The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The 1960s were indeed a new age. In 1958 the world economy was revolutionized, because the main currencies became convertible one into another: that created a true world economy, almost independent of national governments or at any rate putting a great strain upon them, because money would just move out if they defied its rules. But other things of revolutionary importance were coming about. Most ages are marked by some invention or other: as Orwell wrote in a ten-second summary of world history, the castle defeated the knight, gunpowder defeated the castle, and the chequebook defeated gunpowder (he went on that the machine-gun defeated the chequebook). In 1960 such inventions came onto the mass market — the fax machine and the contraceptive pill. The first sent money round the world far faster than ever before. It had long and disputed origins, but came into its own because the Japanese could use it. Their language was almost impossible to type, for there were a great many characters, each needing a different combination of many pen strokes. These could now be quickly scribbled by felt pen, and sent by fax, not typewriter, and as Japan started on her long economic boom, towards the middle of the 1950s, faxes to banks and importers made it possible. She developed into a world economic power, second or third in weight. That example was followed, later on, by Taiwan, a desperately poor country that became fourteenth trading nation in two decades, and by South Korea, devastated by the war. Now, the money exchanges became very busy, no longer dependent on mail, and the amounts of money that went round the world made trade itself of less and less apparent weight. The later effects of the computer have been just a continuation of that process, though on a much greater scale.

The Pill’s effect on the relations of the sexes was, said Conrad Russell, like that of the nuclear bomb on international relations. On 1 June 1961 it came on the market in Germany (through Schering AG). It had origins going back to the early twenties, a time when ‘race improvement’ (eugenics) was fashionable, and the poor or stupid were supposed to be discouraged from procreating (in Sweden, up to the 1970s, Lapps were being sterilized on the grounds that they drank too much and were not very bright). German scientists received grants from American foundations for such research (the money was frozen in Germany under Hitler, and was used to pay for the experiments of Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz). Preventing ovulation had been done by natural methods in the past — in Mexico, for instance, women knew the qualities of wild yam in this respect; the ancient, Hippocrates, had recommended a wild carrot known as Queen Anne’s Lace. In 1951 Carl Djerassi, of Bulgarian-Jewish and Viennese origin, working in Mexico and connected with the Swiss chemical firm Ciba, took out a patent, and experimented with the first synthetic compound in 1956 in Haiti. Germans marketed the Pill first, but it spread very rapidly. Freeing women from unwanted childbirth was equivalent to a new dimension in world history. Before 1914, in England, women doctors had not been allowed to contribute to medical journals because this was thought to be immodest, indicating an interest in the body that was improper. Fifty years later, women were establishing themselves in a man’s world — probably the single greatest change, among the very many that set in after the Second World War. In the next generation, even mothers of small children were going out to work, some of them very successful, and many others left with no choice but drudgery. Feminism became a fashionable cause.

In some ways, what followed was a natural enough outcome of the sheer silliness with which conservatives defended their not indefensible world. They had been, in a way, spoiled by their own success against Communism. There was of course a conservatism that the following decade sneered at — churches got a billion dollars for building, twice what public hospitals got. The fifties ended with optimism and in retrospect seem to have been the last gasp of the old world. Families stayed together, women in the home or aiming to be, and the laws governing divorce or contraception were sometimes ridiculously difficult. A Catholic hierarch in Paris remarked that it was all very well to say that an extra child might break the family’s budget and starve; it would die surrounded by love. This business of course provoked unthought-out reactions. Republican women in Connecticut had to fight a (Catholic- inspired) law against birth control all the way to the Supreme Court and that resulted in the easy-abortion arrangements of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Homosexuals in England faced worse persecution than in the days of Oscar Wilde, as the police could gain promotion points if they provoked an approach in a public place, and got more convictions from magistrates’ courts than they had in the 1930s. There was still censorship, at a comic level, as when a lawyer, prosecuting Penguin for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s (unreadable) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, enquired in what he thought was a devastating way as to whether such a book could be read by the servants. Education was also rigidly unchanging, and everywhere operated unpredictably and unfairly, with, in most universities, a hierarchical professoriate that was all-powerful and old-fashioned. Sexual differences were enforced with ridiculous pinpricks. As late as 1968, at Trinity College, Cambridge, a 28-year-old graduate student was expelled when he was found by the porters ‘with a woman in his room’, and even in the 1970s, at Corpus Christi College, the Master’s wife was refused a key. When a distinguished French historian, Marc Ferro, wanted to bring his wife to stay at Jesus College, Cambridge, two seniors found an argument to stop them from using the main (and splendid) guestroom. The room was used for Boat Club breakfasts. Breakfasts meant toastcrumbs, difficult to vacuum-clean away. Men getting out of bed with bare feet might be expected to put up with the discomfort; women, not. Therefore no Madame Ferro. In the United States, such conservatism, picturesquely tiresome elsewhere, was deadly, because it worsened what was already the worst blot on the country, its treatment of Negroes, as they were then generally called. In New York, if you took a Negro friend to dinner in a restaurant, you telephoned the management beforehand. Even when Kennedy’s Vice- President went round Texas with his cook in a motor car, she could not use the roadside lavatories, and had to squat at the side of the road. Such things bred rebellion on the one side, contempt on the other, and guilty consciences in the middle.

Towards the end of the decade there was an international exhibition in Moscow, and the Americans showed off their kitchens. Vice-President Richard Nixon appeared, and there was a famous row between him and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who said that such things had nothing to do with justice or culture. Though he was not himself an expert in either field, a good part of the intelligentsia might have agreed with him. There was no question about it: Soviet high culture was far richer than American. There was now a Soviet challenge, in that the Soviet space effort appeared to be more successful than the USA’s where science, applied to space and weaponry, was concerned. Sputnik caused national alarm, and a new national effort by America (in Great Britain the alarm was similar if less effectual) was apparently needed. This coincided with a two-year slow- down in the economy, when it grew by 2 per cent and unemployment came close to 6 per cent, then thought excessive. These questions gave Kennedy his narrow margin at the end of 1960, and when he took over, early in 1961, ambitious academics advised as to how the challenge was to be met. There were some famous and influential books, and conservatism had a bad time. These new writers analysed problems, and often suggested easy-sounding solutions, one mark of the sixties. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society (1957) noted that private people had money and governments none the less produced squalor: New York gorged with money, yet the roads were potholed and a good part of the population lived in poor conditions. Two decades later governments had a great deal more money and were still producing squalor: what conclusion was to be drawn, that governments should have even more, or that they just could not help producing squalor? Vance Packard’s Status Seekers (1960) described the American business rat race. Jane Jacobs, looking at the wreckage caused by the San Francisco freeway system, wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and she foresaw that housing estates for the poor would turn into sinks of hopelessness worse than the slums that they were to replace; she also foresaw that city centres would become empty, inhabited only by tramps. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke for the bored housewife. Michael Harrington discovered that there were many poor Americans: The Other America (1962). David Riesman looked at the American rat race in The Lonely Crowd (1961) and shook his head at the two-dimensional misery of it all. Rene Dumont considered international aid, and thought that there should be much more of it; Gunnar Myrdal saw American race relations in the same light. Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch (1970) saying that for women life was a bitter picture from the cradle to the tomb.

The answer was: spend money. Here, the presiding genius was Maynard Keynes. He had been contemptuous of the orthodox balance-the-budget financiers who had run things in the 1930s (and who were still running them in the 1950s): they reduced the National Debt and tried to run a budget surplus. An enlightened State, borrowing and spending, could easily be beneficial, especially if it helped poor people at the expense of the better-off. ‘Demand’ — the ability to buy — would stimulate supply, the provision of goods. It was just selfishness on the part of the rich that got in the way, and a measure of sheer stupidity. The great Slump of 1929 had discredited capitalism and especially bankers in many intelligent eyes, and Keynes had made easy conquests of intelligent young men and women, who would probably have agreed with the grandfather of a well-known Italian journalist, Indro Montanelli,