Conformity and Alienation

Paradoxical Norms and Attitudes, 1945-1960

Post War Society• GNP doubled between 1945 and 1960• GI Bill• Baby Boom—U. S. population grew by 33%

between 1945 and 1960. [76 million babies from 1945 through 1964—28% of current U. S. pop. ]

• Consumer culture—Television and Cars (age of Harley Earl [1893-1969])

• Teen Culture—creature of marketers and baby boom

• Juvenile delinquency• Rock-n-roll—Alan Freed and Elvis Presley

TVs and Cars: Consumer Items of the 1950s

Elvis

Where We Lived

• William Levitt and suburbia

• Emergence of the sunbelt—Willis Carrier (1876-1950)

• Continued African American migration to northern cities (5 million left the deep south between 1945 and 1955)

William Levitt and Levittown

Cults: femininity and domesticity

• Rosie the Riveter yielded to the suburban mom• Wife and mother is only natural role for women• Set stage for Betty Friedan and The Feminine

Mystique “the problem with no name.”• Working class women—browner, poorer—were

not much affected by this gendered oppression; they could work long hours for low wages, while being abandoned with some man’s children.

Rosie the Riveter no more

Quest for Meaning• Large #s of mobile folk created “God” and “church” in quest of community.• Churches were affected by Levittown, marketers, and the

Cold War.• Popular religious figures:

Fulton J. Sheen, Billy Graham, and Norman Vincent Peale

• American Civil Religion (“under God” added to P. of A. and “in God we trust” to currency in 1954)

• Neo-orthodoxy (Reinhold Niebuhr) challenged self-assured “Christ of culture” religion.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

If the ministers of our great urban churches become again the simple priests and chaplains of this American idolatry, subtly compounded with a few stray Christian emphases, they will merely add one more dismal proof in the pages of history that a religiously sanctified self-idolatry is more grievous than its secular variety.

Intellectual Critique of 1950s

• John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)

• John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (1956)

• David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950)

• C. Wright Mills, White Collar Society (1956)

• Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1952)

Artists Challenge the 50s

• Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)

• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

• Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1952)

• Jackson Pollack and abstract expressionism

• Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)

• Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

J. D. Salinger

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. . . . So they gave up looking.”

Jackson Pollock—Lavender Mist

Allen Ginsberg--Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,