James R. Gaines - The Fifties: An Underground History

An exciting and enlightening revisionist history of the 1950s, showing how the brave pioneers of that supposedly sleepy decade launched the 1960s revolutions that continue to this day.

WALTER ISAACSON, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker

The Fifties

An Underground History

James R. Gaines

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2022

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Front jacket photographs (left to right, top to bottom): Medgar Evers by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Gerda Lerner courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Operation Castle, Romeo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/ Nevada Site Office; Professor Norbert Wiener by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images; Car by Found Image Holdings Inc/Getty Images; Pauli Murray by Everett Collection/ Bridgeman Images; Frank Kameny by Kay Tobin NYPL; Family in backyard by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock /Getty Images; Harry Hay courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries; Rachel Carson by Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gaines, James R., author. Title: The fifties : an underground history / James R. Gaines. Other titles: 1950s, an underground history Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042303 | ISBN 9781439101636 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781439109915 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gay rightsHistory. | Gay liberation movementHistory. | FeminismHistory. | History20th century. Classification: LCC HQ76.5 .G35 2022 | DDC 306.0973/0904dc23/eng/20211108 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042303

ISBN 978-1-4391-0163-6

ISBN 978-1-4391-0991-5 (ebook)

For Miles and Hannah Pell and grandchildren yet to be born

You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.

Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998

O n April 16, 1945, four days after President Franklin Delano Roosevelts sudden death, Allen Ginsberg and his friend Joan Vollmer, along with millions of other Americans, turned on the radio to hear President Harry Trumans first speech to the nation. Coverage in the next days newspapers, though darkened by FDRs death, gave Truman credit for clearheaded resolve as the nation faced the last acts of World War II. Outside Washington, D.C., and Missouri, however, most people had never heard Truman speak, and his midwestern twang could not have been less like FDRs familiar, mid-Atlantic lilt. At some point during the speech, Vollmer said their new president sounded like a provincial salesman. What kind of president is that? Years later, Ginsberg remembered how surprised he was by that remark, by the idea that anyone would denigrate the president of the United States, someone he had always thought to be the noblest and best of Americans. That the future poet laureate of the Beat Generation could have this reaction is a measure of just how long ago this was, how young the 19-year-old Allen Ginsberg was, before the end of the world came in sight.

Three months later, at the White Sands Proving Ground in south-central New Mexico, the first test of the atomic bomb ignited a light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described. The energy of the blast melted the desert floor and left a light-green crater of radioactive glass ten feet deep and a thousand feet across.

By the time President Truman heard that the test had been successful, he was in Potsdam with Stalin and Churchill at the wars last Big Three Conference. Three weeks later, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he was on the way home, aboard the USS Augusta. Three days after that, as Japans prime minister, Kantar Suzuki, was discussing the terms of surrender with his cabinet, the second bomb hit Nagasaki.

No precise reckoning of those killed by the two bombs was ever possible, but in the era of total war, the line between soldiers and civilians was erased, and numbers lost their meaning: Were 6 million Jews murdered in Germanys concentration camps, or was it 6,100,000? Did the Soviet Union lose 26.6 million people, or was it 100,000 more than that, or fewer? Estimates of fatalities from the two atomic bombs ranged between 100,000 and 200,000, but the campaign of firebombing that led up to Hiroshima killed far more people than that. The atomic bomb presented the greater threat because it was a new order of violence, a weapon of instantaneous mass murder that could come without warning and permit no escape. It was also an epic feat of physics and engineering. The wizards of Los Alamos had managed to conjure from the smallest particles of matter the greatest power ever devised, a product of human genius whose gift to humanity was a weapon of global suicide. As such, it threatened long-held verities: that human progress was inexorable, that peace would be peaceful, even that reason, humanitys great gift, could any longer be trusted.