HIST 12 - Slideshare Lecture

1. Chapter 25: Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945-1963
Walt Disney cutting the ribbon for the new Monorail as Vice President Richard
Nixon and family wait to take the inaugural ride, 1959

2. The Power of
Television
First commercialized in New York City
in 1941, by the end of 1946, only
44,000 homes had a television set; by
1960 there were 52 million sets,
averaging to almost one set in nine out
of ten homes. In the late ‘40s, you
could only watch for several hours a
day, as there wasn’t enough
programming to fill up the hours. By
1960 you had twenty hours of
programming per day, with several
hours of “dead air” in the early
morning hours. By the early 1950s it
was clear to observers that television
was changing the lives of Americans
faster and more profoundly than any
other modern technological
innovation. Your text discusses much
of this, but I want to take a little time
to talk about the phenomenon of I
Love Lucy.

3. Lucille Ball was never big in the movies – they called her the “Queen of the B Pictures.” In the late 1940s her marriage
to Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz was in trouble because he was on the road with his band so much, and she was
working in Hollywood. They decided to develop a radio show together that could provide a steady income for the two
of them, and allow Desi to stay home more. The show, My Favorite Husband, was a hit with Lucy as star and Desi as
producer, and based on its success, CBS asked them to develop it for television. Lucy insisted that Desi play her
husband, which CBS was not interested in, arguing that “no one would believe they were married.” Lucy’s counter was
simple: “But we ARE married, and people know that. He’ll be playing himself, and they won’t know where reality ends
and the show begins.”

4. CBS also wanted her to play an actress, but her other insight was that average people could not relate to a glamorous
actress married to a famous band leader, and they didn’t think movie stars had any problems – but they COULD relate
to a regular woman who wanted to be a star, married to a minor celebrity who just wanted to be married to a normal
housewife. The show was a monster hit almost immediately: Lucille Ball was made for TV -- her voice, face, comedic
timing, everything clicked, and she was just wacky and naïve enough to generate sympathy, not irritation. Adults loved
the show because it held a funhouse mirror up to the institution of marriage, and kids loved the show because they
were all nuts – not just Lucy, but Ricky, and Fred and Ethel as well.

5. Marshall Fields, one of the largest department stores in New York City, had held a weekly sale on
Monday nights for the better part of fifty years – no one knew what areas of the store would be on
sale until they got inside, and people lined up around the block to get in, every Monday night. The
sale started taking a financial loss because so many people stayed home to watch I Love Lucy on
Mondays; as a result, Marshall Fields not only changed their sale night to Thursdays, they
announced the change of date with a sign in the window that read: “We love Lucy, too, so we’re
closing on Monday nights.”

6. When Lucille Ball became pregnant,
things REALLY got interesting. The
word ‘pregnant’ had never been
uttered in an American motion picture
(maybe any?), and pregnant women
were never shown as such, with a
figure any different than normal.
Women were ‘expecting,’ or they told
their husband, ‘Honey, I have a little
surprise for you…,’ then quick cut to
the husband’s look of surprise, and
next scene – one of them has a baby in
their arms. CBS wanted to shoot
around the pregnancy, but Lucy and
Desi insisted on making it part of the
show. This was dangerous territory –
the show was arriving every Monday
night in tens of millions of American
living rooms. In order to protect the
morals of the American viewing public,
a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister,
and a Jewish rabbi were engaged by
the network to read each script and
make sure that it contained nothing
morally objectionable according to the
tenets of their faiths.

7. Lucy was even able to beat
McCarthyism at the height of its
power. In 1953 it was reported that
she had registered to vote as a
communist in 1936. She received
thousands of letters and telegrams
from fans around the country, and
after a private meeting with a member
of HUAC, she and Desi held a press
conference at their home, where she
explained that she had registered
communist in order to please her
socialist grandfather, and that she had
not even really understood what
communism was about, having only
been twenty-five at the time. Desi
later quipped, “The only thing red
about Lucy is her hair, and that’s not
even legitimate.”

8. The Ricardos (and the Mertzes!) moved to the suburbs of Connecticut, along
with millions of upwardly mobile Americans.
When the show went off the air in 1957 after six seasons and more than 180 episodes, it
was still #1 in the ratings – but they’d run out of ideas, and were all wearing a little on
each other’s nerves. Lucy and Desi would divorce not long after. Modern sitcoms tape
22 episodes per season, whereas I Love Lucy averaged 30 – by modern standards, the
show had an eight-season run.

11. The Explosion of Youth Culture
Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Wild One (1953)

12. In 1904 sociologist G. Stanley Hall, after five years
of research, published a book entitled
Adolescence. Weighing in at 1500 pages (if you’d
dropped it on someone’s head it could have been
classified as a murder instrument), the book
argued that adolescence (Hall coined the term)
was not just biologically determined but socially
constructed, and that it was a ten-year period
that fell between 12 and 25, climaxing at 15-16
years of age. He also noted that “savage nations”
engaged in customary rituals to mark and
celebrate this transitionary phase between
childhood and adulthood, and thought that the
lack of this was problematic for modern society,
posing the question, “How do young people
today make the transition from childhood to
adulthood?”
Prior to the 1920s, kids were simply smaller
versions of their parents, in their clothing in
particular. There were no brands, or styles, of
anything at all, that was designed to appeal to
children, or even adolescents. This changed in
the ‘20s, when, for the first time, manufacturers
began targeting the consumer desires of people
younger than eighteen.
By the early 1930s, there were many products
and brands catering to youthful tastes, and even,
for the first time, a particular brand of cinematic
hero for young Americans to look up to – these
were the stars of the gangster picture.

13. Gangsters were hugely popular with the lower class because they represented resistance against the banks, Big Business, The Man,
the Establishment, in short – against those powers that had brought on the Depression and people so much harm. (It’s interesting
to note that once the New Deal began and the situation began to improve, movie-goers lost their taste for criminal heroes, and the
gangster picture fell into oblivion, not to be revived til the late 1960s with Bonnie and Clyde, and then The Godfather.) Most
popular amongst these on-screen gangsters were James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Jean Harlow. (previous slide)

14. In 1934, Henry Forman published Our Movie-
Made Children, in which he argued that the
movies had convinced young people that a
world of luxury, extravagance, and easy
money was their birthright; further, using
data collected by the Motion Picture
Research Council, he also asserted that 72%
of all dealt with one or more of three major
themes: crime, love, and sex, and that young
people were conscious of wanting to emulate
the behavior that they saw in the movies.
The Great Depression and World War II
diminished the amount of spending money in
young people’s pockets, but by the 1950s, it
was clear to American manufacturers that
their fastest growing and largely untapped
market were the country’s teenagers (a
newly coined term), who were spending $10
a week on average, and 16% of that was
spent on entertainment. American business
began to produce the commodities that
teenagers wanted – make-up, hair products,
magazines, clothes, food (fast), rock & roll
records and portable record players, but
most of all, movies, movies made expressly
to cater to the desires of the American
teenager, movies where they could look up at
the screen and see themselves, for the very
first time.

15. Of course movies had featured plenty
of kids, and adolescents, for over fifty
years by this time, but never had there
been a young person on screen that
behaved like Brando’s Motorcycle
Johnny in The Wild One (1953) (see
Slide 11), Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel
Without a Cause (1955), or Elvis
Presley in Love Me Tender, Loving You,
and Jailhouse Rock (all released in
1957! See Slide 16). THESE were
teenagers (or “Dean-agers,” as they
were termed for a brief time), the fer-
real deal, and Rebel Without a Cause,
in particular, would launch a whole
new genre of moviemaking: the
“teenpic,” which would soon bless the
world with The Rebels, Young and
Wild, Sorority Girl, Teenage Doll, Crime
In the Streets, Blue Denim, High School
Confidential, and I Was a Teenage
Werewolf, among others.

18. Women and Work
In the 1930s many states still had laws
that prohibited married women from
working, even if the laws were seldom
enforced). But World War II forced many
women into the workplace, 8 million of
them, in fact, and when the war was over,
many of them wanted to continue
working. 2 million would be forced out
due to men needing their jobs, not so
much an “anti-women” issue as it was a
“pro-man/veteran” issue – nonetheless, a
poll in the late 1940s made it clear – 82%
of all Americans believed that if the man
could make enough to support his family,
then the woman’s place was at home.
In the ‘50s there were a great many
magazines published for women, and all
of them conveyed a direct message – take
care of the house, husband, and kids, be
happy, and make sure you look like Doris
Day. All the time, every day, morning,
noon, and night. These magazines were
most popular in the suburbs, where
housewives spent a great deal of time
alone, cut off to a large degree from
other women, many of them thinking
more and more about the reality of their
lives.

19. Betty Friedan was a college graduate who had
lived in Greenwich Village and written for a
leftist union newspaper after college. After
she got married, she and her husband moved
to the suburbs, and away from events and
ideas. She was entirely cut off from her old
life, and although she loved her husband and
the children they had together, she felt like
something was missing – her life was both full
and empty, and she found herself asking the
same recurring question: Is this all there is?
Friedan decided to do some writing, hopefully
for publication, to think through her feelings
about the way her life had changed, and she
decided that if she could make more than it
would cost to hire a maid, then she would
keep at it. She pitched ideas to editors (all
male) about profiles of up-and-coming
American women and was told repeatedly that
women only wanted to read articles about
how to be better wives and mothers. She was
asked to do a piece on the 15-year reunion of
the Smith College graduating class of 1942 (her
alma mater, and a leading women’s college),
and devised a questionnaire to try and find out
what these women thought about their lives,
and in their answers she found versions of her
own experience, and realized she should not
have denied her feelings, she should have
dealt with them.

20. Friedan proposed an article, “The
Togetherness Woman,” that would
explore the both full and empty lives
of these women, and at magazine
after magazine she was turned down.
Soon, she began to realize that what
she was interested in writing about
was something the women’s
magazines had to deny in order to
continue to make money. Happily, she
was able to get a publishing house
interested in the idea, and then began
her research in earnest. She
discovered that 1949 was the turning
point: until then, women’s magazines
conveyed the sense that women were
moving up and forward, gaining,
slowly but surely, parity with men in
American life. After that, everything
changed. Women no longer existed on
their own, but only in relation to their
home, husbands, and children. The
more she read, the more she realized
that the magazines had constructed
and consistently reinforced a fantasy
world that never really existed.
When The Feminine Mystique was
published in 1963 it became one of
those books, like The Kinsey Report,
that changed the way Americans lived
forever. Betty Friedan, wiping a symbolic tear from the eye of Abraham Lincoln who, as
many feminists argued, had failed to free the “original slaves” -- women