The 1950s

[novella]

Occasionally I read a comment about the 1950s to the effect that it was a decade of commercialism and dumbing down of culture. I read a comment like that (by veggiedog) on this forum this week.

I’m interested in a discussion of where this perception comes from. My understanding of that decade is totally different. I think of it as a decade when the US was struggling with huge issues of post-war trauma, racism, internationalism, and the breaking down of traditional class structures.

My favorite modern poets did their finest work in the 50s: Roethke, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Richard Wilbur. These are not just good poets for their time, but the best for decades, paradigm-shifters and mold-breakers.

It was a decade when intellectualism flourished. There was an enormous amount of writing on class and political issues in new publications like the Partisan Review and in older ones like The New Yorker, by Kazin, Sontag, Trilling, and Buckley. The Beats were messing with form and trying to escape societal expectations and find "the real America," in the tradition of Walt Whitman.

Great fiction writers like Cheever, Carver, Hemingway, Roth, Bellows, Yates, etc., were exploring ideas about suburban malaise and societal expectations, greed, ambition, and personal assessment. Nabokov, anyone? He seems well-regarded around here.

Bebop, IMO the most sophisticated beautiful American music ever, came out. Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Brubeck, Dizzy G., Coltrane --- these guys’ stuff has not been surpassed. Movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (also a bestselling book) dealt with serious issues of post-war adjustment and trauma.

The myth that Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley defined the decade is ridiculously weak, based on cynical Warholian canning of idiot culture. That bobby-socks-Chevrolet-capitalist-whitebread-racist idea of the 50s was formed in the 1970s, when pablum like “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” misrepresented the postwar American experience by completely ignoring the deeply troubling real societal shifts that lead to civil rights movements and “return to nature” aestheticism of the 60s.

I'm tempted to go on, but if you got this far, I'm grateful.

 

[StillILearn]

novella, I grew up singing How Much is that Doggie in the Window and I wound up as Another Mother for Peace.

The fifties had Senator McCarthy and his "are you now or have you ever been?" tirades. I can remember the very first little black and white TV sets. I remember Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Act, I recall watching riot police and snarling dogs attacking citizens (on television only, thank God) for daring to turn out in favor of integration. We had Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, we had Sputnik and the Space Race. I learned to "duck and cover" in grammar school just in case somebody dropped an atom bomb on our grammar school in Palm Desert. We had Official Fallout Shelters, with signs and arrows indicating their whereabouts.

We had John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was during this time period that the Peace Corps began, not to mention the Viet Nam war. And how about the Students for a Democratic Society? We watched the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and two Kennedys on those little black and white TV sets, and we also got to see the actual massacre of the Symbionese Liberation Front. We saw the beginnings of Medicare and Medicaid and we got to watch the Watts riots in full swing.

We had the priviledge of seeing Richard F Nixon saying: "I am not a crook.".

We witnessed Neil Armstrong placing the first human footprint on the moon's surface. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

We're talking about the Miranda Rights and the National Organization for Women here. Alaska and Hawaii "attained statehood". The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead all appeared at a bowling alley in my home town. And Buffalo Springfield.

We took LSD in order to see God back in those days. We had Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. We had Ram Dass. Well, we still have Ram Dass, thank God.

And now we have computers. When were computers invented, anyway?

 

[pontalba]

Novella posted... I think of it as a decade when the US was struggling with huge issues of post-war trauma, racism, internationalism, and the breaking down of traditional class structures.

I agree. Trauma being the operative word. Granted, I was only a child in the 1950's, but the feeling was.......innovative, searching. I look back on it feeling that everything was coming to a boil so to speak. Readying for the explosion.
I also think that shows like Happy Days et als are eye candy of the era and not representative. But its a sitcom, what can you expect?

As far as why it seem to be a "Dumbing down of culture", I have one word.....Television. In spite of some of the very excellent series on at the time...Playhouse 90 and its brothers, for the most part it was loads of silliness. LCD. Lowest Common Denominator.

 

[novella]

I'm confused by your post, StillI.

I'm not positing the 50s versus the 60s, or saying the 50s were 'better' than any other time in history, only that the ill-informed stereotyping of the 50s as some commercialized cultural bubblegum wasteland is far from reality. Even as McCarthy was building a name for himself as a law-and-order anticommunist, there were many people who stood up for his tactics and refused to knuckle under. Aside from McCarthy's personal approach to that issue, latterly there's an acknowledgement that USSR expansionism WAS a true threat, there WERE spies in Washington (as we know now), and McCarthy and his cohort distorted that threat in order to purge the media of what they read as a cultural threat.

I wasn't yet born in the 50s, but my parents tell me that NYC social life was rife with discussion of the rights and wrongs of war, cold war, the Bomb, codified racism, and the US international agenda. Meanwhile, the cultural landscape was rich with new ideas and the mixing of cultures.

Though as a child and a teenager, I saw artful rebellion in 60s drug-taking and rockandroll, as an adult I see it even more present in postwar jazz and the stripped-down psychologically intense narratives of Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and the poets previously named.

 

[novella]

Also, pontalba, I would say that 50s television was the way it was because it was a new medium that people just didn't know what to do with yet. It's still a relatively new medium that we're just learning how to use well.

The idea that TV air time should be filled up with sitcoms and ads dates to the 50s. Now it's multistreams of 24-hour news and shows that disrupt and pry into the lives of real people. It's cinema and commentary and sitcoms and chat and selling and porn and a load of other things, good and bad. I don't think it's fair to assess the culture of the 50s according to 50s television. We may as well judge the 1940s according to the quality of the Chinese food in America at that time. It's like "oh, this is new, try it" but in retrospect it sucks.

 

[StillILearn]

That's okay, novella. I'm confused by my post too. I guess I just sort of threw in the sixties for good measure, since they were there. The seventies and eighties have faded from my memory, and the nineties are going fast.

Okay, back to the fifties. I'm ready!

 

[pontalba]

What I was trying to say was that television in the '50s was only the beginning of dumbing down. Set the pattern, which is still catering to the LCD for the most part. Whenever I see any of the Reality Programs, I can't help but think of Stephen King's (Richard Bachman) story, The Running Man, and how ludicrous it seemed to me at the time. But here it is.
I'm not really equating television of the time as representing the time, as it happens thats a particular "rant" of mine, and tends to get under my skin.
I saw the decade thru a childs eyes (being born in 1950 ), but even I sensed at the time the simmering. So I have to agree with that.

 

[Peder]

I have often felt maligned by people who have called those of us "The Silent Generation." So let me scare up some ammunition and I'll be back.
Peder

 

[Thaibebop]

Occasionally I read a comment about the 1950s to the effect that it was a decade of commercialism and dumbing down of culture. I read a comment like that (by veggiedog) on this forum this week.

I’m interested in a discussion of where this perception comes from. My understanding of that decade is totally different. I think of it as a decade when the US was struggling with huge issues of post-war trauma, racism, internationalism, and the breaking down of traditional class structures.

My favorite modern poets did their finest work in the 50s: Roethke, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Richard Wilbur. These are not just good poets for their time, but the best for decades, paradigm-shifters and mold-breakers.

It was a decade when intellectualism flourished. There was an enormous amount of writing on class and political issues in new publications like the Partisan Review and in older ones like The New Yorker, by Kazin, Sontag, Trilling, and Buckley. The Beats were messing with form and trying to escape societal expectations and find "the real America," in the tradition of Walt Whitman.

Great fiction writers like Cheever, Carver, Hemingway, Roth, Bellows, Yates, etc., were exploring ideas about suburban malaise and societal expectations, greed, ambition, and personal assessment. Nabokov, anyone? He seems well-regarded around here.

Bebop, IMO the most sophisticated beautiful American music ever, came out. Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Brubeck, Dizzy G., Coltrane --- these guys’ stuff has not been surpassed. Movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (also a bestselling book) dealt with serious issues of post-war adjustment and trauma.

The myth that Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley defined the decade is ridiculously weak, based on cynical Warholian canning of idiot culture. That bobby-socks-Chevrolet-capitalist-whitebread-racist idea of the 50s was formed in the 1970s, when pablum like “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” misrepresented the postwar American experience by completely ignoring the deeply troubling real societal shifts that lead to civil rights movements and “return to nature” aestheticism of the 60s.

I'm tempted to go on, but if you got this far, I'm grateful.

While I agree with your post, I must say that almost all you have mentioned was at that time underground, and has only become well know nto us today because society did change. A lot of these icons were even looked down upon until the liberal influences of the late '60's really changed that view.

So, I think what a lot of people are talking about the '50's is main stream culture. Which was a WASP "Happy Days". The '70's didn't define that decade through TV either. Happy Days and MASH for example were shows that were placed in the past while making comments on the present, a safe way to bring up issues that people got touchy about.

In would say that the '50's are both these things. Remember the Civil Rights Movement started here and there were many who opposed this. Bombings in Black Churches, Evers being slain outside his home, etc. I think someone mentioned blacklisting before as well. Many of these artist you mention were blacklisted and worked under different names if they could work at all. So yes, both these things and more.

 

[novella]

While I agree with your post, I must say that almost all you have mentioned was at that time underground, and has only become well know nto us today because society did change. A lot of these icons were even looked down upon until the liberal influences of the late '60's really changed that view.
.

This is baloney. The jazz artists I mention above were doing sold-out shows in the 50s, their records were in great demand, they played all the clubs in midtown Manhattan. They were FAR from 'underground.'

Similarly, the fiction and criticism authors I mentioned were all best-selling authors. The poets were the major poets of their day. The movies were Academy Award winners. I don't know what 'underground' you're referring to.

 

[Thaibebop]

This is baloney. The jazz artists I mention above were doing sold-out shows in the 50s, their records were in great demand, they played all the clubs in midtown Manhattan. They were FAR from 'underground.'
I'll stop you right here. In demend in MIDTOWN MANHATTAN. What about Atlanta, or Charleston? How about any state in the midwest or deep south?They were suppprted by urban crowds in the North East, the same people who would later help the Civil Rights Movements. These Artists were Black they weren't allowed to mix with the crowd, they weren't allowed the same rights as the white crowd that they were paid to entertain. It was a fine line that divided the audience and the artist. The artist was only welcome on stage, no where else.

The record sales were very good yes. Alot were sold outside America as well. Once again though, the only radio stations playing Jazz (Black Music) was in urban areas, and mostly at night.

Jazz at the time also had a reputation for drug abuse, Herion, hash and drinking. The Bird & Coltrane died from drinking. Many White Americans felt that this Black music was a bad influence, which is why only cosmopolitan centers endorsed Jazz as it never made it(during the '50's) outside major cities.

How do you think Elvis got so big? Black music (Jazz and Blues) was not something self-respecting white people listened to in the day, even if they did and wouldn't admit it. So, along comes a white guy singing Black music, well now it's okay. Why? Because he is white. When people began to look for Elvis's influences they found the music of Black America.

My Grandfather's both loved Jazz and they both, if they weren't in New York, sneak out to the shows that wouldn't start until 11 at night and only in some seedy backroom, it enjoy this music.

Similarly, the fiction and criticism authors I mentioned were all best-selling authors. The poets were the major poets of their day. The movies were Academy Award winners. I don't know what 'underground' you're referring to.

This is a classic case of the artists world supporting their own. You really don't think that the common Amercian has a say in the Academy Awards do you? The poets, writers once again stayed in urban areas and sold outside America as well. They were loud voices for their art and what they believed and are remembered as such but the rest of America wasn't all on the same page as them. Many groups spoke out against these artists, just as they are doing today, calling Hollywood and the entertainment companies liberal institutions that are against so called American values. The same fight was taking place then. We don't remember them because they lost out and the artist didn't.

How many movies did the Hollywood studios put out each year in the '50's? How many of them would fit the liberal bill you are pointing out? Which ones made the most money? I don't care what the Academy says, ticket sales will tell you what Americans are watching. Did they daily source of American entertainment the TV showcase these artists and reflect this verison of the decade you see?

You are right that these things were taking place, but I think you should look at the context of how, when, where, and why they were taking place. The '50's were dynamic and as you said these artists were paradigm shifters, so ask yourself from what paradigm were they shifting from.

These infuences you mention became the foundation for later thinking and entertainment that we as Americans (most of us anyway) excepted. They struggled then and that is part of their importance, to forget this is a shame and wrong.

 

[novella]

These infuences you mention became the foundation for later thinking and entertainment that we as Americans (most of us anyway) excepted. They struggled then and that is part of their importance, to forget this is a shame and wrong.

Yes, which is why I made the first post, calling the decade one in which the 'US was struggling with huge issues . . ." That's the point exactly.

 

[muggle]

Like peder, give me a little time to think about it and I will post my thoughts. Unlike most of you I was a teen-ager in the early 50's and lived it. There is good and bad in every generation. I would not trade my growing up years in the 50's for any subsequent generation.

 

[novella]

Like peder, give me a little time to think about it and I will post my thoughts.

Looking forward to it!

 

[Thaibebop]

Yes, which is why I made the first post, calling the decade one in which the 'US was struggling with huge issues . . ." That's the point exactly.

I already said I was in agree with you, I was just adding that these great thinkers and artist were underdogs in that decade and not to be held up in high esteem until the very end of it and into the '60's. That was my point.

 

[novella]

I already said I was in agree with you, I was just adding that these great thinkers and artist were underdogs in that decade and not to be held up in high esteem until the very end of it and into the '60's. That was my point.

This post has all the intellectual integrity of a mothball. Are you saying these artists of the 50s were not held in high esteem until . . . the 50s? THEY WERE ALL FAMOUS MONEYMAKERS IN THEIR TIME.

Who among these artists I mentioned was 'looked down upon' in the 50s? None of them were. None were criticized as being liberal. These are NOT the people who McCarthy targetted. Could you please be more specific and get away from these unjustified generalizations?