The 1950s, much like the 1920s before it, is attracting revisionist histories, especially on the textures of everyday life. As a result, the cultural landscape of the 1950s-once dismissed by high-modernist liberals and cultural radicals as a gray, middle-brow wasteland-is brightening considerably. Building on earlier accounts, especially Thomas Hine's Populuxe (1986), Karal Ann Marling's As Seen on TV finds the 1950s to be aglow in dazzling colors. From the nation's First Lady, with her "Mamie Pink," to its "King," Elvis Presley, with his pink- splashed wardrobe and pink-toned Cadillac, bright hues color this re- visioning of the 1950s-the decade that begot "Trix," the first multicolor breakfast cereal. Even the "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" sports a pink, button-down, Brooks Brothers shirt and a pink tie. Nearly everyone, it seems, wanted to look pretty in pink.
More broadly, argues Marling, life in the 1950s was coming to revolve around people who wanted to look-and to be looked at. With TV at the center of a new visuality, there was a growing emphasis on appearing bright, fresh, and new. From the "New Look" in women's fashion, popularized in the United States by Mamie Eisenhower, to exotic looking food items, "life in the age of television was a feast for the eye" (p. 240). Detroit "replaced designers with stylists" (p. 154), and the automobile became "a piece of figurative sculpture, a powerful work of art" (p. 140). The 1950s provided "a visual, visceral dazzle, an absorbing sense of pleasure in the act of perusal" (p. 5).
The decade's most colorful icons, including Elvis at full throttle on "All Shook Up" and Detroit's chrome-encrusted behemoths, accentuated "mo- tion." Once the culture of the 1950s picked up speed, it toppled old values and rolled over traditional hierarchies. Television, Marling's study repeatedly reminds, should be seen as central to these changes. Even in black and white, its moving images "made everything look new.
To read thr full review of the study, click HERE. The study itself is published in a book available at ASM.
Hollywood Blacklist
Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of the American Left.
Political Cartoons
Political cartoons from the 1950's in the U.S.A.
'Enemies from within' : Senator Joe Mc Carthy's Accusations of disloyalty
Senator Joe McCarthy's speech at West Virginia attacking Truman's foreign policy, accusing the government of harbouring communists.
Literature and culture of the American 1950's
Reading list and research tools from the University of Pennsylvania.
THE 28-YEAR-OLD SEAMAN WAS PUZZLED. LAWRENCE PARKER HAD BEEN forced off his job as a waiter on the S.S. President Cleveland in February 1951 as a "poor security risk," but had not been told why. This was not the first time he had been barred from the waterfront under the federal government's Port Security Program. But with the help of his union, he had appealed his earlier removal and was reinstated. "I just can't under- stand it at all," Parker told the Coast Guard official who was conducting his hearing. "I would like to have some reason or something definite I would like to know whether I will be able to work." Unfortunately, as his attorney explained, Parker could not clear his record because "there are no facts which have been alleged anywhere ... to give him any knowledge of the charges on which the conclusion of a poor security risk is based. Therefore, it is impossible for him to respond adequately to the charges."1 Unemployable since being identified as a security risk, Parker was desperate to clear up his case and go back to sea, but as long as his status was unresolved, he could not even draw unemployment.2 Parker's encounters with the Alice in Wonderland world of the West Coast Port Security Program were not unique.
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In a 1955 essay on the "radical right" as a force in American politics, the sociologist Daniel Bell complained about the "polarization of images"' to which much political discourse had succumbed. "In these strange times," he wrote, "new polar terms have been introduced into political discourse, but surely none so strange as the division into 'hard' and 'soft."' As Bell explained, "presumably one is 'soft' if one insists that the danger from domestic Communists is small," while one is "hard" if one holds that "no distinction can be made between international and domestic Communism." Objecting to such stark dichotomies, Bell stressed that liberals had long affirmed an anticommunist politics and were taking conservative positions on traditional eco- nomic issues. In the end, however, he could only lament that "an amorphous, ideo- logical issue," rather than an "interest-group issue," had become "a major dividing line in the political community." "The only issue is whether one is 'hard' or 'soft."''1 In retrospect it appears that Bell was speaking to a striking feature of the political culture of his time: the reduction of political positions to dualistic images-images that often superseded a policy-oriented politics and obscured the extent of the polit- ical consensus that was emerging. Yet the rhetorical polarities he pointed to had entered Cold War political discourse long before the radical right made its mark on the political scene in the early fifties, charging liberal Democrats with softness on Communism.
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