Culture after 1945 in two minutes
- About one home in eleven had a television in 1950 and almost nine in ten had one by 1960, and three networks sent similar shows about white middle-class families into them.
- Advertising, chain stores and credit cards built a consumer culture, and in the 1959 Kitchen Debate Nixon and Khrushchev argued over which system gave families a better life.
- In 1954 Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, partly to set the United States apart from officially atheist Soviet communism.
- About a third of married women had jobs or sought them by 1960, though television showed homemakers, and Betty Friedan's 1957 survey of classmates led to The Feminine Mystique.
- Teenagers had money and their own culture, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 to rock and roll and Elvis Presley's 1956 television appearances.
- John Keats mocked suburban sameness, John Kenneth Galbraith decried public squalor, Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg rejected the mainstream, and gay Americans formed the Mattachine Society in 1950.
- On the exam: Questions ask you to compare mass culture's conformity with dissent from teenagers, Beats, women and gay Americans, and to contextualize a 1950s source within the Cold War.
Topic 8.5 key terms
- Mass culture
Entertainment, advertising and products shared by the whole country at once, through national networks, chains and brands.
- “Under God”
Two words Congress added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, as the Cold War set the U.S. against the officially atheist Soviet Union.
- Contextualization
Explaining a source by the events of its time. Eisenhower said this in the middle of the Cold War, so read it with that in mind.
- Consumer culture
A way of life shaped by buying things. In the 1950s, national ads, chain stores and credit cards taught millions of people to want the same goods.
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
J. D. Salinger's novel, told by a troubled sixteen-year-old who thinks the adult world is phony. It became a classic challenge to the conformity of 1950s culture.
- rock and roll
A 1950s style of popular music that blended African American rhythm and blues with white country music. Teenagers bought it on 45 rpm records and heard it on the radio and television.
- Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956)
A 381-day protest in which Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride segregated city buses. It made Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure and ended when the courts struck down bus segregation.
- Beat Generation
Writers and poets of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who rejected conformity, careers and consumer comfort for spontaneity, travel and personal freedom.
- Conformity
Acting, dressing and thinking like everyone around you. Critics in the 1950s said big corporations, suburbs and mass media pushed Americans to fit in instead of thinking for themselves.
- The Affluent Society (1958)
John Kenneth Galbraith's book arguing that a rich America spent too much on private goods and too little on schools, roads and cities. His phrase: private opulence and public squalor.
- Mattachine Society
One of the first gay rights groups in the United States, started in Los Angeles in 1950. Its 1951 statement of purpose set out three goals: to unify gay Americans, to educate the public and to lead.
- ONE, Inc. v. Olesen (1958)
A one-paragraph Supreme Court ruling that overturned lower courts which had called a gay magazine obscene. ONE could be mailed to its readers.
- Suburbanization
The move of families from cities to new suburbs after 1945. Federally backed mortgages, cars and highways drove it. Most families who moved were white, because lenders and builders shut out many Black families.
- Racial wealth gap
The gap between the typical wealth of white and Black families. A house is most families' biggest asset, and federal mortgage rules after 1934 steered loans away from many Black families and neighborhoods.
- Baby boomers
Americans born between 1946 and 1964. They grew up in the suburbs and the television age, and the oldest of them came of age in the 1960s.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Same Show
1948–1960
Key terms: Mass culture, “Under God”, Contextualization, Consumer culture
In 1950, about one American home in eleven had a television. By 1960, almost nine in ten did.
Three networks sent the same shows into every one of those homes. Most of the families on those shows were white and middle class.
One Monday night in 1953, about 44 million Americans watched Lucy Ricardo have a baby. The next day, about 29 million watched Eisenhower sworn in as president.
In one 1952 episode, Lucy and Ethel argue with their husbands over whose job is harder. So they switch.
The women take jobs at a candy factory. The men try to cook. Everybody loses. The joke only works if everyone agrees where each of them belongs.
Real women had more going on. By 1960, about a third of married women were working or looking for work.
In 1957, a writer named Betty Friedan began surveying her college classmates about their lives.
In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Why then? The Senate was investigating Communists, and the Soviet Union was officially atheist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
…we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource, in peace or in war.
Ads, chains and charge cards taught the same wants from coast to coast.
On July 24, 1959, Khrushchev watched a demonstration of push-button appliances in Moscow.
Nikita S. Khrushchev
Don't you have a machine that puts food in your mouth and pushes it down?
Some Americans had the same question.
Teenagers
1951–1958
Key terms: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), rock and roll, Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956), Beat Generation
The teenagers of the 1950s weren't baby boomers. They were born before or during the war. They had jobs, allowances and time.
A 1951 novel gave them a hero. Holden Caulfield was sixteen, and he thought most grown-ups were phonies.
The girl from the attic stairs is fifteen now, and the attic is finished.
And they had their own music.
That September, about 60 million people watched Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show.
On his last visit, in January 1957, the cameras showed him only from the waist up.
Ed Sullivan
This is a real decent, fine boy.
Put that year in context: in Montgomery, Black residents were walking to work rather than ride segregated buses. Segregationists heard rock and roll as part of the same threat.
That April, men from Carter's group rushed the stage in Birmingham and attacked the singer Nat King Cole.
Some artists walked out of the picture altogether. In 1951, Jack Kerouac typed a cross-country novel in three weeks, on one roll of paper about 120 feet long.
In 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl in a San Francisco gallery.
In 1957, San Francisco police arrested the bookstore clerk who sold Howl. The publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was charged too.
Judge Clayton W. Horn
Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?
Judge Clayton Horn found the poem was not obscene.
By 1958 there were about 4,000 drive-in theaters. The teenagers sat on the hoods. In the back seats, asleep, were the actual baby boomers.
The Crack
1950–1958
Key terms: Conformity, The Affluent Society (1958), Mattachine Society, ONE, Inc. v. Olesen (1958)
The title comes from a 1956 book by a journalist named John Keats.
John Keats
you too… can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we're building around the edges of America's cities.
Critics said suburbs and big companies were turning Americans into copies. Organization men, in William Whyte's phrase.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved…
Galbraith called it private opulence and public squalor. Rich families, shabby public services.
Then a sociologist moved in. Herbert Gans lived in Levittown, New Jersey, from 1958 to 1960.
Herbert J. Gans
most new suburbanites are pleased with the community that develops.
Herbert J. Gans
the critics are right about members of their own culture, but wrong when they presume to judge and speak for the majority of Levittowners.
Some Americans couldn't fit in without hiding. In 1950, five men in Los Angeles met in secret to start a group for gay Americans: the Mattachine Society.
In those years, gay federal workers were being fired, and gay Americans could be arrested for meeting. The Society's 1951 statement set three goals: unify, educate, lead.
In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that ONE, a gay magazine, could go through the mail.
In August 1957, William and Daisy Myers and their children moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania. They were its first Black family.
For nights, crowds gathered outside. Rocks came through their picture window.
State police broke up the crowds. Neighbors Bea and Lew Wechsler stood by the family. Someone burned a cross on the Wechslers' lawn.
William Myers said he had bought the house and meant to live in it. The family stayed four years.
Proof
1945–1960
Key terms: Suburbanization, Racial wealth gap, Baby boomers
So what did the house prove?
That the boom was real. In 1940, fewer than half of American households owned their home. By 1960, more than three in five did.
That builders, unions and a lot of federal money had built it together. And that the government had helped decide who got in.
Nixon was right that a steelworker could buy that house. He left out which steelworkers.
The kids growing up behind those windows had been watching all of it. In a few years, they'd have plenty to say.
The first baby boomers turned eighteen in 1964.