In the ever-sketchy collective memory of our nation, the 1950s are the big sleep. They belong to Ozzie and Harriet, and their First Family (somewhat older but just as dull) equivalents, Ike and Mamie. Oh, if you look at the decade closely, you can see the ‘60s beginning to percolate in Elvis and James Dean, in Kerouac and the beats, in the kids who were shortly to sit down at a lunch counter in North Carolina and form SDS at Port Huron. But the grown ups? Squaresville. Living in little boxes. Gutless. The popular sociologists worried chiefly about conformity. From the vantage point of social progress, political courage, and cultural grace, the parents of the boomers were a lost generation.
So imagine my astonishment when, midway through George Clooney's terrific film of the Edward R. Murrow-Joseph McCarthy set-to, Good Night, and Good Luck, I realized he was doing the unthinkable. He was making the ‘50s hip. And not the dissident ‘50s of Brando and biker gangs and Greenwich Village lefties. Clooney's film finds the cool in the mainstream ‘50s, an epoch hitherto defined by its utter absence of cool.
But here are the organization men over whom David Riesman and William Whyte despaired, devoted to CBS, defined by their work, never leaving the office except to hear Dianne Reeves sing the American songbook. The last movie to be set in and concern itself so totally with the 1950s corporation was Billy Wilder's The Apartment, and Wilder saw conformism and cowardice behind every water cooler.
Not George Clooney. His subjects are hard at work in the very center of the vast wasteland, in the medium dominated by Milton Berle, reporting on a nation mumbled over by Grandpa Ike. And yet, they groove together. They dig, they uncover uncomfortable facts, they cringe at McCarthy and his ilk, they decide to take him on, and they prevail.
The threat to them is very real, but we see them ever banded together in their tight little digs. The Robert Downey Jr. character goes out to Michigan to cover a story and right a wrong, but we don't see him in Michigan. We don't see anyone outside the CBS Studio, save on the television monitors inside the CBS Studio. There's not a single exterior shot in the movie. The singularity of the characters' purpose and style is heightened by their insularity. In this sense, the film is a bit like those Howard Hawks adventure pictures of the Thirties, in which a bunch of guys ply a dangerous trade in a world of splendid insulation. (The Hawks film I was reminded of particularly was a James Cagney aviator picture, Ceiling Zero.)
Anyone who seeks to redeem the mainstream ‘50s must come around to Murrow. The 1950s were his time. He first made a splash with his World War II reporting, but in the ‘50s, he became both the pre-eminent journalist and the conscience of television. And then, it was over: He went into the Kennedy Administration to head the Voice of America in 1961 and died from too many cigarettes in 1965. There are other figures who personify the good side of the ‘50s, of course. Some – Rosa Parks, Joseph Welch – had hugely important 15 minutes. But if your project is to redeem the ‘50s at their center, you're dealing above all with Murrow, Adlai Stevenson, and Frank Sinatra, whose careers all peaked during the decade.
And they each had their limitations. Murrow, as Clooney's film shows us, had to host the sometimes ridiculous Person to Person, a harbinger of today's celebrity journalism. Stevenson became the tribune of mainstream discontent with the somnolence and saber-rattling of the Eisenhower years; his acolytes set up the Democratic clubs that were to destroy the old big city machines and give crucial support to the civil rights and antiwar struggles of the subsequent decade. His followers were better than their leader; however, since the real Stevenson was no liberal on matters of race and was probably to the right of Harry Truman on economic questions. Sinatra's shortcomings were merely personal, and his work from the ‘50s has held up better than Stevenson's, anyway.
Still, the dominant figure in the decade was Eisenhower, the dominant lifestyle was suburban, the dominant institution was the giant corporation, the dominant culture and politics were conservative. The right looks back fondly on the time. Leftwing historians regard it as a time of repression, which in many ways it was, and extol only those seeds beneath the snow – those individuals and institutions in which the politics and spirit of the Sixties were incubating. In this assessment, there's some element of autobiography, since most of our left-wing historians are children of the Sixties.
But the left is not just missing Murrow and neglecting Stevenson's legions (who had a more transformative effect on our politics than Stevenson himself). For the ‘50s was also the decade in which a quietly militant working class created the first and greatest mass prosperity in the history of humankind. Today, that prosperity is so threatened that it may just be time for the left to look back at the world of the 1950s, and the unions of in particular, with new appreciation.
Unions were a mainstay of American life in the 1950s. They were never bigger (they represented 35 percent of American workers in 1955, when the AFL and CIO merged), and never more powerful. It was their power and corruption that dominated public consciousness during that decade. The 1940s saw the emergence of Walter Reuther on the national stage, while the 1950s saw the emergence of Jimmy Hoffa. The great union movie of that era, On The Waterfront, depicted a movement that had lost its soul. Unions may have been surly in the 1950s, but they were no longer militant.
The only problem with this picture is that it's largely not true. The decade that had the most strikes in American history wasn't the 1930s or 1940s; it was the 1950s, during which there were an average of 352 major work stoppages a year. And those strikes weren't over petty grievances. They led to the establishment of employer-provided health insurance and pensions. They were the instruments by which manufacturing workers were able to increase their real wages by 89 percent in the years between 1936 and 1959. They created the America in which virtually every family could afford a car and a TV set, in which millions of working-class Americans went on their first vacations and put their kids through college and retired in Florida.
I've taken these numbers from a remarkable book, published by Temple University Press in 2000, about the forgotten ‘50s: Striking Steel by Jack Metzgar, a steelworker's son who is a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The title refers to the epochal 1959 strike of hundreds of thousands of steelworkers, who stayed out for 116 days – in terms of man-hours lost, the largest strike in American history. Yet today, that strike is totally forgotten. In his reading of 18 histories of the postwar United States, Metzgar finds only one that acknowledges that the 1950s were a period of worker power and militancy, which notes that the great postwar prosperity was a product of workers' willingness to shut down their work sites.
But those confrontations lacked a certain cachet. The strikes of that era weren't the violent confrontations that marked the CIO's birth in the 1930s or the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. That's partly because in the more unified culture of the auto and mill towns of the time, hardly anybody crossed the picket lines.
Nor were the unions of the 1950s by any stretch of the imagination vanguard institutions. Under Reuther, the United Auto Workers funded the early civil-rights, student, women's, and environmental movements, but the UAW was an exception: most unions were uncomfortable with the struggles and the styles of the movements of the 1960s. For its part, in both its ideology and its style, the New Left defined itself largely against the unions and the non-radical reformism of the mainstream Democrats. The slowness and reluctance of some of the older, 1950s-style leftists to embrace the causes of the 1960s only widened the rift.
The liberalism of the 1950s was indeed a circumscribed and timid faith. But the New Left's indictment of the decade and its liberals goes well beyond that. Out of frustration, ignorance, and generational grievance, the 1960s leftists retroactively decreed the 1950s to have been devoid of a decent mainstream oppositional politics and deficient in its sense of style. In the absence of a dissenting perspective, their viewpoint has become the conventional wisdom. And that, as George Clooney has so brilliantly and surprisingly demonstrated, is neither fair nor right.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
