Henry Finder - The 60s: The Story of a Decade

I TS DIFFICULT TO think of William Shawn, the reserved and courteous man who edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, as a figure of the sixties. If he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, he kept it well hidden. Most days, he wore a dark wool suit, a necktie of subdued color, and a starched white shirt, sometimes adding one or two sweater vests to the ensemble when it was chilly. He was soft-spoken and addressed his colleagues with the formality of an earlier time. Nearly everyone in the office referred to him, even when he was out of earshot, as Mr. Shawn. He was already well into middle age when that decisive decade came roiling in, and although there is no definitive way to fact-check this, I would bet the house that he did not partake of the hallucinogens that helped define the era.

Yet this volume represents a magazine that, under his guidance, became more politically engaged, more formally daring, more vivid, and more intellectually exciting than it had ever been or wished to be. The world was changing, and Shawn was determined to change The New Yorker. In the early days of the magazine, Shawns predecessor, Harold Ross, had preferred to minimize politics in what he referred to as a comic weekly. When Dorothy Parker wanted to write a piece about the civil war in Spain that was sympathetic to the Loyalists, Ross told her wryly that he would print it, but only if she would come out in favor of Generalissimo Franco. God damn it, he told her, why cant you be funny again?

Shawn, who had been Rosss longtime deputy, helped deepen the magazine with its coverage of the Second World War, but The New Yorker tended to steer clear of the most vexed of many political questions, including that of race. There were exceptions, including Opera in Greenville, Rebecca Wests 1947 account of a lynching in South Carolina; Richard H. Roveres occasional coverage of the movement to desegregate American schools; and Joseph Mitchells Mr. Hunters Grave, which portrayed an elderly man living in Sandy Ground, one of the oldest communities founded by free African Americans. But such instances were infrequent.

In 1959, Shawn gave James Baldwin an advance to make a trip to Africa and write about it for the magazine. Baldwin was then thirty-five, and celebrated for his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovannis Room, and for the essays that formed the collections Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. He was a consistent presence at civil-rights rallies, and he spoke with eloquence and penetration from stages and on television about the realities of white supremacy. Baldwin, accompanied by his sister Gloria, finally made the trip in the summer of 1962. He made stops over a period of a few months in Guinea, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. But, when he returned, he failed to concentrate for long on the writing he was meant to do about his journey. He was too absorbed by what was going on at home.

A few years earlier, Baldwin had agreed to write an article on Elijah Muhammads separatist movement, the Nation of Islam, for Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. Baldwin set to work on Down at the Cross, a discursive and powerful twenty-thousand-word essay on race, the church of his Harlem childhood, and the Black Muslims. He gave it to The New Yorker. Podhoretz never forgave Baldwin or Shawn.

Baldwins essay confronted the cowardly obtuseness of white liberalsthat is, much of the magazines readershipand acted as a kind of spur to the next phase of the civil-rights movement, black power. Shawn was well aware that such an intensely personal and polemical essay, which did not permit an easy complacency, was a mold breaker for a magazine that had thrived for so long on reportage, humor, fiction, and, for the most part, a generalized equanimity. As if to domesticate the essay, to keep it within the bounds of his readers expectations, Shawn retitled it Letter from a Region in My Mind. (It appeared the following year in the book The Fire Next Time.)

Baldwins masterpiece was one of a number of ambitious works in the sixties that reshaped the tenor of the magazine, expanding its sense of the possible. Rachel Carsons environmental manifesto, Silent Spring; Hannah Arendts coverage of the trial of one of the engineers of the Holocaust, Eichmann in Jerusalem; Dwight Macdonalds assessment of American poverty; Jonathan Schells dispatches from Vietnam; Calvin Trillins and Renata Adlers coverage of the student movements; and Ellen Williss essays on feminism and rock music were among the pieces that provoked the kind of rancorous debates that were part of the sixties soundtrack. For a magazine that had long had a distinct antipathy toward intellectual seriousness, Arendt, a German migr philosopher with a Germanically heavy prose style, was an especially unlikely addition to the table of contents. Arendts assessment of the trial, her phrase the banality of evil, and her interpretation of Holocaust history, particularly her seeming disdain for the behavior of the victims, would be debated for years afterward.

Perhaps the most sensational publication of the decade for the magazine was one that Shawn quietly came to regret. In 1959, Truman Capote, who had failed as a young assistant in