1
The Fifties: Tranquility in Turmoil

Even today Americans tend to remember the 1950s as a placid, antiseptic decade-a rather boring time of suburban puttering, backyard barbecues, and plastic smiles. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, most of what we associate with the 1960s-the struggle with the Soviets, war in Southeast Asia, television, youth culture, drug culture, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, space travel and exploration, even the anti-nuke movement-had its roots in the previous decade. Worthy of study in their own right, not simply as a prelude to the 1960s, the 1950s is one of the most dynamic decades in US history-a puzzling, paradoxical period of swift transformation, swathed in conformity and consensus.

How the 1950s garnered a reputation for sterility relates mainly to television, a new medium that rose to the fore of American culture and consciousness. Television expanded rapidly between the end of World War II and the end of the Korean War. Americans bought an average of 250,000 television sets per month between 1949 and 1952, and millions more saved their money to buy the magic box, a device that transformed the nation as no invention had done since the automobile. Purchasing a TV was a major event for any family, many of whom had scrimped and saved until the proud day that neighbors gathered to watch delivery and installation of the new "TV" by the local retailer. Television had instant appeal, bringing inexpensive, convenient, and passive entertainment right into the home for the enjoyment of the entire family. Critics worried that it leveled high culture and dulled taste, an opiate of the masses.

Figure 1.1 A family watching television in 1958.

(Source: © Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 306-PS-58-9015)

Sales of new sets averaged in excess of 5 million per year in the 1950s and in some years reached the 7.5-million mark; by the early 1960s, 90 percent of all American homes had at least one TV. The invention of coaxial cable and videotape in 1951 and 1956, respectively, further improved the device, which, by projecting the same formulaic programming into homes across the nation, encouraged homogeneity of interests, tastes, and opinions. In just over a decade, television had not only nationalized cultural expression and shared experience in new ways but also democratized news and entertainment-becoming an essential piece of electronics owned by rich and poor, urban and rural, white and black, illiterate and intellectual. Through advertisements, it also fed the growing appetite for consumer consumption. As historian J. Ronald Oakley has observed, no other invention-motion pictures, cars, or radio-brought so much change to so many people in so short a time.

The images television projected were happily reassuring. On westerns such as Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger, justice always prevailed; the good guys enforced law and order with cold steel and hammer fists; talented sleuths on Dragnet and Perry Mason always solved the crime du jour. Comic relief was furnished by shows starring famous comedians of the day, You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx, the self-titled The Jackie Gleason Show, and shows featuring Milton Berle and Steve Allen. Dinah Shore and Donna Reed-multitalented actresses who hosted eponymous variety shows-and Lucille Ball, whose handsome Cuban-born co-star and real-life husband Desi Arnaz joined her on the #1 hit I Love Lucy, provided strong but non-threatening female role models. Clean-cut, white teenagers danced on American Bandstand, a local Philadelphia television program, which grew from its 1952 debut into a nationally broadcast show by 1957. Quiz shows like The $64,000 Question and What's My Line? tempted viewers with quick riches, and variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show offered a kaleidoscopic array of entertainers and musicians. Programming was generally entertaining, soothing, and-due to careful producing and censorship-safe.

Most importantly, situation comedies (or "sitcoms") such as Leave it to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and Father Knows Best idealized the new suburban life, purveying a gee-whiz world of narcotic consumerism and suburban euphoria. Dads ruled their households sternly but benevolently; moms catered to the needs of their husbands and children. Pot roasts browned in convection ovens; children played on cul-de-sacs. Whatever problems arose, usually small ones, were resolved in a 30-minute format. So closely did "Ozzie & Harriet" mirror its cast's lives-with real-life husband Ozzie, wife Harriet, and sons David and Ricky portraying themselves, with Ricky crooning his own songs and Ozzie editing them into early music videos-that the show's "adventures" were more prototype reality show than sitcom (the house shown in exterior shots on the show was the family's actual house in the Hollywood Hills). Theodore "the Beaver" Cleaver and his brother Wally got themselves into some real pickles on Leave it to Beaver-mostly due to the instigation of their rascal friend Eddie Haskell-but Ward and June Cleaver were always ready to guide their sons back onto the right path. By the conclusion of each episode, all was forgiven. It was the golden age of television and television projected a golden age: 1950s America, TV-style, was pleasant, saccharine, even bland, but almost always comforting.

And why not? In the wake of the biggest challenges the nation had ever faced, the Great Depression and World War II, times were good in America. Unprecedented military spending during the war-close to $300 billion-had brought a massive stimulus to industrial and agricultural production, ushering in a new era of economic expansion and prosperity. By the mid-1950s, the United States-with 6 percent of the world's population and 7 percent of its landmass-was producing almost half of the world's manufactured products. It contained within its borders most of the world's cars and telephones, and a sizable portion of its televisions and radios (and, not surprisingly, consumed almost half of the world's annual energy production). Over the course of the 1950s, the Gross National Product (GNP) rose from $285 billion to $500 billion, per capita income rose by 48 percent, the median family income rose from $3083 to $5657, real wages rose by almost 30 percent, and the number of millionaires rose from roughly 27,000 to almost 80,000. The expanding economy created jobs in record numbers; by 1960, the number of working Americans had risen to a record 66.5 million.

Young couples who had delayed marriage during wartime now got married and had children in record numbers, and at younger ages. By 1953, almost one-third of married American women had "tied the knot" by age nineteen; by 1960, almost 75 percent of all women aged 20-24 were married. And in the 1950s couples tended to stay married, as divorce remained a social stigma, a badge of personal and even moral failure. Those who were married had kids-lots of them. From 1946 to 1950, an average in excess of 3.6 million children were born each year (in 1940 the number had stood at 2.6 million), and from 1950 on there was a steady rise past 4 million in 1954 to an all-time high of 4.3 million in 1957, an average of one newborn every seven seconds. It was, as everyone recognized, a baby boom, one fed by prosperity. Naturally, the boom in babies fed the nation's increasingly growing and powerful economy, as sales of maternity clothing, baby furniture, diapers, baby food, formula, clothing, toys, trikes, bikes, washing machines, clothes dryers, and televisions spiked, so did new school construction. Dr. Benjamin Spock's bestselling Book of Baby and Child Care, which sold a million copies per year in the 1950s, offered an informal, commonsense approach to caring for this surge of children, one that emphasized love and positivity rather than discipline and punishment. The advice was well tolerated and much appreciated: after all, the 76.4 million children born between 1946 and 1964 became the single largest generation in the nation's history, the generation that largely came of age in the 1960s.

Figure 1.2 The ideal 1950s housewife: working, smiling, and pleasing.

(Source: © George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images)

Much of the postwar growth occurred in previously undeveloped hinterlands, neither urban nor rural; in fact, 83 percent of the total population growth occurred in so-called "suburbs," a new feature of the American landscape. A severe housing shortage had developed after World War II and developers met the crisis with ingenious new solutions-and did so quickly. Between 1947 and 1951, the construction company Levitt & Sons built the first suburban development in history at Hempstead, New York, where crews followed a precise, 27-step process using prefabricated materials to produce new single-family homes, more than 30 per day at the peak of production. As Henry Ford had done to the automobile industry, the Levitts brought assembly-line production to housing: bulldozing the land and covering it with standardized units with uniform floor plans. Cost-cutting techniques meant that...