A pessimistic look at the U.S. in the fifties exposed by Frank. I was there. I was 28 when The Americans hit the street. Robert put his finger on a lot of things all of us knew about and many of us deplored, but the overall picture wasn't as dark as this essay makes it sound. Our armed forces had integrated, and there was a lot of push-back against the KKK and the things that had gone on in the South. Shortly before The Americans came out I spent several months in the Air University at Montgomery, Alabama. Every night when you came out there'd be KKK flyers under your windshield wipers. Down the road there was a "separate but equal" school for black kids where the boys were taught how to work in the fields and the girls were taught how to do housework. But it wasn't long after I finished the school that things began improving. I'll never know how much Frank's book influenced those changes, but I know it had an effect. With or without the book, things were improving, and all in all, even then, the United States probably was less bigoted than most of the world.
