Affluence

THE NATION

The Boom in Bloom

In New England woods the fiddlehead ferns were unfolding, and blankets of wisteria spread over the houses. Outside Santa Fe, ribbons of green laced the brown adobe on the flatlands, and here and there the full-flowering lilacs formed purple buttons. On riverbanks of the Northwest, wild rhododendrons, spiraling up to 30 feet, were spreading red and pink and white blooms two hands wide. Spring was full blown, and the nation's prevailing mood seemed to be as bright as its blossoms.

The people of the U.S. had never been so prosperous. Never before had the breadwinner taken home so much money; in March and April, after-tax pay of the average factory worker with three dependents was around $70 a week. Not since the first delirious, mistaken weeks after V-J day had there been so much expectancy--with caution, this time--for peace. The fishing was good too. In the gulf, off the coast of Louisiana, speckled trout were swarming in the bays and bayous, and tarpon appeared a full month earlier than usual. Said Bill Tugman, editor of the weekly Reedsport (Ore.) Port Umpqua Courier: "The salmon are running and the trout and striped bass, and they even say the shad feel like taking a fly this year. Let Moscow do its worst."

This was no sudden mood that had swept the nation. It had been growing for months. Bomb shelters were on sale in Los Angeles, but hardly anyone was buying them. Californians were more interested in buying swimming pools--at the rate of 25,000 a year. Mrs. C.T. Higgins of Portland, Ore., who four years ago had the city's first private, backyard underground shelter, granted that the family had been thinking about converting it into a walk-in deep freeze. Oregon Journal Staffer Doug Baker made an admission in print: he had eaten the last can of sardines out of the family survival kit.

--May 30, 1955

The New Vision: Television

In Philadelphia last week, the television camera was more important than a good political slogan--and more frightening than a powerful political enemy. Never had a national convention been so continuously and fully mirrored. Thanks to TV, about ten million spectators along the Eastern seaboard actually saw the convention in action. In scattered communities across the U.S., five million others saw telefilm versions while the news was still warm--three to 24 hours after it happened. it was far & away the biggest gallery television had ever had.

The TV camera had the run of the city; it peered and pried everywhere, and its somewhat watery gaze was often unflattering. Good-looking women turned into witches and dapper men became unshaven bums. Under TV's merciless, close-up stare, the demagogues and players-to-the-gallery did not always succeed in looking like statesmen. Besides exposing the politicians' worst facial expressions, the camera caught occasional telltale traces of boredom, insincerity and petulance.

July 5, 1948

Life Under the Bomb

Time was when a small American who got vaccinated and looked both ways before crossing streets had a reasonable chance of outliving boyhood. But a new complication has been added. A recent treatise on the subject seriously inquired: "Can Junior fall instantly, face down, elbow out, forehead on elbow, eyes shut? Have him try it tonight as he gets into bed."

Junior could probably do the trick all right. A little practice and an understanding of the situation might save the life of a small boy born into the Atomic Age. The treatise explained how: "Junior will feel the wind go by, the dirt and pebbles blown with hurricane force against his head. A few cuts on the arms and legs aren't important. His playmates, standing upright, will be blown over like matchsticks. Some may get concussions, some broken bones."

Oct. 2, 1950

Imperial Coca-Cola

Coke's peaceful near-conquest of the world is one of the remarkable phenomena of the age. It has put itself (in the phrase of a Coca-Cola executive) "always within an arm's length of desire." And where there is no desire for it, Coke creates desire. Its advertising, which garnishes the world from the edge of the Arctic to the Cape of Good Hope, has created more new appetites and thirsts in more people than an army of dancing girls bearing jugs of wine. It has brought refrigeration to sweltering one-ox towns without plumbing, and it has transformed men one generation removed from jungle barter into American salesmen with an irresistibly sincere approach.

May 15, 1950

The Roots of Home

For better or for worse, Suburbia is the U.S.'s grass-roots. In Suburbia live one-third of the nation, roughly 60 million people who represent every patch of democracy's hand-stitched quilt, every economic layer, every laboring and professional pursuit in the country. Suburbia is the nation's broadening young middle class, staking out its claim across the landscape, prospecting on a trial-and-error basis for the good way of life for itself and for the children that it produces with such rapidity. It is, as Social Scientist Max Lerner (America as a Civilization) has put it, "the focus of most of the forces that are remaking American life today."

June 20, 1960

POLITICS

Betting on Ike

Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency of the U.S. in a ballot-box revolution. In a time of unprecedented prosperity with 62.5 million men & women at work, the voters repudiated the party in power--repudiated an administration which held the awesome leverage of a $80 billion-a-year budget. The Democrats frankly fought the campaign on the pocketbook issue: "Don't let them take it away." The people did what materialists and cynics say people never do: voted against what they believed to be their immediate economic interests.

Nov. 10, 1952

Spies: Death of the Rosenbergs

The hour of death was moved from 11 p.m. Thursday to 8 p.m. Friday in order to avoid an execution on the Jewish Sabbath, which begins at sundown on Friday.

Julius entered first into the presence of the ugly, brown-stained oak chair. As he walked through the glaring light of Sing Sing's white-walled death chamber, the three newsmen allowed as witnesses noted that his mustache had been shaved off, that he wore a white T shirt, and that his feet were shod in cloth slippers. The prison chaplain, Rabbi Irving Koslowe, intoned the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want..." Just before the chair, Julius seemed to sway. Guards quickly placed and strapped him in the seat, then dropped the leather hood over his face. Three shocks of 2,000 volts each flung his body convulsively against its bonds. Listening with stethoscopes to the heart under the T shirt, attending doctors pronounced Julius Rosenberg dead.

The body was gone only a few minutes when Ethel Rosenberg entered the chamber. She wore a dark green print dress with white polka dots. Cloth slippers were on her feet, too, and her hair had been cropped close on top for the electrode's contact. The rabbi intoned the 15th Psalm: "Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle?" Just before the chair, the prisoner shook hands, then impulsively brushed a kiss on the cheek of a matron accompanying her. She sat down with taut composure, wincing only slightly as the electrode was applied to her head. The mask fell. Three shocks coursed her body. The doctors still heard a faint heartbeat. They stood back, and Ethel Rosenberg was given two more shocks. Then she was pronounced dead.

June 29, 1953

Incident at Little Rock

Four Negro newsmen had foolishly approached the crowd from the rear. It was the tinder's spark. Some 20 rednecks turned on the Negroes, began chasing them back down the block. Other whites streamed behind. A one-armed man, his dimpled stump below his shirtsleeve, swung wildly at one Negro. Another Negro (a onetime U.S. marine) decided not to run, ambled with terrifying dignity through a gauntlet of blows, kicks and curses. A cop stood on a car bumper to get a better view. Other cops moved toward the fighting. Governor Faubus' Henchman James Karam cried, "The nigger started it!" A huge man came up behind Karam and said: "Get five or six boys and get them over there where the nigger kids came in last time." State Athletic Commissioner Karam led five bullyboys to the other end of the school.

The Negro children had already entered Central High School. While the mob's attention was distracted by the Negro newsmen, the nine students stepped from two cars and walked calmly into the school. But the mob had nonetheless won the first day's battle of Central High School. It had tasted blood and liked it.

Oct. 7, 1957

Cold War of Words

Tense and wide eyed, the officials, security guards and newsmen who were touring the exhibition with Nixon and Khrushchev clustered around the debaters. "I hope the Prime Minister has understood all the implications of what I said," Nixon went on with an oblique reference to Berlin. "What I mean is that the moment we place either one of these powerful nations, through an ultimatum, in a position where it has no choice but to accept dictation or fight, then you are playing with the most destructive force in the world."

Khrushchev (flushed, wagging a finger near Nixon's face): We too are giants. If you want to threaten, we will answer threat with threat.

Nixon: We never engage in threats.

Khrushchev: You wanted indirectly to threaten me. But we have means at our disposal that can have very bad consequences.

Nixon: We have too.

Aug. 3, 1959

Man of the New Frontier

Before the moment of victory, Jack Kennedy allowed himself to doubt that he might make it. In the final swing of the campaign, the Kennedy troupe was showing the frazzled edges of fatigue, even unaccustomed confusion. The motorcades in Connecticut and New York were dogged with inefficiency and out-of-kilter schedules; so furious was Kennedy at one point that he stomped about in his Manhattan hotel room, called in his weary aides and chewed them out. "This," he stormed at one man, "is the most blankety-blank day of the entire campaign!" His raw-rubbed nerves jangled all the more with his determination to win, for in his fatigue he had worked up a bitter personal dislike for Richard Nixon. "When I first began this campaign," said he grimly, "I just wanted to beat Nixon. Now I want to save the country from him."

Nov. 16, 1960

FOREIGN NEWS

In the Heart of Darkness

Along the narrow footwalk behind the high red wall of the Kremlin, mauve-capped sentries pace slowly. From each of the 19 towers which space the mile-long encircling wall, the blue muzzles of machine guns point out over the huge (pop. 4,000,000) busy city of Moscow. Inside the Kremlin's walls, the tiny wooden church of Our Savior of the Pine Forest, long since shorn of its bonds to God, nestles beneath the great golden domes and onion-topped towers of the Uspensky and Arkhangelsky Cathedrals, which are now museums.

Separated by broad cobbled squares and courtyards are the ornate buildings of the Czars, executed, like the history of Russia itself, in a variety of styles: Byzantine, Gothic, Romanesque, Neoclassic. On the tops of the tallest spires are the newest accretions: huge five-pointed crystal stars which catch the sun's rays. The tall Spasski clock overlooking Red Square strikes the hour, and chimes. From cupolas, cornices, eaves and ledges a flock of ravens rises in a black cloud, filling the air with cawing, then settles. On many evenings, when the Spasski clock strikes 7, Stalin & Co., the members of the Politburo, drive up to the Kremlin in their big black cars and settle down for an all-night discussion of the lands where they will strike next.

July 17, 1950

The War in Korea

This is a story that no American should ever have to write. It is the ugly story of an ugly war. It is so for reasons which every American must understand if we are to grasp the extent, the nature and the immense complexities of our problem in Asia. Much of this war is alien to the American tradition and shocking to the American mind. For our men in Korea are waging this war as they are forced to wage it and as they will be forced to wage any war against the Communists anywhere in Asia.

Our soldiers will continue to be forced to war in this fashion--until our leaders acquire and apply an understanding of war in Asia that they have not as yet displayed in Korea. Above all, our leaders must grasp one quite simple fact: war against the Communists of Asia cannot be won--not really won--by military means alone.

To attempt to win it so, as we are now doing in Korea, is not only to court final failure but also to force upon our men in the field acts and attitudes of the utmost savagery. This means a savagery in detail--the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans in the anonymous white clothing of the Korean countryside, or who may be screening an enemy march upon our positions.

Aug. 21, 1950

Introducing "Uncle Ho"

Ho Chi Minh is a wispy man (100 lbs.), mild and slow-spoken, and disarmingly forthright. He is a man who sits on the edges of chairs, his hands folded meekly in his lap. "You must give the people an example of poverty, misery and denial," he sometimes adjures his disciples, and off he plods, ostentatiously, through the villages, with a knapsack on his back. Ho Chi Minh works from 16 to 18 hours a day, usually with a jacket slung across his shoulders as if he were perpetually cold.

He considers himself a man of the world: "Moscow is heroic," he will remark, jocosely, "but Paris is the joy of living." Ho Chi Minh is a kindly man, it seems, who calls his associates "Little Brother," while they call him "Uncle Ho." Yet Uncle Ho, it also seems, keeps his favorite Swallow's Nest--a rare and expensive delicacy made from the saliva of sea swallows--in his room so that he will not have to share it; he keeps Philip Morrises in one pocket for himself and passes local cigarettes from another. Then there is the question of murder.

Nov. 22, 1954

God Save the Queen

The King was dead, but the Crown remained, and it must be fitted promptly to a new head. In London's High Court, King's Counselor Harold Shepherd had just finished cross-examining a defendant when the news came. The court adjourned. Ten minutes later, the lawyer resumed the floor as Queen's Counselor. Painters at another London court set to work painting out the sign "King's Bench" and replacing it with "Queen's Bench."

More than anyone, perhaps, Queen Mary was conscious of the great destiny that had come to her granddaughter, the princess whom she had so often reproved and scolded in the past. When Elizabeth entered Clarence House, Queen Mary was waiting, perfectly prepared, to curtsy before her. The Queen talked with her grandmother for half an hour. That night, while all Britain listened to Churchill's eloquent eulogy of her father, she rested.

Feb. 18, 1952

THE ARTS

In Love with Laughter

Lucille submits enthusiastically to being hit with pies; she falls over furniture, gets locked in home freezers, is chased by knife-wielding fanatics. Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharanee or a toothless hillbilly, she takes her lumps and pratfalls with unflagging zest and good humor. Her mobile, rubbery face reflects a limitless variety of emotions, from maniacal pleasure to sepulchral gloom. Even on a flickering, pallid TV screen, her wide-set saucer eyes beam with the massed candlepower of a lighthouse on a dark night.

May 26, 1952

A Tiger in the Reeds

Brando has a nose that drips down his face, according to a make-up man, "like melted ice cream" (it caused him to flunk his first screen test ten years ago). But then again, as one fan tried to explain, he does have a kind of "lyric lunkishness--he looks like Lord Byron from Brooklyn." At moments he can vanish into the character he is portraying like a salamander into stone--or a tiger in the reeds. Said one thoughtful playgoer: "The only other place I've ever seen such a terrifying shift of identity is in a schizophrenic ward. But this man has control of what he's doing. He has the power of total camouflage." A moviemaker sighed last week: "I though I'd seen everything, but it looks as if we've got a genius for a matinee idol."

Oct. 11, 1954

An Icon Is Born

Marilyn Monroe is an inexpert actress but a talented woman. She is a saucy, hip-swinging 5-ft. 5 1/2-in. personality who has brought back to the movies the kind of unbridled sex appeal that has been missing since the days of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. The trademarks of Marilyn's blonde allure (bust 37 in., hips 37 in., waist 24 in.) are her moist, half-closed eyes and moist half-opened mouth. She is a movie pressagent's dream.

A loud sustained wolf whistle has risen from the nation's barbershops and garages because of Marilyn's now historic calendar pose, in which she lies nude on red velvet. Uneasy studio executives begged her last January to deny the story. But Marilyn believes in doing what comes naturally. She admitted she posed for the picture back in 1949 to pay her overdue rent. Soon she was wading in more fan letters than ever. Asked if she really had nothing on in the photo, Marilyn, her blue eyes wide, purred: "I had the radio on."

Aug. 11, 1953

Hail to the King

Without preamble, the three-piece band cuts loose. In the spotlight, the lanky singer flails furious rhythms on his guitar, every now and then breaking a string. In a pivoting stance, his hips swing sensuously from side to side and his entire body takes on a frantic quiver, as if he had swallowed a jackhammer. Full-cut hair tumbles over his forehead, and sideburns frame his petulant, full-lipped face. His style is partly hillbilly, partly socking rock 'n' roll. His loud baritone goes raw and whining in the high notes, but down low it is rich and round. As he throws himself into one of his specialties--Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes or Long Tall Sally--his throat seems full of desperate aspirates ("Hi want you, hi need you, hi luh-huh-huh-huv yew-hew") or hiccuping glottis strokes, and his diction is poor. But his movements suggest, in a word, sex.

May 14, 1956