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The Counterculture
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The decade of the 1950s has a reputation as an age of political, social, and cultural conformity. Yet, as Professor Alan Brinkley states, "An activist national agenda emerged from a series of critiques of and protests against the self-satisfied public culture of middle-class America in the 1950s. The activist agenda that emerged helped lay the groundwork for a more activist politics and a more turbulent and divisive social climate in the 1960s."
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Respond to this statement, specifying whether you partly or entirely agree or disagree. Use your knowledge of the time period and the sources provided to support your arguments.
Whatever position you take, be sure to explain the how and to address the who, what, when, and especially the why in your response. Be sure to address the counterargument—what historians might say in opposition to your thesis—and to support your argument with historical evidence. Remember that "conformity" can include the ideas of "consensus" and "complacency," so be sure to define your terms carefully. Do not forget to consider the point of view of the source, particularly regarding class, race, and gender.
Select three of the following topics to use as evidence to evaluate the above quotation:
1. suburbanization and the suburban ideal and/or the drive-in culture
2. intellectual critics of the affluent society and corporate culture
3. the role of women and men and/or teen culture
4. the role of anticommunism and the threat of nuclear war
5. the position of blacks in society and/or of the federal government on issues of civil rights
6. the domestic and/or foreign policy positions of the Republican and Democratic parties
7. critics of conformity in the arts: abstract expressionist painting and/or beat writing
Primary source:
Brown v. Board of Education, Supreme Court decision, 1954.
Background information: This landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 declared the segregation of black and white children in American public schools to be unconstitutional.
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To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . . Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . . . [Separate educational facilities therefore violate] the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Full
text of the decision is at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=347&invol=483.
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Primary source: Richard Lacayo, "Suburban Legend: William Levitt," magazine article, 1950.
Background information: As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its mass-produced housing. William Levitt is quoted as saying the following.
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He [William Levitt] was a prime facilitator of the American Dream in its cold war formulation. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist," he once said. "He has too much to do."
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Richard Lacayo, "Suburban Legend: William Levitt," Time, 3 July, 1950.
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Primary source: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 1949.
Background information: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted American historian, wrote this influential book to argue that a rejuvenated faith in democratic ideals and the continuation of New Deal liberalism would safeguard America from the twin threats of totalitarianism and fascism.
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Another objective [of the American communists] is what the Communists call "mass organizations"—that is, groups of liberals organized for some benevolent purpose, and because of the innocence, laziness and stupidity of most of the membership, perfectly designed for control by an alert minority. . . The Attorney General's list of subversive groups (whatever the merit of this type of list as a form of official procedure) provides a convenient way of checking the more obvious Communist-controlled groups. . .
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 121.
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Primary source: Joseph McCarthy, “Communists in Government Service,” testimony to Congress, 1950.
Background information: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, an unremarkable member of Congress from Wisconsin, burst onto the national political scene in 1950, after announcing to a West Virginia audience that he held in his hand a list of 205 American Communists who worked in the U.S. State Department.
. . . Today we are engaged in a final, all–out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down, they are truly down.
Six years ago...there was within the Soviet orbit 180 million people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 800 million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500 million. In other words, in less than six years the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within.
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Senate, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, "Communists in Government
Service," testimony given on 9 February 1950, Congressional Record (3
February–4 March 1950), Proceedings and Debates of the 81st Cong., 2nd sess., 96, pt. 2:1954.
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Primary source: Jackson Pollock, Convergence, oil painting, 1952.
Background information: Renowned for his technique of spontaneous "splatter" or "action" painting, Jackson Pollock (1912–56) emerged as the leading American artist of the abstract expressionist movement.
Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956) Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas, overall: 93 1/2 x 155 in.
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1956.
Copyright 2002 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduction, including downloading of Pollock's work, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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Primary source: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "I Am Waiting," poem, 1958.
Background information: One of the beat poets, Ferlinghetti captures an alternative perspective on life in postwar America in this poem.
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder. . .
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am seriously waiting
for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley
to exchange roles seriously
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on. . .
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder. . .
and I am waiting
for the human crowd
to wander off a cliff somewhere
clutching its atomic umbrella. . .
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives . . .
and I am waiting
for Ole Man River
to just stop rolling along
past the country club
and I am waiting
for the deepest South
to just stop Reconstructing itself
in its own image
and I am waiting
for a sweet desegregated chariot
to swing low. . .
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder. . .
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "I Am Waiting," in A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), 49–52.
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Primary source:
Levittown, photograph, 1958.
Background information: As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its hundreds of acres of mass-produced housing.
Joseph Scherschel, TimePix.
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Primary source: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958.
Background information: John Kenneth Galbraith, a prominent Harvard economist, outlined in this article the necessary balance that should exist between the private and public sectors of the American economy.
The final problem of the productive society is what it produces. This manifests itself in an implacable tendency to provide an opulent supply of some things and a niggardly yield of others. This disparity carries to the point where it is a cause of social discomfort and social unhealth. The line which divides our area of wealth from our area of poverty is roughly which divides privately produced and marketed goods and services from publicly rendered services. Our wealth in the first is not only the startling contrast with the meagerness of the latter, but our wealth in privately produced goods is, to a marked degree, the cause of crisis in the supply of public services. For we have failed to see the importance, indeed the urgent need, of maintaining a balance between the two.
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John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 251.
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Primary source: "Little Boxes," folk song, 1962.
Background information: The folk-song movement in America grew after World War II, and in this song, Malvina Reynolds critiques the American way of life in the 1950s. After receiving her doctorate, she met Pete Seeger and became a folk singer and songwriter.
Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same,
There's a green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses all went to the university,
Where they were put into boxes and they all came out the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers, and business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry,
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university,
Where they are all put in boxes and they all come out the same.
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Words and music by Malvina Reynolds, 1962. Schroder Music Co. (ASCAP) / Renewed 1990 / Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Primary source: "A group of Negro Students . . . ," photograph, 1960.
Background information: In 1960, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically black institution, defied segregation by sitting at the luncheon counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro.
"A group of Negro Students . . . ," photograph, 2 February 1960.
New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-114749 (9-9).
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Primary source: Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962.
Background information: With this book, writer and social activist Michael Harrington helped launch the New Left movement of the 1960s and its concerns about American poverty and social injustice.
[ . . . ]
. . . [T]ens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care. . . .
[ . . . ]
This book is a description of the world in which these people live; it is about the other America. Here are the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life. . . .
The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them. . . . The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us . . . . Thus, one must begin a description of the other America by understanding why we do not see it. . . .
. . . . Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been. The ordinary tourist never left the main highway, and today he rides interstate turnpikes. . . .
[ . . . ]
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Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 2–3.
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Primary source: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
Background information: Founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Betty Friedan wrote this influential treatise critiquing the loneliness and dissatisfaction felt by many suburban housewives in postwar America.
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[. . . ]
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—"she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"
[. . . ]
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Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 15.
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