Word: 1950s
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...have any objective, scientific advantages with respect to one another. Yet we must choose. Every doctor knows he or she can find scientific papers that prove or disprove the same idea; "always do this" and "never do this." Sometimes they're even in the same journal. In the 1950s, scientific authorities told the public they should eat butter, eggs and caffeine. Then they said they shouldn't. Now they should again. This tempts us to throw up hands and give up on thinking...
...that obstacle course lingered with Eisenhower. And two decades later, as the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, he noted how easily his armies disrupted German supply-lines by bombing railroads. But he also noticed how, despite Allied pummeling, the country's Autobahn had remained passable. In the 1950s, the general-turned politician, by then elected president, resolved to build a similar system across the United States. "The old convoy," he recalled, "had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land...
...fuller sense, however, it was America's 1950s economic boom that proved the Interstates' true progenitor. The Federal-Aid Highway Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by Eisenhower on June 29,1956, allocated $25 billion to pay 90% of the costs of a 41,000-mile "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways," to be completed...
...Still one might fairly ask, to what degree does the system incarnate the vision of its 1950s authors? And how does it mesh with the nation's grand romance of the open road? After all, travelers from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac have done time on earlier American roads, portraying them variously as pathways to freedom or into a Hobbesian wilderness. And more recently, Hunter Thompson, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and other myth-makers have tried to hustle the Interstates into that same picaresque canon...
...influence. He speaks of classmates who marry each other's sisters in order to remain in a kind of Eton club, of their difficulties in relating to exotic creatures like women and the less privileged, and quotes writer John Le Carré, who taught at the school in the 1950s: "The boys were adult, funny, a little removed from life, even as they evolved effortlessly into the shrewdest operators. They communicated with each other in code. Most of all, I felt, they really knew how to be with each other, and that was the real Eton thing." Some boys...