The Influence of the 1950s on the 1960s Cultural Revolution
I Kennedy
In the 1960s, a powerful youth culture rebelled against traditional values, subverting the primacy of the family and the individualistic drive to success by enacting sexual liberation and engaging in collective social endeavors, including the fight for civil rights and economic equality as well as consciousness expansion through drugs and artistic movements. Cultural and social changes seemed to accelerate rapidly in the early 1960s, to reshape public policies in the mid-1960s, and to polarize the nation in the last few years of the decade (Patterson 1996443). The 1960s was indeed a decade of enormous ideological transformation, transformation which has its antecedents in the politics, technological innovation, mass culture and counter-cultural rebellion of the 1950s. No public figure embodies the shift from 1950s to 1960s culture as strikingly as John F. Kennedy, who combined the youthful drive for change with values of the American past.
The election of John F. Kennedy to the presidential office is synonymous with the spirit
of the early 1960s. His administration was, at least after his death, referred to as Camelot, or a magic period in American history when the government was run by gallant men (OBrien 2005xiii). While this is mythological, his presidency was highly significant, and he was admired for his confidence, intellect, and optimism. Kennedy exhibited idealism with regard to international human relations, appealing to the desire for peace and collectivity emerging among young people. At the same time, he appealed to the Cold War anxiety that characterized the 1950s public condition. His inaugural speech referred to the fight against tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself as well as to the danger of Soviet totalitarianism and nuclear power.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human lifeWe dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americansborn in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritageand unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
In his speech, Kennedy captured the paradox of American culture at the turn of the decade. Americans desired both peace and power they were optimistic about the future in a fast-developing world, yet frightened by the specter of annihilation the culture had changed dramatically, but America was still built on an ancient heritage of civil and human rights. Many instigators of political transformation throughout the 1960s appealed to traditional American principles as a basis for the changes they advocated (Cavallo 199912-13). The most obvious example of this is the Civil Rights movement, which, according to Rorabaugh (2002), left three legacies. Most important was the end of legalized white supremacy, but consciousness among Americans about the evil of racism also grew. Then, too, the movement encouraged other groups to organize using similar tactics. In particular, feminists took notice (235). White youth in the 1960s joined black Americans in fighting for liberation, and feminists and homosexuals agitated for their own basic constitutional rights.
Kennedys success was helped, to a certain extent, by his support of the Civil Rights movement. He supported sit-ins for the cause, and civil rights activists felt encouragedduring the Kennedy administration (Rorabaugh 2002235). During his campaign, Kennedy was instrumental in securing Martin Luther King Jr.s release from jail, and received a great deal of positive exposure, including an endorsement from Kings father, for this act (OBrien 2005485-87). At the same time, some civil rights leaders questioned Kennedy for his refusal to support more forceful and violent agitation (OBrien 2005484). This is another example of Kennedys simultaneous appeal to older and newer values. All in all, his relationship with the civil rights movement was positive, and this increased his popularity among the youth and other counter-cultural Americans. At the same time, his popularity among rural Midwestern and Southern Protestant voters was diminished by his urban image, his youth (relative to all other presidents), and his Catholicism, a faith practiced by no other president before him (OBrien 2005427).
While Kennedy advocated peace and international harmony, he also pushed for a stronger nuclear weapons program and military expansion for the purposes of interventionist wars. He supported the escalation of the Vietnam War, against which counter-cultural activists, principally college students, protested throughout the mid and late 1960s. Kennedy also called for an increase in economic support for developing nations, which, combined with military spending increases, would lead to higher taxes, which he painted as a sacrifice for national security (OBrien 2005433). His rhetoric about sacrifice was coupled with rhetoric about the dangers of Soviet military power. He understood himself to be an invigorating force in American society, and saw competition with the Soviet Union as a vital to that invigoration.
A free society, Kennedy said is at a disadvantage in competing against an organized, monolithic state such as Russia. We prize our individualism and rightly so, but we need a cohesive force. In America that force is the presidency. The President of the United States has an obligation to develop the publics interest in our destiny to the highest level of vigor that can be sustained (OBrien 2005 426).
Even before he became president, Kennedy was committed to rallying the American people out of complacency by playing on the fears associated with the Soviet threat. He used the Cold War anxieties of 1950s Americans to forward a new policy of military strength and interventionism, which, in turn, contributed to the anti-war reaction that shaped 1960s counter-culture.
While it may have led to the conditions for anti-war reaction later in the sixties, Kennedys strength on the question of military and security served him well at the time of his campaign. This was due in part to the near-hysterical anti-communism and Cold War apprehension of the 1950s. Other conditions of 1950s America, including television and mass media culture, contributed to and were influenced by Kennedys success. Kennedy invented media-oriented, televisual, celebrity politics (Rorabaugh 20021). His television campaign was enormously successful, and he polled the concerns and desires of Americans more effectively than any previous candidate in American historyand used the information to decide his schedule and tactics (OBrien 2005 430-35). This was the beginning of consumerist politics, in which the candidate is packaged in the media in order to appeal to as many voters as possible. The television, a wartime invention and a dynamic force in the explosion of mass culture in the 1950s (Patterson 1996348), enjoyed a dramatic increase in popularity during the 1950s, being used by 4.4 million families in 1950 and approximately 50 million people in 1960. In the short space of 15 years, watching TV had gone from freakish oddity to the perfectly usual (Miller Nowak 1977344). Television, which facilitated the rise of consumer culture in America, bolstered John F. Kennedys career and helped to change the nature of American politics.
II. The Cold War
Kennedy was a radical change from the president who preceded him. President Eisenhower had spent most of his life in the Army (Halberstam 1993250), and perhaps it was for this reason that his Cold War policy was more skeptical and relaxed than Kennedys. When Eisenhower failed to react to the Gaither Report, which reported that the Soviets could soon surpass the United States in nuclear striking power, perhaps even have a first-strike capability by 1959 (OBrien, 2005 425), the Democrats, Kennedy included, attacked Eisenhower for being soft on the nuclear threat. Although Eisenhower, in his more sober estimation of the Soviets progress, was seen to be underestimating the problem, it turned out his estimation was correct. By the time he left the White House, no gap had opened up But Ike failed to communicate effectively with the nation about the wisdom of his defense policies as a growing sense of insecurity and anxiety spread throughout the country (OBrien, 2005 425). Eisenhowers poor communication skills were easily overwhelmed by the power of Cold War anxiety, and the growing sense of panic helped to turn favor away from Eisenhower and toward the Democratic party, giving Kennedy an edge. Kennedy openly critiqued Eisenhowers national security leadership , and implicitly associated him with the lack of nerve that prevented Americans from meeting Soviet challenges with strength (OBrien 2005 432). Kennedy was young and vital, whereas Eisenhower was viewed as old and slow, no longer capable of commanding leadership in the fast-changing world. Life in the twentieth century underwent a tremendous amount of technological change very quicklyAs the world grew more fluid and less stable, anxiety and uncertainty spread (Miller Nowak 1977148). Kennedy was more in touch with the fast-changing landscape of the 1950s, and the confidence he projected assuaged uncertainties.
Eisenhower, by contrast, did nothing to assuage Americans fears, which were centered on the prospect of a missile gap between the US and the Soviet Union Khrushchevs seeming eagerness to bury the US (Patterson 1996425) and the general perception that the Soviet Union was winning the technology race. In 1957, the Soviet Unionlaunched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, gaining a huge propaganda victory. In America the event caused intense anxiety and ignited a national self-examination (OBrien 2005424-25). It contributed to the feeling, in newspapers and among citizens, that America was in a race for survival with the Soviet Union (OBrien 2005425). The Sputnik controversy transformed the conflict into a competition over aerospace and science education (Miller Nowak 197744). The apparent greater progress of the Soviet Union in the areas of space technology and science education lowered Americans confidence, and dampened the high expectations about the blessings of science and technology that had animated hope for a prosperous American future (Patterson 199667). So while advances in scientific technology represented new discoveries, they also stimulated Cold War anxiety. In his inaugural speech, Kennedy captured this paradox, referring to the double nature of Americas new frontiers its infinite possibilities and potential for total annihilation. Eisenhowers failure to communicate with the public about nuclear arms stands in contrast to Kennedys rhetorical strength. Kennedy was caught up amidst the conflicting currents of the 1950s and 1960s. As a figure, he symbolizes the youthfulness and tolerance of the 1960s, and his election affected Americas sociopolitical situation, facilitating civil rights progress while invigorating the countrys youth and, eventually, stimulating anti-war feeling. He was not, however, the main catalyst for change. No single event brought about the changes that took place during the 1960s, but they were informed by multiple events in the 1950s.
American Cold War anxiety in the 1950s had two aspects the external nuclear threat, and the internal threat of communism. Some of the political rebelliousness of the 1950s and 1960s was a reaction to McCarthyism, the witch hunt for American communists spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy enjoyed widespread support because the fear of communism in America was a givenan essence of lifeIn the years from the late forties through the mid-fifties, it became an hysterical pandemic (Miller Nowak 197722). Anti-communist hysteria and McCarthys career were both facilitated by the mass media. Television gave McCarthy a national platform, it stimulated discussion of Soviet nuclear proliferation among the population, and it spread anti-communist propaganda (Miller Nowak 197728). Like Kennedy, then, McCarthy owed a large degree of his success to the advent of television.
Though McCarthys rhetoric was well within the already established framework of cold war politics (Miller Nowak 197729), his authoritarianism did not appeal to everyone. Counter-cultural figures spoke out against civil rights violations, and poets like Allen Ginsberg conveyed an irresistible dream of American spontaneity and personal freedom to counter the fear and regimentation of the Cold War (Charters 2003404). Some of the same counter-cultural revolutionaries would react against Kennedys Cold War policies in the 1960s. President Kennedy would heat up the cold war all over again, and the escalation of Vietnam was both an aspect of that heating up and an alternative location for Cold War anxiety over the course of the 1960s, the cold wars tensions were funneled into Vietnam (Miller Nowak 197744). The youth culture spoke out against Vietnam, holding protests on college campuses and the streets of Washington (Patterson 1996449). If Vietnam was a result of the Cold War, then the anti-war culture of the 1960s was a semi-direct result of 1950s Cold War tensions. Part of the reaction against Vietnam was related to a desire for collectivity and increased respect for human life, respect that had been sorely damaged by the bomb and the nuclear age. Deadening of human sensibility was one of the major results of the bomb culture in America (Miller Nowak 197765). It was not just the Vietnam war, then, against which 1960s radical youth were protesting, but also the entire mood of human insensibility and Cold War hysteria.
The Cold War also paved the way for 1960s culture by contributing to Americas economic boom and disseminating new technologies. Besides space technology, computers were made a mandatory technology by the Cold War (Halberstam 199397). Reliance on computers would transform American society radically, leading to mass culture on a scale that 1950s Americans could not have dreamed. Overall, the cold warhad a salutary effect on the economy. Anyone could see how affluent the country had become since the advent of World War II. The continuing postwar military habit helped even more. In the fifties the country grew richer as business and government intertwined (Miller Nowak 197744). In the 1950s, Americans achieved an unprecedented level of prosperity. The values and social realities of the 1950s were decisively molded by this prosperity (Patterson 199661). It gave way to the rise of consumer culture and a higher standard of living, both of which reached a crescendo in the 1960s. It also encouraged a tendency toward individualism, family success and economic competition, values which shaped the next generation even as they caused them to rebel.
III Prosperity, Consumerism and Cultural Conflict
The economy grew 37 during the 1950s, and by the end of the decade, the average American family had 30 more purchasing power (Patterson 1996312). There was no significant competition for economic stature from Europe and Asia, which were still recovering from the devastation of WWII, and so the United States developed into the worlds leading economic power (Patterson 199661). An expansion of production was accompanied by low unemployment and an increase in disposable income, which led Americans into a consumerist pattern. While WWII produced useful technologies like penicillin, it also heightened the sense of economic deprivation that had existed since the Depression. When goods banned during the war became available again, deprivation gave way to an explosion in consumer spending (Patterson 19968). Increased automobile production made it possible for Americans to travel more freely, and low domestic oil prices increased industrial growth while allowing Americans to save money (Patterson 1996313). The combination of cheap domestic oil prices and increased automobile production paved the way for the mass society and suburbanization of the 1960s and beyond. Economic prosperity was bolstered by post-WWII government provisions like the G.I. Bill and low-cost loans. The GI Bill provided millions of veterans with money for education, unemployment benefits, and home purchases, leading to a highly educated workforce and an increase in property ownership (Patterson 19968). In the late 1940s, the Federal Housing Administration offered billions in low-cost mortgage loans, thereby underwriting much of the suburban expansion of the era (Patterson 199627). The post-WWII generation felt equipped to buy property and settle into family lives, and the drive to do so became a primary 1950s value.
From this drive to achieve successful family life there emerged a culture of conformity. The idealization of the family grew stronger throughout the 1950s, and was bolstered by the increasing ubiquity of television. Television offered a vision of the perfect family, and the popularity of suburban sitcoms reinforced Americans desire for a perfect suburban lifestyle. Suburban sitcoms dominated network programme schedulesThis format offered viewers a new vision of domesticity, identity and consumer cultureViewers were now eager to embrace the good life promised in suburbia (Thumim 200285). The traditional values of the 1950s were tied to mass consumer culture through television as well as economic prosperity.
As prosperity and consumerism rose, America shifted from being a production-based society to being a consumption-based one. It was obviousthat economic growth greatly boosted the consumption of goods, with much attendant waste and misdirection of resources from public needs to private display (Patterson 1996341). The 1950s saw the advent of products that could be used and thrown away, and spending became a fulfillment of the desire to buy more, rather than a way of simply surviving. Consumer purchasing was driven by advertising, which kept production high, and helped to forward consumerism by satisfying buyers desires rather than their needs (Aaker Day 1971216). Advertising was one of the most celebrated growth areas of the 1950s, selling 5.7 billion worth of ads in 1950 and 11.9 billion in 1960 (Patterson 1996315). Advertising, a high-stakes business, also influenced the sense of economic competition and the rat race among Americans. The first credit card, Diners Club, was introduced in 1950, and accompanied a general shift in the way Americans thought about money. People became willing to buy now and pay later, and private debt skyrocketed from 104.8 billion to 263.3 billion over the course of the 1950s (Patterson 1996315). People borrowed money to buy houses, cars, and appliances, and the belief that a good life could be bought became part of the dominant ideology. Happiness in consumer culture was linked with economic competition because it was based on ownership and consumption.
Rebellion against 1950s values was also tied to mass consumer culture, even as it critiqued conformity, materialism, convention and economic ambition. Critics of the counter-culture often connected the delinquent youth movement with the scourge of mass media.
To listen to commentators on American cultural life in the 1950s was often to hear a litany of complaints the mass media were debasing public taste, sexual license was threatening traditional morality, juvenile delinquency was overrunning society, and generational changea youth culturewas undermining the stability of family and community. (Patterson 1996343)
As much as mass media was tied to the dissemination of traditional, conformist values, then, it was also tied to the breakthrough of new art and media forms, as well as sexual liberation. Movie stars like Marlon Brando glorified and eroticized the image of the rebellious teenager Brandos provocative behavior made his looks and sexuality seem even more remarkable and powerful (Halberstam 1993270). Just as the success of counter-cultural film was driven by mass media technology, so was the popularity of rock n roll. Like jazz in the 1920s, rock n roll shaped a youth movement by providing a sense of unity, and was shocking because of its new sound and overt expressions of sexuality. The liberalization of sexuality, which subverted marriage-oriented conventions, was a large part of 1950s counter-culture.
The Beat writerspoets, novelists and thinkers who acted as scathing critics of mainstream values (Rorabaugh 2002236)advocated free sexuality and drifter lifestyles that clashed with traditional 1950s notions about marriage and property ownership. Allen Ginsberg was particularly open about his sexuality, and shocked 1950s sensibilities with exuberant celebrations of his homosexuality and radical politics (Charters 2003405). This link between free sexuality and radical politics would help to shape the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, and it was already fueling conservative outrage as traditionalists reacted against the so-called beatnik poets as a degenerative element in American society (Charters 2003405). This is how the Beats were known in the 1950s, if they were known at all. But by the 1960s, they had gained sufficient stature to be taken seriously (Rorabaugh 2002236) as artists and revolutionary activists. Norman Mailer, who acted as a go-between defending the Beat writers to the square world (Miller Nowak 1977172), championed the right to free speech and freedom from artistic censorship. Ginsberg led political protests in the 1960s and challenged the anti-communist policies of the Cold War. In his treatment of Jack Kerouac, Halberstam (1993) shows how free jazz accompanied poetry to form a new, multimedia sound that spoke to the youthful desire for freedom from the restrictions of old forms (306). Additionally, Motown music brought black culture into the mainstream, thereby contributing to a more universal consciousness about race relations and civil rights. In all of these ways, Beat writers and other 1950s artists served as modes by which 1950s cultural rebellion was carried into the 1960s.
It was not only artists (or only men) who challenged traditional 1950s values and enacted sexual liberation. Feminists throughout the 1950s had fought for access to birth control, and in 1960 birth control was introduced onto the market. By 1962, 2.3 million women were on the Pill (Patterson 1996360). Nowhere was cultural change more clear than in the realm of sexuality among young people. The Pill assisted the spread of the already ascendant sexual revolution, but larger notions of personal rights and liberation contributed still more (Patterson 1996 448). Sexual liberalization was depicted in the media, and posed a challenge to 1950s media discourses about the primacy of the family. In the counter-culture, marriage was linked to female subjugation, while open sexuality and birth control were linked to womens empowerment.
Rock n roll, sexual liberalization, and the youthful challenge to family values provoked a great deal of controversy. While these changes did not stem the force of traditional values in the 1950s, they exposed undercurrents of dissatisfaction and rebellion that were to break loose more powerfully in the 1960s (Patterson 1996 344). Mass culture was linked to increasing social liberalism, and while the Left critiqued consumerism, mass culture was used and nurtured by more liberal figures, particularly Kennedy. The beginning of the third era of the consumer movement often is dated from John F. Kennedys Consumer Message to the Congress in Spring 1962 where he enumerated the rights of consumers (safety, information, choice, and the right to be heard) (Aaker Day 197129). As product purchase began to take over as a primary drive in peoples lives, individuals began to be called consumers rather than citizens. Kennedy, whose rhetoric was otherwise citizen-oriented, was not responsible for this shift, but he did help facilitate it with his Consumer Message to the Congress.
Consumerism in the 1950s was reinforced by television, which was described by T. S. Eliot as a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome (Patterson 1996 350). The consumerism associated with television and advertising came under criticism for just that reason, both from subversive public figures in the 1950s and student groups in the 1960s. American materialism was perceived by many critics, artists and intellectuals to be weakening the character of American society. Some Marxist thinkers saw mass culture as the commodification and debasement of American cultural life (Patterson 344), while other social critics, irritated by the generally quiescent attitude and the boundless appetite for consumerism, described a silent generation. Others were made uneasy by the degree of conformity around them (Halberstam). Comics like Lenny Bruce, labeled a sick comic in the establishment mass media, advocated non-conformity and disobedience, criticizing the prevailing attitudes of selfishness and insensitivity to human life (Miller Nowak 197764). These figures, with their protest of consumer culture and economic inequality, carried over into the 1960s, influencing student groups fighting for civil rights.
Many young people reacted to 1950s materialism by embracing socialist views and insisting that the middle-class rat race fostered gross disparities of wealth and power (Cavallo 1999 66). Even as 1960s political youth groups like the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) reacted against their parents individualistic values, they were still molded by them some members of the SDS were fiercely aggressive and competitive (Cavallo 199966). 1950s middle class parents nourished their childrens independence, self-esteem and assertiveness (Cavallo 1999 64). The cultural rebellion of the 1960s was made possible by the self-esteem and assertiveness instilled in children by their prosperous parents. 1950s individualism might have been challenged by 1960s radicals, but it also influenced the rebellious attitudes of young people and their commitment to individual rights.
In the 1960s, black movements for racial equalitydesegregation, voting rights and economic equalitywere increasingly joined by disaffected white youth (Cavallo 199912). The counter-cultural focus on civil rights for black Americans and women did more than any other development of the early 1960s to spur the idealism, egalitarianism, and rights-consciousness thatchallenged social relations in the United States (Patterson 1996443). Young 1960s radicals were galvanized to challenge social relations both by guilt and by the desire for a new kind of consciousness or way of perceiving the world. From the early sixties, young radicals mocked the staid, privileged lifestyle of their middle-class parents. And, not surprisingly, they felt guilty about their own privileged status (Cavallo 1999 68). The commitment to civil rights was one way of expiating guilt over undeserved economic prosperity. But it was also related to a broader desire for a new kind of social and personal consciousness, something outside the bounds of 1950s conventions. Many members of 1960s counter-cultural movements found this something in drugs, particularly hallucinogens such as LSD. Writers like Timothy Leary and Carlos Castaneda advocated the use of hallucinogens for the purposes of consciousness expansion and deeper personal fulfillment (Charters 2003350). The popularity of LSD and other drugs was a direct rejection of the older generations emphasis on productivity, competition and conformity. The rise of LSD suggested how older values were being threatened (Rorabaugh 2002236). Hallucinogenic drugs were also an alternative to television and other mass media consumption, an attempt to replace the conformity of consumer culture with the unique projections of the individual mind.
IV Conclusion
The rise of mass consumer culture in the 1950s both facilitated the spread of radical 1960s counter-cultural movements and provoked these movements distaste, leading them to find alternative ways of expressing the experience of life. The seeds of the 1960s cultural shift are rooted firmly in the 1950s, a decade that changed the world with its prosperity, technological innovation and reaction to the Cold War. The 1950s generation also inherited values and drives from the experience of the Depression and post-WWII prosperity that led to economic individualism, strict codes of conformity and the idealization of the family, all of which the 1950s and 1960s counter-cultures rebelled against. The 1960s, a decade that saw the election of Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement, the first moon landing, and dramatic cultural change, would never have occurred without the transformative events of the 1950s.
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