-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/growing.html
----
>>This was the meritocratic version of the elitist world that produced George
Bush, who was at Yale shortly before me and was a member of one of the
exclusive secret societies, for which about ten per cent of the senior class
were 'tapped'. His was Skull and Bones; others were Book and Snake. and
Wolf's Head. It meant that you were set for life as a member of the
commercial aristocracy. Like many other members of Skull and Bones, Bush went
into the CIA. Rather like the wearing of silly clothes at Christ's Hospital
or Eton, members of those secret societies spent every Sunday evening doing
secret things in large buildings, with no windows, which looked like tombs.
Secret. Exclusive. Elite. They were called 'spooks', because no one saw them
entering those mausoleums.>>
-----
GROWING UP IN TEXAS IN THE 1950S
by
Robert M. Young
In 1950 I entered high school, having left Texas only once before � for a
week � in my life. In 1960 I arrived by boat at Southampton and have lived in
England since then, in Cambridge and London. During that decade I went to
Yale, always held onto my wallet when in Manhattan and ended up studying
medicine in upstate New York. Up until 1954 there was a quality about living
in America that's hard to convey, but come to think of it, was rather like
now: consensual and ostensibly apolitical. I say ostensibly, because, of
course, everything is political, in the sense that we live out values,
willy-nilly and these occur in the framework of institutions and power. But
in the 1960s we knew that it was a time when 'the politics of experience' �
experience itself � was crucial, vivid, earnest. Everything was at stake. The
1950s was the time of the Cold War. A machine politician had inherited the
presidency when Roosevelt died, had dropped the atom bomb and had astonished
everyone by winning the 1948 election. For all but the first two years of the
decade the President was an avuncular war hero, Eisenhower, born in Texas but
raised in Kansas. Even he got round to stirring the tranquillity of the times
when he left office, warning the people against the military-industrial
complex:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only
an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the
huge industrial and military machine of defence with our peaceful methods and
goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together....
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment,
project allocations, and the power of money is ever present�and is gravely to
be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should,
we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy
could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
He may as well have been Cassandra: he went unheeded. What he warned against
has occurred and is now taken for granted in the customer-contract basis of
our industry, research and development, with its priorities, funding and
curricula largely determined the high-tech goods and services of both civil
and military.
The quality of experience in the fifties was utterly different. Wartime
manufacturing had got us out of the depression. The firm my father worked for
had gone from the doldrums to manufacturing artillery shells, and the
government-supported resources were then converted to a booming trade in
cotton gins and heating and ventilating equipment. The company was bought out
by Rockwell, a leading high-tech military and aerospace company, and there is
now a green field where the plant was. Rockwell had wanted another subsidiary
of the company and had simply asset-stripped the remainder, sacking everyone,
without compensation.
In the fifties the quality of experience had a mixture of post-war optimism
and utter paranoia about communism. I had no idea what it was � beyond
Godless and wrong. I never heard of Freud, Marx or Darwin before entering
university. I never a met a communist until I arrived in Cambridge in 1960,
expecting him to be a hard man. In fact, he turned up late for Christmas
lunch, because he got lost.
'Politics' was not part of our values. The word conjured up � not a set of
issues � but a career for opportunists, for gregarious and corrupt people.
Lyndon Johnson had become a Senator from Texas in 1948; many votes had been
bought; many names came from gravestones; others voted many times, since the
electoral rolls were out of date. He was a crook, albeit a benefactor of the
poor through rural electrification. The building of hydro-electric power dams
in the 1940s transformed the life of people who had hitherto carried water
from streams, tended wood-burning stoves and lit their homes by candle and
kerosene. This enlightenment was part of Johnson's strategy, because his
mentors, Brown and Root of Houston, got the lucrative contracts to build the
high dams which provided the energy for the hydro-electric turbines. The
corruption was so widespread that Johnson became Washington's most effective
power broker. It is said that when one went into his office, the conversation
could not begin until an envelope containing cash had been placed on the
table. It is he who coined the boast: 'I never trust a man unless I have his
pecker in my pocket'.
People who stood for elective office at school, locally, in the state or
nationally were on the whole despised as seekers of popularity, and
popularity was something one was supposed to evoke, not seek. Every high
school annual had its 'Favourites', but that status was mystically conferred
from above, never pursued so that one could see the works. Politics was
'tacky'; running for office wasn't 'neat'.
And yet I was up to my neck in politics. The mother of a close friend was an
ultra-conservative organiser. The (then) richest man in the world had founded
'Facts Forum', an ostensibly open organisation on current issues. I was
privileged to be among its first cohort of youth members. We were also
invited to swim in the swimming pool at his home, which had been built as a
replica of George Washington's Virginia mansion, Mount Vernon. Mr Hunt's
replica was, however, built to a larger scale. We got regular questionnaires
framed in the narrowest terms, but the cocooning of our experience from the
outside world prevented us from realising this. I recall one about school d
esegregation, centring on a Supreme Court decision which insisted on
integration of black and white pupils. The Chief Justice was Earl Warren, and
the choices, as I dimly recall them, were whether he should be shot, hung or
merely imprisoned. My relation to all this was that I felt privileged to be
an acolyte, a junior member of a professional and commercial elite � with the
right connections at such an enviable early age.
It was odd to be of good family but without money (my grandfather had pissed
it away). A few years after the war my friends all had imported motorbikes
from Britain � James, Excelsior, BSA - all with Villiers 125cc engines. My
paper rounds wouldn't stretch to supporting one of the best motorbikes, so I
had a belt-driven Servi-Cycle. We were as obsessed with cars as with
motorbikes. Everyone I knew could tell you the year and make of any car that
went by, and we often sat on street corners doing exactly that. Our other
preoccupations were football for everyone, guns for most and going to dances.
There were two or three a weekend during the season, and everyone was
preoccupied with whether or not they were going to be invited. I sometimes
still catch myself checking to see that I have my invitation in my pocket on
the infrequent occasions when I go to an event with an engraved invitation.
It was the time of the Korean War; the Russians had the bombs; all of us were
in the cadet corps � the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps). We went to
camp every Summer, wore military uniforms at school three days a week
(inspection and parade on Tuesday) and expected to serve in the armed forces.
I became Cadet Colonel, Regimental Commander, head of the Summer camp and was
asked to take up place at West Point or Annapolis. And I was very proud of
it.
No one told us that the Korean war was unjust or that we lost it. We had been
brought up at the time of the justest of wars and saw military service as
good. I was in my second year at university before the concept of pacifism
even entered my mind, and when I told the head of the Naval ROTC that I
wasn't sure, a ton of bricks landed on my head, and I nearly had to leave the
university. I vividly remember opening the textbook of the second-year course
and taking in the meaning of the first sentence: 'The primary value of naval
weapons lies in their power to destroy.' Such things had not occurred to me
before, as we played at soldiers in the forties and learned to fire bazookas
and howitzers at Summer camp. It is probably difficult for a post-Vietnam
generation to grasp in imagination that the military was good, even glorious,
in the 1940s and fifties.
The other thing that mattered was sport. You had to have one. Mine was
swimming, and it got me a scholarship to any university I wanted to attend.
The same was true for most accomplished athletes, whatever the sport, but
football was king. I went to Yale, because it was posh and because I didn't
have the money to go locally and afford the life-style of a fraternity � the
centre of college life for my class. So I made a smart career move and went
East to college. What I encountered was amazing. I'd had no idea that one
could think about values and the meaning of life outside religion. I'd heard
the word 'philosophy' but had no sense of it. Similarly, I came upon a rich
new sense of politics. My first year at Yale was the time of the
army-McCarthy hearings.
It turned out that my peer group in Dallas had bankrolled the anti-communist
crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. His paranoid witch-hunting overreached
itself when one of his minions was drafted into the army, and McCarthy tried
to get special treatment for him. The resulting hearings (like the Watergate
ones in the 1970s) were an auto-dissection of a world view. And we saw it all
on television. It was the first nation-wide trial by television, and
everything stopped for it. The denouement was when the army's counsel, Joseph
Welsh, shook his head and wearily removed his spectacles, while alluding to
McCarthy's having no 'decency'. The demi-God was destroyed in that moment by
the contrast between their characters. He was dropped by Eisenhower, drank
heavily, was censured by the Senate and died ignominiously three years after
the hearings.
But the atmosphere of anti-communism remained pervasive. Anyone suspected of
leftism was a subversive, an agent of the Kremlin. After all, spies had given
the atomic secrets to the Kremlin. I recall the thrill of learning that
leftists weren't agents of the devil but gentle people who played folk songs
and gathered in basements at Hootenannies. I met some, especially Pete
Seeger, who was lovely and populist and was for peace and brotherhood and
helping the unfortunates of the world.
So politics had another meaning. Just as philosophy offered a
non-fundamentalist view of knowledge and the problem of how to live, populist
left politics offered a vision of society that wasn't paranoid. Along with a
small number of people who were also doing well at Yale, I became a member of
the John Dewey Society and The Student League for Industrial Democracy,
precursors of the student movement and New Left of the 1960s.
But in my social life I never shared a swimming pool with a black person
until I was eighteen, never slept under the same roof as one (except
servants) until I was twenty, had no black, working-class, Jewish or Catholic
friends or girlfriends until I was that age or older. We lived in a
cotton-wool world, never even driving past slums, never really wanting.
Though my own family was constantly in debt, it was possible to buy the
clothes, run the car and pay for corsages from doing odd jobs. This was the
meritocratic version of the elitist world that produced George Bush, who was
at Yale shortly before me and was a member of one of the exclusive secret
societies, for which about ten per cent of the senior class were 'tapped'.
His was Skull and Bones; others were Book and Snake. and Wolf's Head. It
meant that you were set for life as a member of the commercial aristocracy.
Like many other members of Skull and Bones, Bush went into the CIA. Rather
like the wearing of silly clothes at Christ's Hospital or Eton, members of
those secret societies spent every Sunday evening doing secret things in
large buildings, with no windows, which looked like tombs. Secret. Exclusive.
Elite. They were called 'spooks', because no one saw them entering those
mausoleums. But it was different where culture was concerned: Radio, movies,
music, honky-tonks. The mainstream on the radio was as consensual as my
suburb: 'Slow Boat to China', 'You Belong to Me', 'Tenderly'. But our radios
could get low-powered local black stations and high-powered ones from the
Texas Mexico border, especially XERF from Villa Acuna. The adverts were
hilarious. There was the Blade Man, selling reconditioned razor blades,
another selling Acid-X crank case plugs to prolong motor oil life, another
selling lanolin for the hair, still another hocking life-size busts of the
Virgin Mary that glowed in the dark and personally autographed pictures of
Jesus Christ. The music was amazing: 'She's long gone. Where did she go? She
boogied her way to Mexico', 'A huggin and chalkin (my fat girl)', 'When they
made her they broke the mould', 'I've got the cutest little dinghy in the
navy, and all the girls say that it is so. I've got the cutest little dinghy
in the navy. Heave ho, me lads, heave ho.'
We danced dirty bop at Lou Ann's, a honky tonk on the edge of town. We
bopped, Charlestoned, waltzed, dipped and whirled. We heard the (as yet
un-megastar) Elvis on the Big D Jamboree and The Louisiana Hayride. His was a
hybrid between the purity of black blues and the original country and western
sound of Hank Williams ('Love Sick Blues'), Bob Wills and the Light Crust
Doughboys, all heirs to Jimmy Rodgers whose 'T.B. Blues' was the best and
saddest of the blue yodels of the 1930s.
All of this now makes me a member of a golden age, but to us it was only a
way of escaping from the oppressive blandness of our suburban existence. We
could take off our dinner jackets or suits and ties and dance and drink and
be outside our roles. We knew we were escaping. It was the roots of rhythm,
and the roots of rhythm remain.
A small number of us also found ways of learning something about the broader
outside world. I can recall two or three friends who had saved their money
and bought communications radio receivers. We listened to the BBC World
Service and Radio Moscow. Indeed, I recall (whether it was true or not) that
the FBI visited my home when I wrote off for the wavelength schedule of Radio
Moscow. We went to films in an art cinema which showed all of the Ealing
Comedies and classic films like Oliver Twist. and The Red Shoes. Long before
I emigrated, I had seen all of Alec Guiness's films.
I cannot emphasise too strongly that the newspapers that I delivered at four
in the afternoon and when I was older at four in the morning every day of my
life gave us no sense of cultures other than our own. There were events in
the world that were not to our liking, but there was no alternative world
view which could be discovered. That was why going to Yale was such a piece
of dumb luck for me. I had no idea what would open out when I left Texas.
In addition to the music, there was another transcending medium � the movies.
Every Saturday, without fail, we went to the movies. We saw the classic
westerns, the film noir of the fifties, adventures � all part of our ordinary
fare: The Asphalt Jungle, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killing, the
westerns of James Stewart, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, and Burt
Lancaster, both swashbuckling and in the saddle.
We lived in an utterly conformist culture and pursued the hobbies and careers
expected of us. Yet our cultural consumption was of oppressed people � white
blues and black deviants, outlaws, people who stood up alone, if necessary,
against cowardice and the system. People crushed by the miasma of atomic
diplomacy � The Incredible Shrinking Man. I shall never forget seeing that
film at a cult cinema at Yale. Halfway through, a wag brought the house down
with, 'It's incredible! He's shrinking!' So was the world into which we were
expected to enter.
But in the cinema � produced and directed, don't forget, by the very leftists
who were being persecuted by the anti-communists � we saw High Noon, On the
Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause.
I owe everything to raunchy music and to movies in which people stood out
against the system. I can't sufficiently convey the sheer pressure of
conformism � white socks and loafers in high school, white socks or cordovan
shoes, black flannel or chino trousers, tweed coat or blazer in college. We
were to be doctors, lawyers or businessmen or wives. That some of us became
academics was apostasy, no matter how little deviant this may seem. My
college produced a year-book twenty-five years on from graduation in 1957.
Only a tiny number wrote against the grain of corporate satisfaction. Most
celebrated their roles in expected careers and suburbs. The 1950s was the
decade of The Organisation Man and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and we
really did inhabit those cosy spaces.
Then how to square this with the appeal of film noire, country and western,
blues, rock and folk? The answer lies in a profound � but unconscious � sense
of alienation. I say profound, because it was gestating in the 1950s.
Otherwise how could it blast forth in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War
movements � burst forth with such strength and clarity? Racists and rightists
controlled the network media. Pete Seeger and The Weavers were top of the Hit
Parade until he said to the House of Un-American Activities Committee that he
wouldn't betray friends' confidences about their politics. He declined to
'take the Fifth Amendment' � to appeal to his constitutional right not to
incriminate himself. He and many others were hounded from radio, the movies
and television. Network radio was filled with wall-to-wall celebrations of
middle American values. This is the origin of the concept of 'soap opera' �
sponsored by Lux or Camay or Lava soap. 'The Lux Radio Theatre', 'The FBI in
Peace and War' (L-A-V-A; L-A-V-A to lock step music), 'Gangbusters', 'One
Man's Family', 'Ma Perkins', 'The Right to Happiness', 'Fibber McGee and
Molly'. For kids there was 'The Lone Ranger', 'Green Hornet', 'Captain
Midnight'. I was brought up on the voice of Orson Welles as 'The Shadow' and
those of Jack Webb and Mercedes McCambridge in the nightly 'I Love a
Mystery', to which I listened against my parents rules at ten o'clock at
night.
My sense, looking back, is that the values of the consensus gave me my basic
belief in a right to belong � to be a member of the culture � but the country
and western and the black music, and the men who stood up in the westerns and
the films noire gave a sense of the legitimacy of being stubborn and of the
dignity of subversion as the right stance if the community was corrupt. And
it was, though no respectable person said so.
There was something else that was strong for me: Realart Pictures. They
brought out The House of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse, The Bride of
Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Invisible Man, Doctor Jekyl and Mr
Hyde, even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I owe a lot to Boris
Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and even Bela Lugosi. Nearly everyone of those
monsters was tormented and suffered agonies of the soul, and they were
reviled and destroyed (always temporarily) by a witch-hunting culture which
might have understood them and granted their humanity (perhaps not
Dracula�s). These films appeared in a culture that was otherwise droning on
about inevitable progress through science and technology. A regular
subscriber to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Mechanics Illustrated, I
was unable to sleep with my closet door open or enter the kitchen without
reaching round and turning on the light first, lest the Mummy or the monster
get me. Think it simplistic if you like, but at a distance of thirty or more
years and after lots of psychoanalysis, I find the fascination and foreboding
I felt for those films was more than a child's love of being scared. I think
it resonated with a sense of the too-perfect, too-optimistic and touched on
the destructive forces of Thanatos in fifties America and an unconscious
sense of something deeply wrong � that the suppressed would not remain so,
that blacks, Vietnamese, women, Hispanics, the Third World, would rise up and
smite, if not overwhelm, the consensual and conformist empire of what came to
be known as Middle America.
What we now have to figure out is how these forces got re-contained in the
present. Someone said to me in the seventies that once we'd seen through the
system, there could be no forgetting. He was wrong. Social amnesia and a
cynical approach to modernist fragmentation are prevalent, if not hegemonic.
Who'll be our role model, now that our role model's gone? My neice tells me
that in our suburb in Dallas, alcoholism and widespread use of both hard and
soft drugs are now commonplace at the high school my sister and I attended. I
had not even heard of dope until I was eighteen, and I was twice that old
before I smoked any.
I had written all of the above before it had dawned on me that I'd said
nothing about religion or sex. Of the three taboo topics at an English dinner
party, I've dwelt on one � politics � and have been silent about the others.
I don't find them easy to write about, even though I've spent two thirds of
my life thousands of miles from Texas.
Religion was important, because it taught us to split. We went to Sunday
School as kids, to 'big church' in latency, and became baptised members of
the church in adolescence. We read our Bibles. It was the only grown-up book
I'd read all the way through before going to university, and more than once.
We went to vespers on Sunday evening. We went to Young Life and sang hymns
during the week. My father was a Deacon, and my grandmother had been a
missionary in China.
It was a harsh doctrine. We were given a powerful sense of original sin. We
knew that we were or were not among the Elect, but not which. We knew that we
had to do good works. My father never tired of saying that the only sure way
of doing God's work was to be 'a hewer of wood and a drawer of water'. So one
had a sense of impending divine retribution and a powerful sense of work. I
can still hear echoes: 'That's idle, and what's idle is sin.' As I say, we
knew about sin � all sorts of sins. And we committed most of them. I first
saw a condom at Sunday School, lusted after the girls in church, vespers and
hymn sings. But we never petted or made love with members of our own class,
no matter how agonising the pain in our balls from kissing and sexy dancing.
We went to whores. Hard as it is to say, it is what we did. The night I won
the state swimming championship at the tender age of fourteen, I was taken to
a whorehouse. And again at intervals much less frequent than my peers � not
out of hesitation but because I didn't have as much money as they. It was
considered unremarkable and normal, like learning to drive. I was in my third
year at Yale before I made love; before that I fucked. We all did in Texas,
and my friends who went to college there went on doing so, largely in weekend
jaunts to Mexico.
You can imagine the problems this created for anyone who came to want to
relate to women as people, not part-objects for sex. Just as we split in
religion, between Sunday ethics and the day-by-day values of the society, we
split in our sex lives between (pre-marital) Madonnas and whores. The more
money people had, the more they went to whores, year in and year out from
early teens onward. That's where Sonny and Duane went on their wild weekend
in The Last Picture Show, with Sam the Lion's blessing and an extra bit of
money. Good ole boys sowed their wild oats on Third World putas. The joke
told was of a small boy in a border town saying, 'Hey Meester. You want my
mother? She virgin.' As far as I know, they may still be at it, though I
imagine Aids has made a pretty big impact. Rumour had it that the Favourites
in high school made love, but we ordinary mortals didn't. We fucked whores.
And went to church and married in church and � for the most part�became
pillars of the community, educated in every sphere of life to double
standards. That's why Bush could be head of the CIA, screw around, run a
dirty Presidential campaign and still advertise himself as for family and
community. Kennedy did the same. So did Johnson. And Slick Willie. They had
their wives and their affairs � Kennedy by the dozens.
I'm not being priggish, nor am I justifying the whoring. I am saying that we
were taught that way in our most intimate lives � in our consciences and our
relations with women. In my experience, men don't talk much about such
things. Therefore it may be only lack of information that leads me to think
that middle-class boys from elsewhere in America or in Britain don't learn
their sexuality in quite that way. A woman from my high school wrote The Best
Little Whorehouse in Texas, and it ran on Broadway for over four years. The
film version starred Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. The television series
Dallas was based on the community in which I grew up. Come to that, the Ewing
family was based on the man who founded Facts Forum and lived in the outsized
house (not South Fork) which I visited from time to time. That's how it was
to grow up in Texas in the 1950s.
>From Ideas in Production: A Journal in the History of Ideas, Special Issue on
�Culture and Experience in the Nineteen Fifties�, Issues 9 & 10, 1989, pp.
31-43.
� The Author
Address for correspondence: 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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