by 1943, and the nature of the Pacific war changed overnight. The Mustang, which transformed the bomber campaign in Germany through precision attacks, unperturbed by German fighters, had its prototype within six months of the designing, and had few troubles in testing. This economic machine, so successful at home, now turned abroad. Ford, IBM, General Motors, Chrysler, General Electric, Xerox became household words the world over.
When did ‘the sixties’ begin? The obvious moment to choose would be January 1961, when John F. Kennedy, aged forty-four, became President of the United States. But definitions of decades can only be ragged, and in a sense the sixties began in 1956. That year launched Elvis Presley; the London theatre was assailed by ‘angry young men’, especially John Osborne; Hollywood was stunned by James Dean, the ‘rebel without a cause’ who starred for sullen teenagers, was rated sixth most sexually attractive film star ever, but had died in a car crash the year before, aged twenty-four. On an altogether different plane, 1955 had been the last year in which world prices fell generally, as, from time to time, classical economics expected to happen: thereafter, prices just went up, overall. There was a mysterious sea-change, in other words, away from the old world. In the short run, it had obviously enough to do with the prosperity that was spreading so extraordinarily fast, as domestic tools made life much easier, food and energy became cheaper, television spread and spread. In another perspective, the sea-change had to do with a ‘youth culture’ which reflected the rise in population in the Anglo-Saxon West, where, in place of the sometimes negative growth rates of the troubled interwar years, it became normal again for families to produce three or four children. They were growing up and, because the necessities of life were costing less, they had money to spend. Youth, at least in the media world, had its decade in the sixties. Student revolts occupied the headlines; student thoughts were taken seriously; the vote was given to people aged eighteen, though in many places they were forbidden to buy alcohol until they reached the age of twenty-one. All of this was emerging in Eisenhower’s second period, and the elderly golfing President, with his occasional troubles with long words, was not the man of the hour. Deeply honourable, in defence of the dollar, Eisenhower accepted three recessions, one of which in effect cost Nixon his succession. John F. Kennedy succeeded him in January 1961, and seemed indeed to be the man of the hour. He too had to defend the dollar, but it was characteristic of him and indeed the sixties as a whole that he imagined it could be done without pain.
Chateaubriand had remarked of Talleyrand that he was ‘a nineteenth-century parvenu’s idea of an eighteenth-century great nobleman’. In the same way, Kennedy, with his fairy-tale looks, money and wife, was a hairdresser’s Harvard man. He was easily adaptable to a television age that older men had found uncomfortable. Next to the glowering, charmless, permanently unshaven-looking Richard Nixon, his election opponent, he shone, and especially entranced the intelligentsia of the East Coast. They, culturally still overshadowed by Europe, were often embarrassed by their own country, in some ways still very naive and simple. A visiting English grandee, Harold Nicolson, had gone on a coast-to-coast lecture tour in the USA to rescue his finances, had addressed Midwest ladies in cherried hats as to how the two democracies stood shoulder to shoulder facing the foe to the east, had taken yet another train to yet more ladies offering tea and cookies, and had gone back to London and told his friends that it had been ‘like a month at a servants’ ball’. The New York intelligentsia in their way agreed. They had not much cared for Eisenhower, who played the golfing Republican buffoon; and Norman Mailer set the tone for many writers to come when he dismissed the fifties as ‘the worst decade in the history of mankind’. Most writers really respond to conditions a generation before, did not feel at home in mass prosperity, and made fools of themselves when they pronounced on politics. But pronounce they did, and the sniggering or resentment of the intelligentsia had effect. Kennedy appeared. He was less well-read and was certainly less musical than Truman (who was a good pianist) or even Eisenhower, but the image was far better: he could pretend, and perhaps even believe in the pretence. Kennedy, a Catholic, and sprig of a corrupt Boston-Irish dynasty, was not by nature a convinced friend of the left-wing intelligentsia, and he had even, for a time, gone along with Joe McCarthy’s persecution of the crypto-Communists among them. That had helped Kennedy’s father, notoriously crooked, in effect to buy a Massachusetts Senate seat, which was retained by the longest-surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, for decades, despite a reputation that included manslaughter. Kennedy’s own electoral victory came only with a tiny margin, which he owed to the slippery practices of the man whom he chose as Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had managed Congress for Roosevelt and understood how Texas worked. Almost everything to do with Kennedy was, in other words, false. In practice, as Johnson said, he ‘never did a thing… It was the goddamnedest thing… his growing hold on the American people was a mystery to me.’ However, he was the man for the decade to come.
Kennedy proclaimed a ‘New Frontier’. The reference to Roosevelt’s New Deal was obvious, and Kennedy took office with a promise of new energy. Fashion clothes and concert pianists appeared in the White House, and clever academics made up a good part of the new presidential team. Was there any substance? ‘New’ is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on. However, when he began, Kennedy symbolized quite well what were to be the great makers of the decades to come. Apart from anything else, he was the first, and very, televisual politician. That instrument was to give politics an altogether new shape, or, rather, it vastly spread what had already been a vice of the cinema, to oversimplify to the point of caricature. William Blake had prophesied this a century and more before, and in their way the medieval iconoclasts had done so, as well. ‘They ever will believe a lie who see not with but through the eye’, said Blake, and St Bonaventura had announced that ‘the ears communicate faith and the eyes, fervour’. But there were other inventions that shaped the sixties and beyond.
The 1960s were indeed a new age. In 1958 the world economy was revolutionized, because the main currencies became convertible one into another: that created a true world economy, almost independent of national governments or at any rate putting a great strain upon them, because money would just move out if they defied its rules. But other things of revolutionary importance were coming about. Most ages are marked by some invention or other: as Orwell wrote in a ten-second summary of world history, the castle defeated the knight, gunpowder defeated the castle, and the chequebook defeated gunpowder (he went on that the machine-gun defeated the chequebook). In 1960 such inventions came onto the mass market — the fax machine and the contraceptive pill. The first sent money round the world far faster than ever
before. It had long and disputed origins, but came into its own because the Japanese could use it. Their language was almost impossible to type, for there were a great many characters, each needing a different combination of many pen strokes. These could now be quickly scribbled by felt pen, and sent by fax, not typewriter, and as Japan started on her long economic boom, towards the middle of the 1950s, faxes to banks and importers made it possible. She developed into a world economic power, second or third in weight. That example was followed, later on, by Taiwan, a desperately poor country that became fourteenth trading nation in two decades, and by South Korea, devastated by the war. Now, the money exchanges became very busy, no longer dependent on mail, and the amounts of money that went round the world made trade itself of less and less apparent weight. The later effects of the computer have been just a continuation of that process, though on a much greater scale.
The Pill’s effect on the relations of the sexes was, said Conrad Russell, like that of the nuclear bomb on international relations. On 1 June 1961 it came on the market in Germany (through Schering AG). It had origins going back to the early twenties, a time when ‘race improvement’ (eugenics) was fashionable, and the poor or stupid were supposed to be discouraged from procreating (in Sweden, up to the 1970s, Lapps were being sterilized on the grounds that they drank too much and were not very bright). German scientists received grants from American foundations for such research (the money was frozen in Germany under Hitler, and was used to pay for the experiments of Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz). Preventing ovulation had been done by natural methods in the past — in Mexico, for instance, women knew the qualities of wild yam in this respect; the ancient, Hippocrates, had recommended a wild carrot known as Queen Anne’s Lace. In 1951 Carl Djerassi, of Bulgarian-Jewish and Viennese origin, working in Mexico and connected with the Swiss chemical firm Ciba, took out a patent, and experimented with the first synthetic compound in 1956 in Haiti. Germans marketed the Pill first, but it spread very rapidly. Freeing women from unwanted childbirth was equivalent to a new dimension in world history. Before 1914, in England, women doctors had not been allowed to contribute to medical journals because this was thought to be immodest, indicating an interest in the body that was improper. Fifty years later, women were establishing themselves in a man’s world — probably the single greatest change, among the very many that set in after the Second World War. In the next generation, even mothers of small children were going out to work, some of them very successful, and many others left with no choice but drudgery. Feminism became a fashionable cause.
In some ways, what followed was a natural enough outcome of the sheer silliness with which conservatives defended their not indefensible world. They had been, in a way, spoiled by their own success against Communism. There was of course a conservatism that the following decade sneered at — churches got a billion dollars for building, twice what public hospitals got. The fifties ended with optimism and in retrospect seem to have been the last gasp of the old world. Families stayed together, women in the home or aiming to be, and the laws governing divorce or contraception were sometimes ridiculously difficult. A Catholic hierarch in Paris remarked that it was all very well to say that an extra child might break the family’s budget and starve; it would die surrounded by love. This business of course provoked unthought-out reactions. Republican women in Connecticut had to fight a (Catholic-inspired) law against birth control all the way to the Supreme Court and that resulted in the easy-abortion arrangements of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Homosexuals in England faced worse persecution than in the days of Oscar Wilde, as the police could gain promotion points if they provoked an approach in a public place, and got more convictions from magistrates’ courts than they had in the 1930s. There was still censorship, at a comic level, as when a lawyer, prosecuting Penguin for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s (unreadable) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, enquired in what he thought was a devastating way as to whether such a book could be read by the servants. Education was also rigidly unchanging, and everywhere operated unpredictably and unfairly, with, in most universities, a hierarchical professoriate that was all-powerful and old-fashioned. Sexual differences were enforced with ridiculous pinpricks. As late as 1968, at Trinity College, Cambridge, a 28-year-old graduate student was expelled when he was found by the porters ‘with a woman in his room’, and even in the 1970s, at Corpus Christi College, the Master’s wife was refused a key. When a distinguished French historian, Marc Ferro, wanted to bring his wife to stay at Jesus College, Cambridge, two seniors found an argument to stop them from using the main (and splendid) guestroom. The room was used for Boat Club breakfasts. Breakfasts meant toastcrumbs, difficult to vacuum-clean away. Men getting out of bed with bare feet might be expected to put up with the discomfort; women, not. Therefore no Madame Ferro. In the United States, such conservatism, picturesquely tiresome elsewhere, was deadly, because it worsened what was already the worst blot on the country, its treatment of Negroes, as they were then generally called. In New York, if you took a Negro friend to dinner in a restaurant, you telephoned the management beforehand. Even when Kennedy’s Vice-President went round Texas with his cook in a motor car, she could not use the roadside lavatories, and had to squat at the side of the road. Such things bred rebellion on the one side, contempt on the other, and guilty consciences in the middle.
Towards the end of the decade there was an international exhibition in Moscow, and the Americans showed off their kitchens. Vice-President Richard Nixon appeared, and there was a famous row between him and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who said that such things had nothing to do with justice or culture. Though he was not himself an expert in either field, a good part of the intelligentsia might have agreed with him. There was no question about it: Soviet high culture was far richer than American. There was now a Soviet challenge, in that the Soviet space effort appeared to be more successful than the USA’s where science, applied to space and weaponry, was concerned. Sputnik caused national alarm, and a new national effort by America (in Great Britain the alarm was similar if less effectual) was apparently needed. This coincided with a two-year slow-down in the economy, when it grew by 2 per cent and unemployment came close to 6 per cent, then thought excessive. These questions gave Kennedy his narrow margin at the end of 1960, and when he took over, early in 1961, ambitious academics advised as to how the challenge was to be met. There were some famous and influential books, and conservatism had a bad time. These new writers analysed problems, and often suggested easy-sounding solutions, one mark of the sixties. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society (1957) noted that private people had money and governments none the less produced squalor: New York gorged with money, yet the roads were potholed and a good part of the population lived in poor conditions. Two decades later governments had a great deal more money and were still producing squalor: what conclusion was to be drawn, that governments should have even more, or that they just could not help producing squalor? Vance Packard’s Status Seekers (1960) described the American business rat race. Jane Jacobs, looking at the wreckage caused by the San Francisco freeway system, wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and she foresaw that housing estates for the poor would turn into sinks of hopelessness worse than the slums that they were to replace; she also foresaw that city centres would become empty, inhabited only by tramps. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke for the bored housewife. Michael Harrington discovered that there were many poor Americans: The Other America (1962). David Riesman looked at the American rat race in The Lonely Crowd (1961) and shook his head at the two-dimensional misery of it all. René Dumont considered international aid, and thought that there should be much more of it; Gunnar Myrdal saw American race relations in the same light. Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch (1970) saying that for women life was a bitter picture from the cradle to the tomb.
The answer was: spend money. Here, the presiding genius was Maynard Keynes. He had been contemptuous of the orthodox balance-the-budget fina
nciers who had run things in the 1930s (and who were still running them in the 1950s): they reduced the National Debt and tried to run a budget surplus. An enlightened State, borrowing and spending, could easily be beneficial, especially if it helped poor people at the expense of the better-off. ‘Demand’ — the ability to buy — would stimulate supply, the provision of goods. It was just selfishness on the part of the rich that got in the way, and a measure of sheer stupidity. The great Slump of 1929 had discredited capitalism and especially bankers in many intelligent eyes, and Keynes had made easy conquests of intelligent young men and women, who would probably have agreed with the grandfather of a well-known Italian journalist, Indro Montanelli, in the sentiment that ‘it is possible for an honest man to have dealings with whores, but with bankers, never’. If making life better for people beyond the prosperous circles of the fifties meant spending money, then that was a worthy cause. Galbraith had been involved in price control during the Second World War and never did understand why his critics regarded the State as wasteful, corrupt and inefficient. The war economy had been extraordinarily successful, thought he and his like: even petrol rationing, which made life very difficult in the more isolated places, had been very widely accepted. Why bother with out-of-date economic rules?
Economists of the younger generation were convinced that they were the legislators for mankind, and even that they had abolished all problems. Keynes himself would never have agreed with this, but his younger disciples, among them splendid writers such as Galbraith, did not have doubts. Economists were the Druids of the age, and the message that, overall, they gave was very comforting: if governments spent money, problems would be solved and the good life (whatever that meant) would duly happen. As a profession, economists had been rather caught out in the interwar Slump, because they had preached austerity and virtue — saving, cuts in welfare spending. That had not cured the Slump — far from it, at least in the popular mind. On the contrary, it had worsened matters, to the point where, in Germany, Hitler came to power. Galbraith wrote a book on the Slump that blamed bankers, and it was a bestseller. Now, economists were associated, on the whole, with easy answers. How widespread their effect was can be seen from an aside by the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, in his book about the origins of the Second World War. Hitler’s economy had produced mild inflation, he said, and had thereby produced full employment in a country that, in 1933, had had 8 million men out of work; Taylor added that everyone now knew that mild inflation was a cause for prosperity. A dozen years after writing this, when, nearing old age, he saw his savings consumed by inflation, and the streets outside scattered with litter, he told a different story. But the essence of the sixties was a belief that there were easy answers, so long as grumbling old men got out of the way. Kennedy was inspired by Roosevelt, but the ghost of Keynes stalked his corridors (although when Keynes met Roosevelt in the 1930s, and tried to discuss his theory, the meeting was not a success). It is strange, looking back, how easy the solutions appeared to be. Cambridge, where Keynes had reigned, was still the leading centre in the world for economics, and one of the few dissidents with a sense of publicity, the young Milton Friedman, from Chicago, went there for a spell. He was a good mathematician, and his work might have proved useful to the economists there. Instead, he was in effect frozen out by a grand old dame of Cambridge economics, Joan Robinson (who padded around King’s College in a bizarre Chinese peasant costume: but she was the daughter of a reactionary general who had fallen foul of Lloyd George in 1918, and the granddaughter of a considerable Victorian poet). There were of course dissident voices, but they were few, and they were unfashionable. Milton Friedman published a key article, ‘The Quantity Theory of Money’, which warned that there was a danger of inflation with the then current practices. He was waved aside, and when in the early 1960s Alan Walters — much later on, a recognized authority on both sides of the Atlantic — applied for a grant to develop statistics as to how much money was being created in England, he was turned down. At the time, economists were fighting their last war, in this case against unemployment, and an engineer-turned-economist, Alban Phillips, who had worked on a long run of data, produced one of the great symbols of the decade, the Phillips Curve. Wage rises and unemployment were related, with only one variable, import costs (as in the Korean War). In England, welfare benefits stopped wages from falling too low, and so demand for goods was kept up; government must surely maintain that demand to the point at which unemployment would never rise above 2.5 per cent. That way, there would be price stability, and men such as Alan Walters, wanting to make complicated calculations as to how much credit there was in the system were simply wasting time. The Phillips Curve dominated academic economics (or ‘discourse’). If anything went wrong, ran a further assumption, then price controls could be used — after all, they had been so used during the war, and operated, even by J. K. Galbraith. In ultra-prosperous Sweden, prices and wages were controlled by law. Why not elsewhere? So the economists, on the whole, assumed that they either had the answers or would have them.
