THE PERIOD from 1946 to 1969 quite probably witnessed the peak influence of mass-circulation magazines and journals in the United States, and many families were affluent enough to subscribe to a broad range of them. The media domination of cable television and the internet was still to come. Substantial elements of this book were gleaned from hundreds of period journals. An almost mandatory activity in a project of this nature is the investigation of Life and Look, the two major mass-circulation magazines of the era. While both of these periodicals contain the celebrity orientation of modern journals such as People and Us, they also presented serious discussions of the national and international scene and focused heavily on contemporary family life, parenthood, and childhood experiences. Coupled with their extensive, largely full-color advertisements, these two periodicals provide priceless glimpses into the daily world of the Boomers and their families.
The major news weeklies of the era are invaluable for their chronicles of important events of the period. Time and Newsweek provide an excellent narrative of primary news events while U.S. News offers substantially more material on school issues, parenting concerns, the economic and social impact of the Baby Boom, and projections of future trends in society. Several other general-audience periodicals proved surprisingly valuable. Fortune magazine featured highly readable assessments of the economic and marketing aspects of the ongoing population explosion and included several multi-issue predictions about life in America in both the 1980s and the early twenty-first century. Sports Illustrated varied its nuts-and-bolts reports on sporting events with articles on the role of sports in all levels of education and the impact of race and gender changes in sports on the broader society. T.V. Guide offered far more than grids that highlighted television programming for a particular week in a particular year. It also featured extensive articles on the impact of television violence on young children, the possible effect of global television on education, and the future role of adult Boomers when they became the gatekeepers for their children’s viewing experiences.
The role of children in families and the broader adult society seemed to be a perennial theme in mass-market women’s magazines such as Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. “Back to School” child fashion layouts were interspersed with features on discipline, social and school success, and the shared responsibilities of mothers and fathers. Even Better Homes and Gardens offered features on coping with overcrowding in new suburban houses and hints on managing the issues of shared bedrooms and study spaces. Parents magazine at times seemed almost, but not quite, a women’s journal, as it conceded that mothers spent far more time with their children than fathers. But it carried just enough features on joint parents’ concerns and the special roles of the male parent to provide a slightly different perspective than more general periodicals.
Two valuable references aimed at child readers were Jack and Jill and the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine. The former magazine offers excellent insights into the stories, games, and activities that were approved by parents of the time. Disney’s offering features fascinating features on the relationship of 1950s children to young people of yesterday and tomorrow. In fact the initial article in the first issue in 1956 featured two children and their parents preparing to celebrate New Year 2000, and comparing their lifestyles to those of their counterparts nearly five decades earlier. While the feature provided only mixed results in the accuracy of its predictions, it offered an excellent perspective on how child Boomers may have perceived their adult future.
The world of preteen and teenage girls of the era received massive coverage in Seventeen and Glamour, both of which explored attitudes about relationships, popularity, school issues, and career prospects. Equivalent sources for a male Boomer perspective are more difficult to find. Boys’ attitudes about adolescence must often be filtered through indirect sources, such as the enormously popular DC and Marvel comic books and satire magazines such as Mad and Cracked, with proper allowance for the nature of these publications.
While contemporary periodicals proved invaluable to the research for this book, some fifty contemporary and later books added greater perspective. A number of excellent general histories of the fifties and sixties were written between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. Works on the earlier decade include Douglas Miller and Marion Novak, The Fifties the Way They Really Were (New York, 1977); J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York, 1986); William L. O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence (New York, 1986); and the magisterial David Halberstam work, The Fifties (New York, 1993), which is a necessity for gaining a full appreciation of the decade. Works on the 1960s include William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s (Chicago, 1971); David Faber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York, 1974); and Joseph Peter, An Oral History of the 1960s (New York, 1974).
These works offer some contrasts with the longer-term perspective from the twenty-first century, including Stuart Kallen, The 1950s (San Diego, 2000); Mark Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, 2006); Karen Mannus Smith and Tim Koster, The Time It Was (Saddle River, N.J., 2008); and Michael Kazin, America Divided (New York, 2008). These authors generally view the 1950s as less conservative and the 1960s as less radical than their earlier predecessors.
Chapters on the emergence of Boomer families and 1950s home life begin with reference to Dr. Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York, 1946). I believe it is difficult to overestimate Spock’s influence on early postwar child-rearing. Lynn White, Educating Our Daughters (New York, 1950) provides another valuable contemporary insight into the experience of parenthood while Thomas Hine, Populuxe: The Life and Look of America in the 1950s and 1960s (New York, 1986) is a lavishly illustrated view of home life in the era. More recent works on this topic include Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York, 2005) and Peter Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York, 2003). Steve Gillon, Boomer Nation (New York, 2004) provides interesting demographic aspects in a work that concentrates on the emergence of the Boomer generation as adults.
Chronicles of the teenage experiences of Boomers and their older siblings cover a wide spectrum of publication dates. Contemporary accounts include James Herlihy, Blue Denim (New York, 1959) and Enid Haupt, The Seventeen Book of Young Living (New York, 1957); more recent treatments include Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York, 1999) and Kate Burns, The American Teenager (Farmington, Mich., 2003).
The impact of school overcrowding, the cold war, and Sputnik on American schools and children was a major feature of contemporary books. These include Albert Lynd, Quackery in the Public Schools (Boston, 1953); Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (New York, 1955); and the less shrill and more prescriptive James Conant, The American High School Today (New York, 1959). Two excellent perspectives on the impact of Sputnik on the Boomer experiences are Paul Dickson, Sputnik: Shock of the Century (New York, 2000) and Homer Hickam, Jr., The Rocket Boys (New York, 1999). Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine (New York, 1976) chronicles the broader topic of utilizing Boomer children as an asset in cold-war policymaking.
The popular culture of the Boomers is a well-chronicled element of the postwar narrative. Joel Whitburn, The Top Ten Single Charts of Billboard Magazine: 1955–2000 (Menominee, Wisc., 2001) is an invaluable guide to the type of music that Boomers and their older siblings found exciting during the period. Glenn Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock and Roll Changed America (New York, 2003) and Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll (New York, 1986) explain the cultural impact of the new music on teenagers. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics (Boston, 1986) and Karal Ann Martling, As Seen on T.V.: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass., 1994) evaluates the impact of film and television on Boomers from the perspective of a later time while Robert Shayon, Television and Our Children (New York, 1951) views the topic from the early days of the postwar culture.
The drama of challenging the Establishment in the civil rights and student activism movements has received substantial coverage. The emotionally wrenching saga of the integration of Little Rock Central High School is chronicled in Melba Banks, Warriors Don’t Cry (New York, 1984). Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer offer a wider lens on the movement in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1991), which in turn complements Robert Weisbrot’s Freedom Bound (New York, 1990).
The New Left on the college campus receives extensive treatment in James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York, 1968) and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987). Conservative culture in confrontation is a major element of John Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties (New York, 1997) and Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties (New York, 1995). An excellent, balanced narrative of student activism is Kenneth Heineman, Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels (Chicago, 2001).
Narratives of the Boomer experience in the crucial year of 1968 include Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting America in 1968 (New York, 1998) and Mark Kurlansky, 1968—The Year That Rocked the World (New York, 2004). The cultural transition from the end of the sixties to the dawn of a new decade is a major topic of Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York, 1969) and Michael Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (New York, 2002).