A book about the 1950’s sounds like a bland and vanilla story but it turns out David Halberstam had two stories to tell – and one wasn’t about the 50’s.  

Back when Milton Berle and ‘I Love Lucy’ ruled the airwaves unemployment was nil, inflation was nil, incomes were rising and families were moving up.

William Levitt, a Navy veteran who served as a Seabee, came home and decided to use mass production techniques to build houses. Kemmons Wilson, another veteran who’d flown cargo planes over the Himalayas, did the same thing to build Holiday Inns. And when the two veterans were done almost every family could afford a new home in the suburbs and a vacation.

Consumerism erupted like a skyrocket. Betty Furness became a national heroine by appearing on TV in Westinghouse ads. Easy credit poured gas on the fires of consumerism. A new economy was born based on consumer spending, sounding the death knell for the old Capitalism and the even older Calvinist ethic of work and save.

Women had entered the workforce in waves during the Second World War. But in the 50’s did an about face, landing in the suburbs as housewives. But devilment never rests – and  ghosts appeared in the machine. By mid-decade the battle-lines were drawn with Father Knows Best on one side and the Rebels – Brando, Dean, Elvis – on the other. Peyton Place, Halberstam reports, sold 20 million copies not because it was a soap opera but because it was a story about unhappy women asking themselves, Is that all there is?

Face to face with the rebels, establishment icon Ed Sullivan declared he’d never have Elvis on his show. Elvis was obscene. Then Elvis performed on Steve Allen’s show, for the first-time Allen topped Sullivan in the Neilson ratings, and Sullivan did an about face.

The night Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show the Old Order fractured and gave way to the New Order.  

A seamstress in a factory, who also worked part time as a domestic, climbed onto a bus tired and unhappy after working a long day and sat down in the section for African Americans beside three black men.

But there was a tricky fact about Montgomery buses. The line separating the black section and the white section was mobile. As the bus rolled from stop to stop, and the front of the bus filled up with white people, the line moved. One minute Rosa Parks was sitting in the black section and the next she was sitting in the white section. When the bus driver told her to move, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The Montgomery newspapers weren’t about to light the fuse that turned Rosa Park’s arrest into a social upheaval. But a new power – marching across the land hand in hand with consumerism – did.

In Little Rock, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the first day of school a lone black girl, a student, walked toward a white high school and, suddenly, she was surrounded by a mob of protestors, faces contorted with anger. TV captured it all. And TV’s message was simple: This is wrong. Twenty million people saw it.

TV changed General Motors too. Ed Cole, the engineer who’d invented GM’s new 8-cylinder engine, walked into a meeting one day, sat down and listened surprised as GM’s new CEO announced, What matters now is the stock price –  before what had mattered was the quality of GM’s product. And the engineering. But to the new men in gray flannel suits what defined success wasn’t quality – it was salability. And the price of stock.

The Volkswagen Beetle was an engineer’s dream, the epitome of utilitarian engineering. But it was the opposite of salability while the Cadillacs in GMs’ TV ads, emblems of upward mobility, were a salesman’s dream.

In The Fifties David Halberstam’s telling one story about the New America being born, after millions of soldiers came home from war. Without TV there’s no Civil Rights Movement, without suburbs there’s no women’s movement, Brando, Dean, Elvis, and the birth control pill are all pieces of the same tapestry. 

The other story is about the roots of the America we live in today.