Santa Monica, Calif.
Again within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, innumerable movies, TV documentaries and historical past textbooks instructed us that the Fifties had been years of conformity and conventionalism: “The Donna Reed Present,” McCarthyism, “The Group Man,” TV dinners. Actually, the ’50s had been a time of extraordinary inventive creativity, boundless technological innovation, authentic pondering in politics, mental range in journalism and better schooling, new power in faith, and large progress in race relations. What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally developed cultural solidarity—one thing almost all people, on the left and the fitting, longs for now.
