James Madison University JMU Scholarly Commons Masters Theses The Graduate School Spring 2013 Giant ants and killer children: Fear and popular culture in 1950s America Kathleen Elizabeth Ford James Madison University Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019 Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ford, Kathleen Elizabeth, "Giant ants and killer children: Fear and popular culture in 1950s America" (2013). Masters Theses. 213. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019/213 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the The Graduate School at JMU Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of JMU Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Giant Ants and Killer Children: Fear and Popular Culture in 1950s America Kathleen Ford A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the degree of Master of Arts Department of History May 2013 In dedication to my amazing parents, Paul and Lynn Ford ii Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the support of many different people. Many thanks to my advisor, Dr. Gabrielle Lanier, who read the numerous versions of this project and who further always helped to bring some sense of order and cohesion to my often scattered mind. Additional thanks to my committee members, Dr. Philip D. Dillard and Dr. Steven Guerrier, who offered guidance and support just when it was most needed and appreciated. I would also like to thank the History Department for providing the funding and opportunities to make this study possible. I would finally like to thank my family and friends who offered the support and motivation I needed to labor through this process through providing the right doses of fun and laughter. iii Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..….ii Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..…iii List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………...v List of Figures………………………………………………………………………….....vi Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….viii Introduction………………………………………………………………………....……1 Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………….…5 Chapter Two……………………………………………..……………………..…….…..34 Chapter Three……………………………………………..…………………..……….....62 Bibliography………………………………………….………………………………….85 iv List of Tables Table 1: Exhibit Storyline………………………………………………………………..37 v List of Figures Figure 1: Thematic Structure…………………………………………………………….36 Figure 2: Gort costume…………………………………………………………………..45 Figure 3: Alfred Hitchcock………………………………………………………………46 Figure 4: Rod Serling…………………………………………………………………….46 Figure 5: Pye Television Receiver, 1948…………………………………………...……47 Figure 6: A McMichael Model Television, c. 1951………………………………...……47 Figure 7: Murphy V210C Television, 1953…………………………………………...…47 Figure 8: Colllier’s Magazine, May 6, 1950……………………………………………..48 Figure 9: “There Will Come Soft Rains” Adapted Comic, 1953…………………..……48 Figure 10: Bemis’s Glasses……………………………………………………………....49 Figure 11: First Edition of I, Robot, 1950………………………………….…………….50 Figure 12: Astounding Science Fiction, 1942……………………………...…………….50 Figure 13: Rear Window Poster, 1954…………………………………………….……..51 Figure 14: Psycho Poster, 1960………………………………………………….………52 Figure 15: Psycho Poster #2, 1960…………………………………………………..…..52 Figure 16: Paperback Version of On the Road, 1957……………………………..……..53 Figure 17: The Hollywood Ten, 1947……………………………………………………53 Figure 18: Greensboro Sit-Ins, 1960………………………………………..……………54 Figure 19: Fallout Shelter Plan……………………………………………….………….55 Figure 20: Resource Suggestion for the Shelter…………………………………………56 Figure 21: First Issue of Shock, 1953…………………………………………………….57 Figure 22: Fin Fang Foom Attacks Chinese Communists, 1966……………………..….58 vi Figure 23: Monster Magazine featuring the character of Gorgo……………..………….58 Figure 24: Scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers………………………………….59 Figure 25: Article from the Los Angeles Times, 1959………………………….………..60 vii Abstract This public history thesis consists of three main sections that combine to form a complete plan for a museum exhibit on 1950s American fears as seen through the lens of popular culture. In American popular memory, postwar America often emerges as a somewhat simplistic time in which every citizen was mired in conservatism and concerned only for communist spies and nuclear devastation. Though these were very real fears for the majority of the population, their fears also went much deeper than this. Through the museum exhibit medium, this thesis explores fears of loneliness, humanity’s capacity for evil, and societal collapse that occupied the minds of postwar Americans. Horror and science fiction are a uniquely useful medium to explore such fears as each attempts to break down and explore the particular fears and neuroses of its historical moment. Films, television shows, and literature written in the horror and science fiction genre are thus used to explore such fears. The exhibit plan is divided into a research paper, an exhibit brief, and an exhibit script that combine to complicate popular memory concerning 1950s America. viii Introduction Scholars in various fields have written multiple works on nearly every aspect of the fascinating time that was the 1950s in the United States. Some have focused on masculinity and gender, others on the era of paranoia associated with McCarthyism, and others on the complex political machinations associated with the Cold War. Further, popular culture during the 1950s Cold War has also proved to be a popular area of study. As seen throughout popular culture in the 1950s, fear was a near constant theme, though it manifested itself in vastly different ways. There was fear of communist subversion among neighbors, fear of radiation and the atomic age, and fear of the “other,” just to name a few. Few historians have looked at the culture of fear in general that developed across popular culture in the 1950s. Even when studying individual aspects, though, historians tend to disagree on the nature of the fear that they are studying.1 Was it simply a conservative backlash against liberal communism? Or was it a fear of modernity and the changes inherent in postwar culture? Or was it something else altogether? I intend to explore such questions through the creation of an exhibit plan that focuses on fear and popular culture in the 1950s. Rather than creating a permanent exhibit, this will be a travelling exhibit designed to fit into a variety of museum settings and increase interest for the museum. In order to understand properly the background and results of this phenomenon, I focus on the immediate postwar years through 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, as most historians tend to agree that the American attitude 1 For example, two of the most compelling scholars of the period to display this disparity are Mark Jancovich and Stephen Whitfield. Jancovich tends to focus on the psychological aspects of 1950s culture and fear, while Stephen Whitfield attributes much of the paranoia to a clash between conservative and liberal elements during the prolonged Cold War. For Jancovich, see Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); for Whitfield, see Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 2 toward the Cold War was markedly different after this point. The goal of creating an exhibit plan on the subject is to understand better how the museum medium can be used to explain and explore complex historical questions. Planning an exhibit is a multistep process through which greater understanding of the topic can be achieved, for both the creator and the public that would eventually go to see it. Popular culture in the 1950s is an inherently fascinating subject and my research and resulting plan provide a different outlook on the way that fear manifested itself in that decade. This project is split into three main chapters. The first is an original research paper in which I explore fear and popular culture in this time period. I focus mostly on the film industry, literature, television, and some of the “fads” of the time, such as the creation of fallout shelters. I have centered my research on the horror and science fiction fields as I believe they offer the best lens for viewing popular fears of the day. The film industry, for example, was very concerned with creating films at this time that explicitly portrayed communism and the communist party in a negative light.1 However, this was less a reflection of popular culture and more of a reflection of governmental influence on the film industry through the House Un-American Activities Committee in Hollywood. Horror and science fiction, on the other hand, were also influenced by the politics and events of the time, but they portrayed these fears in more subtle ways that are much more revealing of the accepted values and paranoia.2 They can use common themes and historical realities as props to explore the deeper fears of the moment. Through examining these media three common fears are revealed: fear of loneliness, fear of 1 For example, this is well covered in Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010). 2 This is a common theory in the film studies field, as seen in Charles Derry, Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror