The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (review)

The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury. By Mary F. Corey (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999) 252 pp. $25.95

With the end of the Cold War, scholars and popular writers have increasingly turned their attention to a key question, Was the post-World War II era distinct? That is, did it represent a new era in American history? Following upon the hardship of the Depression and war, this time is occasionally seen as an era of triumph. Americans experienced a vast increase in the standard of living and emerged for the first time as an international power. However, this was also the "age of anxiety," when artists and intellectuals focused on the loss of innocence and tragedy. The cause of this duality is open to debate. Corey has entered this discussion in splendid fashion. By providing an in-depth examination of one magazine, The New Yorker, she has enriched our understanding of middle-class life in the fifties, and suggested fresh ways to comprehend the roots of the counterculture politics among the youth of the sixties.

One major contribution is her method. Recent theorists of nationalism, including Hobsbawm and Anderson, have shown that the print media and literature provide a focal point for defining the core values of a nation and its ruling groups. ¹ Yet, these scholars rarely focus on how a key publication undertakes this task of re-imagining the national dialogue. By closely examining the relations between political commentary and fiction over a fifteen-year period in the New Yorker, Corey shows how the editors and writers geared its commentary to the upper-middle-class, white, college-educated reader who looked to the urban world of "Manhattan," rather than the small town or suburb, for a model of the good life. Corey demonstrates that shifts in the writers' values had a profound impact on political and personal tastes, from consumer goods to relations with servants and attitudes toward minorities.

Major editors, like E. B. White, initially resisted domestic anti-communism. As liberals who had a great faith in reason and tolerance, the editors published John Hersey's "Hiroshima" to dramatize the impact of the Atomic bomb on Japan and wrote in opposition to the House-Un-American Activities committee, seeing that the jailing of the artists known as the Hollywood Ten intimidated workers in the arts and journalism. Yet, Corey locates a major shift in the magazine's politics with the advent of the Korean War and the jailing of Alger Hiss. These events prompted the editors to reshape their ideology and promote a Cold War liberalism, arguing that the Soviet Union and Communism represented dangers to domestic and world peace.

At this point, the editors backed the new liberal consensus that celebrated economic growth rather than calling for a restructuring of society that would yield a pluralistic nationalism. But Corey reveals the deep contradiction in these views. In this ethos of postwar liberalism, it was the duty of those who adhered to advanced Western values of progress and science to create a rational self and social order. Yet, by looking closely at the fiction that paralleled these political shifts, Corey shows how advocacy of a world mission was filled with personal anxiety in the new consumer culture. Men's work and women's domestic world were the arenas where fictional characters became consumed with discontent and loss of public agency. In response, they turned to drink for consolation, or fantasized about American Indians, white ethnics, and blacks, whose lives seemed to have more vitality and community than their own, despite their affluence and status.

Corey points out in her conclusion that the fiction in The New Yorker foreshadowed the discontent of the young men and women who grew up in relative privilege and entered politics in the sixties. Well before Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique or writers in Students for a Democratic Society wrote the Port...