How did the boring, conformist ’50s lead to the cultural upheavals of the ’60s? Civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement—all emerged full-blown in the ’60s but, according to journalist and historian James R. Gaines in his new book, The Fifties: An Underground History, all had their origins in the sometimes little known struggles of the previous decade.
“It seemed to me history just doesn’t work that way, it’s not usually defined by decades,” Gaines told The Daily Beast. “Why did a period so well known for conformity lead to one known for the opposite? So I started looking for the roots of that outburst in the 1950s, and found people who gave me a different idea of how change happens. It occurred to me that people who are change makers in a time so difficult to do that deserve some acknowledgment.”
Gaines’ book isn’t a broad overview, but more an up close and personal look at the lives and careers of activists who recognized various societal problems and fought them. Some are well known, like murdered civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers or author Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring warned about the effect of pesticides on the environment. Others, like Harry Hay, an organizer of the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights group, and Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in the study of “thinking machines” and their effect on humans and the natural world and the man who coined the term cybernetics, have been nearly forgotten over time. But all had one thing in common: the courage to stand out from the conformist crowd and address issues that had been swept under the table.
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“There is a clarity about these issues that arose from intimate problems within themselves,” says Gaines of these forerunners. “All these people were very stubborn, and flawed, and unique as individuals. They were all intimately affected by the causes they took on. It was out of their personal struggles that they got the courage to begin change.”
If there’s one of these activists Gaines admires more than any other, it’s, Pauli Murray a light-skinned, gay Black woman who helped found the National Organization for Women, and believed that discrimination based on race, class and gender were all connected. “She began with such a burden,” says Gaines, “her autobiography is painful to read sometimes, the assault on her for her light skin, and society’s assault on her for her confusion about her gender. The fact she was the only woman in her class at Howard University Law School, was discriminated against and wound up first in her class. And she came out with a law school thesis that helped Thurgood Marshall make his argument in Brown vs. Board of Education. It’s a great story of courage against long odds.”
Also a great story of courage is the Black World War II veterans who came home to a world of racism and helped jump-start the civil rights movement. Medgar Evers and Anzie Moore of the Mississippi NAACP, Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Floyd McKissick of the Congress on Racial Equality, James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and more, men who, says Gaines in his book, believed that “non-violence without the support of armed resistance to racist violence amounted to surrender.”
But, Gaines told The Daily Beast, there’s a reason why the military backgrounds of these men, who were familiar with weaponry—Evers carried a .45 with him when he traveled and slept with a shotgun at the foot of his bed—seems to have taken a historical backseat to the non-violent protests of the era. “The character of the non-violent movement predominated,” he says, “and it was almost an image-making problem. The idea that Blacks would revolt with arms I think would have inflamed the American public. It was a tactic of the Martin Luther King movement not to emphasize that, despite the fact that King’s home was on occasion an armory.”
The Fifties also includes the little known story of President Harry Truman and his support of civil rights. It seems Truman was angered by two high-profile cases of World War II veterans who returned home to racist violence—Isaac Woodard, blinded by a white cop when he didn’t address him as “sir,” and George Dorsey, murdered by a white mob for protecting his brother-in-law after an altercation with his landlord. Truman responded to these outrages by naming a commission to analyze the problems in the South, and gave support to its final agenda, which included anti-lynching legislation, abolition of the poll tax and laws to ensure equal access to housing, education, and health care. When an old friend castigated him for this, Truman responded that “the main difficulty with the South is that they are living 80 years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves.”
Truman’s liberal stance, says Gaines, “came from his experiences as an officer in World War I. It angered him, the reception black veterans got when they came home. He did things no president had ever done before. He acted on his convictions.”
Despite the courage and convictions of all the people in the book, Gaines admits the various issues they addressed have succeeded or failed to varying degrees. Although not enough, he sees the most progress in the gay and women’s movements, thanks in part to “a generation coming up now that is far more egalitarian in terms of gender than previous generations.”
But Gaines feels the “environmental movement has not accomplished what it needs to,” and civil rights “is still a work in progress. The initiative preventing people of color from voting, how could that be? The fact the Supreme Court has done nothing to stop it is sickening.”
And yet, Gaines feels that readers of The Fifties should get the feeling “that there is progress, and even when you think it’s least likely, there are people who will stand up and make the argument for change and eventually be supported by our Constitution, and their demonstration of courage and farsightedness.”
