This Side of Paradise
WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD by Jeffrey Hart '51 Crown, 1982. 304 pp. $15.95
It came as a surprise to me, and no doubt will come as an equal, if not greater, surprise to the author, that I much enjoyed When the Going Was Good. It is crisp, swift, light-hearted. Its tone and content reflect much of the visible 1950s tranquil, optimistic, reassuring.
It is inspiring to recall the best, whether in culture, sports, theology, or even politics. You feel good and warm. In the face of such warm feelings, it makes one uncomfortable to cavil about what's missing. Yet what Professor Hart has recorded as good was essentially only visible good: good for the educated, the economically secure, the socially acceptable.
What happened to the others in the 19505, his chosen era? To extol the/virtues of the winners, to skim the peaks, of success, does not adequately treat the course of history or accurately reflect reality. The undercurrents of the fifties were, driving the ship of state in a new and disturbing direction. If the surface appeared calm, it was deceiving.
For example, racial turbulence was about to erupt. So how could the going be so good in America in the fifties when the vaunted bastion of democracy was demonstrating such a disregard for human dignity? If the past is prologue, the fifties, must be seen as the progenitor of the civil rights explosion, even the hedonism (which is another story) of the sixties.
The book deals with the pursuit of happiness in one decade. It is about those who had realized the promise, those who had shared in the splendor of the American dream. The impact of those who were forgotten is not well treated, whether it be the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing "separate but equal" schooling or the reign of terror which effectively denied blacks their constitutional right to register and vote. How can one fully describe the fifties and mention Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on but two pages?
The fifties also saw a nation overreact to alleged internal subversion through communist infiltration. The ugliness of McCarthyism with its savage attacks, its near dismantling of the nation's foreign policy apparatus (an occurrence which may have accounted for America's flawed entry into Vietnam) is treated as a slight aberration. The book does not pretend to be a political or sociological tract, but would it not have been worthy to address more frontally how the arts and public discourse are to prosper in an atmosphere where dissent is equated with subversion?
In many respects, Professor Hart's approach mirrors that of the dominant political figure of the fifties, President Eisenhower i.e., voiced concern and public inactivity. President Eisenhower did heal some of the nation's partisan wounds, even renewed its spirit. The book parallels this side of paradise. But President Eisenhower
did not direct a new course. So the decade of the fifties saw a holding action, with many of the highs well recorded in the book. But the price for inaction was high, and the author's enthusiasm might well have been tempered by the cost.
The book should be seen for what it is a high spirited, albeit narrow, view of history seen from the top, examining too lightly the strife and oppression down below. When the Going Was Good gives one the feeling of sitting on a veranda on the cliffs overlooking Casco Bay in Maine, on a hot summer day, wearing Bermuda shorts, sipping a gin and tonic, smelling clean air and enjoying the distant rumble of the seas, while watching, without concern, a thunderstorm, approaching but still an hour away.
Berl Bernhard, a Washington lawyer, arrivedat Dartmouth with Jeffrey Hart in the fall of1947. Their paths subsequently diverged, mostconspicuously in 1972 when Mr. Hart wrotespeeches in President Nixon's re-election campaign and Mr. Bernhard managed EdmundMuskie's bid for the Democratic nomination.
