The sixties as we know them could not have happened if it hadn’t been for the huge and abrupt changes that occurred in the fifties. The common conception of the fifties is that they were a time of retreat, a time of longing for peace and quiet after the turbulent forties, a decade that saw the Second World War followed immediately by the Korean War. In the popular conception of the decade, it is as though the adults of the country said, “We’ve had enough. It’s time to relax, forget about war, make a pitcher of martinis and just kick back, watching our brand new TV sets.” Yet this was the decade that brought into being all of the elements that led to the creation of the idealistic political rebellion of the young. By examining, even in a generalized fashion, the main currents of the decade we can begin to see connections.
The picture we have of the decade of the fifties is, of course, oversimplified. As Todd Gitlin has written:
“The Fifties” were multiple, of course, according to whether you were from California or North Carolina; different, too, depending on whether you were eight or eighteen or fifty-eight, female or male, black or white, Irish Catholic, protestant or Jewish, an electrical worker or a salesman of appliances, or a housewife with an all-electric kitchen or the president of General Electric; and this is not to speak of differences in family style or personality.1
Still, there was a dominant impulse in the decade and that was to retreat. It was a pattern that has happened throughout American history. Every war has been followed by a need to relax and escape. So the nation had been there before. At the end of the First World War we welcomed in the twenties, a decade of decadence and hard partying, of Bohemians and others flirting with the edges. The immediate post–Second World War years of the late forties played out this pattern. By the time the fifties hit, America decided to get off that particular highway and take a different route. In the fifties America retreated, played it cool, decided what the nation had been through entitled us to a life where the waters did not produce waves. The country entered an age of exhaustion.
Although it sounds contradictory, America in the fifties also entered an age of progress. Eisenhower built the federal highway system, which, by opening up the suburbs, led to a new way of living, one that perfectly suited the rising mega corporations. Even though we think of the fifties as the period of time that gave rise to the giant corporations, those companies were not a new factor in American life. Corporations have always been with us, so while the corporate life dominated the fifties it did not originate there. One hundred years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had said, “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…. [C]orporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”2
In fact, the original thirteen colonies had been first explored and settled by employees of corporations, but in the postwar fifties the growth and influence of these companies became pervasive. These businesses sought conformity beyond all other values. They valued sameness, almost as if they believed that any sign of individuality would cause psychic landslides to crush the business. They sought to control all aspects of an employee’s life, including approving of his wife—the corporate life was overwhelmingly male—and suggesting which suburban neighborhood he should live in and how he should dress. Among other big businesses of the day, GE and IBM insisted on uniforms for their white collar employees: gray suits with matching ties and white shirts. A retired IBM executive described for me the way the corporation dictated areas of his life that he might have preferred to keep private. To go to work for IBM, he said, was to be issued a pamphlet describing how to behave, how to dress, what type of car to drive, how your wife should dress and behave—everything the rising young executive should know in order to succeed through conformity.
If you were not a budding young executive, the culture encouraged you to still strive to live like one. You bought the house in the suburbs, had cocktail parties with your friends, and got your opinions from Time and Life magazines, which described and defended the status quo. The fifties brought this vision close to fruition. Sociologists of the day wrote treatises on the dangers of the mindless conformity that appeared to characterize the times. In 1950 David Reisman published The Lonely Crowd, in which he argued that society was moving from an inner-directed to an other-directed model. Where once, Reisman said, people searched for meaning inside themselves, now they sought meaning through the social, religious, and political institutions America had created. C. Wright Mills in his classic 1951 study White Collar lamented the rise of conformity and its corresponding loss of independence. By 1956 he was convinced that the battle for personal autonomy had been lost, and in The Power Elite he argued that we were being ruled by a military, political, and corporate oligarchy. Actor, writer, and student of culture Peter Ustinov said about the prevailing times, “In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice but nothing to choose from.”3
Conformity was the rule of the day, a rule that led to a profound emptiness. On a material basis, the lives of Americans were better but the psychic cost was high. At the time, the corporations made the economy cook and the cost of living was still low enough that a family could survive on one income, leading most suburban wives to stay at home. The men rode trains or drove cars to empty jobs that were segmented and specialized so that they rarely saw the fruits of their labors, while the women encountered emptiness in their homes. It was the age of the development of the tranquilizer, which found a welcome in those homes. An astonishing number of American housewives were prescribed the mood-stabilizing drugs to help them cope with the emptiness and boredom of their stay-at-home lives. Tranquilizers were seen as miracle drugs, the triumph of corporate pharmacology over conditions they had done so much to create.
The conformity and emptiness weren’t just created and driven by the corporations. Politics, of course, played a vast part. Eisenhower, who had no political experience when he took office as president, was a product of the military. He became famous by planning and executing the D-day invasion and as a result of this fame both parties tried to recruit him as their candidate. After months of being courted, he chose the Republicans and won easily but was known as “a great general but a poor president.”4 Arguments have been made that he was actually a much more involved and better president than he appeared to be at the time. Whatever the truth of the matter is, one glaring error of his presidency stands out: he did nothing to stop senator Joseph McCarthy’s three-year reign of terror, which did so much to give rise to the radical right that so terrorized our nation.
McCarthy was elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin in 1947. For three years he languished in obscurity while desperately seeking a higher profile. Then, in 1950, he found the issue that would propel him into the national limelight and proceeded to use it to become the most feared man in America, leaving in his wake a trail of broken lives. From the beginning of his career McCarthy showed none of the traits that make a good leader. He succeeded through a series of lies, innuendo, and personal attacks on his enemies. He was one of van Vogt’s right men. During the war, for example, he served in the Marines, a branch he chose because he felt it would look better on a resume when he ran for office. McCarthy awarded himself the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe,” falsely claiming to have flown thirty-two missions so that he could qualify for a Distinguished Service Medal. He was very proud of a letter of commendation he received, signed by his commanding officer, Admiral Chester A. Nimitz. The only problem was that the letter was a fake; he wrote it himself.5
Once out of the service, McCarthy ran for the Senate, challenging the three-term incumbent, Robert La Follette, Jr., for the Republican nomination He made points among the voters by accusing La Follette of ducking active duty in the armed forces, even though La Follette had been forty-six when the war started. McCarthy nailed the nomination by accusing La Follette of war profiteering. Thus handily disposing of his Democratic opponent, McCarthy spent his first three years in the Senate earning himself first place in the Senate press corps’ poll of the worst U.S. senators. Determined to become a man to be reckoned with instead of one to be laughed at, McCarthy used the opportunity of a speaking engagement at the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, to make his strike: “In February 1950, appearing at the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy gave a speech that propelled him into the national spotlight. Waving a piece of paper in the air, he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were ‘working and shaping policy’ in the State Department.”6
In those Cold War years, when the Russians were seen as America’s mortal enemies, charges like McCarthy’s were taken seriously—even though they were ludicrous. Committees were set up in both houses of Congress to investigate his claims and McCarthy, despite the fact that he unearthed no Communists, known or cloaked, became a power, going from the worst senator to the most feared. His list, of course, was fraudulent, but McCarthy was not as interested in rooting out Communists as he was in acquiring power:
These people on the list were in fact not all communists; some had proven merely to be alcoholics or sexual deviants. Regardless, McCarthy relentlessly pushed through and became the chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, widening his scope to “investigate” dissenters. He continued to investigate for over two years, relentlessly questioning numerous government departments and the panic arising from the witch-hunts and fear of communism became known as McCarthyism.7
Not content to find Communists in every closet, he began ransacking those closets for homosexuals, determined to drive anyone gay out of government. His anti-communist and anti-gay stances led to almost constant fights with Democratic president Harry Truman, who McCarthy continually referred to as being soft on Communism. Later he upped the ante, claiming that Truman, if not a Communist himself, was certainly united with them.
By the time Eisenhower took office, McCarthy was the most powerful man in America, and the military genius who had defeated foreign armies was afraid to criticize McCarthy, even though he knew and said privately that the man was a dangerous demagogue. By 1953, though, like most right men, McCarthy had gone too far. He decided to use a subcommittee he chaired to investigate the United States Army: “This was the final straw for then president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who realized that McCarthy’s movement needed to be stopped. The Army fired back at the accusations, sending information about McCarthy and advisors abusing congressional privileges to known critics of McCarthy. Reporters, Drew Pearson included, and other critics soon hopped on board, publishing unflattering articles about Joseph McCarthy and his methods of seeking out the supposed communists in America.”8
When the army fought back, the hearings were televised. Every day for six weeks twenty million American citizens got to see McCarthy in action—bullying, harassing, threatening, coming across as reckless and lying. His popularity plummeted. Pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow put the symbolic bullet in the fallen McCarthy’s head. On his news analysis show, See It Now, he ran an episode called “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” in which he used film clips of the Senator speaking, using McCarthy’s own words as rope to hang him with. Murrow concluded his show with these famous words:
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.9
He followed this up with a second show that focused on the story of Annie Lee Moss, an African-American soldier who had her life and career ruined by McCarthy. Furious, McCarthy came on Murrow’s show to defend himself and accused the reporter of being linked to Russian espionage groups. This time, after hovering off the edge of the canyon like Wile E. Coyote for three years, McCarthy fell and crashed; to accuse army heroes and bureaucrats of being Communists and spies without producing a shred of evidence against them was one thing but to accuse America’s favorite TV journalist? McCarthy was through. Discredited and reviled, within three years he drank himself to death.
McCarthy was gone but the damage he had done lingered, mostly in the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was established in 1938 to investigate the infiltration of Communism into the lives of America’s private citizens. From the very beginning the committee engaged in a kind of mindless overkill. One congressman asked a theater director who was testifying whether the playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was a Communist. Also, the committee considered investigating the KKK but passed on that one on the grounds that, as Mississippi senator John E. Rankin said, “after all, the KKK is an old American institution.”10 Although as a senator McCarthy had nothing to do with the HUAC, it really took off when witch-hunts made his name a household word. The committee widened its focus and began looking for anyone who was a perceived threat to the American way of life as guaranteed by the Constitution—at least as the anti-communist archconservatives on the committee read it. Their methods, as well as their goals, were questionable:
The committee employed several controversial methods to accomplish its goal of ferreting out suspected Communists. Typically, an individual who raised the suspicions of HUAC received a subpoena to appear before the committee. During the hearing, the suspected Communist was grilled about his or her political beliefs and activities and then asked to provide the names of other people who had taken part in allegedly subversive activities. Any additional figures identified in this manner also received subpoenas, widening the committee’s probe. Individuals who refused to answer the committee’s questions or to provide names could be indicted for contempt of Congress and sent to prison. Subjects of HUAC investigations had the option of invoking their right to avoid self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, but “pleading the Fifth” created the impression that they were guilty of a crime. In addition, those who refused to cooperate were often blacklisted by their employers. They lost their jobs and were effectively prevented from working in their chosen industry.11
HUAC investigated the film industry and when writers and performers refused to answer their questions or would not give the names of others, the committee saw that they were banned from working for the studios:
It was the casting call no one in Hollywood wanted to receive. In October 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) convened a hearing in Washington, D.C., to investigate subversive activities in the entertainment industry, 41 screenwriters, directors and producers were subpoenaed. Most witnesses were “friendly”—that is, willing to respond to the committee’s central question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” And those who confessed to membership were offered the opportunity to name “fellow travelers,” thereby regaining their good standing with the committee and, by extension, the American film industry. Ten witnesses—all current or former party members—banded together in protest, refusing to cooperate on First Amendment grounds (freedom of speech, right of assembly, freedom of association) and affirming that HUAC disagreed: It found the so-called Hollywood Ten in contempt of Congress, fined them each $1,000 and sentenced them to up to a year in federal prison. All 10 artists also were fired by a group of studio executives—and the era of the Hollywood blacklist began.12
The famous Hollywood Ten were blacklisted and their careers and lives ruined. Musicians faced the same fate. Just as the screenwriters had been, they were asked about left-wing affiliations and ordered to give the names of others they knew who might be “red.” Before the blacklist was crushed in the sixties, more than 300 artists, including Pete Seeger and the Weavers, had been banned from working at their craft.
When McCarthy fell, HUAC slid down the long ladder to oblivion. It was no longer feared or taken all that seriously as a social and political force. Reading the signs, President Truman now felt comfortable regularly denouncing it. His words carried power and, though the committee tried to carry on and still managed to wreck a few more lives, its power gradually diminished. It hung on until 1975 and, as we shall see, the New Left had a lot to do with its decline.
Conformity, then, was the dominant idea that drove American lives, conformity brought about by the unquestioning acceptance of the status quo and a refusal to question the basic assumptions on which we were building a society, coupled with a fear of outsiders who advocated another way. People who had fought two wars in ten years to protect this way of life were not in any mood to see it questioned or challenged.
In 1957 the humorist and social critic S.J. Perelman summed up the state of our culture by titling one of his books The Road to Miltown. To intellectuals like him, our age was characterized by a need to escape from the crushing everydayness and emptiness through the use of chemicals like the newly developed tranquilizers. Most middle-class Americans, however, accustomed to a liquor-fueled suburban culture, simply saw the new tranquilizers as one more rung on the ladder to the good life.
If grownup middle-class America were happy and content, their children were not. Kids, especially those in their teens when the suburban diaspora took place, were most dramatically affected. The move to the suburbs radically altered the nature of teenage life. Once, these kids had been able to walk out their doors and find entertainment with their friends in the neighborhood. To move around, they used public transportation, which was widely available. Corner shops, neighborhood theaters, ice cream shops, empty lots and fields where baseball could be played—all of these were readily available. A teen had a sense of belonging to the larger life, a notion of an uncluttered meaning of life as a member of a community. As Paul Goodman wrote in 1960, at one time a young man could find a good job repairing cars in his neighborhood garage, where every day he would encounter his neighbors and friends. He could meet girls and make new friends. He could be a part of a community.13 The suburbs and the new pervasiveness of the corporate culture killed all of that. How could he be a part of a community when the people he knew were scattered all over a series of developments, walled off from each other by income and status? How could the young man make his way in the world if he could no longer live in a community that contained people of all classes, races, and ethnicities? The kid who once mingled with the whole population found himself stratified, stuck as though trapped in amber in an inescapable grouping of people of his own race and class.
Now he had to rely on the schools to find companionship, schools which, with the rise of the suburbs and the conformity of postwar life, found their mission subtly altered from the teaching of individual thinking to a kind of group-think. Rather than striving to turn out people capable of changing the system, the schools aimed at getting people to fit into the existing system. In their halls and classrooms, kids learned that they were being guided into lives that were depersonalized, systemic, and habitual. From the first grade on they learned that they were not very important as individuals and were much more valued as future consumers. So they learned to fit in, to seek approval from the group by indulging only in socially approved activities, like sports, cheerleading, and school clubs. They also learned to dress like everyone else, to talk like everyone else, to look like everybody else, to read the same books, to listen to the same music. In short, they learned to be everybody else. They also learned that they were officially branded as teenagers and that fact carried with it a sense of secondary citizenship. Voting, drinking, having sex, possessing the ability to make yourself understood to adults—all of these actions and more were suddenly off the table.
As scattered as teens were and with the lack of public transportation, a car was essential to life; without one, you were not only stranded but also judged as somehow inadequate. With a car, you could obtain a little freedom. So a car culture emerged, with its attendant drive-in movies and restaurants and teen-centered dances and meeting places. Cars not only widened physical borders, they opened up new possibilities of an inner life also. They made dating possible and became a source of new music and entertainment; the car without a radio was not really a vehicle at all.
So, as far as adults and most teens went, life was good. For those young people who could think, however, American life in the suburban fifties was characterized by a soul-crushing emptiness. It was out of this cohort that a group of college students who sought a bigger meaning in their own lives tried to find that meaning in political activism. They would help themselves by helping those less fortunate than themselves. This group became known as the New Left and were almost immediately identified by their conformist elders as un–American and subversive.