Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Two certainties about the 1950s were detected at the time and persist today: the United States had become a nation both powerful and rich. Late in the decade, social critics questioned whether the wealth was either as widely distributed or as beneficent as its champions insisted; and later, with Vietnam, global power came to seem less of a godsend than was once imagined. We sense “the fifties” as a unique era that we think we know and often recall fondly. In fact the decade was more complex than the era we may wish to remember or imagine, a fidgety mix of anxiety and relaxation, sloth and achievement, complacency and self-criticism. Nostalgists recall an age of domestic tranquility – a 1970s television sitcom about the fifties was entitled Happy Days- but the label overreaches for a decade that opened with the ominous shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy and closed on such scenes as bus boycotts and sit-ins. Still, there was more than a grain of truth to the sentimental perspective. Even dating the period presents a puzzle. Decades are simple enough, but perhaps we need to think in terms of a “long 1950s,” starting with war's end in 1945, or soon after, when Cold War patterns congealed at home and abroad. It is also sometimes argued that President John F. Kennedy's “thousand days” resembled more the fifties than the sixties, so the decade could be extended to 1963, or perhaps even to ... log in or subscribe to read full text