December 1953: A Snapshot

Stepping back out of the snapshot of 1953, I am struck by a world which bears many of the hallmarks of our own deplorable epoch. The most striking difference, and it is a grim and sobering one, is that our own techno-dominated peers seem much more comfortable with their enslavement to Big Brother than were our grandparents.

A few weeks ago, I was delving into rarely visited recesses of my library when I came across an old copy of Harper’s Magazine, dating from December 1953. I have no idea how it got there or, to put the matter another way, how I had obtained it in the first place. I have no recollection of ever having seen it before. Intrigued, I opened its pages and found myself transported to one particular moment in history, as though I had passed through a magic wardrobe into a specific and single snapshot of time.

Here’s what I found, stepping into the snapshot.

The new president of Harvard, Nathan M. Pusey, “emphasized his belief that the study of religion should be a part of formal education”, contradicting the view of his predecessor, Charles William Eliot, who had argued in an address to the Harvard Divinity School that the “religion of the future” would be nontheological. Mr. Pusey claimed that the creedless “religion of the future” that his predecessor had espoused had “let us down and that we must no longer reject creeds but must examine them” seeking “an adequate one for our time”. As for Mr. Pusey himself, it is hard to imagine a twenty-first century president of Harvard or any other Ivy League school having his credentials. A former associate professor of classics at Wesleyan University (Connecticut), he had introduced a course for all freshmen on the “great original works which have affected civilization and still affect it”.

If the state of education can be seen to have declined in the almost seventy years that have elapsed since the days of Mr. Pusey’s presidency of Harvard, some things were much the same then, in embryonic form perhaps, as they are today. Addressing the progressivism of the Zeitgeist, an op-ed piece complained about the pontifications of “atomic physicists and other scientists-turned-prophets … the persuasive pleas of the television priests, and the ex-Communists, and the industrialists in search of tax-exempt salvation”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Genuine progress, as distinct from progressivist posturing, was being made in terms of Americans becoming owners of their own homes. In 1940 only 43.6 per cent of American families owned their own homes, whereas by 1950 this had risen to 55 percent, with a further rise to 60 per cent being predicted by 1955. The dark underbelly of this positive development was the rise in personal debt as the population groaned under the usurious burden of mortgage payments. One consequence of the increase in home ownership, the rise of the suburbs and the social conformity that suburban-living instilled in residents, was examined in an article entitled “Rugged American Collectivism”.

An advertisement for the charity, Save the Children, highlighted the plight of Kathy, an eight-year-old girl in the little town of Kalavryta in Greece: “Grief and the memory of horror are still alive from the massacre of the town’s 1200 men and young boys by the Nazis. The world recoiled at this atrocity, but has forgotten; the hundreds of widows and returned soldiers must live in poverty and desolation.”

Unsurprisingly the recent Nazi menace continued to haunt the minds of post-war Americans. The first of a series of articles on “The Germans: Their Cause and Cure” focused on an American’s experience of living in Germany in the post-war period and the attitude of the German people in the presence and shadow of their own sense of guilt.

A good insight into the state of the culture at the end of 1953 is afforded by newly published books. Post-war optimism was epitomized in Fire in the Ashes by Theodore White, which, according to the reviewer, “explains how we helped to rebuild the Western European countries; how differently they responded; and on the whole how successfully we and they together kept those civilized and productive lands from falling backward into destitution and anarchy”. The “regeneration of Europe” needed to be seen “in perspective against the struggle between Russian revolutionary imperialism and the undestructive progress which is America’s long-range policy”.

A more pessimistic view was supplied by two new dystopian novels, one of which has become a classic whereas the other has been largely forgotten.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, described by Harper Magazine’s reviewer as the “finest living American fantasist”, was “a meditation on the theme of book burning”. It is fascinating to see how this well-known novel was perceived at the time it was first published. The reviewer describes the novel’s hero as living in an epoch in which books are burned, “simply because it is a bore and a disturbance to think, and people are happier watching TV all day long and going to bed with a miniature radio whispering and crooning in their earhole”:

The danger (as Mr. Bradbury sees it) is that, moving down one of the slopes on which we are poised, we may reach the stage of hating literature because it is an effort to assimilate, despising books because they are beyond us, changing schools into “activity centers”, and abandoning the search for happiness because we prefer soothing or exciting pleasures.

If Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel reminds us of Huxley’s Brave New World, the other newly published novel, One by David Karp, reminds us of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which had been published four years earlier. The novel is set “in a country dominated by a totally benevolent and all-powerful state machine” in which one man is selected at random for a spot check. “Is he adjusted? Does he conform? Have the officials convinced him that they are always right, and that he himself is – neither right, nor wrong, but simply one who says Yes?” He is interrogated and physically and mentally tortured, revealing to the examiners that, in some things, he still trusts his own standards, not those of the State. “He still thinks that he can tell true from false and right from wrong. The book is the story, strongly and ruthlessly told, of the effort of the officials to break him down.” Parallels with Orwell’s earlier novel are inescapable but Karp’s spin on the Orwellian theme ends, unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a modicum of hope. Even after Karp’s hero has been broken and remodeled in the image of the State’s prescribed norms, with “a new personality and a new name and new socially acceptable thoughts, he still, to the astonishment of his tyrants, persists in being an individual, a Self”.

Stepping back out of the snapshot of 1953, I am struck by a world which bears many of the hallmarks of our own deplorable epoch. The most striking difference, and it is a grim and sobering one, is that our own techno-dominated peers seem much more comfortable with their enslavement to Big Brother than were our grandparents.

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The featured image is a photograph of a family watching television, c. 1958, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.