Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
12
American Culture and Society in
the 1950s and 1960s
Marilyn Monroe (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
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AMERICAN STORIES
220
White and Black, Apart and Together
With the war won and the boys coming home, people wanted to enjoy the
peace. Prosperity seemed like the best reward possible, and by 1950 a brief
postwar recession had been sorted out. Suburban subdivisions sprouted,
providing jobs for the builders, the bankers and lenders, the loggers felling
the trees to turn into lumber delivered from forest to sawmill to subdivision
by truckers on new interstate highways funded by the federal government.
After four years of government rationing, Americans bought big cars moved
by high-compression engines, gulped Pepsi or Coke and munched popcorn
at sprawling drive-ins featuring two or even three movie screens, purchased
television sets at the rate of more than 1 million a year, and butter-knifed
through the salty Salisbury steaks of a Swanson TV dinner. Women hosted
Tupperware parties. Dads came home from work to throw a ball with the kids
and help with the homework. There was time to work and time to play.
As had always been the case, peace and prosperity for some did not mean
peace and prosperity for all. After witnessing the lack of segregation in Europe
and the Pacific, African-American soldiers returned to a segregated America.
Lynching continued in the South. Schools for black children remained second-
rate. White men still called grown black men “boy.” And in the deep south of
Mississippi, it was dangerous for a black man or teenager to look at a white
woman, except from the corner of a downward-turned eye. Stepping outside
the boundaries was a bad idea.
Emmett
Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago vacationing at his uncle
Moses Wright’s place in Mississippi, stepped outside the race boundary.
Inside a drugstore, Till apparently flirted with a white woman, Carolyn Bry-
ant,
maybe by whistling, maybe by calling her “baby.” Four nights later, on
August 28, 1955, two white men—the woman’s husband, Roy, and his friend,
J.W. Milam—took a sleeping Emmett Till from a bed at his uncle’s house
and, equipped with pistols and a flashlight, drove for hours, looking for the
right spot to “scare some sense into him,” as the men admitted a year later in
a Look magazine article.
1
They pistol-whipped Till in the face and head with
a Colt .45 so severely his skull bones turned to mush. They castrated him,
shot him through the ear, and then sank his body under water with a giant
metal fan tied to his neck, satisfied that they had done the right thing. Less
than a month later, with the whole nation following the case, an all-white
jury acquitted Bryant and Milam in sixty-seven minutes, one jury member
saying it would have taken less time but they had slowed down to sip a soda.
The killers lived until 1990 and 1980, respectively, shunned but free. Emmett
Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral for her mangled son in Chicago,
and a stunned nation reacted in outrage. But there were also letters to editors
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
of various newspapers expressing support for Bryant and Milam. Changing
southern culture would take a revolution.
In
Montgomery, Alabama, three months after Emmett Till’s grisly murder,
Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary for the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her bus seat to
a white man, got arrested, and sparked a year-long bus boycott that generated
enthusiasm for the burgeoning civil rights movement, which had been run for
decades by the NAACP largely through lawsuits.
In 1954, one year before both Emmett Till’s fateful trip to Mississippi
and Rosa Parks’s brave defiance of social custom, the Supreme Court had
ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation
was unconstitutional and did not provide “separate but equal” treatment
for blacks and whites, as many whites had been claiming for fifty years
ever since Plessy v. Ferguson. However, in a follow-up ruling in 1955, the
Supreme Court said that with regard to implementing the new policy of
integration, district courts could give “such orders and decrees consistent
with this opinion [in Brown] as are necessary and proper to admit to public
schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the
parties to these cases.”
2
The key phrase was “with all deliberate speed.”
School districts could, in other words, integrate very slowly if they chose
(and white people could move to the suburbs and continue putting their
children into mainly homogeneous schools). Still, a reversal had been made,
and the federal government now aligned itself—even if cautiously—with
the hopes of African-Americans like Thurgood Marshall, who had argued
the Brown case, and Martin Luther King Jr.
While Thurgood Marshall’s very public role in the Brown case helped him
to become the first African-American member of the U.S. Supreme Court (in
1967), the Montgomery bus boycott elevated a young Baptist minister, Mar-
tin
Luther King Jr., to prominence and gave him a platform to demonstrate
the effectiveness of nonviolent activism and protest. In fact, during the long
bus boycott, King’s house had been firebombed—with his wife, Coretta,
and baby daughter at home—and he had been arrested. But King remained
publicly calm and strong, if anything growing more resolute in the face of
hostility, learning how to cast his voice through the storm. Not since the
days of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey had there been a black
man with King’s emerging popularity. With a warm-honey voice, a Baptist
preacher’s rise-and-fall, hush-then-hurry rhythm, and a dignified message,
Martin Luther King Jr. was the kind of man who could inspire a revolution,
the kind of man who could make other people want to do good. Race bigots
were watching their rule, their privileges, their arguments fall before a slowly
building wave of justice.
AMERICAN STORIES
222
While northern suburbs passed covenants barring black people from buying
a home and southern juries propped up the sad sight of Jim Crow, black Ameri-
c
ans bonded together with white allies to challenge the laws, the customs, and
the attitudes that perpetuated oppression. When Thurgood Marshall had argued
the Br
own case during the early 1950s, his staunchest supporter on the bench
had initially been Felix Frankfurter, who had known how to slow down the
judicial process long enough to rally the other justices. After President Dwight
D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren chief justice in 1953 (while the Brown
decision
was pending), he put his considerable political skills to the task and
wrangled a unanimous ruling in Brown by getting hesitant fellow judges to see
the moral value in a united court opinion. When Martin Luther King Jr. formed
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, sixty black
ministers joined him in a pledge of nonviolent direct action for change. Their
peaceable tactics soon attracted white allies from north and south. In 1960,
four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at
a segregated Woolworth’s department store lunch counter. Within a few days,
three white co-eds (as female college students were called in the 1950s) from
the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina had joined their
growing ranks. By year’s end, more than 50,000 people—well-dressed and
polite—had participated in similar sit-ins across the South and North, with
ever more white volunteers joining the young black men and women sitting
quietly at counters for burgers or sodas fifty years in the coming. In April 1960,
a coalition of black and white students, inspired by the SCLC’s adherence
to nonviolence and by the ongoing integration sits-ins, formed a new civil
rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC,
pronounced “snick”). Then, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
organized “freedom rides” on interstate buses in 1961 to speed integration of
public transportation, the freedom riders were white and black, and they bled
together when members of the Ku Klux Klan and various other goons pulled
them off their buses in Alabama and beat them savagely.
To say you were nonviolent was one thing, but to let another person hit you,
kick you, trample you, required the fastening of your soul to a greater purpose.
Once when Martin Luther King Jr. was giving a speech on stage, a man ran
up and punched him three times in the face. When audience members rushed
to King’s aid, he asked them not only to leave the assailant untouched but
also to pray for him. Sometimes, at night in the privacy of his kitchen, King
would tremble with visions of his death. But on the dais or the street talking
to the milling crowds, King radiated calm, slow courage. He mingled with
the members of his congregation and with prime ministers and presidents.
They had to meet him. King was their future.
F
rom the presidential perch, Harry S. Truman watched African-American
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baseball star Jackie Robinson swat his way out of the Negro Leagues and
into a major league ballpark in 1947 when he debuted with the Brooklyn
Dodgers. Other sectors of the business world also started to open doors.
With an eye for progressive profits earned fairly and decently, the Pepsi-
Cola Company, under its president, Walter Mack, promoted its products by
hiring and training the first African-American sales team in a major U.S.
corporation. Sales skyrocketed in black communities and an example was
established for integration via the business corridor, though most of the
fanfare showed up in black-owned newspapers.
3
Although Truman was
not able to get a hemming and hawing Congress to pass his proposed civil
rights initiatives, he did order the armed forces to integrate and mandated
that civilian agencies attached to the federal government would have to enact
fair employment standards. While Truman acted openly without prompting,
President Eisenhower supported civil rights when nudged. Eisenhower took
Truman’s military integration order and made it happen. He had, after all,
been the nation’s premier war hero—who better to change military culture?
After the Supreme Court overturned “separate but equal” segregation, nine
black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, tried to enroll at Central High
School, but Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state national guard and
state police to surround the school and prevent the “Little Rock Nine” from
entering. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne, federalized the National
Guard, and provided bodyguards for the black students, one of whom gradu-
a
ted at the end of the year (after which, Governor Faubus shut down all the
schools in Little Rock). However, Eisenhower was reluctant to use the courts
or legislation to promote racial equality. He believed laws would not change
“the hearts of men.” King, on the other hand, said, “A law may not make a
man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”
4
Nonetheless, despite
the president’s stalling, Congress passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act (which
was shuttled through the Senate by a war veteran from Texas named Lyndon
Baines Johnson, the youngest-ever Senate majority leader).
Although most Americans tried to sink into a quiet peace, in many ways
World War II had made America ripe for social revolution. The nation had
fought Hitler’s obvious racism. Black men had once more worn a military
uniform, and some of their white brothers in arms were willing to join the civil
rights cause. In Florida, for example, when a bus driver told a black veteran to
either move to the back of the bus or get off, the man’s fellow veterans, both
white, told the driver to mind his business and drive or they would throw him
off and drive the bus themselves. A growing segment of Americans demanded
that peace and prosperity should be made equally possible for all citizens.
The struggle expanded in the mid-1950s and grew to a crescendo during the
1960s, leading to the legal dismantlement of Jim Crow segregation.
AMERICAN STORIES
224
Rebels in Denim and Diamonds, and Rebels with a Pen
Somehow the popular imagination sees the 1950s and early 1960s as a time
of square-top haircuts, gentle manners, safe neighborhoods, and cold milk
before bed. The buzz cuts and barbecues were real and ubiquitous, but for
every half-gallon jug of milk left on a doorstep there was a rowdy teenage boy
greasing his hair, rolling up the cuffs of his coal-blue jeans, and daydreaming
about drag racing toward a drop-off cliff, just like James Dean did in Rebel
W
ithout a Cause (1955). For every malt milkshake or Coca-Cola served by a
freckly soda jerk at the local drug store or soda fountain there was a cold beer
served to a war veteran at the local American Legion or to a down-and-out
alcoholic at the local dive or to a two-wheeled loner wearing “black denim
trousers and motorcycle boots”
5
—like Willie Forkner, the real-life inspiration
for another era-defining film, The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando, a
cool hunk first made famous for his steamy performance in the movie adapta-
tion
of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). In July 1947,
Willie Forkner and some vet buddies—part of the Boozefighters motorcycle
club, whose motto was “A drinking club with a motorcycle problem”—rode
their cycles into Hollister, California, triggering two nights of brawls with
townspeople who did not like the bikers parking their rides indoors in the
quiet off-hours between incessant street races. Years down the road, Forkner
remembered feeling bitter about the way he had been treated after serving in
World War II: “We were rebelling against the establishment, for Chrissakes.
. . . You go fight a goddamn war, and the minute you get back and take off
the uniform and put on Levi’s and leather jackets, they call you an asshole.”
6
The 1950s were anything but simple, and emerging music genres gave voice
and melody to the itch that people were feeling.
Country
music rambled at the Grand Ole Opry, and delta blues slid and
wailed in the backwaters of Louisiana and Mississippi. Someone somewhere
on one guitar was bound to introduce country music to the blues. In 1954,
a shy, polite, pimple-faced, blue-collar boy from East Tupelo, Mississippi,
stopped off at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio near Memphis, Tennessee,
and recorded a few little ditties that he claimed were for his mama. But re-
ally
Elvis Aaron Presley wanted to hear how his voice sounded on a record.
Before long, Elvis’s hips were gyrating from one dance hall to the next while
“Jail House Rock” blasted out of every radio and turntable from East Tupelo
to Tacoma.
Parents who worried about the “race record” sound of Elvis’s electrified
rock ’n’ roll could take their teenagers to see comforting movies starring
safe-joke Bob Hope, who had long since made a name for himself in goofball
comedies and by entertaining troops as part of the United Service Organiza-
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tions (USO). The same Hollywood producers and directors who sponged mil-
lions from Hope’s clean-cut comedy also squeezed green from another USO
performer, Norma Jean Mortenson, who dyed her hair blonde and changed
her name to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe winked, teased, pouted, and purred in
sexy, irreverent films like The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Bus Stop (1956).
Elysian Marilyn Monroe, antiauthoritarian Marlon Brando, and teen-dream
James Dean delivered equal doses of sexy, rebellious, and dangerous. Tough
guys wore jeans and diamonds were a girl’s best friend.
Monroe’s movies and Presley’s songs gave something essential to a gen-
eration
taught at school by a cartoon turtle to “duck and cover” if they saw a
bright flash of (atomic) light. A poet-musician named John Trudell put it best
when he sang that Elvis was a “Baby Boom Che,” a revolutionary fighting “a
different civil war” against a culture of “restrained emotion” with the help of
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley, Elvis’s “commandants.” Trudell
grew up during the 1950s, and like a lot of other kids who would go on in the
1960s to challenge the status quo (which he did after serving in Vietnam),
he thinks Elvis “raised our voice, and when we heard ourselves, something
was changing.”
7
Part of what was changing during the 1950s was the public
attitude toward sex and sexuality. The closeted restraint of the old Comstock
laws would not last much longer.
While major magazines, daytime television soap operas, and nighttime
favorites like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy encouraged women to drop
their welding aprons and put on kitchen aprons, the first issue of Playboy
magazine
was issued in December 1953. Marilyn Monroe graced the cover
smiling and waving in a slinky, v-cut black dress; she also graced the centerfold
dressed casually in her birthday suit; and Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner,
joked
that the magazine would provide “a little diversion from the anxieties
of the Atomic Age.” After all, Hefner wrote, frisky men enjoyed “putting a
little mood music on the phonograph and inviting a female acquaintance for
a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
T
he contrast between Playboy’s nudity and network TV’s modesty
highlighted the schizophrenic three-way divide in 1950s America between
puritanical timidity, playful titillation, and outright sexual extravagance, as
exemplified in Alfred Kinsey’s reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(
1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Both were best
sellers that exposed in the frankest of terms that about 75 percent of people
interviewed had had premarital sex, almost all men masturbated, and about
one-third of men had had at least one homosexual experience ending in
orgasm—this at the same time that the State Department proudly proclaimed
that once each day it was firing a homosexual, part of the “Lavender Scare”
that falsely conflated homosexuality with communism and anti-Americanism.
AMERICAN STORIES
226
If one-third of American men kissed and touched other men, homosexuality
was, as Kinsey insinuated, quite American. As for marital fidelity, Kinsey
reported that about 50 percent of men cheated, as did nearly 34 percent of
women. And well-to-do businessmen cheated more than anyone else, more
than 75 percent having strayed at least once. Although Kinsey’s percentages
have since been questioned, his reports completely altered American percep-
t
ions of sexuality by making it a topic fit for public consumption, by allowing
for recognition of women’s equal right to orgasm, by generating sympathy
for homosexuals in a very homophobic society, and by suggesting that sexual
orientation was fluid rather than fixed. Television shows featuring families
rarely showed bedrooms, and when they did, mom and dad slept in separate
beds—a not terribly accurate portrayal of American family life considering
the 76 million babies born from 1946 to 1964. Ward and June Cleaver had
to conceive the Beaver somewhere; maybe they went to the drive-in. As one
interviewee in the 2006 documentary Drive-in Movie Memories recalled,
“Many lives were caused by accident last night.”
8
Henry Ford’s lamentations about the amorous use of his Model T were more
on-target than ever after World War II when automakers could stop making
army jeeps and start making cars again. In 1950 alone, Americans bought 6
million cars. By 1953 almost two-thirds of Americans owned a car; 40 percent
of women had a driver’s license.
9
General Motors, under the direction of Al-
fred P. Sloan, made and sold nearly one-half of all automobiles, and Sloan’s
deputy, Harley Earl, innovated the yearly release of a new model, ensuring
better sales for carmakers by encouraging customers to “keep up with the
Joneses” who sported the latest Cadillac. This was conspicuous consumption
taken to a new level where social status derived not from family history, good
deeds, or academic degrees but from make and model. Advertisers provided
the outline, and Americans bought the image. From his corporate perch Har-
ley
Earl himself emphasized the central role of image: his office closet was
stocked with a ready supply of outrageously colorful suits, and since he would
not let his son drive a Ferrari, he ordered the design department at General
Motors to whip out a one-of-a-kind Corvette to keep the young man happy,
hip, and inside the brand.
Cars
needed roads, so the federal government paid for an asphalt flood of
road and highway construction. President Eisenhower’s 1956 Federal-Aid
Highway Act created the interstate highway system—free of tolls. The last
and full transformation of America into the world’s premier car country was
under way. Not only did this nation with a mere 6 percent of Earth’s popula-
tion
own two-thirds of the world’s cars,
10
but Americans were driving their
tail-finned Ford Fairlanes and cherry-red Chevrolet Corvettes to and from the
spreading suburbs as quickly as men like William Levitt could get them built.
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
The cars were flashy; the suburbs were functional. And anybody who wanted
to be middle-class and could afford the entrance fee packed up and headed
for suburbia. By 1960, half of all Americans lived in the suburbs.
Barbie in the Suburbs
William Levitt came from a contractor’s family and was a Navy Seabee in
the Pacific theater during World War II, ironing out instant landing strips in
malarial jungles and watching fellow Seabees building Quonset huts and bar-
r
acks efficiently and sturdily. With a sense for mass production of housing and
communities, Levitt returned to the States and set about designing a town of
tiny, identical two-bedroom houses with no basements, whitewashed picket
fences out front, and a red-brick chimney poking up from every roof. Just as
Henry Ford had placed one worker doing one task in one spot on one factory
floor all day long, Levitt hired single-job men who monotonously banged on
the siding, painted the windowsills, or ratcheted in the washing machines.
Before long, the first Levittown—on Long Island, NY—had 17,000 houses.
To outsiders, the uniformity seemed stultifying. To homebuyers, the sameness
was either irrelevant or comforting. Levitt’s houses sold for an affordable
$8,000, and for war veterans, the GI Bill furnished the down payment. By
1950 nearly 30 percent of Americans lived in suburbs.
Immediately after the war, the national housing shortage was so acute that
veterans were sleeping in government-donated Quonset huts, in rented-out
railroad cars, and in their parents’ basements. But at Levittown, every new
family got not only immediate entry into the independence of middle-class
living but also a free television on which Michael and Mary (the most popular
boy and girl names in 1955) could watch fourteen-year-old Annette Funicello
singing “M-i-c k-e-y M-o-u-s-e” as one of The Mickey Mouse Club’s original
Mouseketeers. Walt Disney had been making movies for twenty years; Disney
World—a one-stop subdivision for cartoon characters come to life—opened
in Florida in 1954, giving outwardly conformist suburbanites a common
destination for a prefabricated vacation. Before long, Disney World visitors
could stay in nearby Holiday Inns, first opened in the early 1950s, and eat
fifteen-cent hamburgers at a franchised McDonalds. Family destinations were
starting to look alike no matter where the average family of five went. And
just like the ubiquitous “Mary” at home watching The Mickey Mouse Club,
child
star Annette Funicello wore a cotton sweater and bobby socks, attended
school, and was expected to be polite and cheery. Unlike Michael and Mary,
Annette had on mouse ears . . . but the family could pick up a couple of pairs
on their trip to Disney World.
More than ever before in American history, corporate products, logos, ad-