SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7Book WorldTHE FIFTIES
An Underground
History
By James R. Gaines
Simon and Schuster
288 pp, $27.49EATING TO
EXTINCTION
The World’s
Rarest Foods
and Why We
Need to Save
Them
By Dan Saladino
Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
464 pp. $30Writer Betty
Friedan, second
from right, was
among those who
marched in
Houston in 1977 for
the N ational
Women’s
Convention.
Friedan began
thinking and
writing about
women’s
dissatisfaction —
“the problem that
has no name” — in
the 1950s.A selection of beers
at a shop in
Zedelgem, Belgium,
last month. As
sugary drinks have
become more
ubiquitous around
the world, people
have grown less
interested in the
sour flavors of
beverages such as
Belgium’s lambic
beers, Dan Saladino
writes.ing Committee or the militant gun club led by
Robert F. Williams. The chapter on ecology,
which focuses not on an emerging social
movement but rather on two individuals —
scientists Carson and Wiener — shows that
the struggle between moderation and radical
transformation took place within each person
over time. Whereas early in their careers
Carson and Wiener believed unequivocally in
the value of scientific progress, by the end of
their lives they “converged on the heretical,
even subversive idea that the assertion of
mastery over the natural world was based on
an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential
for disaster.”
Beyond the significance of individual ac-
tion, this underground history of the 1950s
has another message for today. It serves as a
reminder of the hard work and personal
sacrifice that went into fighting for the consti-
tutional rights of gay people, Blacks and
women as well as for environmental protec-
tions. As we face ongoing threats in all those
arenas, it is clear that despite the somewhat
triumphalist trajectory of Gaines’s narrative,
pointing as it does to the legislative and
regulatory victories to follow, these battles
have not been permanently won. Dedicated
leaders, flanked by equally committed cadres,
are still required.sympathy with workers whose livelihoods he
feared would be lost to automation.
That people’s prior participation in radical
politics fed their willingness, and ability, to act
against injustice turned out to be indicative of
a larger reality in the lives of these activists.
Despite our tendency to tie leaders to one
particular movement, it turns out that a great
deal of cross-fertilization was underway —
among individuals as well as movements.
Gaines conveys that when he introduces Fan-
nie Lou Hamer in his feminism chapter rather
than the one on civil rights. Or when we learn
that consciousness-raising and the message
that “the personal is political” appeared in
Hay’s gay rights struggle, long before the
women’s movement to which it is usually
attributed. Murray battled both gender and
racial discrimination and played a pivotal role
in both movements, articulating “intersec-
tionality” years before Kimberlé Crenshaw
would label it and give it theoretical depth.
Less surprising but poignant nonetheless is
the recurrence in all these movements of a
struggle between moderates and radicals. The
battle took a different form in each movement.
In the early gay rights movement, those
hoping for broad cultural change found them-
selves up against opponents seeking only the
decriminalization of homosexuality. The re-
formist founders of NOW like Friedan alienat-
ed Murray with their narrow appeal, to the
point that she withdrew her name as a board
candidate. Everywhere in the South, the more-
establishment NAACP faced challenges,
whether from the more direct-action-oriented
activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinat-one individual soul — to launch a movement
with the capacity to take down an entrenched
status quo.
Gaines’s focus is on what his subjects did in
the 1950s as they launched their movements.
Although we learn some about their prior
experiences, Gaines did not search for any
common patterns in their personal histories.
A couple of parallels struck me, however.
World War II played an outsize role in inspir-
ing these individuals and sustaining their
movements. A vast majority of the activists
were veterans, an experience that particularly
motivated Black Americans. Lerner was a
Holocaust survivor. Wiener designed missile
guidance systems, whose legacy grew to
frighten him. The self-appointed security
force for the March on Washington in 1963
was composed of Black veterans who applied
the structure and strategies they learned in
the military to keep a demonstration of
250,000 peaceful.
Another, perhaps more unexpected, source
of inspiration was participation in the Com-
munist Party or similar radical movements.
Hay brought communist-like cells to the Mat-
tachine Society. Lerner’s work to create the
communist Congress of American Women
launched her feminist institution-building.
Friedan applied the polemical skills she had
developed writing for left-wing unions in the
1940s to her success selling “the problem that
has no name,” her description in “The Femi-
nine Mystique” of female unhappiness in the
years after World War II. Wiener was never a
member of the Communist Party, but he made
no secret of his dislike of capitalism andF
orget the stereotype of the patriarchal-
family-dominated, suburban-rooted,
church-going 1950s of television sit-
coms. In its place, James R. Gaines proposes a
decade that launched the social activism of the
1960s and 1970s around gay rights, second-
wave feminism, civil rights and the environ-
ment. This is not an uncommon claim among
historians, who often search for origin stories
in a deeper past. Gaines, a journalist who rose
to be managing editor of Time magazine and
has written three serious books of history,
adds a twist, however.
In “The Fifties: An Underground History,”
he argues that the later successes of these
movements can be directly attributed to cou-
rageous individuals who often suffered isola-
tion, ostracism, even familial banishment for
battling to improve their own, and many
others’, lives. That they fought sometimes
lonely struggles confirms that the 1950s in-
deed valued conformity and complacency.
Gaines does not deny that reality and in fact
documents much ugliness from the era: gay
bashing, authoritarian policing, patriarchal
oppression, white supremacy and profiteering
from environmental contamination. But he
also offers a response — and potentially an
inspiration — to those today who see around
them only systemic and hard-to-budge rac-
ism, sexism, economic inequality and climate
catastrophe. Instead, he insists, individuals
committed to change can make a difference.
In making his case for individual heroism,
Gaines provides engrossing character studies
of people both well-known and more obscure.
Some of the most famous figures are gay rights
activist Harry Hay, who founded the Matta-
chine Society; Black lawyer Pauli Murray, who
developed brilliant legal arguments that led to
Supreme Court victories for greater gender
and racial equality; Betty Friedan, the pio-
neering feminist who authored “The Femi-
nine Mystique” and helped establish the Na-
tional Organization for Women (NOW); Med-
gar Evers, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secre-
tary who worked tirelessly to overturn
segregation and was assassinated for it; and
biologist Rachel Carson, whose hugely influ-
ential book “Silent Spring” is credited with
launching the modern environmental move-
ment with its no-holds-barred condemnation
of the pesticide-producing chemical industry.
All of these lives are well documented in
biographies, memoirs and scholarly publica-
tions, from which Gaines skillfully draws his
evidence. In a few cases, he has also consulted
personal papers.
More fascinating to me, however, are the
many lesser-known individuals who populate
Gaines’s book as agents of change. We meet
Frank Kameny, who battled for gay rights from
the 1950s until President Barack Obama ex-
tended employees’ benefits to same-sex part-
ners in 2010; historian Gerda Lerner, who
pioneered the field of women’s history, with
particular attention to the untold story of
Black women’s lives; decorated Army Sgt.
Isaac Woodard, who was blinded by a South
Carolina police chief on his way home from
World War II; and MIT mathematician turned
skeptic of technology Norbert Wiener.
These are only some of the characters who
fulfill Gaines’s claim that individual activists
mattered. But it is striking how so many of
their successes depended on the cadre of
like-minded colleagues who fought alongside
them. Gaines is correct that the mass move-
ments that emerged in the next decade did not
burst forth full-blown. But he misses the
importance of this intervening level of activ-
ists, without whom the leaders would have
failed. It took a village — not a city, but also not1950s battles on rights and the environment that heralded changes to comeGREG SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESSHISTORY REVIEW BY LIZABETH COHENLizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones
professor of American studies at Harvard
University. She is the author, most recently, of
“Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the
Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban
Age.”Saladino describes or not, he makes one thing
abundantly clear: These ancient culinary tra-
ditions kept people alive during hard times,
and they’ve become an integral part of a
region’s history and culture.
There is hope. In each country Saladino
visits, he finds an underground of passionate
citizens who are valiantly working to preserve
their crops and food cultures. Sometimes it’s a
botanist who has saved seeds and cultivates
rare plants. Other times it’s a small-scale
farmer, a cheesemaker or a cultivator of wild
yeasts who is proselytizing, sharing knowl-
edge and know-how with a younger genera-
tion. One example is miller Rae Phillips of
Barony Mill, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands,
whose father and grandfather also milled
bere, an ancient form of barley that’s adapted
to the harsh weather of the islands. Phillips
came out of retirement in his 70s when he saw
a new generation of Orcadian farmers, bakers
and brewers who were excited about bere,
which requires an intricate milling process.
Before he died in 2018, Phillips passed his
knowledge to a younger miller who keeps the
tradition alive.
Saladino brings his subjects to life, even
breaking bread with them as he seeks out
these rare and important foods. His evocative
descriptions make a culinary case for preserv-
ing them. In a rural village in Turkey, he is
invited to join farmer Erdal Göksu and his
wife, Filiz, for a feast where he tastes kavilca
for the first time. “Filiz ... added bowl after
bowl to the table: cream and soft cheeses,
pickled cabbage, peppers stuffed with spiced
lamb and, at the centre of it all, a large dish
piled with Kavilca shaped into a ring, its
brown grains glistening with the fat and juices
from the goose, with flakes of tender, buttery
meat in the centre.” The sensual enjoyment of
delicious, nutrient-rich foods may be as good
an argument as any for saving them.Coca-Cola and other sugary beverages around
the world, people — even Belgians — don’t
crave the sour, complex flavors of lambic beers
as much as they used to. In Russia, where a
fermented sour beverage called kvass has
been made for centuries, a government ad
campaign squarely aimed at Coca-Cola, which
had opened a bottling plant in St. Petersburg
in 1995. “Say no to Cola-nisation. Drink kvass
to the health of the nation!” read one ad,
according to Saladino. The effort kept Coke
from capsizing kvass for a bit but ultimately
failed.
In some cases, as with the Faroe Islands’
skerpikjot — sheep’s meat that is fermented in
sea wind for nine months until it’s covered in
mold — the reader may wonder if the extinc-
tion of a particular food may be such a bad
thing. (After all, now that the fishing industry
has taken off in the Faroe Islands, its inhabit-
ants won’t face starvation anymore.) But
whether you hunger to try the delicaciesother ancient varieties of emmer may also
have genetic resistance to wheat blast, a new
disease that is decimating crops from Brazil to
Bangladesh. (Because of the Green Revolu-
tion, which developed more productive crops,
95 percent of all wheat grown today is
Triticum aestivum.) In China, red mouth
glutinous rice was spurned in favor of high-
yielding white rices known as IR8 and IR64.
And on and on. Saladino even has a chapter
on alcoholic beverages, where he shows how
industrially made wine has become popular in
Georgia, the birthplace of natural winemak-
ing, and how Belgium’s lambic beermaking
tradition is at risk of dying out thanks to the
global beer industry. (Saladino delivers this
depressing fact: Today, 1 in 4 beers consumed
around the world are brewed by just one
company, A-B InBev.)
Another culprit is more personal: the grad-
ual but decisive change in our palates. In part
because of the ubiquity and popularity ofI
n the early 1970s, American botanist Jack
Harlan proclaimed that mass extinction
was underway in America’s fields. “These
resources stand between us and catastrophic
starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,”
Harlan wrote. He was referring specifically to
the genetic resources within three crops that
we most depend on: wheat, rice and corn.
Forty years later, his words inspired another
botanist, Cary Fowler, to launch an under-
ground seed vault in Svalbard, Norway.
Journalist Dan Saladino unveils the work of
Harlan and other visionaries in “Eating to
Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and
Why We Need to Save Them,” his impressively
researched book about the variety of crops,
animals and foods that have been tossed aside
in favor of the monocultures that have come to
dominate our food supply. Though they were
meant to improve efficiency and yield by
“feeding the world,” these crops and breeds
are having unintended consequences. Many of
today’s “improved” crops, which lack diversity
because they come from patented seeds, have
no defenses against fungi, viruses and insects
— all of which are becoming more of a threat
with climate change. The breeds of animals
we rely on for food have also been narrowed
on a global scale, making them more suscepti-
ble to diseases that could wipe them out.
One by one, Saladino, a food journalist for
the BBC, shows how unique foods and crops
have been neglected in favor of modern,
supposedly “revolutionary” varieties. In India,
the wild citrus fruit memang narang (“the
fruit of ghosts”) was overlooked after 19th-
century plant breeders bred out the bitter-
tasting phenols, which are what give this fruit
its potent health-bestowing properties and
also serve as a defense against pests and
disease. In Anatolia, Turkey, kavilca wheat, a
type of emmer that’s been grown since Neo-
lithic times, is not only more nutritious than
today’s bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) but,
thanks to its tightfitting husks, is also resis-
tant to Fusarium head blight, a devious fungus
that is threatening wheat crops. Kavilca andWhy we need biodiversity on our dinner plates — and why it’s disappearingKENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESFOOD REVIEW BY HANNAH WALLACEHannah Wallace is a journalist who covers
regenerative agriculture, food justice and start-ups.
She lives in Portland, Ore.