The Atlantic and Its Enemies (27 page)

In Europe at large this was misunderstood, because of business schools; and it was a curious fact that they did more damage than good. Any true businessman regarded them as pernicious or at least useless: Sir James Goldsmith remarked, for instance, that he would never hire anyone for senior management who had failed to leave school at sixteen. One trouble was that those who could not manage, taught, and sometimes preached. Real managers have better things to do, and asking them about theories of management is equivalent to asking a first-class golfer to lecture on ballistics. There was even around 1900 a group of men who wanted to make business academically respectable and Harvard acquired a business school that its founders expected to rival the law school. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) invented the time-and-motion study, in which white-coated experts studied the performance of the workforce, and, with slide-rules, criticized. Early on, the application of these methods caused demoralization and in the Ford plant at Dearborn turnover of the workforce stood at 900 per cent a year. Taylor’s claim was to ‘mathematize’ everything, and though himself a failure as a manager of men, he was the ancestor of the management consultant, and even the originator of a notion that management could be learned from books as distinct from experience. He and later followers referred to their creed as ‘Scientific Management’, and this suited some modern production methods, by ‘flow’,
i.e.
of workers each, on a slowly moving belt, assembling one part and moving it on to another worker who would add something to it. To manage men doing this mechanical stuff was not at all easy: in fact Taylor himself once remarked that he preferred a ‘little Dutchman’ for a pig-iron job because what it needed was ‘the mental make-up’ of an ‘ox’. In the USSR later on, ‘Taylorism’ was thought to be a good doctrine to follow. As things turned out, it was not, because it was so machine-like and inhuman. One reason for the failure of the USSR in the end was that it copied what it thought to be the most successful, because nastiest, method of managing labour. It merely demoralized, and created drunks.

America’s businessmen managed in fact in different ways and in the fifties they were very successful. One striking aspect was the in-house research laboratory. The Dupont Company, the first of America’s great ones, already employed a hundred technicians in gleaming new buildings, and the example was followed by General Electric, where a mathematical genius tinkered away at Schenectady in New York State, and helped produce the cathode tube and the high-frequency alternator which made commercial broadcasting possible. General Electric then set up the National Broadcasting Corporation. Bell Laboratories was the research side of AT&T and it produced sixteen Nobel Prizes over the half-century: even the theory of information technology came from there, with a paper in 1948 called ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communications’, by Claude Elwood Shannon (like other mathematicians a considerable eccentric, who rode along the corridors on a specially made bicycle which enabled him along the way to juggle balls). As Kenneth and William Hopper say, these vastly successful companies ‘achieved a delicate . . . balance between . . . shareholders, employees, managers, suppliers, customers - and researchers’. They also attracted young scientists, who somehow gave of their best, because they were well-led, by men with knowledge and enthusiasm. Productivity growth per man-hour was 3 per cent per annum in the fifties and sixties, an extraordinary and unmatched figure.

Alfred Chandler analysed the success story - two men at the top, one a chairman, complementing each other; both, products of the business itself, and sometimes with a very lowly start in it; a readiness for long-term thinking rather than short-term profits. A rule was ‘one man, one boss’; employees would be given as good a guarantee as possible of long-term work: the middle manager was seen as the ‘keystone of the managerial arch’ because, through him, information could be collected and passed up. The great companies survived the 1930s because they had carefully avoided debt; they were able to shift resources towards the new products that distinguished that decade, despite the general blackness: radio, telephones, commercial aircraft, electrical goods. The Slump stimulated them as slumps are meant to do - ‘the only cause of prosperity is depression,’ said the economist Clement Juglar, a student of the business cycle. They cut costs and made intelligent adaptations towards new goods. IBM did not borrow on any scale until the 1970s, and Gillette had an office in an old factory with bare brick walls. When it came to war, there was further extraordinary adaptability - a peacetime economy created aircraft-carrier-borne fighters that outdid the Japanese Zero by 1943, and the nature of the Pacific war changed overnight. The Mustang, which transformed the bomber campaign in Germany through precision attacks, unperturbed by German fighters, had its prototype within six months of the designing, and had few troubles in testing. This economic machine, so successful at home, now turned abroad. Ford, IBM, General Motors, Chrysler, General Electric, Xerox became household words the world over.

When did ‘the sixties’ begin? The obvious moment to choose would be January 1961, when John F. Kennedy, aged forty-four, became President of the United States. But definitions of decades can only be ragged, and in a sense the sixties began in 1956. That year launched Elvis Presley; the London theatre was assailed by ‘angry young men’, especially John Osborne; Hollywood was stunned by James Dean, the ‘rebel without a cause’ who starred for sullen teenagers, was rated sixth most sexually attractive film star ever, but had died in a car crash the year before, aged twenty-four. On an altogether different plane, 1955 had been the last year in which world prices fell generally, as, from time to time, classical economics expected to happen: thereafter, prices just went up, overall. There was a mysterious sea-change, in other words, away from the old world. In the short run, it had obviously enough to do with the prosperity that was spreading so extraordinarily fast, as domestic tools made life much easier, food and energy became cheaper, television spread and spread. In another perspective, the sea-change had to do with a ‘youth culture’ which reflected the rise in population in the Anglo-Saxon West, where, in place of the sometimes negative growth rates of the troubled interwar years, it became normal again for families to produce three or four children. They were growing up and, because the necessities of life were costing less, they had money to spend. Youth, at least in the media world, had its decade in the sixties. Student revolts occupied the headlines; student thoughts were taken seriously; the vote was given to people aged eighteen, though in many places they were forbidden to buy alcohol until they reached the age of twenty-one. All of this was emerging in Eisenhower’s second period, and the elderly golfing President, with his occasional troubles with long words, was not the man of the hour. Deeply honourable, in defence of the dollar, Eisenhower accepted three recessions, one of which in effect cost Nixon his succession. John F. Kennedy succeeded him in January 1961, and seemed indeed to be the man of the hour. He too had to defend the dollar, but it was characteristic of him and indeed the sixties as a whole that he imagined it could be done without pain.

Chateaubriand had remarked of Talleyrand that he was ‘a nineteenth-century parvenu’s idea of an eighteenth-century great nobleman’. In the same way, Kennedy, with his fairy-tale looks, money and wife, was a hairdresser’s Harvard man. He was easily adaptable to a television age that older men had found uncomfortable. Next to the glowering, charmless, permanently unshaven-looking Richard Nixon, his election opponent, he shone, and especially entranced the intelligentsia of the East Coast. They, culturally still overshadowed by Europe, were often embarrassed by their own country, in some ways still very naive and simple. A visiting English grandee, Harold Nicolson, had gone on a coast-to-coast lecture tour in the USA to rescue his finances, had addressed Midwest ladies in cherried hats as to how the two democracies stood shoulder to shoulder facing the foe to the east, had taken yet another train to yet more ladies offering tea and cookies, and had gone back to London and told his friends that it had been ‘like a month at a servants’ ball’. The New York intelligentsia in their way agreed. They had not much cared for Eisenhower, who played the golfing Republican buffoon; and Norman Mailer set the tone for many writers to come when he dismissed the fifties as ‘the worst decade in the history of mankind’. Most writers really respond to conditions a generation before, did not feel at home in mass prosperity, and made fools of themselves when they pronounced on politics. But pronounce they did, and the sniggering or resentment of the intelligentsia had effect. Kennedy appeared. He was less well-read and was certainly less musical than Truman (who was a good pianist) or even Eisenhower, but the image was far better: he could pretend, and perhaps even believe in the pretence. Kennedy, a Catholic, and sprig of a corrupt Boston-Irish dynasty, was not by nature a convinced friend of the left-wing intelligentsia, and he had even, for a time, gone along with Joe McCarthy’s persecution of the crypto-Communists among them. That had helped Kennedy’s father, notoriously crooked, in effect to buy a Massachusetts Senate seat, which was retained by the longest-surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, for decades, despite a reputation that included manslaughter. Kennedy’s own electoral victory came only with a tiny margin, which he owed to the slippery practices of the man whom he chose as Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had managed Congress for Roosevelt and understood how Texas worked. Almost everything to do with Kennedy was, in other words, false. In practice, as Johnson said, he ‘never did a thing . . . It was the goddamnedest thing . . . his growing hold on the American people was a mystery to me.’ However, he was the man for the decade to come.

Kennedy proclaimed a ‘New Frontier’. The reference to Roosevelt’s New Deal was obvious, and Kennedy took office with a promise of new energy. Fashion clothes and concert pianists appeared in the White House, and clever academics made up a good part of the new presidential team. Was there any substance? ‘New’ is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on. However, when he began, Kennedy symbolized quite well what were to be the great makers of the decades to come. Apart from anything else, he was the first, and very, televisual politician. That instrument was to give politics an altogether new shape, or, rather, it vastly spread what had already been a vice of the cinema, to oversimplify to the point of caricature. William Blake had prophesied this a century and more before, and in their way the medieval iconoclasts had done so, as well. ‘They ever will believe a lie who see not with but through the eye’, said Blake, and St Bonaventura had announced that ‘the ears communicate faith and the eyes, fervour’. But there were other inventions that shaped the sixties and beyond.

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.