20 conformity and rebellion in 1950s to mid-1960s america
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A lecture on conformity and rebellion in 1950s-mid-1960s America
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20 conformity and rebellion in 1950s to mid-1960s america
- 1. Conformity and Rebellion in 1950s-early 1960s America Individualism in Corporate America
- 3. Unattainable Ideal • Salt of the Earth (1954): – Made by Hollywood blacklist who focused on social issues – Based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico – Uses actual miners and their families as actors – Women assert themselves as equals in the struggle, calling for improved sanitation and dignified treatment – Women take over the picket lines when men are legally prevented from striking
- 4. Women: Not Just Happy Homemakers • Birth control pill, 1961 • Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963) Work • Many women did not return home after WWII - Employment became a principal part of many women’s adult lives after 1945 • Policy makers sought to make permanent and to extend the World War II experience with gender equality in the workplace in the years following 1945. • Results at federal level: • President’s Commission on the Status of Women 1961-63 • Equal Pay Act (1963) • Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
- 5. Sexuality • Alfred Kinsey, “Kinsey Reports”: 1948, 1953 • Everyone is having sex (even women) – not just with the opposite sex, and not just with their spouses, and not just in traditional positions • Kinsey Scale measures sexuality on a spectrum, 0-6 exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual • Momism • Medicalization of Sex and Sexuality • Lavender Scare: persecution of homosexuals in 1950s • (Left) Barbara Gittings, 1966, helped found Daughters of Bilitis in 1955
- 6. Corporate Conformity • While Jazz and Abstract Expressionism symbolized American individualism and freedom, the experience of men and women in postwar America demanded conformity – Red Scare had a chilling effect on Americans’ personal preferences – Corporate America expected employees and managers to uphold code of respectability – “climbing the corporate ladder” required that individuals not stand out in dress, demeanor, and belief
- 9. White-Collar Conformists “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” two adaptations
- 10. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd • Uneasiness due to presumed loss of individualism • “Feminization” of mass-produced culture due to industrialization – men working indoors, expectation of breadwinning • Called white middle-class men to create a new, autonomous masculinity • Sparked discussion of “masculinity crisis” • Phillip Wylie, Generation of Vipers: – Voiced growing popular resentment towards women who, Wylie argued, held hegemony over men through their parasitic gender roles – Popular and psychological blamed homosexuality and juvenile delinquency on Momism
- 11. Access to Masculine Privileges Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike (1968)
- 12. NAACP, “An Appeal to the World” (1947) • Petition to United Nations protesting the treatment of blacks in US • Denounced US race discrimination as “not only indefensible but barbaric” • “It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi…internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad.” • Created international sensation • US countered with “Negro in American Life” (1950, 1951) – pamphlet telling history of American race relations as tale of redemption with pictures of happy children and integration
- 14. Criticism Abroad Krokodil, August 24, 1963
- 15. Jazz as “American” Music • Jazz as American Music = since 1920s • Evolution of Jazz in 1930s—Swing, Hot Jazz, and into 1940s Bebop • No one single form of jazz expression, but Bebop captured a performance style that defied “big band” sounds and style by – Intellectual appreciation of music – Downplaying dance dimension – Personal demeanor, dress, “language,” etc. marked by aloofness
- 16. Postwar Jazz Artists: Hip Improvisation Charlie Parker & Miles Davis Dizzy Gillespie Thelonious Monk
- 17. Jazz Ambassadors State Department hired African American jazz artists to serve as “Jazz Ambassadors” by performing all over the world Jazz = musical freedom Black Musicians = evidence of democratic equality Meant to counteract soviet propaganda about racism in U.S. Unintended result = musical borrowing, making Jazz international music
- 18. Jazz Ambassadors Benny Goodman Sarah Vaughan
- 19. Dizzie Gillespie in South Asia and in Greece Jazz Ambassadors used to build or maintain alliances with “democracies” African American musicians like Josephine Baker were internationally restricted and red baited. Continues today in Rhythm Road
- 20. Thomas Benton, Threshing Wheat (1939)
- 21. Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism Frustrated with Figure Painting meant to represent the world, knowing the impossibility of representation Seeking to present the essence of the scene—e.g. “Autumn Rhythm” (left) Artist as part of the canvas and a conduit for emotion and the quest for truth, authenticity Abstract Expressionism - giving viewers access to “truth” as it emerged rather than trying to mediate between some agreed-upon reality and viewers of that reality
- 22. Pollock at work Large-Scale: Artist working in the canvas, ultimately to make the viewer part of the canvas Combining artist and art: Dripping, flinging paint; leaving metaphoric and literal footprint on the painting; incorporating the world by adding sand and soil Style: Variety of lines reflect contrast between delicacy and density, peace and violence Jazz as Pollock’s artistic inspiration How is this an expression of ultimate individualism?
- 23. Mark Rothko’s Multiforms No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1951 • Color field painting: "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself." • Technique: Repeating thin layers of paint • Attempt to document true emotion and energy; paintings as self-contained units of human expression • Blocks of color possessed own “life force” lacking in figurative paintings • How is this an expression of ultimate individualism?
- 24. Production and Consumption of “High Art”: Not appreciated by all Americans, but official support for the genre resulted in high value ($$$) in art market, further propelling it upward in importance Centering America in Art World: Abstract Expressionism as first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world Art born of rebellion against convention came to represent American “freedom” How can we see different definitions of freedom emerging? Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms, 1943
- 25. Beat Generation • Group of writers push the critique further— material abundance = accompanied by spiritual emptiness • “Beat” writers—different explanations for the name – “beat” down by experience and struggle – Quest for “beatitude,” or inner peace – “beat” as rhythm
- 26. Beats as Rebels Famous representatives: Jack Kerouac (above left) & Allen Ginsberg; others: Neal Cassady, Diane DiPrima, William S. Burroughs, Anne Kyger…. Rejecting Conformity: Alternative dress, long hair, drugs (alter consciousness), casual sex, and rejection of Middle-Class prejudices, Protestantism, political conformity, rejection of “American interests” Key themes: disillusionment, spontaneity, emotionality, colloquial language, drug use
- 27. Interested in the Beats? Need an awesome class for next semester?
- 29. Dissent in 1950s and into the 1960s • Cultural “containment” of tension between individualism and institutions that demand conformity • Taking an oppositional or alternative stance in the 1950s = courageous and dangerous, but also generative of new ways of thinking about the future • For younger generation, 1960s rebellion = articulated in terms of “civic nationalism”
- 30. Study Questions • In what ways did international influences affect Americans’ responses to postwar American society? • How would you distinguish “individualism” from “rebellion” in this period? • What is the significance of the co-existence of both conformity and rebellion? • Why did the government send jazz musicians around the world? • What is the “unattainable ideal”?
Editor's Notes
- Unattainable ideal for many americansThey weren’t all married, women couldn’t all be housewives, families didn’t always have 2.5 kids, living in the suburbs with a TV and appliancesThey weren’t all heterosexual, they weren’t all white, and they weren’t all happy.Today’s lecture is about responses to the postwar American Way of LifeExuberant individualism—in art, music, literatureStrict conformity as the price for getting ahead – gender, sexuality, work, Rebellion and new definitions of freedomAll were set against a post-WWII backdrop of globalism, consumerism, and Cold War
- "Salt of the Earth" was produced, written and directed by victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Unable to make films in Hollywood, they looked for worthy social issues to put on screen independently. Mainstream culture did not pick up on its civil rights and feminist themes for at least a decade."Salt of the Earth" tells the tale of a real life strike by Mexican-American miners. The story is set in a remote New Mexico town where the workers live in a company town, in company-owned shacks without basic plumbing. Put at risk by cost cutting bosses, the miners strike for safe working conditions. As the strike progresses, the issues at stake grow, driven by the workers' wives. At first the wives are patronized by the traditional patriarchal culture. However, they assert themselves as equals and an integral part of the struggle, calling for improved sanitation and dignified treatment. Ultimately, when the bosses win a court order against the workers preventing them from demonstrating, gender roles reverse with the wives taking over the picket line and preventing scab workers from being brought in while the husbands stay at home and take care of house and children.
- Birth control:Ability to pursue higher education, careers, sexual autonomy > previously considered immoralFirst only legally prescribed to pregnant womenFriedan:what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s.What happened to women war workers when World War II was over?Women who not only stay in the workplace but unionize
- He is best known for writing "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reportsbased on personal interviews with nearly 6,000 women. Kinsey analyzed data on the frequency with which women participate in various types of sexual activity and looked at how factors such as age, social-economic status and religious adherence influence sexual behavior. Comparisons are made of female and male sexual activities. Men: 11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.[18]Women: 7% of single females aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.[19] 2 to 6% of females, aged 20–35, were given a rating of 5[20] and 1 to 3% of unmarried females aged 20–35 were rated as 6.[21]Marital coitusThe average frequency of marital sex reported by women was 2.8 times a week in the late teens, 2.2 times a week by age 30, and 1.0 times a week by age 50.[22] Kinsey estimated that approximately 50% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives.[23] Among the sample, 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 females from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex.[24] However, Kinsey classified couples who have lived together for at least a year as "married", inflating the statistics for extra-marital sex.[25][26]During this time he developed a scale measuring sexual orientation, now known as the Kinsey Scale which ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual; a rating of X, for asexual, was later added by Kinsey's associates.In 1935, Kinsey delivered a lecture to a faculty discussion group at Indiana University, his first public discussion of the topic, wherein he attacked the "widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology" and promoted his view that "delayed marriage" (that is, delayed sexual experience) was psychologically harmful.medical practitioners, especially family physicians, situated themselves as the guardians of Americans' sexual well-being during the early years of the Cold War. many doctors viewed their patients' sexual habits as more than an issue of personal health. They believed that a satisfying sexual relationship between heterosexual couples with very specific attributes and boundaries was the foundation of a successful marriage, a fundamental source of happiness in the American family, and a crucial building block of a secure nation during the Cold War.Mothers as the gatekeepersIn preserving heterosexuality, doctors also medicalized sexuality. Homosexuality had been officially classified as a mental disorder in the APA's first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1) in 1952. There it was designated as a "sociopathic personality disturbance." The American Psychological Association declared that it was not a disorder in 1975.The Lavender Scare refers to the fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s in the United States, which paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism.Because the psychiatric community regarded homosexuality as a mental illness, gay men and lesbians were considered susceptible to blackmail, thus constituting a security risk. U.S. government officials assumed that communists would blackmail homosexual employees of the federal government who would provide them classified information rather than risk exposure.[1]The Daughters of Bilitis bill-ee-tis also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the firstlesbiancivil and political rights organization in the United States. The organization formed in San Francisco in 1955, conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were subject to raids and police harassment.
- The pressure of the Cold War reinforced conformity for even African American musicians whoFollowing wartime America, when masculinity was clearly defined in popular and professional literature, men increasingly questioned the proscribed roles dictated by the media, and self-consciously rebelled against the real or imagined “feminization” of society. many men attempted to negotiate alternative masculinities rather than embracing either hypermasculine traditional masculinity or “soft” new masculinity. While historians and the popular press have been tempted to generalize—discussions of masculinity as “male panic,” men as one homogenous group, and dialogue on alienation as universal—Gilbert reminds readers that underneath the sensationalism in popular culture lies context.
- Michael Kimmel: In the first decades of the twentieth century, former heroic artisans found themselves increasingly proletarianized, mere appendages to the machine. The world of work was increasingly competitive and crowded. Charlie Chaplin as a dispossessed worker in Modern Times (1936).
- Police exam New York City 1931
- by Sloan Wilson, is a 1955 novel about the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business. Tom and Betsy Rath share a struggle to find contentment in their hectic and material culture while several other characters fight essentially the same battle, but struggle in it for different reasons. In the end, it is a story of taking responsibility for one's own life.
- Academic and Literary questioning of ConformityWilliam Whyte, The Organization ManC. Wright Mills, White CollarDavid Riesman, The Lonely CrowdJohn Sloan, The Man in the Gray Flannel SuitAll are examples of explorations of the personal costs of Corporate success that led to abundance
- Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike (1968) battled againstStereotypes that they weren’t real men – could never protect their wives from slave masters, could never protect their children from being soldBlack men as lazy – large black male unemployment, sexual aggressor and impotent, stemming from slaveryFlip side of momism for African Americans, black women , Francis Beal called Double Jeopardy were matriarchs, and jezebels, reinforcing male unemploymentClaiming masculine privilege as expression of individualism and freedom
- Realization that African Americans didn’t have freedom – no double victory. Realization that American exceptionalism was focus of world, proving that there truly was democracy in America
- The Little Rock Nine were a group of African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Mary Dudziak in Cold War Civil Rights says, “Little Rock, however, was a crisis of such magnitude for worldwide perceptions of race and American democracy that it would become the reference point for the future. Later presidents, facing crises of their own, would try best to avoid ‘another Little Rock.’” Story appeared in India, Tanganyika, the East African Standard, Egyptian Gazette, South China Morning Post, Sweden, Russia, Montreal
- African American student is stopped by police entering an American university. Segregationists in background carry signs that say, “Go Away,” “Lynch Him,” “We Want Segregation,” and “Put the Colored on Their Knees.”
- Duke Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category.“ “ He tried to avoid the word 'jazz' preferring 'Negro' or 'American' music. He claimed there were only two types of music, 'good' and 'bad' ... And he embraced a phrase coined by his colleague Billy Strayhorn – 'beyond category' – as a liberating principle.“As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music.
- Jazz
- Us wanted to export cultural products that would show off the freedom of the individual to express himself/herself without hindrance from the state.Offset critiques about US race relations, but also covered over tensions in the US between demand for conformity in corporate life and free expression.US Representative from Harlem Adam Clayton Powell proposed Jazz Ambassadorship Program.
- Benny Goodman plays the hne (oboe) with a musician in Rangoon, Burma, 1957.Sarah Vaughan at the Newport-Belgrade Jazz Festival. Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1973.
- U.S. State Department chose venues partly on political grounds—to build or maintain alliances with “democracies” by showcasing African American freedom arranged for Gillespie, his close friend, to make the State Department’s first goodwill jazz tour, starting out in March 1956 with an 18-piece band and traveling all over southern Europe, the Middle East and south Asia.Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”The Jazz Ambassador tours, as they were called, lasted weeks, sometimes months, and made an impact, attracting huge, enthusiastic crowds. A cartoon in a 1958 issue of The New Yorker showed some officials sitting around a table in Washington, one of them saying: “This is a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy. The question is, who’s the best man for it — John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?” The stars were happy to play their parts in this pageant for hearts and minds, but not as puppets. After his Middle East tour Gillespie said with pride that it had been “powerfully effective against Red propaganda.” But when the State Department tried to brief him beforehand on how to answer questions about American race relations, he said: “I’ve got 300 years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us, and I’m not going to make any excuses.” Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school-integration laws. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.”Administration officials feared that this broadside, especially from someone so genial as “Ambassador Satchmo,” would trigger a diplomatic disaster. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Attorney General Herbert Brownell that the situation in Arkansas was “ruining our foreign policy.” Two weeks later, facing pressure from many quarters, Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas. Armstrong praised the move and agreed to go on a concert tour of South America.The jazzmen’s independence made some officials nervous. But the shrewder diplomats knew that on balance it helped the cause. The idea was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union, freedom over Communism, and here was evidence that an American — even a black man — could criticize his government and not be punished.African American musicians, like Josephine Baker, who spoke out against racial discrimination abroad (Cuba for Baker) were red-baited, censored, and their travel and performances restricted.
- Kerouac’s On the Road – quest for “It”— “We gotta go an’ never stop going ‘til we get there.” “Where we going, man?” “I don’t know, but we gotta go.” A rejection of “American Interests”—house, family, television, Disney rejection of respectability had consequences for women and childrenGinsberg’s Howl – long litany of complaints about postwar life, attempts to capture a pervasive sense of un-ease, injustice, and spiritual emptinessNature, toil/survival, outcasts = key motifsPrecursor to the hippies