"When the Going Was Good: American Life in the Fifties" Jeffrey Hart

 Sunday is Mother’s Day. With all the nonsense we hear today, motherhood is the most important role for the continuation of our species, or any species for that matter. Make sure you celebrate with your mother, or, if she is no longer with us, make sure to remember her with love. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“When the Going Was Good: American Life in the Fifties,” 1982

Jeffrey Hart 

May 11, 2023

 

“History is time memorialized…

And that, gentlemen, is why history must be told.”

                                                                                                                Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)

                                                                                                                Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College

                                                                                                                As quoted by Jeffrey Hart

 

When history is written by those who experienced it, there is a freshness not available from those who write of the distant past. On the other hand, such histories lack the perspective that time and distance provide. However, like Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen’s history of the 1920s, this is a fascinating book.

 

Hart was born in Brooklyn in 1930, where he was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and played tennis. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, received both his AB and PhD from Columbia, but spent most of his life in New Hampshire where he was professor of English at Dartmouth from 1963 to 1993. In 1963, he began writing for William Buckley’s National Review. As well, he spent time as a speech writer for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and he was faculty advisor to the Dartmouth Review.

 

“By and large,” Hart wrote, “people felt good about themselves and their country during the fifties.” For sixteen years, from 1929 until 1945, the nation had experienced Depression and War. While the post-War period was interrupted by the Korean conflict, it was a time of strong economic growth, scientific advancement, and nuclear deterrence. Americans appreciated the role their nation had played in the War and in the post-War global recovery. Hart quotes Columbia history professor, the French-born Jacques Barzun’s God’s Country and Mine, a celebration of America: “…we have here a complete Europe – Swedes cheek by jowl with Armenians, Hungarians with Poles…No one can say that all is love and kisses in this grand mixture. In many towns there are two sides of the railroad tracks…But at what a rate these distinctions disappear…In Europe a thousand years of war, pogroms and massacres settle nothing.” “Barzun,” Hart wrote, “is well aware of the blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, and American Indians, but he sets against the darker spots the larger panorama…Like Gertrude Stein, Barzun sees America as the modern nation.” So has Hart.

 

The reader is provided a window on this “extraordinary period in American life.” We read of the Eisenhower Presidency; Korea; the McCarthy hearings; the Brooklyn Dodgers – their last game at Ebbets Field and Pee Wee Reese waving farewell; tennis lessons from Bill Tilden; Levittown; rock and roll; jet planes and TV; computers and air conditioning; the ‘Pill’; the Interstate Highway Act and Atom Bomb shelters; Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals: and how the deaths of Robert Taft and John Foster Dulles book-ended the decade in Republican politics. He writes of the intellectual life, of Lionel Trilling, Mark van Doren, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr: “Contrary to current opinion, the fifties were years of intellectual ferment and intense excitement…” They ended,” Hart wrote, “in extravagances of feelings and behavior.”

 

William Buckley wrote the introduction: “For those who didn’t live through this decade, or weren’t aware of having done so, this is the liveliest trot they could imagine.” The going was good; so is this book.