INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
S13
Sanford Pinsker:
In the popular imagination,
1952
is perhaps most
notable as the year in which General Dwight David Eisenhower traded
in the short-waisted army jacket that bore his name for suiting more
appropriate to the office of President. As his campaign rhetoric proudly
declared, what America needed to do was take the straight road (no pun
or sexual innuendo intended) down the middle. So it was that this great
military leader and down-to-earth father figure presumably set the tone
for the decade, one that embraced the time-honored virtues of home,
church, and community, and that spent its increasing leisure time culti–
vating suburban gardens and learning the newest mambo steps . In a
booming economy, corporate America had jobs for men willing to don
gray flannel, and offered their wives glittering new homes with kitchens
bursting with the latest appliances.
For most Americans, the postwar era dripped with material prosper–
ity. While the great cities of Europe-London, Paris, Berlin-had been
brought to their knees by the devastation of World War II, Manhattan
after
1945
was another matter altogether. As Jan Morris's account of
that time, that place, points out, "Everywhere in Midtown was the
patina of unembarrassed wealth-in the smoke of Cuban cigars, (in the
hauteur of uniformed doormen,) in the behemoth Cadillacs purring by,
in the scalloped canopies which, like wedding firmaments or arrange–
ments for state occasions, crossed the sidewalk from the doors of any
establishment aspiring to class."
Meanwhile, those with an eye for details of wider cultural signifi–
cance would have noticed that
1952
was the year in which such tower–
ing intellectual figures as John Dewey, George Santayana, and
Benedetto Croce died, and the year in which Norman Vincent Peale
published
The Power of Positive Thinking.
It
was also the year that
brought us Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea,
Ralph Elli–
son's
Invisible Man,
Truman Capote's
The Grass Harp,
and the co l–
lected poems of Marianne Moore and Dylan Thomas. And, not least of
all,
1952
was the year during which
Partisan Review
ran a three-part
symposium on the topic "Our Country and Our Culture."
Possibly the most commented-upon discussion ever to appear in a " lit–
tle magazine," "Our Country and Our Culture" was out to explore
whether or not an intellectual sea change had in fact occurred during the
years immediately following World War II. The journal's editors strongly
suspected that the pressing concerns that had once rallied them around
the typewriters no longer existed, or at the very least had been signifi–
cantly altered by the collapse of Europe-and they said so in their fram–
ing statement: "The purpose of this symposium is to examine the
