Recent Readings: The Fifties and The Miracle Worker

Ann Bancroft and Patty Duke
in The Miracle Worker

It seems like a habit of mine to take a big fat book and turn it into a summer read. This year's lunch hour mental nourishment has been David Halberstam's The Fifties. When I acquired the book at a June library sale I wrote a note to myself on the first page where I usually place my name and the year I bought it. The note reads, "Still trying to understand myself and my generation."

If you were a Baby Boomer, I can't recommend a better volume than this one for highlighting the multitude of events that shaped our world going forward. Television, suburbs, rock and roll, the Cold War--what a decade.

I also generally like to close the end of my day with some thoughtful reading. Two standouts from my evening reads were The Glass Menagerie and The Miracle Worker.

The Glass Menagerie is a powerful play by Tennessee Williams which I wrote about here. The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, proved to be equally potent. 

If you are unfamiliar with the story of Helen Keller, then I strongly recommend it. It's an astounding story that has been converted to a three-act play about a girl born both deaf and blind and the young woman, Anne Sullivan, who broke through her isolation and opened her up to the world by teaching her how to communicate. The three-act play also went on to become a film by the same name.

There's a sense in which the unlocking of Helen Keller was serendipitous. Anne Sullivan knew all too well what lay ahead for Helen if she could not be reached.  Sullivan herself had been blind, and with her brother had been put in an institution. Any number of other people could have been hired, but Sullivan had experienced things few others ever had. She also had nowhere else to go, though she hid this fact from the family that hired her.

In the 1962 film version of the play Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate) is Anne Sullivan, with Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller. Bancroft and Duke played these same roles in William Gibson's 1959 Broadway play about this story which was based on the book Keller published in 1904 titled The Story of My Life.

The scope of the play is quite narrow: the arrival of Anne Sullivan to assume responsibility for bringing "light" to the deaf and blind girl of an Alabama family. In addition to disagreements about how to best help Helen, there is friction between Sullivan, who is from New England, and the Southern culture which is still distrustful of the North. 

Here's a bit of trivia that's not in the play. Mark Twain took an interest in this story. It was Twain who first called Sullivan a miracle worker. Twain also arranged funding for Helen Keller to attend Radcliffe College. (I'll bet you didn't know that.) She became the first deaf/blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree there.

Keller went on to write 14 books, countless articles and gave speeches in 36 countries around the world.  

Related Link
Interview with John S. Hall, the Blind Poet of Ritchie County

The Beginning of America's Imperialist Ambitions

"Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

David Halberstam's The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. The events and issues of the fifties were the seeds of issues dominating our culture for the next fifty years. 

I selected the Marquez quote above because it accurately describes my outlook on life as a child of the Fifties. Today, as I enter my "Golden Years" I find myself looking backwards, studying the outlines of events that shaped the lives we lived, the people we have become. This was my motivation for picking up Halberstam's voluminous, nearly 800 page book about two months ago for my summer reading. 

The Fifties details the many transitions that took place in our post-WW2 nation. The housing boom, birth of Suburbia, national highway expansion along with the auto industry, new ideas about our place in the world and the expanding role of covert operations were all emerging in that decade.

It was under Dwight Eisenhower that the CIA began to flex its muscles. In 1953, the CIA decided that we (America) needed a leader in Iran who would be more dedicated to U.S. interests than their current leader. It only took one million dollars (chump change) to implement a coup d'etat and install the Shah. The man in charge of the mission was Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy.

On page 371, Halberstan writes, "In fact, even as Roosevelt was briefing the top national security people about Iran, planning was going ahead on the next coup--one that they hoped would topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbinez in Guatemala."   

It had been so easy to overthrow a potential political adversary that they were licking their chops to do it again. One feature of the overthrow was using $100,000 to hire a mob of protesters to make it look like an internal uprising.

When you see mobs on television, have you ever wondered if they were real or just hired hands? How is it that the television cameras are always at the ready? 

Here is another disturbing sentence from that page: "Administration officials had few moral qualms either about their role or about deceiving the American press and people."

And a little further down the page: "The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open."

Much more can be said, but that's all for now.

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Noteworthy: Allen Dulles, Deputy Director 1951-1953, Director CIA 1953-61. Member of Warren Commission, 1963-1964

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Crowds On Demand: Believe Nothing You Hear, and Only One Half That You See

I heard a former newspaper editor say recently, "Believe nothing you hear, and only half that you see." It sounded like a line from a movie, but actually originated with Edgar Allen Poe.

This quote came to mind as I was reading a David Halberstam's The Fifties. I began reading this book because (a) Halberstam is a writer who is thorough in his research and effective in laying out his narrative, and (b) I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and believed his book might give additional insights toward understanding myself and the context of my life. 

In Chapter 25 he writes about the factors that led the U.S. to manufacture a coup there and overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, "the legally constituted but left-leaning prime minister of Iran" in order to install the Shah as head of Iran. The sentence that jumped off the page for me was this one:

"Roosevelt also brought with him $1 million, in Iranian currency, of which about $100,000 was subsequently used to rent a mob and pay off key people."

There were a couple reasons this stood out. First, it was the second time in the book something like this occurred. Second, because it still happens. And Americans think they are seeing protesters when in reality they are seeing shills, actors. How can we tell when what the cameras are showing us is real or staged? 

Chapter 25 is in the book because it details the beginning of America's interference in the politics of independent countries, a pattern that continues to this day. If we don't like a country's leader, we think we have the right to go in and take him out. We use PR to demonize them, actors to stage protests, and apply other kinds of pressure to drive people out of power who won't dance to the tune we play. It makes me want to cry for my country. 

In 2020 I wrote a blog post called The Art of Artifice: Capitalism and the Events Industry. In that article I share information about two companies that provide strategies, services and people to put on demonstrations. The one says they can create events anywhere in the world. Here's their promise:

With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact.

Let's stop being so gullible and exercise a little discernment. Check out The Art of Artifice: Capitalism and the Events Industry.   Related: He Who Controls the Narrative Controls the People