THE CULTURE OF THE 1950s
During the 1950s, many cul- tural commentators pointed out that a sense of uniformity pervaded American society . Conformity, they asserted, was numbingly common . Though men and women had been forced into new employment pat- terns during World War II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed . Men expected to be the breadwinners in each family; wom- en, even when they worked, assumed their proper place was at home . In his influential book, The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman called this new society “other-directed,” characterized by conformity, but also by stability . Television, still very limited in the choices it gave its view- ers, contributed to the homogenizing cultural trend by providing young and old with a shared experience re- flecting accepted social patterns .
Yet beneath this seemingly bland surface, important segments of American society seethed with rebellion . A number of writers, collectively known as the “Beat Gen- eration,” went out of their way to challenge the patterns of respect- ability and shock the rest of the culture . Stressing spontaneity and spirituality, they preferred intuition over reason, Eastern mysticism over Western institutionalized religion .
The literary work of the beats displayed their sense of alienation and quest for self-realization . Jack Kerouac typed his best-selling novel On the Road on a 75-meter roll of
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paper . Lacking traditional punctua- tion and paragraph structure, the book glorified the possibilities of the free life . Poet Allen Ginsberg gained similar notoriety for his poem “Howl,” a scathing critique of mod- ern, mechanized civilization . When police charged that it was obscene and seized the published version, Ginsberg successfully challenged the ruling in court .
Musicians and artists rebelled as well . Tennessee singer Elvis Presley was the most successful of several white performers who popularized a sensual and pulsating style of Af- rican-American music, which began to be called “rock and roll .” At first, he outraged middle-class Ameri- cans with his ducktail haircut and undulating hips . But in a few years his performances would seem rela- tively tame alongside the antics of later performers such as the British Rolling Stones . Similarly, it was in the 1950s that painters like Jackson Pollock discarded easels and laid out gigantic canvases on the floor, then applied paint, sand, and other mate- rials in wild splashes of color . All of these artists and authors, whatever the medium, provided models for the wider and more deeply felt social revolution of the 1960s .