Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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vertisements, and attitudes were defining a monolithic national culture that cut
across regional and ethnic lines. Individual television shows usually had one
sponsor only. When I Love Lucy first aired in 1951, the Philip Morris Company
(purveyor of cigarettes) sponsored a wild redhead, Lucille Ball (aka Lucy),
and her real-life Cuban bandleader husband, Desi Arnaz (aka Ricky), in their
on-screen marital antics: a risky duo in segregated America that paid off almost
instantly for Philip Morris and CBS. The show went to number one. Average
people could relate to Lucy’s lovable but fiery independence and to Ricky’s
consequent headaches. Each show started with a little sponsored coaching on
how to inhale cigarette smoke deeply into the lungs, a method Philip Morris’s
commercials guaranteed would make for better, smoother breathing (useful
information for the 50 percent of Americans who smoked by 1950). When
Lucille Ball got pregnant in 1952, the executives at CBS wanted to hide the
pregnancy, but Lucille and Desi protested, demanding both creative control
and the freedom for Lucille to show the resplendent roundness of her belly.
Desi appealed directly to Alfred Lyons, the chief of Philip Morris, who, after
all, controlled the show’s finances. After their conversation, Lyons wrote to
his contact at CBS, “Dear Jim, Don’t fuck around with the Cuban.” Thanks
to star power and advertising power, CBS allowed Lucille to be pregnant on
screen (though the word “pregnancy” itself was not allowed to be uttered).
11
The show’s ratings went up. Here was a depiction of a good, if slightly un-
orthodox
marriage, supported by cigarettes. Families and products, families
and sales, were married.
Sometimes
corporate successes came in pairs. When two brothers named
Maurice and Dick MacDonald started a drive-in hamburger joint in San
Bernadino, California, in 1940, they dropped the Scottish “a” and called
their new venture McDonald’s. Within a few years, they were making good
money, driving new Cadillacs, and feeling content. Lines of customers, how-
ever
, snaked down the block from opening till closing, and it was obvious to
everybody that the hamburger brothers had a good thing going. A milkshake
mixer salesman named Ray Kroc sat outside McDonald’s one day in 1954 and
marveled at the potential. That year, Kroc became the franchise manager for
McDonald’s, and in 1961 he bought out the company for $2.7 million. The
MacDonald brothers had never wanted to manage such a monstrous organiza-
tion
(with 228 stores by 1960); Dick MacDonald said that if he had taken on
the expansion the way Kroc did, “I would have wound up in some skyscraper
somewhere with about four ulcers and eight tax attorneys trying to figure out
how to pay all my income tax.”
12
Ray Kroc, on the other hand, nearly sixty
in 1960 and weakened by diabetes, thrived on competition. While the Mac-
Donald
brothers had shared technology with anyone who asked, Kroc said
that if a competitor “were drowning to death,” he would “put the hose in their
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
mouth.”
13
In order to drown McDonald’s imitators, Kroc made Coca-Cola the
drink of choice for America’s fastest-growing fast-food restaurant. Cash-poor
suburbanites on a budget could afford $2.50 for enough hamburgers, fries,
and Cokes at McDonald’s to feed the family. They could also afford to buy
for their daughters that other American icon, the Barbie doll.
Barbie was born in 1958, only a few inches tall with impossible hips and
unlikely breasts. Her mother and father were Ruth and Elliot Handler, the
founders of Mattel Corporation. The Handlers had arrived in Los Angeles in
1938—optimistic despite the Depression—and started a furniture business
using new kinds of plastics, like Plexiglas. Elliot was good with plastics. Ruth
was good at everything else. On a trip to Europe in 1956, she noticed some
sexy German dolls that were toted around by adults. She knew the dolls were
too racy for the average American adult, but she had a hunch that children
would love them. So she convinced the rest of Mattel’s decision makers to
create something similar, and the result was Barbie. To bypass conservative
mothers and fathers warily monitoring their children’s exposure to the outside
world, Ruth Handler paid half a million dollars to become the sole sponsor
of The
Mickey Mouse Club. She ran ads for Barbie, ads that directly targeted
children, who did exactly as Ruth expected: they begged and demanded a
Barbie. Pressured parents complied, and the age of direct marketing to chil-
dren
began. Handler was one of America’s top two female executives in an
era when women worked for men, not as their bosses. Her position explains
why she chose to create multiple lines of Barbie. They were career dolls—
s
tewardesses, nurses, and businesswomen—that little girls could play with
and imagine a future for themselves as equal members of a democratic society.
The career dreams that Ruth Handler had sewn into each Barbie outfit were
fulfilled in the short run not by the girls themselves but by their mothers, who
were selling Tupperware.
After World War II, four out of five working women wanted to keep their
jobs, of whom 69 percent were “working wives.”
14
And while the number of
women in the workforce continued to rise during the 1950s (up to 10 mil-
lion
by 1960), the jobs typically available were in low-paying sectors of the
economy, and there was rarely equal pay for equal work. Ruth Handler was
an exception; so was Brownie Wise, the woman who sold Tupperware to
America. In fact, Wise figured out how to combine a suburban housewife’s
seemingly incompatible needs: being home with the children all day long,
sharing in a network of female friends, and earning at least some extra money
for the family. Tall, glamorous, and as gorgeous as a movie star, Brownie
Wise took the plastic storage wares of Earl Tupper and trained a generation
of American women to sell the snap-seal containers to each other. A single
mother in 1947, Wise started to sell Stanley Home Products door to door. The
AMERICAN STORIES
230
job with Stanley morphed into a wildly successful attempt at selling Tupper-
ware—which a fellow salesman had seen in a department store—from home
to other mothers. By the early 1950s, Wise had convinced Earl Tupper to give
her complete control over all sales, which would be made from that point on
at home parties. Selling kitchenware from home merged suburban realities
with capitalist impulses and was something that women of any skin color, any
religious orientation, and just about any financial status could try.
In the same way that any mass-produced phenomenon like Barbie dolls or
Levittowns could be reshaped to individual tastes, Tupperware sales allowed
saleswomen (and their occasional husband helpers) to throw parties according
to their own culinary and decorative aesthetics—a little gumbo here, a little
Manhattan chowder there. While the overriding impulse in 1950s America may
have been conformist, individual expression was never far from the surface.
Barbie lived like a jet-setting debutante in one house but performed open-heart
surgery down the block. Suburbs became social test tubes. Would sameness
lead to mundaneness, and if so, what would be the consequences?
A
Gallup poll taken in 1962 indicated that two-thirds of American women
were satisfied with their lives. For most, their days revolved around family,
part-time jobs, and local community activities. This neighborly world of
children, chores, and appointments was aided by a shared interest in safety
and comfort, but typically impaired by the lack of big parks, neighborhood
restaurants, and other public and private spaces within walking distance.
More and more, family and community gave right of way to the car and to
the television, both of which tended to seclude and separate. Paradoxically,
the car connected people and isolated them, simultaneously.
In contrast to many other suburban developers of the early 1950s, William
Levitt had intentionally subdivided his first sprawling development according
to a few community-building concepts: no fences were allowed in backyards
in order to provide a type of my-yard-is-your-yard commons for children’s
play; concrete swimming pools, one for every 1,000 houses, provided a nexus
where families—including dad on the weekends when he was not commut-
ing
to his job in New York City—could gather, splash, and relax together;
kitchens were placed in the back of the houses to encourage mothers to do
housework while simultaneously keeping an eye on the kids in the backyards.
The original Levittown on Long Island in New York was meant to encourage
the nuclear family’s success within a context of like-minded peers who could
talk sports and politics at a backyard barbecue and discuss their children’s
education at PTA meetings, largely the domain of mothers. But could young
mothers recently relocated to a suburban development find satisfaction in a
redux cult of domesticity? Were daytime television soap operas, canned-soup
casseroles, Tupperware parties, and other stamps of mass-culture America
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
going to provide genuine satisfaction for suburban women, especially when
many of them were starting to feel that their college degrees were not being
put to use?
Modern
memory has the 1950s mother Jell-O-molded into place between
the stove and the sink, and in theory, her life was supposed to be getting easier
and better—at least according to advertisements for Betty Crocker cake mixes
and Campbell’s soup, popular magazines like McCall’s, and other purveyors
of iconographic images. After shooing the children (an average of three per
mother) off to school and doing the laundry (in the finally fully automated
washer and dryer), she might drink freeze-dried Folgers coffee with other
mothers of the same age, skin color, and religious orientation while sitting
together around the brand-new avocado or tangerine laminate table. Dinner
would be ready for dad’s happy arrival at six or six-thirty each night, at which
point he might play a little catch with Junior, help with the homework, or
simply sink into a plush martini and tap his weary feet to Bing Crosby or Pat
Boone records.
During
Levittown’s early years, only “Caucasian” people were allowed to
either rent or buy. However, covenants preventing people of color from buy-
ing
in collapsed in 1954, perhaps inspired by Brown v. Board of Education
and
the military’s full push to integrate housing on bases as per President
Truman’s 1948 order. As minority populations pushed to be included in the
American Dream, indicating that the middle-class lifestyle was tempting to
those excluded from it, some women began to speak out against what they
felt was not a golden era.
The Many F
aces of Feminism
Between 1945 and 1965, the percentage of young Americans going to college
tripled, from 15 to 45 percent. The GI Bill did a lot to make this possible, as
did the need for more educated professionals. Business management became
an academic discipline and a job. Legions of tie-and-jacket MBAs were part of
an expanding corporate culture, which relied also on scientists and engineers
who were inventing new drugs and technologies. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine
eradicated a viral scourge that struck indiscriminately at victims of any age or
income, and people realized there was money to be made investing in similar
kinds of remedies. The white lab coat became the secular emblem of a scien-
tific
America guided by the priests of physics, chemistry, and biology whose
pocket protectors and slide rules measured the distance from dismal ignorance
to unending progress. Literally hundreds of pharmaceuticals appeared on the
market during the 1950s and 1960s: varieties of antibiotics, chemical thera-
pies
for treating cancer, muscle relaxants like diazepam (commonly known
AMERICAN STORIES
232
as Valium), and a birth control pill. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik,
the world’s first orbital satellite, in 1957, President Eisenhower called for the
nation to churn out mathematicians and scientists so that communism could
be crushed by calculus. Nerds were the new patriots. College, then, was more
than a ticket to the suburbs, more than a slip of paper; college was the door
to a new America, a land of benevolent capitalism.
Americans of every color and both sexes wanted to participate in these
new manifestations of the American Dream, wanted a chance to earn decent
money, wanted a chance to help cure a disease, at least wanted a chance. In
some ways, however, earlier markers of progress and change had been rolled
back after the war. Women made up 51 percent of the population in 1958 but
only 35 percent of the college students, though women had been 47 percent
of college students in 1920. Harvard Medical School did not admit women
until 1945, and Princeton University did not admit any women at all until
1969. What is more, in the mid-1950s only 37 percent of college women
completed their college course, often under pressure from popular culture to
seek marriage rather than a degree. “As one writer in the Ladies’ Home Journal
advised,
‘Many young men find that they can do much better work if they get
the girl out of their dreams and into their kitchens.’”
15
Somehow the Victorian
era had sprung out of its grave and was running around loose.
Here
was the central dilemma: the general national ideal was for women
to be at home raising children, cooking, and safeguarding American morality
through a cheery domesticity, as though the right mixture of pancakes, love,
and bedtime stories would prevent communism from seeping into the hearts
of innocent children. But even by the late 1950s, in order for families to have
enough money to be middle-class, most women had to work outside the home.
Some worked only out of necessity, others for the satisfaction, and many for
both. In other words, the popular message was not the national reality. Stay
at
home and be a mom was what women heard. Go to work and earn some
money was what most black women had to do and what increasing numbers
of white women faced as well. “The proportion of married women in the labor
force had increased from 15 percent in 1940 to almost 25 percent in 1950.”
16
Of the millions of employed mothers holding college degrees, almost none
received equal pay for equal work, and many could not get a job commensurate
with their degree in the first place. Feeling overworked and underpaid, women
faced yet another puzzle because they were also expected to be uncomplaining.
Responses to these sets of contradictory expectations varied.
Often
a cause can first be noticed by the appearance of a manifesto, credo,
or leader—for example, back in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other
feminists met at Seneca Falls, New York, and released their Declaration of
Women’s Rights. As time passed, the issue of women’s rights became more
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
complex; the movement splintered, and new leaders appeared to spearhead
each of the factions. On the other hand, sometimes a cause gets ignored because
the people in power (the democratic majority) do not want to recognize that
there is a problem, as had been the case for blacks in the United States until
the late 1700s. Occasionally someone like Frederick Douglass or Booker T.
Washington would draw attention and inspire a bit of reform, but then white
people would tire of the issue and collectively turn their backs. In that case,
a leader may be not evidence of a cause but instead a necessary torch that
burns bright and hot enough to attract proper attention, as Martin Luther King
Jr. was starting to do by the late 1950s. The suffrage movement, naturally,
had always had women for leaders: Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
and Alice Paul. As for the movements initiated by black people to obtain fair
and equal treatment socially and legally, men had more often been the faces
on the podiums and on the posters, but women had done just as much work.
Rosa Parks was typical, not unique. In fact, a good argument can be made
that the modern, public civil rights movement initiated by Parks in 1955 spun
into the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
According to historian Elaine Tyler May, credit for the revolutions of the
1960s is too easily and often given to college students, when in fact it was
the baby boomers’ mothers who paved the walkways of protest, dissent, and
rebellion.
T
hat growing numbers of women were becoming discouraged by their lack
of opportunity and equal treatment was made clear in 1961 when the newly
elected and youngest-ever president, John F. Kennedy, created the Commission
on the Status of Women. A cold warrior, schooled by military service in the navy
during World War II, John Kennedy was also attuned to the nuances of a chang-
i
ng nation and people. In 1963, just before his assassination, the commission’s
report “focused attention on the pervasive inequities women experienced on
the job, preparing the way for the Equal Pay Act of 1963.”
17
The commission
had been established from the top down, but it had been preceded by tens of
thousands of ordinary women who had marched, picketed, appeared before the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and done whatever else
they could to get the United States to step back from the nuclear arms race.
Women were mobilizing on behalf of peace and prosperity.
Beginning on November 1, 1961, 50,000 women took to the streets, calling
themselves “Women Strike for Peace.” For more than a year, pushing baby
carriages, holding up signs, trudging up and down the pavement, mothers got
mad, and they got noticed. Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
director J. Edgar Hoover naturally assumed the “commies” had infiltrated the
nurseries and kitchens, so he ordered the peace strikers put under surveillance.
Other red hunters agreed with Hoover, seeing the mothers as accidental sabo-
AMERICAN STORIES
234
teurs and communist dupes. From the FBI to HUAC was a natural progres-
sion in a nation partly run by the paranoid, and the activists were called to
testify. However, although university professors, actors, and movie directors
had been easy targets for HUAC during the 1940s and 1950s, the members
of Women Strike for Peace put the congressmen of HUAC on the defensive.
In a chamber packed by hollering women whose babies yodeled alongside
them, the hearings lasted for three days, during which it was made abundantly
clear that defiance in the face of possible nuclear war (and of nuclear testing
that laced cows’ milk with radioactive strontium 90 fallout) was much more
patriotic than the witch hunt HUAC had hoped to have. Blanche Posner, “a
retired school teacher who was serving as the volunteer office manager of
the New York WSP,”
18
informed committee members, “This movement was
inspired and motivated by mothers’ love for children.” The president of the
strikers, Dagmar Wilson, was asked if she would knowingly let communists
into the organization. “Well, my dear sir,” she replied, “I have absolutely no
way of controlling, do not desire to control, who wishes to join the demon-
strations
and the efforts that women strikers have made for peace. In fact, I
would also like to go even further. I would like to say that unless everybody
in the whole world joins us in the fight, then God help us.”
19
Deciding not to wait for divine intervention, Betty Friedan, a college-
educated mother of three who had once been fired simply for being pregnant,
published The
Feminine Mystique in 1963. The title of the book was a term
Friedan coined to describe what she called “the problem that has no name.”
20
This problem was the isolation, lack of fulfillment, and unending drudgery
experienced by many American women whose lives Friedan had studied for
six years after reading the results of a questionnaire sent out to the members
of her university graduating class. Friedan’s fellow respondents, of whom 89
percent were housewives, indicated that the constant cycle of car to kitchen
to cleanup was not enough. Most of them loved being a mother, and most of
them wanted something more. Friedan gave them a voice through her book.
With strong sales, The Feminine Mystique gave Friedan the popularity and
leverage to do more than merely publicize the discontent. She wanted to
find a cure. In the next two decades, Friedan worked with such luminaries
as Gloria Steinem (who started Ms. magazine in 1972) to found the National
Or
ganization for Women (NOW), fight vigorously, although unsuccessfully,
for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, and generally create a
public atmosphere that fostered debate about women’s issues typically not
covered elsewhere in print, television, radio, or lecture. Betty Friedan helped
resuscitate feminism, that mixture of understanding, belief, and action geared
toward giving women equal treatment, equal access, and equal choice person-
ally and in society at lar
ge.
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While feminists worked to establish rape crisis centers, women’s studies
programs at universities, and equal access to good jobs and good educations,
other reformers looked to cure maladies of a chemical bent. The modern age
had, from the start, been built on industry. And the new atomic and chemi-
cal
industries created both vast potential and vast waste. For example, ever
since the 1940s, modified crop dusters had been flying over fields, farms,
and towns spraying DDT, a lethal insecticide that wiped out mosquitoes,
flies, and birds, killing most within minutes of contact by disrupting their
nervous systems. During the war, DDT was given to soldiers in the Pacific to
prevent the spread of lice and mosquitoes; it was instrumental and effective
in quelling malarial outbreaks. After the war, trucks drove through suburbs
belching out clouds of insecticide. Children skipped through the spray. At
drive-in movie theaters, patrons could pay a nickel or dime to have their cars
hosed down with DDT so their popcorn munching would not be shared with
dive-bombing horseflies or mosquitoes. Meanwhile, suburban housewives
sprinkled new chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides on identical patches of
ever-greener grass during the summer and then purchased boxes of “artificial
snow” made of powdered asbestos for the Christmas tree. Directions on the
festive red and green boxes indicated that the “snow” should be spread freely.
After all, it was fireproof!
Chemical power and nuclear power evinced the technological optimism
of the times, yet their use highlighted the consequences of attacking prob-
lems
with relatively unexamined cures. The cures could be worse than the
problems. A few contemporary skeptics realized the hazards—moral and
medical—inherent in using new technologies before they could be thoroughly
investigated. For example, in 1962 the biologist Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring, a wake-up call to the chemically uneducated populace about
the hazards of using substances like DDT to eradicate insects. Carson infused
science with morality. Herbicides and pesticides were not just killing droves
of unwanted bugs and “weeds”; they were polluting the entire planet at an
unsustainable rate. Carson began the book’s first chapter, “A Fable for Tomor-
row
,” with an idyllic portrait: “There was once a town in the heart of America
where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Deciduous
trees “set up a blaze of color” in the autumn and “foxes barked.” The land-
scape
rippled with birds, wildflowers, and fish dilly-dallying in the streams.
Carson’s fable, however, soon revealed itself as a eulogy for paradise lost.
“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change,”
she wrote. Where birds had once been plentiful, those left “were moribund;
they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.”
21
This calamity came not from lack of rain or volcanic ash, Carson argued, but
rather from the thoughtless use of DDT and other pesticides. In 1972, ten
AMERICAN STORIES
236
years after the publication of Silent Spring, DDT was banned in the United
States for all but a few uses and in all but a few places. However, DDT had
been in widespread use for thirty years, and it had taken twenty years to piece
together sufficient evidence of its toxicity. Unbounded optimism, it seemed,
might not always lead to favorable results.
And
as the 1960s dawned, optimism seemed to be the flavor of the day.
The middle class was expanding its reach as the formerly impoverished
moved into suburbia. John F. Kennedy was elected president, and he promised
Americans that together they could march into a “New Frontier” where the
motto would be not “ask what your country can do for you,” but rather “ask
what you can do for your country.” A cold warrior with plenty of vitality and
a great smile, he created the Peace Corps (an international aid organization
staffed by American idealists) and promised to find ways of providing health
care for all Americans. Kennedy brought with him to Washington advisers
with Ivy League educations—the “best and the brightest.”
22
Together, they
governed from a White House affectionately dubbed “Camelot,” a reference
to the fabled court of King Arthur, who sent his knights on quests to find the
Grail—the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper—and whose kingdom fell
apart after he was killed. It was with optimism, then, that Americans entered
the 1960s, and for a time, it would carry them a long, long way.
Notes
1. Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Nar-
rative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 206.
2. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society: 1607–Present
(New
York: Routledge, 2007), 265.
3. Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of
Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business (New York: Free Press, 2007).
4. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Lipper/Viking, 2002), 40.
5. The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers,” Capitol Records, 3219, 1955. This was
a popular rockabilly song, with words written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who
also wrote songs for Elvis Presley.
6. James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York:
Gotham, 2007), 90–91.
7. John
Trudell, “Baby Boom Che,” from AKA Grafitti Man, Rykodisc, 1992.
8. Drive-in Movie Memories (New Jersey: Janson Media, 2006).
9
. Owen D. Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the
American Landscape (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54–55.
10. Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl, 54.
1
1. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 201.
12. Halberstam, The Fifties, 160.
13. Halberstam, The Fifties, 170.
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AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
14. Elaine Tyler May, “Pushing the Limits: 1940–1961,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed.,
No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 493.
15. May
, “Pushing the Limits,” 498.
16. William H. Chafe, “The Road to Equality: 1962–Today,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed.,
No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 534.
17. Chafe, “Road to Equality
,” 535.
18. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical
Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 110–111.
19. May, “Pushing the Limits,” 525–527.
20. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 15.
21. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1–2.
22.
The phrase “the best and the brightest” was first applied to Kennedy’s circle
of advisers by journalist David Halberstam in the eponymously titled book, The Best
and the Brightest (New York: Random, 1972), 10.