THE FIFTIES
An underground history
By James R. Gaines
We make our history of what we want to see in the past. To some, the 1950s are all malt shops, raccoon caps, and Elvis. For others, it’s Eames chairs, Mies skyscrapers, and Jackson Pollock.
But “The Fifties,” by James R. Gaines, a former editor of Time, People and Life, reminds us that a trip in time to much of America would then be more like “The Handmaid’s Tale” than ” Ozzie and Harriet”. A racial caste system was rigorously enforced across the country, while strict standards of religion, gender and sexuality pushed millions into the shadows. The government experimented on its citizens without their consent or knowledge; companies worked without checks.
some Americans did fight back. And they are the subject of this short, very forceful introduction to four groups of people usually left out of the general hallelujahs to the Greatest Generation, although – or perhaps because — they opened the first cracks in those structures of oppression. Gaines begins with Harry Hay and Frank Kameny and their drive to create gay awareness, freedom and ultimately power, then moves on to interweave the life of academic Gerda Lerner, the founder of women’s studies in the American academy, with that of Pauli Murray. , whose activism bridged race and gender and laid the foundation for both Brown v. Board of Education and the National Organization for Women. Third, a neglected cohort of WWII veteran black activists, most notably Medgar Evers, is willing to fight white fire with their own fire, believing that “nonviolence without the threat of armed resistance to racial violence was surrender. ” Finally, Gaines gives us the unusual but ultimately compelling pairing of Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” and the information theorist and MIT professor Norbert Wiener, both of whom, in their own way, warned that misuse of human knowledge could harm the ecology of the planet. .
Values we take for granted may seem obvious when we encounter them in historical figures, but Gaines makes clear the price of justice – these men and women weren’t just canceled for what they believed; they faced brutal violence and exile, both personally and professionally. If we recognize ourselves in people like Kameny and Lerner, it’s not because they’ve adopted our values as early adopters; it’s because their brilliance, their originality, their ruthless courage created U.S.