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Summary
Summary
A bold and original argument that upends the myth of the Fifties as a decade of conformity to celebrate the solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines.
In a fascinating and beautifully written series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals--people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts--who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet the legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her "in between" sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsberg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination illegal, but that was only one of her gifts to 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay-rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book's unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring 's Rachel Carson and MIT's preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives--she in the living world, he in the theoretical one--converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement.
The Fifties is a dazzling and provocative work of history that transforms our understanding of a seemingly staid decade and honors the pioneers of gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism. The book carries the powerful message that change actually begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of de-centered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.
Author Notes
James R. Gaines is the former managing editor of Time and the author of several books, including Evening in the Palace of Reason , a study of Johann Sebastian Bach and the early Enlightenment, and For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions . He lives in New York and Los Angeles.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Gaines (For Liberty and Glory) delivers a compassionate and insightful group portrait of "singular men and women" who spoke out on LGBTQ issues, women's rights, civil rights, and the environment in the 1950s. Documenting how these pioneers sowed the seeds for the political, cultural, and legal sea changes of the 1960s and '70s, Gaines spotlights Harry Hay, founder of the gay rights advocacy group the Mattachine Society; Gerda Lerner, an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Holocaust who taught the first women's history course in the U.S. at the New School in 1962; Medgar Evers, the original field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, whose desegregation efforts led to his murder in 1963; and cybernetics originator Norbert Wiener, who warned of "the many ways cutting-edge technologies could benefit humanity but also draw its blood." Other profile subjects include feminist Betty Friedan, conservationist Rachel Carson, and civil rights activist Robert F. Williams. Gaines provides essential historical context and vividly captures the resilience of these and other "authentic rebels" who battled the FBI, McCarthyism, the medical industry, and the Ku Klux Klan "in a time infamous for rewarding conformity and suppressing dissent." This revisionist history is packed with insights. Illus. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
The 1950s have not had a good press. In the US the decade has long been synonymous with a retreat to political and social conservatism following the upheaval of the second world war. Senator McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities is the obvious example here, but there are many more. Women who had taken men's jobs during the hostilities reconvened in dormitory suburbs to nest, wear pointy bras and full skirts and raise the next generation of patriotic Americans. Black servicemen who had fought alongside their white compatriots in Europe found themselves returning to a segregated south where they were required to sit at the back of the bus. The 50s, or to be more exact the period from 1946 to 1963, marked what Norman Mailer dubbed at the time the "years of conformity and depression". Except it didn't, or at least not for everyone. As James Gaines shows in this revelatory study, beneath the Pleasantville surface of postwar America there churned all manner of resentment and refusal. Everywhere he looks, Gaines finds individuals who insisted on marching to their own drum, even when that brought them into direct and even dangerous conflict with the newly oppressive status quo. In the process, he sheds light on a whole range of underground movements tackling everything from race relations to working-class feminism by way of non-binary sexuality. He starts with Harry Hay, the British-born activist who was gay at a time when neither the political left nor right would have any truck with homosexuals. (Gaines gives a shocking example: when the concentration camps were liberated by the Aallies they did not set free all the prisoners with pink triangles. Those with convictions in the Nazi courts for so much as flirting with another man were required to serve out their sentences, with no credit for time served.) Hay was himself highly conflicted. Early on he had married a "boyish girl" on the advice of a psychiatrist and adopted two daughters in an attempt to "cure" himself. Only later did he start to go against the grain until, at the age of 38 in 1950, he set up the Mattachine Society to advocate for gay rights. The wider point here is that there was nothing simple or obvious about being a progressive in the 1950s. Hay's campaigning brought him into direct conflict with his former comrades in the Communist party, who declared homosexuality to be not only "deviant" and "perverted" but, worse still, an expression of "bourgeois decadence". The Mattachine Society itself split between those conservatives who wanted to run it along the lines of AA (at one point it was going to be called Bachelors Anonymous) and those who were increasingly persuaded of the need for direct political action. Gaines sees his job as not to neaten Hay's story, making it fit one shape or another, but to point up its idiosyncrasies instead. It is, he suggests, in the stumbling quality of Hay's journey that we see true heroism, a full two decades before the Stonewall riots and Gay Liberation made it simpler, if not exactly easier, to be out and proud. Gaines's great skill is to use individual life stories, with all their messy contradictions, to dislodge entrenched narratives about life in postwar America. Particularly deft is his pairing of two thinkers who never met but whose writing about the frailty of the natural world echoed one another in uncanny ways. Rachel Carson was the popular science journalist whose lyrical account of America's coastal wildlife The Sea Around Us (1951) was serialised in the New Yorker and remained in the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks. Norbert Wiener, meanwhile, was the MIT mathematical prodigy whose pioneering work in weapons guidance had contributed to the allies' victory in the second world war. Starting from radically different places, both Carson and Wiener came to the realisation that humankind was dismayingly close to destroying itself. Carson's final book was the apocalyptic Silent Spring (1962), in which she argued that America's addiction to chemical pesticides was poisoning the ecosystem on which all life depended. Wiener, meanwhile, published a letter under the title A Scientist Rebels in the Atlantic Monthly in 1947, in which he warned of the government's militarisation of scientific research and announced his refusal to participate in projects that could lead to nuclear proliferation. Both Carson and Wiener were pilloried for their apparently abrupt shifts in thinking, and both died before they had any inkling that their radical changes of heart would mark the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Gaines is a former editor at three magazines - Time, Life and People - whose titles, taken together, provide the key strands for his braided narrative history. By attending to the experience of historical actors as they move through the world, he builds an account that is full of the complexity of lived experience. The result may not make for a simple read, but it is an infinitely rich one.
Kirkus Review
A history of the courageous men and women who roiled postwar complacency. In his latest book, former Timemanaging editor Gaines debunks the image of the 1950s as a period of quiet contentment. Although the postwar period was "hostile to change," American society, Gaines reveals, was prodded by activists who dared to speak out against sexism, racism, classism, and environmental contamination. Drawing on histories, memoirs, reportage, and government documents, the author creates a vigorous group biography of several feisty individuals who risked isolation and censure by advocating for systemic change. His subjects include Harry Hay, a closeted gay man who founded the Mattachine Society, "the first sustained advocacy group for gay rights in American history"; feminist lawyer Pauli Murray, feminist historian Gerda Lerner, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, all of whom "saw that race, class, and gender were inseparable, mutually reinforcing sources of discrimination that could only be defeated on the basis of that understanding"; Black veterans such as Isaac Woodard, Medgar Evers, James Forman, and Aaron Henry, who became leaders in a variety of significant civil rights organizations throughout the South; and philosopher and mathematician Norbert Wiener and biologist Rachel Carson, who, from their vastly different perspectives, "converged on the heretical, even subversive idea that the assertion of mastery over the natural world was based on an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential for disaster." Each individual confronted formidable obstacles: Hay, for example, faced the challenge of arousing support from men who feared exposure and "inspiring solidarity in people who had never wished to be known as a group, around questions most had never asked." Carson, who wrote Silent Springwhile being treated for advanced cancer, battled a campaign mounted by the chemical industry. Black GIs came home from the war to face violent racist uprisings. Hamer, who worked as a sharecropper in Mississippi until she was 45, was thrown off the cotton plantation when she tried to register to vote. Inspiring activists populate a useful revisionist history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
A storyteller's exploration of the hidden, ground-level experience of the 1950s, this book explores four social and moral grievances from the period--gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism--which exploded more visibly into the public sphere in the following decade. This is not a story of counterculture, e.g., the Beat generation and rock 'n' roll. Rather, in addressing social justice movements, the book explores the uneasy accommodation of and emerging resistance to the white, patriarchal, heterosexual decade of a largely self-confident and complacent postwar American mainstream. Gaines, the former managing editor of Time magazine, intentionally employs synecdoche as a narrative structure, using individuals and their stories to represent larger realities. The dust jacket correctly calls the book's subjects the "accidental radicals--people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts." The result is a very human view of the crushing weight of expectations and conformity mainstream society demanded during the decade. Each thematic chapter has its own similarly thematic bibliography--a very effective arrangement for lay readers. This volume, which would be a good book-club selection, is much more enjoyable reading than standard academic history. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and lower-division undergraduates. --Richard L Saunders, Southern Utah University
Table of Contents
| Introduction Seeing in the Dark | p. xiii |
| Gay Rights "To Be Nobody but Yourself" | p. 1 |
| Feminism Meet Jane Crow | p. 49 |
| Civil Rights The War After the Wars | p. 99 |
| Ecology Before We Knew | p. 145 |
| Epilogue The Best of Us | p. 201 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 207 |
| Bibliographies | p. 209 |
| Notes on Sources | p. 233 |
| Index | p. 255 |
