PARTISAN REVIEW
31
release, as long as the thrill of letting go obscured the accumulated
debt. In retrospect the explosive conflicts of the sixties, agonizing
as they often were, unmasked another Old Regime whose con–
venient symbol was Eisenhower, whose substance was the increas–
ingly decayed and irrelevant traditions of rural or small-town
America, and whose stability was grounded in a suppression of
grievances and new energies that could be suppressed no longer.
The political atmosphere of that time is hard to recall today.
The period was shadowed by the fear of thermonuclear war yet
suffused by a mood of business-as-usual, everyone in his niche. Its
legislative monument was the interstate highway system, which
helped transport an ever more rootless population from the farms
to the cities, from the cities to the suburbs, from the South to the
ghettoes, from the Midwest to California. While hymning the
praise of traditional values people were learning to live without a
past, on a roller coaster of technological novelty that had already
begun to Americanize the world.
This whirl of social movement found no echo in the political
arena. The hallmark of both foreign and domestic policy was the
extremely narrow range of permissible debate. Formal democracy
thrived while the real issues of the day were excluded from the
domain of choice. When Adlai Stevenson raised questions about
the draft and about nuclear testing in the 1956 campaign he was
said to have exceeded the bounds of mainstream opinion.
Obviously he was not a serious
candi~ate.
High school students
could debate ad nauseam whether Red China should be admitted
to the UN but no one in public life would dare take similar
liberties. Allied to this was the mania of national security which
ruined the lives of some, touched many others with the cold hand
of fear and conformity, and helped foreclose the political options
of all. Much later, the domestic achievements of Johnson's Great
Society and the dramatic coups of Nixon's foreign policy were but
the thawed-out imperatives of this twenty-year freeze in the politi–
cal
process.
I enumerate these things not to close off the question of the
fifties but to underline its importance. The fifties were the
seedbed of our present cultural situation and the ground against
which the upheavals of the sixties sought to define themselves.
The challenge of these upheavals has yet to be met and we are still
