Donna Dooms
The Road to the 60s

“Sex, Drugs, and Rock&Roll”! Isn’t that what the 60’s were all about? Was that really the story of that decade? Certainly those three things were a big part of it, but what led to this becoming the motto of an entire generation during one of the most turbulent eras in the history of our country?

The 1950’s have been called the “boring years” and the “safe years”. Supposedly the sixties were a reaction to the bland fifties. America seems to have a fondness for those “bland” years. We collect hula-hoops, poodle skirts, and old Life magazines. We love to look at old black and white pictures of smiling people drinking Cokes and riding in big cars. Some of us even make a hobby of restoring and driving those old cars. We watch re-runs of “Father Knows Best” and “I Love Lucy” with nostalgia. There seems to be a real longing for those years, when “women were women, men were men, and the rules were clear.” (Harvey, 1993, p. xii).

A close look at that era may present a different picture. As Brett Harvey wrote in The Fifties, “What some of us tend to forget—and some of us are too young to remember—is that the engine that drove the rules was fear.” (p.xii). There must have been a lot to fear. Children’s lives may have been totally disrupted by the war: fathers went off to fight and mothers went to work in factories. Many families were split up, even sending those children away to live with other families. Fathers, uncles, and brothers went away and many never came back. Even though wartime wages were high, there were shortages. Gas and food were rationed. There were blackouts and air raid sirens. The news was filled with images of war. All of these contributed to fear and unease.

And when the war ended, America was a major power in a dangerous world. The Atom Bomb had effectively ended the war, but Russia had it with missiles aimed right at this country. The leaders of this country constantly warned us the Communism was a threat to our very way of life. Senator Joseph McCarthy revived his career with accusations of Communism in this very country—including the government and Hollywood. Communism had become Public Enemy #1. According to Senator McCarthy, Edger J. Hoover, and the FBI there were saboteurs, spies, and subversives everywhere. According to Hoover, there were as many as 205 “Commies” in the State Department. It’s no wonder that some of the most popular movies of that time were science fiction. Aliens could take over our planet, but the good guys would win in the end. Communism could take over the country and the United States government might not be able to fight back. Innocent people were prosecuted as spies. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were even executed with no real evidence against them.

Then our government decided that we needed a more powerful weapon. In October of 1949, the United States had their “super weapon”, the H-Bomb. When it was tested in the Nevada desert, the results became far-reaching over a period of many years. Soldiers in that desert became ill and many residents of that area lived to develop Cancer. Even though most Americans had no idea how devastating a new war could be, the fear was prevailing. Suddenly, school children were practicing “duck and cover” in classrooms and public buildings included bomb shelters. Some homeowners even built these shelters into their house plans. This bomb that was developed to eliminate fear soon became the biggest fear! Using it would not only destroy the enemy—it would destroy us.

In that first year of peace more than two million were married (Halberstam video, The Fifties: The Rage Within). By 1950, 21 million babies had been born. These couples with those babies were looking for real homes to live in. Thus suburbia was born—for some of those two million families. Suburbia wasn’t available to black families.

Many black men had gone to war, and many lost their lives—just like the white men in World War II. Those that returned fully expected that life would be better when they came home.

Unfortunately, things hadn’t changed. When Bill Levitt built the first suburban neighborhood, negroes were told openly that they could not buy homes there. There may have been architectural equality in Levittown, but there was no racial equality.

In 1954, Willie Mays was the best homerun hitter in baseball, but he was not allowed to eat in restaurants with his teammates, or stay in the same hotels. Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics basketball team once described the inner rage stemming from that discrimination as the major motivation for him to become the championship player that he was (Halberstam video).

The United States seems to have been trying to ignore racism. As W.E. DuBois wrote in 1896:

“One cannot demand of whole nations exceptional moral
foresight and heroism, but a certain hard common sense in
facing the complicated phenomena of political life must
be expected in every progressive people. In some respects,
we as a nation seem to lack this; we have the somewhat
inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great
social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer
them, the fault is with the question and not with us.”(DuBois,
(1896).

Indeed, the U.S. government did nothing about racism and segregation until forced to in the 1950’s.

The history of the country’s civil rights movement goes back to the 17th century when blacks and whites (slaves and Quakers from Pennsylvania) became the first to protest slavery. However, it took this country until the 20th century to make some progress toward real equality. Most Americans became aware of civil rights when the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. Although this decision declared segregation in public schools illegal, it was openly defied by white southerners—especially those in power. The National Guard had to be called into Arkansas to integrate the schools there. This did enable the Southern blacks to gain momentum because it made the movement legitimate. Montgomery Alabama’s 50,000 blacks still faced discrimination, but some of them began to achieve prosperity and independence (Adamson, 1951, p.78). Suddenly, Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery was integrated and a new municipal stadium was constructed without separate seating, entrances, and restrooms. However, the situation on the city’s buses was still ugly. Blacks were not allowed to ride in the front of the bus, and they were required to give up seats in the middle section to white passengers. Bus drivers were racist and rude because they could get away with it.

On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks became the catalyst for the great Montgomery Bus Boycott. A hardworking, black seamstress, Rosa was on her way home after a hard day’s work. When the bus driver ordered her to give up her seat, she refused. Now, there had been other such incidents in the preceding year but when Rosa was arrested it was different. She was totally respectable and had been secretary of the NAACP. She wasn’t afraid and she didn’t get excited. City officials had to openly charge her with violating the (illegal) segregation law instead of the usual disorderly conduct. This set the stage for a legal battle. Since Montgomery’s blacks made up 70% of Montgomery’s bus riders, and the bus company was privately owned, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was 100% effective.

No matter how city officials tried to break the boycott, the bus company and downtown merchants began to sustain huge losses. This resulted in horrible reprisals and violence, but suddenly things were different. The blacks held firm, whites from other parts of the country and even some Southerners joined, and the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s segregation laws.

The Emmett Till murder, lunch counter sit-ins, and many more boycotts began to attract attention. Suddenly many people were aware of the injustices and cruelties. The fight was joined by students, white and black, from other parts of the country.
Women also were beginning to feel oppressed and desire change.

“In the fifties as in no other decade, the current of the mainstream was so strong that you only had to step off the bank and float downstream in marriage and motherhood.” (Harvey, 1993, xiii). The women who had been the major workforce during the war because men were leaving to fight, had relinquished their factory jobs to the men returning from war. Many of them had a hard time adjusting to this new life. The government and social scientists had become worried. What if these women had enjoyed their freedom? What if they didn’t want to return to their role of housewife and mother? If women wouldn’t agree to go home and create the ideal nuclear family, who would then create the demand for consumer goods that would fuel the nation’s economy? (Harvey, 1993,xiv). The government responded with a massive effort to make the family the only “safe harbor” for women. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May explains that the home was the perfect vehicle for domestic containment:

“Within its walls potentially dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed, where they could contribute to the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired.”

There was a feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction for these women. They were good wives and mothers, but they probably managed to convey these feelings to their daughters. Young women born into the fifties were growing up knowing that they really didn’t want to slip into that stream of marriage and motherhood at a young age.

The labor force was also fighting a battle. Men and women alike were fighting for a living wage and benefits. Union activists were being beaten and even murdered. Employers, like the Southern whites, were resistant to change.

In a small country that most Americans had never heard of war was raging. As this country entered the sixties, young men were suddenly aware that they could be drafted to go fight in Viet Nam.
As those young people became teenagers and young adults, they were listening to music recorded expressly for them and becoming aware of the injustices in their world. Most of them had been born in the years following the war and brought up on that new invention—television. “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Leave it To Beaver” portrayed perfect family life. Even though they knew that they didn’t live in the Cleaver family and Donna Reed wasn’t their mother, they had what many psychologists refer to as the “just world hypothesis”. Their world was just and “right”. Then in the late fifties, they became aware that the world wasn’t just and they began to suffer (again, the psychologists’ term) cognitive dissonance when they couldn’t reconcile their beliefs with what was happening in their own country. (Aronson, 1999).

The fifties were bland and boring? Not really—only for those who were oblivious to the world around them. Racial prejudice and segregation enforced by violence and murder was prevalent. Women were restless and unhappy. The American labor force was tired of working long hours for low wages and no benefits. As this country entered the sixties, young people were involved.

As the war in Viet Nam escalated, brothers, neighbors, friends and classmates were being sent to fight. Many never came back and those that did were injured physically, emotionally, or mentally. Any kind of injury is always termed the “collateral damage” of war but suddenly America’s young people were not willing to accept that explanation. The sappy love songs of the 50’s were being replaced by protest songs. Barry McGuire was right when he sang, “we’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’.”(1965). In 1965, Time Magazine called young people “a generation of conformists”. Maybe they were in the fifties, but by the sixties they had become a generation of activists. It is still being debated whether or not they were fueled by drugs or conscience. Protest marches, sit-ins, and peace rallies started peacefully. Unfortunately, there was anger on either side of the issue. Violence sometimes replaced peace and love. During this decade, we watched as our president was assassinated on national television. We also saw Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X murdered. Black churches were bombed and civil rights workers were slain. As the sixties came to an end, Charles Manson and his followers murdered eight people, Woodstock was the last successful, peaceful rock festival, and the final rock concert of the decade (Altamont) ended with the Hell’s Angels murdering four young people.

Yes, the 1950’s seeded the sixties. We could no longer ignore what was happening in our own country. However, since the fifties were not the “boring, Eisenhower years” that spawned a generation of bored baby-boomers, they raised our consciousness and made us protesters and conscientious objectors. The very things that were bad in the fifties forced us to become involved and work for change. So, the fifties were responsible for the sixties. However, preceding decades were responsible for the fifties. And history lives on!