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The Book of the Week is “The Fifties” by David Halberstam, published in 1993. This slightly sloppily edited hodgepodge of a volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s journalism entries. As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. The decade was characterized by alpha males with hubris syndrome, egos pushing and shoving, in all areas of American life.
“He delighted in control of the political apparatus, and he started each day by meeting with a trusted aide from the secret police, who brought him up to date on gossip gathered from wiretaps.”
Actually, the above was written about Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. For most of the 1950’s, he was the CIA’s friend. Until he wasn’t.
In connection with the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur exhibited “arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory… taking a small war that was already winding down and expanding it” to fight against Communist superpower China, so the war dragged on for two additional years; “he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China…”
Matthew Ridgway helped save a few American soldiers’ lives by personally visiting all of them in South Korea to boost their morale, while MacArthur stayed in Tokyo, thinking of himself as king of the world. MacArthur thought it was Truman who was irrational. As is well known, about twenty years later, president Richard Nixon repaired America’s relationship with China, but prolonged the Vietnam War.
By the mid-1950’s, the evolution of the American labor movement had taken an ironic, hypocritical turn: Unions allowed Wall Street to invest their pension funds in the securities markets on their behalf.
In December 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks was the last straw– prompting the Montgomery bus boycott. A bunch of factors came together, one thing led to another, spurring great political changes. Just a few included:
- Parks was so emotionally tired of the oppression she and her fellow dark-skinned people suffered, she felt she had nothing to lose by rebelling.
- Parks had friends in high places in the Civil Rights Movement.
- Approximately three-quarters of Montgomery, Alabama public-bus riders were black, and of those, most were women who took buses across town to get to their jobs as servants in the white community.
- The white community refused to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
- The articulate Martin Luther King, Jr. became the public-relations leader of the Movement, which was nonviolent, and his religious crowd had more money than other groups in the black community.
The blacks outsmarted the whites in an end-run around taking public buses, by carpooling. Donations allowed the purchasing of new vehicles. White Montgomery officials had no clue about how fed up the blacks were with the conditions of apartheid, voter suppression, etc., so they didn’t know what to do when dissatisfaction reached critical mass.
In January 1956, police began arresting carpool drivers. The blacks shed their fears that they themselves would suffer retaliation for protesting, and owned their fighting-back as a point of pride. The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper was used as the local white politicians’ disinformation outlet. Nevertheless, after a while, the whole world was watching, as the boycott story spread like wildfire among hundreds of media outlets– mostly newspapers and TV stations.
The major influencers of the initial incident– Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy– continued to behave in a mature manner, so the media sympathized with them. MLK Jr., remained a thorn in the side of the white community because he took a licking and kept on ticking. He was the recipient of a ton of hate mail, doxxing, death threats, fire-bombing of his residence, etc.
Anyway, another pivotal historical event occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus refused to allow segregation of a high school there in order to ensure his reelection. The orgy of hatred he unleashed, taught Southern politicians– George Wallace especially, “how to manipulate the anger with the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media.”
Just as legislation is a tool that can be used to spread hatred, technology is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes, too.
“Do you get the funny sort of sense that, so far, at least, there are no human candidates in this campaign?”
The above was written by Dean Acheson, addressing Harry Truman, about the 1960 presidential race, packaged by consultants. JFK won because he had the nicer-looking TV image. Nowadays, the candidates can be replaced by AI software, created by consultants.
Read the book to learn much more about both disturbing and progressive, seminal historical events, and the people who made them happen.