Edward J. Rielly - The 1960s: American Popular Culture Through History

Contents

Contents

by Ray B. Browne

Series Foreword

Popular culture is the system of attitudes, behavior, beliefs, customs, and tastes that define the people of any society. It is the entertainments, diversions, icons, rituals, and actions that shape the everyday world. It is what we do while we are awake and what we dream about while we are sleep. It is the way of life we inherit, practice, change, and then pass on to our descendants.

Popular culture is an extension of folk culture, the culture of the people. With the rise of electronic media and the increase in communication in American culture, folk culture expanded into popular culturethe daily way of life as shaped by the popular majorityof society. Especially in a democracy like the United States, popular culture has become both the voice of the people and the force that shapes the nation. In 1782, the French commentator Hector St. Jean de Crvecur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer, What is an American? He answered that such a person is the creation of America and is in turn the creator of the countrys culture. Indeed, notions of the American Dream have been long grounded in the dream of democracythat is, government by the people, or popular rule. Thus, popular culture is tied fundamentally to America and the dreams of its people.

Historically, culture analysts have tried to fine-tune culture into two categories: elitethe elements of culture (fine art, literature, classical music, gourmet food, etc.) that supposedly define the best of societyand popularthe elements of culture (comic strips, best-sellers, pop music, fast food, etc.) that appeal to societys lowest common denominator. The socalled educated person approved of elite culture and scoffed at popular culture. This schism first began to develop in western Europe in the viii Series Foreword fifteenth century when the privileged classes tried to discover and develop differences in societies based on class, money, privilege, and lifestyles. Like many aspects of European society, the debate between elite and popular cultures came to the United States. The upper class in America, for example, supported museums and galleries that would exhibit the finer things in life, that would elevate people. As the twenty-first century emerges, however, the distinctions between popular culture and elitist culture have blurred. The blues songs (once denigrated as race music) of Robert Johnson are now revered by musicologists; architectural students study buildings in Las Vegas as examples of what Robert Venturi called the kitsch of high capitalism; sportswriter Gay Talese and heavyweight boxing champ Floyd Patterson were co-panelists at a 1992 SUNYNew Paltz symposium on Literature and Sport. The examples go on and on, but the one commonality that emerges is the role of popular culture as a model for the American Dream, the dream to pursue happiness and a better, more interesting life.

To trace the numerous ways in which popular culture has evolved throughout American history, we have divided the volumes in this series into chronological periodshistorical eras until the twentieth century, decades between 1900 and 2000. In each volume, the author explores the specific details of popular culture that reflect and inform the general undercurrents of the time. Our purpose is to present historical and analytical panoramas that reach both backward into Americas past and forward to her collective future. In viewing these panoramas, we can trace a very fundamental part of American society. The American Popular Culture Through History series presents the multifaceted parts of a popular culture in a nation that is both grown and still growing.

Introduction

The decade of the 1960s was a time of great change in American culture. The winds of change, sometimes more like a tornado, swept across the cultural landscape, uprooting the old and depositing the new. These changes were exciting, troubling, horrifying, energizing, depending on ones individual attitudes toward past traditions and beliefs. Every historical period brings some transformations, but the 1960s seemed to replace an old world with a new one. Even those Americans who wanted to remain faithful to past practices could not totally resist what was happening around them.

If change was like a powerful tornado in the 1960s, the decade began instead with a light breeze, significant but generally welcome. Modernization was in the air. For the first time, the country would have a president born in the twentieth century, regardless of the outcome of the 1960 election. That choice was aided by a new force in politicstelevision. The first televised presidential debates occurred, and the electronic medium gave its blessing to Senator John F. Kennedy over Vice President Richard Nixon. The Massachusetts Democrat was handsome, charming, and self-confident; the camera liked him, and so did the voters. On Inaugural Day, the former war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, in his seventies, turned the White House over to the forty-three-year-old Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected president, and to his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, and their young children, Caroline and John. The decade was off and running.

The country quite literally was running, as the new President pushed a program to get America more physically fit while the First Lady set the style in womens fashions. Dark clouds occasionally blew by, first a failed invasion of Cuban exiles with U.S. support at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and then a confrontation with the Soviet Union over Russian missiles in Cuba. The former led President Kennedy to advocate construction of fallout shelters, and the latter brought the possibility of nuclear war home to Americans who, despite their fears, did not fully understand how close they had actually come to war. Yet these events failed to dampen the optimism most Americans felt in a nation enjoying economic prosperity and continued status as the greatest of the worlds superpowers.

Women were flocking to stores and poring over Sears catalogs to find a pillbox hat like the kind that Jackie wore. At home, they were trying new recipes that Julia Child demonstrated on public television and giving some thought to a new type of kitchen appliance called the microwave, still too expensive for most families. Fathers and mothers, if they had not already done so, were thinking of moving their families to suburbs and considering adding a second car, possibly the cute and economical Volkswagen Beetle. Shopping was more convenient with the spread of shopping malls where consumers could find lots of shops grouped close together and plenty of parking space. A McDonalds probably stood nearby, offering a quick hamburger, fries, and soft drink. Life was good for most Americans.

Literature and the arts moved farther away from established traditions, sometimes building on changes that had started in the previous decade, such as the birth of rock and roll, most prominently displayed in the late 1950s by Elvis Presley. New directions in literature were ushered in by the Beats, including the 1950s Bibles of the Beat generation, Howl, a poem by Allen Ginsberg decrying the dullness of the Eisenhower years and heralding the coming of a vibrant counterculture, and the autobiographical novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Andy Warhol switched from commercial art to serious, realistic depictions of objects and people from popular culture. Images of soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles became art, and pop art became the artistic rage of the decade, forever mangling the old distinction between high and low art. Before long, Roy Lichtenstein was borrowing comic-strip techniques for his canvases.