Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

As reflected in the culture of the decade, the 1950s more than most periods had several split personalities. By culture, we mean serious and pop, the arts and business, lifestyles and political ideologies, the totality of what makes a country into a nation and, by extension, a decade into a decade. As a silhouette of history the fifties have a definite contour: demarcated on one side by the end of the war and on the other by the uproar of the sixties. Unfairly, the fifties have often been narrowly perceived in mainly political and social terms, as the triumph of American prosperity; as the epitome of surging consumerism; as the victory of American culture and values over those of its closest rival, the Soviet Union; as a nation which has proven its uniqueness, in most ways God's chosen; and inevitably, as the time of reward for a generation of strivers who experienced and came through the Great Depression and a world war. The split personalities of fifties culture are dazzling: Joseph McCarthy and the Beats; Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley; Eisenhower and Allen Ginsberg; warm, fuzzy family sitcoms and fixed, crooked quiz shows; the man in the gray flannel suit and the women of Peyton Place ; the savagery of the Korean War and the peaceful, forgetful home front; John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King; Joseph Papp and Roy Cohn; William Gaddis and Herman Wouk; Arthur Miller and Tennessee ... log in or subscribe to read full text