The Fifties

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The Fifties

The 1950s were a time of rapid change and lock step conformity, of new forms emerging out of old, and technical innovations proceeding at a breakneck pace. For all the talk of traditional American values, the country was shedding its past as a snake sheds its skin. By the decade's end, so much had changed—internationalism replacing isolationism; rampant consumerism replacing thrift; the extended family network, once the social glue binding the country, superseded by the suburban nuclear family—that the country was scarcely recognizable. Yet, the 1950s continues to be perceived as the ultra-American decade. Nostalgic for a time when America was without question the most powerful nation on earth, and, like the biblical land of milk and honey, overflowing with bounty, America has projected its anxieties back to this supposedly Golden Age. This perception does not bear scrutiny. At the time, it seemed as if overnight a familiar way of life had been replaced by shopping malls and prefabricated suburbs, the atom bomb and television sets—especially television sets.

It is almost impossible to calculate the effect television had in the first decade of its usage. Television intruded into every aspect of American life, leaving almost nothing untouched. Book sales declined; radio listenership slumped precipitously; the film industry, already in shambles, was dealt a staggering blow. By 1951, movie theaters had begun to close throughout the country—134 in Southern California alone—and even cities with only one television station were reporting drops in film attendance of between 20 and 40 percent. So fascinated was the public with this new medium, according to a 1951 study, that when a popular program was on, toilets would flush throughout the city as if on cue, in concert with commercial breaks or the conclusion of a program. Television altered the country's mores and conventions, its collective vision of the nation and the world, and the very nature of electoral politics. Television brought America the wars abroad and the war at home—the Arkansas National Guard blocking court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, the French Catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu—and the confluence of these forces, racial tension and American internationalism, would foster the more radical changes of the 1960s.

Nowhere was the effect of television so pervasive as in advertising, and so great was the effect of television advertising on consumer habits, it was almost Pavlovian. "Television was turning out to be a magic machine for selling products," writes David Halberstam, author of an exhaustive survey of the decade, "and the awareness of that was still dawning on Madison Avenue in the late 1950s." Six months after Revlon began sponsoring the popular game show, The $64,000 Question, for instance, the company's revenues had risen 54 percent. The next year sales had risen to $85.7 million, a $33 million increase, a figure close to Revlon's total profits prior to television. Obviously, there were winners and losers in this equation. The companies that could afford national advertising gained market share, and smaller companies lost it. In short, television furthered the subsumption of market capitalism under the hegemony of multinational corporations, a profound blow to the free-market that television so zealously trumpeted.

Television advertising was also used to great effect in politics. The campaign commercial became an integral part of the American electioneering, as did television coverage, replacing the whistle-stop tour as a tool of effective voter-outreach. Television could make or break a candidate: it was Richard Nixon's famous televised "Checkers" speech that saved his 1952 vice-presidential candidacy, and television again that proved his undoing against John F. Kennedy in 1960. In their debate, Nixon, exhausted by his arduous campaign schedule, and with the sweat washing away his makeup, appeared so haggard and pale that acquaintances called afterwards to inquire after his health. Kennedy, on the other hand, having spent the previous week relaxing poolside in Southern California, literally radiated vitality; the choice was apparently between a derelict used car salesman and a bronzed demi-god.

There was a schizoid quality to life in the 1950s, a manic oscillation between paranoia and omnipotence. The disjunct was fueled by the long shadow of the Depression and among certain parties, a blind, unreasoned hatred of Communism. "You and I were trained for a conflict that never came," writes D. J. Waldie in his memoir of life in Lakewood, California, the second, mass-produced suburb built in America (Levittown, New York, was first). "At my grade school, the Sisters of St. Joseph made me hate Communists, then intolerance, and finally everything that could break the charmed pattern of our lives. I am not sure the Sisters of St. Joseph expected this from their daily lessons on the Red threat." One might attribute this hyper-vigilance to a form of collective post-traumatic stress disorder, a reaction to defeating the Nazis, as if prosperity—linked as it was to war production—was contingent on possessing a worthy enemy to defeat.

In fact, this was precisely the case. The American economy had become beholden to Keynesian theory, perpetual war production. As it was, America had already experienced a series of recessions since the end of the war. The more leftist historians of the age would argue that the bellicose nature of our foreign policy—Korea, our material support of France's struggle in Indochina, our numerous covert actions in places like Guatemala and Iran—and our strident anti-Communism was in fact a method of keeping the war machine chugging away full blast. It was the Monroe Doctrine expanded to include the entire world. In addition, our numerous foreign interventions coincided with vested interests, and it was often at the behest of large corporations that foreign policy was molded. One seldom mentioned proof of this thesis is the new zeal with which Americans were taxed—they were spending more, but they were also, many for the first time, paying an income tax, much of which went to supporting our foreign excursions. By the end of the decade, even Eisenhower could not ignore the changes the cold war had wrought, and his farewell address carried a dire warning.

Above all else, red-baiting made for effective campaign politics. Richard Nixon, perhaps America's most opportunistic politician, first saw the value of red-baiting, using the Alger Hiss hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as a bully pulpit, pushing anti-Communist legislation through sub-committee when the matter seemed all but dead. Nixon then seized the moral high ground in his 1950 senatorial race, mercilessly baiting his liberal opponent, Helen Gallagher Douglas, at every opportunity. Senator Joseph McCarthy became the most notorious red-baiter of all, stepping into the role of what David Halberstam called an "accidental demagogue" when he casually mentioned a fictitious list of State Department Communists at a Lincoln Day Celebration in Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthy's campaign to ferret out Communism lasted four long years, fueled as much by a lust for headlines as by ideological conviction. It ended with his ill-conceived attack on the U.S. Army, leading to his censure by the Senate and political disgrace. The red scare was, as Maryland Senator Millard Tydings said of Joseph McCarthy, "a hoax and a fraud … an attempt to inflame the American people with a wave of hysteria and fear on an unbelievable scale." As such, it was a smashing success. Nixon was victorious in his senatorial campaign against Douglas in 1950. Tydings, whose comments exposed him to the full brunt of far right wrath, was not: he lost his seat in 1956.

If America was exporting spear rattling abroad, at home the good life was being rationalized as never before. Technology and the mania for speedy service had crept into almost every facet of commerce from restaurants (McDonald's) to motels (Holiday Inn) to shopping (E.J. Korvetts, and the many discount department stores Korvetts inspired) to farming itself. Family farms disappeared at a staggering rate, replaced by large agribusiness conglomerates, whose indiscriminate use of pesticides and feed additives, along with promotion of the beef industry, changed forever the American diet. Whatever product or service could be performed, could be performed better and more efficiently as part of a chain, or so it was thought. Ray Kroc, the original franchiser of McDonald's, demonstrated this with stunning success. It was part of a democratization of goods and services. What had formally been the province of the upper-middle class—leisure, cars, houses—was now available to the working man, albeit in a watered-down form. Nowhere was this dual relationship—technology and egalitarianism—in commerce more apparent than in the housing industry.

Housing had suffered from the paucity of building supplies during World War II. In 1944 there had been a mere 114,00 new house starts, and with the return of America's soldiers, the housing shortage became a housing crisis. Bill Levitt, himself a veteran of the Seabees, began thinking about applying assembly line techniques to housing before the war, and had bought a plot of farmland on Long Island with his brother for that very purpose. Levitt wanted to bring housing to the working class and emancipate them from the inner city. Following the war, Levitt, with the aid of Federally-insured mortgages, began building a community of 17,000 minimalist Cape Cod houses, a scale of production heretofore unknown. Everything was pre-fabricated and transported to the building site, where specialized crews moved from one lot to the next in assembly-line fashion performing their single task. Construction was finished within a matter of months.

"This is Levittown! All yours for $58. You're a lucky fellow, Mr. Veteran," proclaimed an ad in the New York Times. "Uncle Sam and the world's largest builder have made it possible for you to live in a charming house in a delightful community without having to pay for them with your eye teeth." Veterans stormed Levitt's sales office; in one day alone 1,400 contracts were drawn up. The new owners were pioneers in what became a mass exodus from city to suburb as all across the nation similar projects were initiated. Levitt himself built several other Levittowns along the East Coast. It was a revolutionary change in living for the nuclear family. In 1955, Levitt-type suburbs accounted for 75 percent of the new housing starts. Within thirty years some 60 million people had moved to the prefabricated suburbs Levitt had helped to create, while fifteen of the twenty-five largest cities had declined in population, a massive migration that would have dramatic consequences in the ensuing years.

The ranks of the suburbanized middle class were swelling, but what was the price of this newfound affluence? The suburbs were clean and safe, but living in them could be enervating, especially to college-educated women who had forsaken careers for domesticity and child-rearing. Nor were men spared the malaise. It was ironic, an irony not lost on many returning veterans, that having risked their lives in war, they had returned to another kind of death, that of the colorless organization man. In 1950 sociologist David Reisman published The Lonely Crowd, his psychological exploration of middle class anomie. Shortly thereafter, Sloan Wilson quit his advertising job to write The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, his 1955 novel portraying the emptiness of the suburbs. "Have we become a nation of yesmen?" these books asked. Was solace to be found in blind materialism? Many sensed the danger, but could not resist the allure. " The Lonely Crowd was anatomized in 1950," wrote Richard Schickel, "and the fear of drifting into its clutches was lively in us. White Collar [C. Wright Mills' truculent attack on conformist culture] was on our brick and board bookshelves, and we saw how the eponymous object seemed to be choking the life out of earlier generations … though of course, even as we read about these cautionary figures, many of us were talking to corporate recruiters about entry-level emulation of them."

While the nation fell further under the sway of homogeneity, it was no surprise that a kind of exaggerated rebel would become a popular cultural icon, an omnipresent figure in literature (the Beats), in rock and roll, and the movies. Stars such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift assayed a new type of masculinity; sensitive, brooding, and rebellious, while Elvis Presley, and to a greater degree, Jerry Lee Lewis, comported themselves with a haughty menace. These sneering film and music stars were America's surrogate rebels, acting out in ways most people could ill afford to chance. America's contempt for what it had become was caught in the sneer, an expression that, when employed by Marlon Brando or James Dean or Elvis Presley, contemptuously leveled the organization man and the carrot-on-a-stick world of nine-to-five.

Rock and roll was this rebellious spirit's most potent manifestation. The culmination of years of cross-cultural evolution, teenagers began enthusiastically seeking out "race" music, one of a variety of blues and rhythm and blues (R&B), in the early 1950s, an enthusiasm all the more attractive for the disapprobation with which parents reacted to it. Rock and roll was unabashedly sexual, exuberant, and raucous. To parents everywhere it represented a threat, an insidious menace crawling up from the cellars of the lower classes. In 1951, a Cleveland record store owner reported this new craze to DJ Alan Freed, then playing classical music on a late-night show, and prevailed upon him to change his show to the nascent rock and roll, making Freed one of the first disc jockeys in the country to program bi-racially. Previously, a Memphis DJ, Dewey Phillips, had devised a show, Red, Hot and Blue, that had become the rage among Memphis's hip youth. Memphis was thoroughly segregated, but on Phillips show one could hear Ike Turner, Fats Domino, and B. B. King alongside Bill Haley, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash; in short, the two styles from which rock and roll derived played side-by-side.

Elvis Presley, who listened religiously to Phillips show, exemplified this hybrid, blending country-western, blues, and evangelical mania, presented with a sneer ripped straight off the face of James Dean, whom the young Elvis worshipped. Linking the surliness of Dean with the frenzy of the gospel revivalist was an inspired combination. "This cat came out in a coat and pink shirt and socks and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I'll bet, before he made a move," said country singer Bob Luman in recalling an early Elvis show. "Then he hit his guitar a lick and he broke two strings…. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn't done anything yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar." This was the threat that parents worried over, why religious groups burned rock and roll records, and why the music was ineluctably attractive to the kids, and the nature of music, and musical celebrity would never be the same.

The change in rock and roll over the course of the decade, from unbridled passion to commercial product, was an early lesson in cooptation. But for the Beat writers, defiance to American values, such as they were, was a central tenet of their thinking, and they were regularly castigated for it. Writing in the November 1959 issue of Life, Paul O'Neill called the Beat writers "undisciplined and slovenly amateurs who have deluded themselves into believing their lugubrious absurdities are art simply because they have rejected the form, styles, and attitudes of previous generations." The Beats rejected American consumerism and the plastic world of mortgages and car payments, living, instead, on the periphery. "In their discontent with American values," writes Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs' biographer, "with cold-war suspicion, with loving the bomb, with a society shaped by corporate power and moral smugness, they had come up with something more vital…. In their rejection of the boring, the conventional, and the academic, in their adoption of a venturesome lifestyle, they gave everyone the green light to plumb their own experience." And while they were derided in the 1950s, endlessly examined for moral failings, labeled as naysayers and saddled with the diminutive, Beatnik (after Sputnik), America could not be rid of them. Within a few short years, their progeny, the baby-boomers who read them in high school, were omnipresent.

The most common representation of the 1950s is a sort of glossy coffee table histoire, heavy on photographic images and short on historical fact. It is these images of tail fins and spotless kitchens and poodle skirts that endure, as if the other America, the America of violent racist attacks, of Little Rock and Montgomery—the incipient racism and paranoia of the most powerful country on earth—never existed. "One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the 1950s more than twenty-five years later," writes Halberstam, "was not so much that life was better in the 1950s (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television. It was the television images of the era that remained so remarkably sharp in people's memories, often fresher than memories of real life. Television reflected a world of warm-hearted, sensitive, tolerant Americans, a world devoid of anger and meanness of spirit and, of course, failure." Those aficionados of the decade who dress in vintage clothing, drive 1950s-era cars, and listen to the music, have made of the 1950s a virtual cult of style. Their strivings to elude the present constitutes a nostalgic retreat, a harkening back to a Golden Age through the mute power of artifacts. This beneficent image, the make-believe world represented by such movies and television shows as Grease, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, and Laverne and Shirley, constitutes an evasion, a return to a time of clear cut values, which is all the more insidious for being a fiction. As a decade, the 1950s represents a sort of idealized America, but this image has more to do with the 1970s television show, Happy Days, than with any objective reality.

It is perhaps to be expected, then, that, compared to the abundance of memoirs, histories, analyses, and so on published about the 1960s, there is such a paucity of historical material on the 1950s. Ironic, and unsettling, because the America we have inherited, and with which some take umbrage, was shaped in great part by the 1950s. Much of the landscape we take for granted—fast food franchises and foreign policy, corporate hegemony and interstate freeways—was brought into being during that era, as was the generation that went to college, protested the war, took acid, and wrote a memoir. They prefer to remember the 1950s as a bad dream.

—Michael Baers