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Home , 1950s, Morris Dickstein, The Sixties (miniseries), The White Negro

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 . Yet he emphasizes that the conti- into . The 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 . 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 BECAME THE SIXTIES Stephen J. Whitfield

n the , the first decade and a To highlight the unobstructed path into the half or so after the Second World War Sixties, the case of 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 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, , 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,” 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 and , 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 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 , 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 for granted and ated with scorn and self-satisfaction.” In becom- ber, LC-USZ62-42506]. denied that women had any unfinished political ing a rapist tracking “white prey,” Eldridge business (making democratic mobilization unnec- Cleaver seemed to step out of the pages that essary). Indeed, the authorial voice of The Femi- Mailer had written, and indeed defined his crime “as the Broadway musical authentically American.8 nine Mystique was designed to conceal a radical past. an insurrectionary act.” Cleaver professed to take Urban jazz is what kept the American musical from The book makes psychology do the work of poli- pride in “defying . . . the white man’s law . . . and . . being a facsimile of the European operetta or light tics. Her account thus fails to imagine what it would . defiling his women.”6 One way to measure the gap opera. Bernstein’s own score may account for the provoke later in the decade. For the achievement of between the Fifties and the Sixties is the trajectory of proclivity of cultural historians to overlook this most even the seemingly modest goals of economic inclu- Cleaver’s self-invention from ex-con to icon, even to operatic of major musicals in favor of like sion would mean a transformation, the effects of the point of a presidential candidacy on the Peace Blackboard Jungle (whose young hoodlums dig rock ‘n’ which have yet to run their course. and Freedom Party ticket in 1968, a rise that would roll) or Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or The Wild One The case for continuity has been compelling be- have been unimaginable a decade earlier. (1953). cause historians tend to be suspicious of what might “The White Negro” was not, however, just a In the Broadway production of West Side Story, appear to be caesuras in the past. Little in human ex- lucky guess, an anomalous plunge into the torrents “America”—its most political song—omitted men- perience is created ex nihilo, and the likelihood that of history. For a quarter of a century or so, in vari- tion of minority relations or prejudice. But only four the most flamboyant politics of the Sixties could be ous ways, Mailer was emblematic. The dust jacket of years later, when West Side Story reached the screen, traced to the outer edges of the culture of the Fifties his breakthrough novel of World War II had summa- sensitivities had become more pronounced. “Amer- is also bound to appeal to scholars who expect artists rized a paradigmatic experience, and provided with ica” could be more explicit. The Sharks were allowed to have more sensitive antennae than the rest of us. concision his c.v.: “Brooklyn, Harvard, Leyte [Gulf].” to resent the bigotry to which their ethnicity was Modernism was invented in the studios before it hit Having seen the rage and turmoil of the Sixties com- subjected: “Everything right in America / If you’re the streets. Change had to be imagined before (to ing, he encapsulated the transfer of these emotions a white in America.” In 1961 no other aria was so paraphrase the French ‘68-ers) it could acquire to the streets as well as anyone would in The Armies open about the gap between dream and reality that power. of the Night. No wonder that in 1971 the critic Wil- ethnic outsiders confronted. And yet, because the But a sound argument can also be pushed too frid Sheed identified Mailer’s relevance as follows: Fifties had not really ended, the anger that was about far. When contradiction and conflict are emphasized “If he turns to contemplation, buy a prayer mat; if to boil over had to be countered: the girlfriends of at the expense of consensus, the Fifties cease to be he stays with politics, expect huge voter turnouts. As the gang members make the case for consumerism a recognizable decade. After all, the members of the Mailer goes, so goes the nation.”7 and for the superiority of striving for upward mobil- new middle class, sociologist C. Wright Mills ob- The mixed signals that cultural historians have ity, in contrast with the Caribbean stagnation and served in 1951, were “not radical, not liberal, not picked up in the Fifties were not confined to serious poverty from which both the boys and the girls have conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; writers, however. Even Broadway—so often dis- fled: “I like the shores of America! / Comfort is they are out of it.”11 The signature of that decade missed as middlebrow—could be the site of a sub- yours in America! / Knobs on the doors in America, was political paralysis. Presidential candidate John F. versiveness that was primed to explode (and that / Wall-to-wall floors in America!”9 By 1961, unlike Kennedy’s call to “get this country moving again” 10 Historically Speaking • January/February 2008

energized movements just over the horizon. The Get Rich, which ran from 1955 until 1959. Among its voke recoil, and the excesses of homogeneity would middle class profiled by Mills was mild in the suites; most devoted fans was a former military officer then elicit irrepressible yearnings for pleasure and free- its children would go wild in the streets. residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When he had dom. By 1960 the United States had become the first to miss an episode, his press secretary asked that a The Fifties offered Americans prosperity; never society with more college or university students than print of that week’s show—it was always filmed—be before had living standards been so high. What the farmers.12 In October 1968 Fortune announced the re- sent to the White House.14 For three straight years decade could not promise was a wider scope for per- sults of a poll that identified two-fifths of American You’ll Never Get Rich won Emmies as the Best Com- sonal liberty, for autonomy, for equality, for a greater undergraduates as what the monthly magazine called edy Series. democratic inclusiveness that made the society safe “forerunners.” It asserted that they repudiated an in- Then a war that escalated for almost the entire for diversity. That is the work that began—or that terest in making money, that they began to pay off—in the Sixties. In tended to major in the humanities, and 1950 could write—of that they were likely to come from priv- The Fifties offered Americans prosperity; those stigmatized by race or ethnic- ileged homes. A plurality of these par- ity—that “the excluded group has the ticular college students claimed to never before had living standards been so high. same notion of life and the same aspi- identify with the late Ernesto “Che” What the decade could not promise was a rations as the excluding group.”16 Guevara, who ranked ahead of the A decade later, the excluded were presidential candidates that the politi- wider scope for personal liberty, for autonomy, showing far less eagerness for accept- cal system was projecting that fall: ance. By then it was obvious that not Nixon, Wallace, and Vice President for equality, for a greater democratic inclusive- every black citizen wanted to join the Hubert Humphrey.13 ness that made the society safe for diversity. club. For that change, Malcolm X What limits the case for the conti- should be credited. The “freedom” nuity of the two decades is that the iso- that integrationists sought, he sneered, lated and uninfluential figures of the was nothing more than “talking about Fifties suddenly had allies, comrades, followers. Soon decade of the Sixties falsified the frivolity of Bilko’s getting a cup of coffee with a cracker”; and the cit- there were even fantasies that the radicalism of the motor pool. In November 1970 Esquire put on its izenship that the Constitution seemed to promise young was irresistible, the opening salvo of a per- cover a grinning military man, a real military man: was simply a delusion. Just because a cat gives birth manent revolution. For example, by the Freedom Lieutenant William (Rusty) Calley, then awaiting trial in an oven, he is supposed to have observed, does- Summer of 1964 close to a thousand civil rights vol- for his pivotal role as a platoon leader in the My Lai n’t make kittens biscuits. Those like himself who unteers were estimated to have converged in Missis- massacre on March 16, 1968, in which his 23rd were usually designated as Negroes remained “noth- sippi. Such numbers made the white supremacy that Americal Division Company (Charlie), along with ing but Africans,” “Africans who are in America.”17 was earlier taken for granted seem less normal and Bravo Company, murdered about 500 Vietnamese In succeeding decades—when he was no longer alive less immutable. The South had become an embar- civilians over the course of several hours, taking oc- to dispute such a status—he was sanctified as a “civil rassment. casional breaks to smoke their cigarettes and to eat rights leader.” But what matters is that the note of Another sign of historic change, and a second their rations, without ever facing a single round of nationalist defiance that Malcolm X struck could not limitation to the thesis of continuity, is biographical. enemy fire—and then for good measure burned the have been heard in the immediate postwar period, The lives of Fifties folk moved into unexpected po- village and slaughtered the livestock as well. This when honest speech about race was muffled, and litical territory in the Sixties. The church that Tom orgy of violence the U.S. Army had managed to when the bleakness of the black condition could not Hayden had attended as a boy was the Shrine of the cover up for nearly two years.15 Esquire photographed be candidly discussed. Little Flower, where the pastor was Father Charles the smiling Calley surrounded by cheerful Southeast Such evasiveness is what the Sixties would deci- Coughlin, the former radio priest who had been no- Asian children—hence the nickname of “the Killer sively bury, apparently for good. Perhaps indirect- torious for his denunciations of the New Deal. Cover.” It was the most notorious of the ninety-two ness is something that cannot be consistently From that altar to the cutting edge of SDS and then covers that George Lois did for the magazine (since maintained; perhaps serious artists who operate to the defense table of the Chicago Seven repre- 1962), the one that pushed farthest through the en- within a culture that is free of governmental censor- sented quite a distance. In the Fifties Richard Ave- velope of what a decade earlier would have been ship must eventually incline toward truthfulness. The don was so chic a fashion photographer that Fred considered good taste. That Esquire had become im- barriers against it simply had to be breached. Con- Astaire was cast as “Dick Avery” in the 1957 Para- mensely profitable, occupying a niche in the mass- sider how the director solved the prob- mount musical Funny Face. By the end of the follow- circulation mainstream, suggests how markedly lem of transposing Tennessee Williams’ 1947 drama, ing decade, Avedon had become so politicized that popular culture had shifted. A Streetcar Named Desire, to the screen. On stage he became the designated portraitist of Hayden and A second explanation for the arrival of the Six- Blanche DuBois recalls what was wrong with her other members of the Chicago Seven. ties is that the assorted forms of repression— husband: “There was something different about the How then might the turn of the Fifties into the whether political or social or sexual—were simply boy.” She sensed “a nervousness, a softness and ten- Sixties be explained? Two possible answers can be too great for humans in an ostensibly open society to derness which wasn’t like a man’s.” And then she considered here. One is that the discrepancy be- bear, too heavy for those exercising authority to im- happened to discover him in a room with “an older tween the official or popular culture and the realities pose or to sustain. The pressure was considerable man who had been his friend for years.” In 1951, on the ground could no longer be disguised; the gap enough that a reaction was almost mandated. The however, homosexuality could not even be mentioned had become too wide to be concealed. The Fifties claims of order, restraint, and control were pushed in a movie, and was considered by the American Psy- wanted to live within accepted conventions; the Six- so far that resistance built up from below. The de- chiatric Association to be a mental disorder. The en- ties wished to be liberated. The Fifties instilled illu- mands of conformism had become too acute. That forcers of Hollywood’s Production Code refused to sions; the Sixties opted for realism. The Fifties were is why the Fifties proved to be the last decade over allow Blanche’s husband to remain “a sex pervert.” reverent; the Sixties sought demystification. the span of American history—beginning with Toc- So what could be more shameful in a decade in The face of the military on Fifties television, for queville’s account of the “tyranny of the majority” which a people of plenty confounded Marxist ex- example, was benign, even amusing. No smile was and ending with William Whyte’s description of the pectations of a renewed crisis of capitalism? What more beguiling than that of Sgt. Ernie Bilko (Phil “social ethic” of the organization man—in which could be powerful enough to smash a marriage when Silvers), even as he schemed to swindle the uni- the problem of conformism was integral to the di- that institution was sacrosanct? The boy was too formed suckers of Fort Baxter in CBS’s You’ll Never agnosis of the national character. Rigidity would pro- “tweak” to keep a job; he was not a breadwinner.18 It January/February 2008 • Historically Speaking 11

is almost as if Blanche DuBois had somehow mar- Press, 2004), 68; Louis Ginsberg to Allen Ginsberg, December 11 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Ox- 12, 1955, in Allen and Louis Ginsberg, Family Business: Selected ford University Press, 1951), 328. ried into the family of Willy Loman. In straightening Letters Between a Father and a Son, ed. Michael Schumacher (St. out the husband that Tennessee Williams gave her, Martin’s, 2001), 32. 12 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, Kazan’s adaptation entwined the special ideo- 1987), 21. 3 logical inflections of the 1950s—and inadvertently Quoted in Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, 1994), 327. 13 Youth in Turmoil (Time-Life Books, 1969), 15-16, 19, 37; Gitlin, disclosed why such impulses could not last. The Sixties, 344. 4 Norman Mailer, of Norman Mailer (Ban- tam, 1964), 38, 43, and “The White Negro” (1957), in Advertise- 14 James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in ments for Myself (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 356. Television, 1948-1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), American Civilization at Brandeis University. Among 135-36. 5 his many works on 20th-century America are The Hilary Mills, Mailer: A Biography (Empire Books, 1982), 290, 291. 15 Culture of the , rev. ed. (Johns Hopkins Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The War Remembered from All Sides (Viking, 2003), 343. University Press, 1996) and In Search of Ameri- 6 Mailer, “White Negro,” 347; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (Mc- can Jewish Culture (University Press of New Eng- Graw-Hill, 1968), 13, 14. 16 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and land, 1999). Society (Viking, 1950), 261n. 7 Wilfrid Sheed, “Norman Mailer: Genius or Nothing” (1971), in The Morning After: Essays and Reviews (Warner Paperback Library, 17 Malcolm X, “At the Audubon” (1964) and “The Ballot or the 1972), 39. Bullet” (1964), in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (Grove Press, 1965), 128, 36. 8 Leonard Bernstein, “American Musical Comedy” (1956), in The 1 Robert Lowell, “Memories of West Street and Lepke” and “In- Joy of Music (Simon & Schuster, 1959), 172. 18 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (Signet, 1974 auguration Day: ,” in Collected Poems, ed. Frank [1947]), 95; Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and Bidart and David Gewanter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 9 Stephen Sondheim, “America” (1957), in Robert Gottlieb and in the Fifties (Indiana University Press, 1997), 254-55. 187, 117; Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Doubleday, Robert Kimball, eds., Reading Lyrics (Pantheon, 2000), 587. 1979), 81. 10 Richard Ben Kramer, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (Simon and 2 Quoted in Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Schuster, 2000), 358. and the Making of the (University of California

HOW THE FIFTIES BECAME THE SIXTIES: A RESPONSE Terry H. Anderson

tephen Whitfield is to be ap- mospheric bomb testing, as did the Sovi- plauded for tracing the literary ets. That same year a McCall’s article Sand cultural Fifties origins of the asked: “Will Tomorrow Come?” The Sixties, and he is correct when he states next year radioactive strontium 90 began that the first era became the second be- to show up in the nation’s milk supply, cause the “discrepancy between the of- and two-thirds of Americans listed nu- ficial or popular culture and the realities clear war as the nation’s most urgent on the ground could no longer be dis- problem. In response, and forming a guised.” This is particularly true of the bridge from the Fifties to the Sixties, , for as one activist Norman Cousins and others formed the stated in 1960, the sit-ins were a “mass Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, vomit against the hypocrisy of segrega- and only three months after the Greens- tion.” boro sit-ins, over 15,000 citizens held a Moreover, a new generation of ac- rally in to end the nuclear tivists had been raised in Cold War arms race and negotiate a test ban treaty. America. The Fifties were an unusually During the next two years SANE was patriotic era in which teachers had baby Congress of Racial Equality march in memory of those killed in Birmingham bomb- joined by what the press called “house- ings. Photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran, September 22, 1963. Library of Con- boomers begin the school day with the gress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-U9-10515-6A]. wives” in Women Strike for Peace, and Pledge of Allegiance, “with liberty and picketing began in front of the White justice for all,” and then students mem- House. orized the words of the Constitution, “We the Peo- There also were three technological develop- The development of the transistor radio was an- ple,” and the Declaration of Independence, “All Men ments that influenced the Fifties and led to the Six- other technology that bridged the Fifties to the Six- Are Created Equal.” Yet when some of those stu- ties—atomic bombs, transistor radios, and TV. With ties. The first transistor radio went on sale in 1954, dents later marched in the South, they quickly real- the first Soviet bomb in 1949, followed by the de- but was too expensive for kids until Japanese im- ized that such words rang hollow. “The whole velopment of ICBMs and the launching of Sputnik ports began to drive the prices down after 1957 and country was trapped in a lie,” said Casey Hayden. in 1957, a wave of atomic fear washed across Amer- throughout the 1960s. This portable device meant “We were told about equality but we discovered it ica. Citizens learned the location of bomb shelters that kids could listen to their music, rock ‘n’ roll, vir- didn’t exist.” while the Eisenhower administration continued at- tually anywhere and anytime. “I use to listen to my 12 Historically Speaking • January/February 2008

transistor all night in bed,” said one teenage girl, ica’s role in the world, which in a way led to The Port had been rather low during the Depression and “until I ran the batteries dead.” The radio carried the Huron Statement. Political repression also was mani- World War II, but returning veterans and their new tunes of a new generation, music that divided their fested in McCarthyism. That crusade infringed on brides quickly reversed that trend. By 1950 there generation from their parents, and began to express basic rights earlier in the Fifties but had waned by were 8 million more children than demographers their youthful values, weather it was simply “shake, the Sixties. When HUAC held hearings in San Fran- had predicted, and with over 4 million births annu- rattle, and roll” or white kids breaking the radio color cisco to investigate communist activities in the spring ally throughout the 1950s, the World War II genera- line by singing along with the Supremes. of 1960, a thousand Berkeley students protested, re- tion created a Sixties generation of some 45 million The massive expansion of television was the sulting in police brutality and mass arrests. As one kids that would turn 18 between 1960 and 1972. other key technological development. In 1950 very protester recalled, “That was the start of the Sixties That unprecedented flood of youth would have had few people had , but by 1960 Americans for me.” The stand against sexual repression, how- an impact on the United States even if they had had bought 50 million, two for each home, and the ever, did not result in activism until the first baby never protested. But, as it tuned out, they had cause national evening news was soon expanded from fif- boomers arrived at college in 1964. In their dormi- to rebel. teen to thirty minutes. Civil rights was the first tories they were faced with a catalogue of in loco par- Finally, the Fifties became the Sixties because of prime-time news story of the Sixties, presenting vi- entis regulations, all aimed at restricting female a federal institution—the Supreme Court of Chief cious images from the Jim Crow South and convinc- behavior. Sexual repression didn’t seem to bother Justice Earl Warren. Beginning with the Brown case in ing many that change was not only necessary but too many others during the Sixties, until after the 1954 the Court chipped away at the legal status quo, mandatory if the nation was going to live up to its 1968 Miss America Pageant when the media began first concerning race, but then moving against other creed, and its Constitution. to investigate the new women liberationist’s claims restrictive state and federal laws in the late 1950s. In Whitfield’s second assumption, that the politi- of legal, educational, and employment discrimina- Yates (1957), Scales (1959), and Albertson (1965) the cal, social, and sexual repression was “simply too tion; the Seventies became the women’s (and gay’s) Court surprised the nation, overturning convictions great for humans in an ostensibly open society to decade. of Communist Party members, ending the loyalty bear” is more problematic. He is correct concerning And the social repression was regional. While pledge, reestablishing personal and political liberties, the political. The Cold War created a simplistic Whitfield’s argument might have merit in parts of and upholding the First and Fourteenth Amend- worldview. In the bipolar world the United States the nation, the South was not an open society. James ments. Such cases provoked discussion about indi- had to stand up and stop communist expansion at Silver applied a label to Mississippi in the early 1960s vidual rights, ended the McCarthy era’s legal all costs, for if we did not, then one nation after an- that characterized the entire Deep South: “The restrictions on political dissent, and again opened the other would “fall like dominoes” until the enemy was Closed Society.” White Southerners and their politi- door to marches and protest, which came to sym- at our gate. “We are fighting in Korea,” declared cians had done virtually everything to maintain white bolize the Sixties. President Truman, “so we won’t have to fight in Wi- supremacy, including ignoring federal laws and court chita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or on San orders, so the only way for change was, as Martin Terry H. Anderson is professor of history at Texas Francisco Bay.” A popular slogan in the Fifties was Luther King, Jr. proclaimed, “federal commitment, A&M University, specializing in modern U.S. his- “Better Dead than Red,” but by 1960 such notions full, unequivocal, and unremitting.” When presidents tory. He is the author of The Movement and the were being questioned in college classrooms by used federal power and signed key legislation, Jim Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro scholars and historians such as William Appleman Crow died. to Wounded Knee (Oxford University Press, Williams. By the Sixties many students were far more There also was a demographic reason for the 1995) and The Sixties, 3rd ed. (Longman, 2007). ready than their parents to discuss and debate Amer- rise of the 1960s—the baby boom. The birthrate

CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES Alice Echols

or some time now scholars have disputed the Sixties.1 The new revisionism discovered all sorts of Party, and the International Union of Electrical popular view that the turbulence and dissi- connections: between the Fifties Beats of North Workers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the dence of the 1960s happened out of women’s liberationists who hit the headlines F 2 the blue, rather like the Japanese attack on in 1968. Critical to much of this scholarship Pearl Harbor. In “How the Fifties Became Time and again what Fifties survivors of continuity was the work of sociologist the Sixties” Stephen Whitfield points to the Aldon Morris, who argued that the black pioneering work of literary historian Morris stress is how very dull, conformist, freedom movement did not begin in 1960 Dickstein, who was among the first scholars and, yes, “tranquillized” the period felt. with the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in to challenge the majority view of the Fifties Greensboro, North Carolina, but built upon as a somnolent period marked by a fog-like determined organizing that stretched beyond complacency and a particularly coercive form even the Fifties.3 This revisionist approach to of consensus. Beginning in the mid-, historians Beach and the Sixties hippies of Haight-Ashbury; the Fifties proved so successful that by the mid- such as John D’Emilio, Maurice Isserman, George the Old and New Left; respectably dressed ho- Thomas Sugrue could confidently claim that Lipsitz, and Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor have ex- mophile activists and rabble-rousing gay libera- he saw plenty of continuities between the “land of tended Dickstein’s argument, revealing the ways in tionists; and the female activists of the ACLU, ‘Leave It to Beaver’” and the tumultuous decade that which the Ike Age anticipated the upheavals of the National Council of Churches, National Women’s followed.4