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A Forum How the Fifties Became the Sixties

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A Forum How the Fifties Became the Sixties 8 Historically Speaking • January/February 2008 THE SIXTIES RECONSIDERED: A FORUM AMERICANS OFTEN DIVIDE 20TH-CENTURY U.S. HISTORY the 1950s was for later developments in the 1960s. Yet he emphasizes that the conti- into decades. The Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the Turbulent Sixties are nuity thesis has serious limitations. The 1960s witnessed a series of societal and cul- bounded neatly into ten-year spans. Historians of recent America have reacted to that tural transformations that were unique to the decade. Terry H. Anderson, Alice decadal view. The past, they contend, never conforms so nicely to such neat categories. In Echols, Paul Lyons, and David Farber respond, and Whitfield concludes with his re- the lead piece to this forum on the 1960s Stephen J. Whitfield considers how important joinder. HOW THE FIFTIES BECAME THE SIXTIES Stephen J. Whitfield n the United States, the first decade and a To highlight the unobstructed path into the half or so after the Second World War Sixties, the case of Allen Ginsberg is especially Iseemed to lock into place a certain set of convenient. As early as May 1946, the Colum- conventions—from the broad acceptance of bia undergraduate was insisting that modernity the New Deal to the older ideal of domesticity, required “Orphic creativeness, juvenescent sav- from the virtue of the American way of life to agery, primitive abandon.” These were the very its extension to grateful foreigners, from very attributes that the counterculture would exalt moderate progress in race relations to moder- two decades later, the Dionysian qualities that ate reverence for reverence itself. But with ex- not even the best minds of his generation of tremely few observers quite imagining—much social scientists could foresee. If “Howl” less predicting—what was about to happen, (1955), and to a lesser extent “America” (1956), suddenly the Sixties would blindside what did not exist, these works would have had to be nearly all Americans had taken for granted a invented. The publication of Howl and other decade earlier. Poems did not exactly stir the enthusiasm of U.S. At first no reversal in the entire span of Customs officials, who seized the little City American history had seemed more dramatic, Lights’ Pocket Poets Series paperback, as did no transvaluation of values more obvious. With the San Francisco police. Even the poet Louis the possible exception of the shift from the Ginsberg, a leftist, objected to his son’s “vehe- Twenties to the Thirties, no contrast seemed to ment, vaporous, vituperations of rebellion . be more striking. But the economic disaster that . Your attitude is irresponsible . It stinks! had become so exigent by the very end of 1929 Love, Louis.”2 makes it easier to explain the transformation Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower watching television at the Republican Yet rebellion in the Fifties also had its lim- from the rambunctious self-indulgence typified National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, July 1952. Library of Con- its. In the year that Howl and Other Poems ap- gress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-U9- by Warren G. Harding’s pleasure in going out 99A-RC109]. peared, Ginsberg’s closest collaborator among into the country to “bloviate” to the angst and the Beats, Jack Kerouac, cast his ballot for collectivist fervor of the Great Depression. No Eisenhower for president (as did an already fa- such catastrophe can be summoned to explain how ties have erupted? My remarks are intended to sug- mous young Baptist preacher in Montgomery, Ala- the Fifties became the Sixties. When that decade gest how the two decades have been linked and bama). That both Kerouac and Martin Luther King, began, the old order hardly seemed to be undergo- might be better framed. Jr. voted Republican suggests how warily the histo- ing a crisis. As early as 1960, a paperback anthology of pri- rian ought to push the case for the Fifties anticipat- On the contrary, the standard critique was dis- mary sources aimed at undergraduate course adop- ing the Sixties. King was showing residual may that so few felt the urgency of national reexam- tion was published under the title: The 1950’s: loyalty—for the last time—to the party of Lincoln. ination or amelioration. The usual objection to that America’s “Placid” Decade. To insert a question mark at White Southerners were concurrently adhering to decade was to dismiss it as an homage to catatonia. the end of that Houghton Mifflin subtitle has been the party of memory—by remaining Democrats. Robert Lowell referred to “the tranquillized Fifties,” the thrust of subsequent scholarship. As early as Here is merely one instance: “I’m strictly for Steven- which had begun with the 1953 inauguration of a 1977, before the whiff of tear gas on the nation’s son,” Elvis Presley announced in 1956. “I don’t dig president who had instigated an age marked by “ice, campuses had been fully exhaled, the literary histo- the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he ice” everywhere. “The Republic summons Ike,/the rian Morris Dickstein had portrayed the late Fifties knows the most.”3 mausoleum in her heart.” Garry Wills spent most of as “a fertile period, a seedbed of ideas that would The writer who most astutely located as well as Eisenhower’s two terms in a Jesuit seminary. After burgeon and live in the more activist, less reflective personified the undercurrents that would erupt emerging from the novitiate to engage in classical climate that followed. A comparable breakup and aboveground with such force in the Sixties was Nor- and historical scholarship as well as in political jour- transition could be traced in almost every sphere of man Mailer. It was he who predicted that “the in- nalism, Wills “tended to believe people who assured American society during the same period: [even] in credible dullness wreaked upon the American me I had not missed a thing.”1 So how could the Six- politics . .” landscape in Eisenhower’s eight years” of “tasteless, January/February 2008 • Historically Speaking 9 sexless, odorless sanctity” would be washed away therefore needed to be contained). Exactly half a 1957, attitudes toward the United States had become with tsunami-force, swept away by a “subterranean century ago this past September was the opening of gendered. river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic West Side Story. It galvanized audiences with the Sex roles were supposed to remain sharply cir- desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence “urban jazz” that, in a lecture delivered a year ear- cumscribed, however: men were men, and women which is the dream life of the nation.” By 1957 lier, composer Leonard Bernstein had claimed made were housewives. For those who happened to have Mailer could already foresee “a time of violence, grown up white and male and straight in the new hysteria, confusion and rebellion” that would Fifties, it was the belle époque—or, as the TV show soon “replace the time of conformity.”4 Espe- had it, a period of “happy days.” For others, it cially prescient was his essay on “The White was an era of decidedly crappy days. Modern Negro,” which grasped how a descent into the feminism began, after all, in the family of the depths of the black experience would change the Fifties, with its accentuation of the virtues of do- sensibility of many younger whites. mesticity (and the Sixties began with the divorce Only eleven years later the Youth Interna- of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, which occurred in tional Party would be founded—and the two 1960). A distinctive female identity was so inse- most famous Yippies were on record as cure in the Fifties that Susan Sontag occasionally awestruck by “The White Negro.” Jerry Rubin wrote under the name of Susan Rieff. And in read it three or four times (without claiming to 1954, when the most famous American woman understand it fully), and Abbie Hoffman hailed it of the decade flew to Korea to entertain the U.S. as the American essay that “was the most influen- troops there, the ID card of Marilyn Monroe tial in my life.”5 The Yippies flirted with faux-dan- listed her as “Mrs. Norma Jeane DiMaggio.”10 ger, with cap-pistol politics, forming their The self-assertiveness and the declarations of pseudo-party in part to expose the violence (ac- independence endorsed for so long now in Amer- tual or implicit) with which the consensus that ican culture make a book like The Feminine Mys- had been celebrated in the Fifties was imposed. tique (1963) in retrospect seem inevitable. The Little more than a decade after Mailer had degree to which it administered greater shocks to brooded upon the bravery of a couple of teenage the system than any other single volume of the toughs “beat[ing] in the brains of a [weak, 50- last half-century therefore requires a gentle re- year-old] candy-store keeper” and thereby enter- minder of how embedded Betty Friedan was in ing into a dangerous relationship with both the the Fifties. Haunted by the shadow of totalitari- authority of the police and the sanctity of private anism, she denounced the suburban home (oxy- property, a real Negro would recall how he be- moronically) as a “comfortable concentration came “an ‘outlaw’” who had deliberately “stepped Carl Van Vechten's portrait of Norman Mailer, 1948. Library of camp.” Bewitched by the ideal of consensus, she outside of the white man’s law, which I repudi- Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction num- took the legitimacy of capitalism for granted and ated with scorn and self-satisfaction.” In becom- ber, LC-USZ62-42506].
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