They fought for change in the 1950s

We look upon the 1950s as a decade of conformity when little of consequence happened in the United States. But sweeping generalizations about any period in history are misleading at best, and none more so than about the Fifties. Because the period from the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in January 1961 was in fact a tumultuous time. The three-year “police action” in Korea, for starters, The Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ brinkmanship and the abiding threat of nuclear war with the USSR. Most Americans ignored these events — if they were aware of them at all — because they saw no connection to their lives. Passivity reigned. But, as historian James R. Gaines shows in his revisionist history of The Fifties, there were men and women of surpassing courage who bucked the tide.

EIGHT EXCEPTIONALLY BRAVE INDIVIDUALS

Gaines takes us into the lives of eight exceptional people to show just how eventful the decade has proved to be in hindsight.

• Rachel Carson (1907–64) jump-started the environmental movement.
• Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), a genius mathematician who founded the field of cybernetics. “From their very different perspectives — [Rachel Carson] in the living world, he in the electrical, mechanical, and metaphysical one — they converged on the heretical, even subversive idea that the assertion of mastery over the natural world was based on an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential for disaster.”
• Medgar Evers (1925–63), martyred for fighting Jim Crow in the Bible Belt.
• Harry Hay (1912–2002) and Frank Kameny (1925–2011) led “the first sustained advocacy group for gay rights in American history.”
• Pauli (née Pauline) Murray (1910–85), a legal scholar, laid the groundwork for Thurgood Marshall’s precedent-setting civil rights victories and expanded legal protection for gender equality.
• Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–77), a “sharecropper, wife, mother, and activist in the Mississippi Delta,” was among a handful of activists who “saw that race, class, and gender were inseparable, mutually reinforcing sources of discrimination that could only be defeated on the basis of that understanding.”
• And Gerda Lerner (1920–2013), an Austrian-born Jewish historian, pioneered in the field of women’s history.

“In a time like the 1950s,” Gaines observes, “the courage to raise questions was itself isolating, and worse.” Yet these brave and stubborn individuals, and a handful of others who surface in his story, helped build the foundation on which our civilization stands today.

THE FIFTIES: AN UNDERGROUND HISTORY BY JAMES R. GAINES (2022) 256 PAGES ★★★★★

No one set the tone of the 1950s more prominently than Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), shown here brandishing papers with probably bogus evidence of Communist infiltration of the US government. The men and women profiled in this book fought against the tide of McCarthyism and the passivity and conformity it helped to engender. Image: Britannica

THE ROOTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE FIFTIES

The Fifties largely consists of short biographies of these eight extraordinary people. And Gaines writes beautifully, telling their stories with verve and great insight. They were all extraordinary in their own unique ways. Yet there were common threads in the subtext of their lives. Together they built the edifice on which social change took root, expanding the possibilities for lives of fulfillment for African Americans, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ. And, without exception, all eight possessed the inner strength to defy the massive pressure exerted on them to stop what they were doing (and Medgar Evers even paid the price for his stubbornness with his life). Gaines pays homage to these pathfinders in this brilliant revisionist history of the 1950s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James R. Gaines. Image: Harry Benson — Brooklyn Public Library

James R. Gaines is the author of four nonfiction books and editor of a fifth. The former managing editor of Time, Life, and People magazines, he is both a journalist and an historian. He has also held senior positions at several other prominent publications. Gaines was born in 1947 and educated at the University of Michigan.

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