American Popular Culture: 1940s-1950s

American Popular Culture from the Teens Through the 1950s

• Flowchart mapping American popular culture from the teens through the 1950s.
• Focus on the evolution and transformation of American popular culture, its audiences, and its purpose.

The 1950s: Politics Rooted in Three Key Concepts for Consensus

• Three fundamental concepts:
  • No real political divides: Unified, collaborative, and cooperative.
    • Political differences exist but are secondary to a core shared Americanism rooted in democracy.
    • Setting aside personal interest for the broader government.
  • Cultural unity: Political unity is reflected by and shapes cultural unity.
    • Shared Americanism is reflected in a broad shared American popular culture.
    • Not a divisive culture or separate cultures.
  • Racial Integration: Essential to political and cultural unity.

The Shift in Patriotism

• 1944: American identity defined by not being fascist.
• 1948: American identity defined by not being communist.
• Patriotism turning more nationalist; those outside the unified group are considered un-American, subversive, and dangerous, even traitors.

Inequality of American Women

• American consensus predicated on the inequality of American women.
• Emphasis on domesticity, proper womanhood, proper motherhood, and proper families.

Three Key Categories of American Culture

• Music industry: record companies, radio, folklorists, musicologists defining American music.
• Entertainment: vaudeville, ethnic humor, radio, legitimate theater morphing into Hollywood film.
• Literature: realism and proletarian literature; also comic books and lifestyle magazines.

Music

• Out of the teens and twenties, five distinct categories of American music emerged:
  • Traditional: Old, unchanged songs (e.g., old Scottish ballads).
    • Loved by folklorists and musicologists but less so by record companies and radio stations.
  • Old Time: New songs that sound old with better radio play.
    • Often performed by family singers like the Carter Family.
  • Blues: Working-class music from working class communities from the Piedmont, Appalachia, mining towns and cities.
  • Ragtime: Blues transposed into cities (e.g., Baltimore, Washington) with uptempo piano and ragged notes.
  • Classical: Catering to elite audiences.
• In the 1930s:
  • Traditional and old time repackaged as gospel. The Carter Family sings gospel music.
  • Some old time and traditional repackaged as folk.
  • Blues repackaged as either hillbilly music (for white people) or race music (for black people).
    • King Records recorded both in the same studios, combining them into rockabilly.
  • Ragtime and blues in cities morphed into jazz.
• By the 1940s:
  • Jazz and classical (especially big band jazz) become more acceptable to elite audiences.

Entertainment

• Vaudeville: common in ethnic working class neighborhoods, ethnic humor, way too much blackface, radio, legitimate theater.
• The 1920's-30's; these are morphing into Hollywood film, picking up and combining all of these.
• Hollywood film:
  • Pre-Code and Post-Code: Hollywood imposes its own moral order.
  • Crime can be shown, but criminals can never get away with it.
  • No deviancy, drug use, or anything too sexual.
  • Hays Code Hollywood.

Literature

• Teens and twenties: Realism, focusing on the gritty details of urban life (e.g., working in a meatpacking plant).
• The 1930s: Proletarian literature, gritty and realistic stories about the working class from their point of view (e.g., John Steinbeck).
• Comic books (e.g., Superman, Batman) emerge: gritty, urban, and violent.
• Lifestyle magazines: Harper’s, British Home Journal.
• The 1930s saw the replacement of these with Life magazine.

Combining American Culture

• The challenge of combining gospel, folk, hillbilly, race, jazz, classical, and films into a shared culture.
• Frank Sinatra's idea of variety and all American ways of being American.
• The Cold War Complication:
  • What do we share? Anticommunism.
  • The threat of nuclear annihilation: "We're all about to die."

Civil Defense Films

• Civil defense films show how to survive nuclear annihilation.
• Civil defense tests were made to discover the effects of atomic heat on American homes.
• Protective measures can help guard your home against the heat effects of an atomic explosion.

Experiments on Miniature Houses

• Tests on miniature houses in various stages of upkeep, inside and out.
• Tests on common fire hazards like dead grass, old leaves, discarded newspapers, and fence structures.
• Fences built of decayed wood surrounded by trash ignited immediately compared to those without litter.
• Houses with untidy housekeeping (newspapers, cluttered tables) burst into flame, while clean houses sustained damage but stood.

Message of the Film

• Own a home (preferably in the suburbs).
• Keep it painted and clean (inside and out).
• Postwar domesticity: consumer habits, cleanliness habits, and familial structures matter.
• Civil defense administration collaborates with the Paint Up - Fix Up Bureau (paint companies).
• Emphasis on consumerism and the idea that it can't be bartered.

Cracks in the Consensus

• Sense that maybe there are cultural fissures & the American public isn't unified or collaborative.
• What if we're actually really divided, really violent, really misogynistic, really racist?
• Literature, novels, and comic books expose this.

Books Revealing the Cracks

• David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: People move to the suburbs and become isolated and inner-focused.
• Vance Packard's The Status Seekers: People define themselves by what they own, not what they do.
• Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers: Argues that a whole generation grew up screwed up because of terrible moms.
• Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: Exposes the violence, divisiveness, racism, and antisemitism within a World War II platoon, challenging the narrative of unity.

Film that reveals the Cracks

• Film noir: Gritty, urban films about crime, betrayal, and violence, often featuring hypersexualized and hyperviolent stories where the villain is almost always a femme fatale.

Congressional Investigations

• High-profile congressional investigations led by Senator Estes Kefauver.
• Focus on:
  • Juvenile delinquency: comic books are the problem.
  • The Mafia (especially the Italian Mafia).
  • Youth gangs: targeting Mexican and Puerto Rican gangs.
• Fear of deviance and subversion.
• The Lavender Scare: * Fear of homosexuality.
  • Alfred Kinsey: scientific studies into human sexuality; Kinsey reports reveal that human sexuality is way more varied than religion told us and homosexuality is way more common.
    * First report: sexual behavior in human male - celebrated
    * Second report: sexual behavior in human female - not celebrated

Rebellion in the Fifties

• Noir novels and detective novels.
• Rockabilly.
• Hollywood embraces rebellion, with films like:
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers: are your neighbors really who you think they are?
  • The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: the businessman who has the home in the suburbs and the perfect family is incredibly unsatisfied with it.
  • Gangs: street gangs, youth gangs, motorcycle gangs (Marlon Brando in The Wild One).
• Teen rebellion and youth rebellion.
• The allure of the fissures.
• Charles Starkweather: appealed to fantasies of rebellion.

Reinventing Culture in the Suburbs

• Reinventing American culture to fit suburban ideals.
• Television as a source of stability and perfection (e.g., Leave It to Beaver).
• Proper Cold War and suburban masculinity and femininity.
• Levitt homes: mass-produced suburban homes that are fast, cheap, and affordable due to prefabrication.
• The GI Bill: financial support for veterans to buy homes.
• Keynesian defense spending: highways make living in the suburbs a realistic option.
• Levitt towns: Huge tracts of land where new suburban master neighborhoods are built, connected by highways.
• Television equipped: the measure of doing things right.

Consumerism in the Suburbs

• The suburban home, the car, the freeway, and television all reinforce consumerism.
• New industries emerge:
  • Fast food: designed to be picked up and eaten in the car.
  • Drive-in movie theaters: no need to leave the car.
  • TV dinners: designed to be eaten in front of the television.
  • Shopping malls: private spaces that look like public spaces.
• Lifestyle magazines like Playboy advertise to the consumer audience.

The Suburbs

• Suburbs require: homes, freeways, cars, television.
• The suburbs are defined by restrictive covenants, whiteness, the middle class, and by gender (especially womanhood).

Saint Patrick's Day

• An era that reinvents Saint Patrick’s Day.
• Saint Patrick’s Day parades happen downtown, not in Irish neighborhoods.
• In the suburbs, you’re white and middle class and suburban; ethnicity doesn’t matter.

The Role of Women

• Early marriage is expected, and lack of marriage is seen as sexual deviancy.
• Women are expected to have children and move to the suburbs, buying stuff.
• The suburban housewife is responsible for keeping the home clean and safe and raising children.
• Women are stuck at home, leading them to look for answers in TV and magazines, selling them what to buy.
• Emphasis on the simplicity of clothing, complexity of appliances.
• Women buy appliances for the good of the family, sacrificing for the family.

Questions About Suburbanism

• By the early 1960s, there are questions about suburbanism.
• Betty Friedan's study (The Feminine Mystique) exposes the hollowness of suburban life, with housewives feeling miserable.

Consensus and Division

• Cultural divides exist despite the idea of a single shared culture.
• Consensus: suburban, with the urban as dangerous.
• Those who are outside the consensus of suburban life were left out.

Counterculture

• The lack of a single shared culture in the fifties gives rise to counterculture in the sixties.
• Counterculture rejects everything from the fifties, including suburban ideals.
• Rock and roll, Elvis, exposing comics, and noir novels become dangerous, Jazz - even Rock and Roll - is dangerous.
• Country and Western becomes wholesome.