The Road to Shalom

THE FIFTIES: The Best of Times…The Worst of Times

• Fran Sciacca • Season 2 • Episode 2

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       In Fran's new series, There And Back Again - A Hippies' Tale, we'll be flying at 50,000 feet over the past half century of American culture, attempting to sleuth our way into a better understanding of how we've arrived at our moment in history—as a nation and as Christians. Drawing from his past research as well as his own anecdotal memory, in this first episode, Fran will connect you to what it was like, living as he puts it, "within the circumference of the hulu-hoop and beneath the shadow of the Bomb” — life in the Fifties.
       Why spend time looking back 50 years? Because in order to live life forward, you have to always be looking backward. In our always-on, Instagram-Instapot culture, we're forced to always be looking forward because we're driving at broadband speed, and thinking isn't encouraged.
       So...push back a little...put your feet up and take time to be nostalgic. You might just discover that who you are is more of a composite of the past than you think.
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OTHER  RESOURCES BY FRAN SCIACCA:

I’m Fran Sciacca, the host of the podcast you’re listening to, The Road to Shalom. If you’re new, thanks for joining us. If you’re returning. Thanks for coming back. We spent the last year, looking at this idea of Shalom, the ancient word that means things being the way they’re supposed to be, mutually flourishing without diminishing themselves or anything else. We’ve orbited or landed on a bunch of topics, some more interesting than others, no doubt. But, one thread that ran through all of them was this realization that things AREN’T they way they’re supposed to be. Or put another way, it seems like we’re NOT on the road to shalom after all. But, we get that, right? But when did we lose our way? How did we get off the road, and how far off it are we anyway? 

In J.R. Tolkein’s classic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, one of the recurring scenes is the aged hobbit, Bilbo, laboring over a thick stack of parchment between two ancient pieces of leather, his memoir, with the words, “There and Back Again - A Hobbit’s Tale,” on the front cover. Bilbo’s title captures the inescapable truth that the past was once someone else’s present. That where we are now, as individuals and a people, is the sum of a long series of steps headed this way. A road of sorts, I guess. And, I’ve been told, the only way to live life forwards is to always be looking backward, so…Energized by Bilbo’s ambitions, we’re going to do our own “There and Back Again,” but, drawing on my own past, this one’s going to be “A Hippie’s Tale,” rather than a “Hobbit’s Tale.” because we’re from Middle-America, rather than Middle Earth. Here we go…

First, I’m neither a sociologist nor a historian, nor a son of either, but I have lived a while…Nearly 70 years. And of those years,  a half-century of it has been walking the Jesus Road. And while on that road, I’ve been paying attention to the world around me these 50 years—especially the culture of what’s known now as American Evangelicalism—a culture that I wasn’t born into, and to be honest, have never really felt at home in it either. But, it is where my own journey began when I was twenty and America was trying to commit suicide.

For the next 5 or 6 episodes, we’re going on a side journey off the Road to Shalom. And because I believe that the road to the future runs through the past, we’re going to take a bird’s eye view of American culture from as far back as I can travel within my memory, up to as much as I can see about it in our day. I’ll give you my own ideas why I think we are where we are, as well as how we got here. So, let’s head “There And Back Again - A Hippie’s Tale.”

Nearly 100 years before I was born, Charles Dickens’ epic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, opened with these words. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Turns out, Dickens’ words are a great description of the beginning of our journey, the decade that has been fondly called "the Fifties." The postwar economy, energized by WWII in the previous decade, was just beginning to crank out a veritable tsunami of goods and services.  "Peace, Progress, and Prosperity," was President Eisenhower's appealing reelection slogan. Unfortunately, in spite of the outward national unity, it was also the closest to national schizophrenia the U.S. has ever come.

Despite all the prosperity, in another part of the American psyche, a political fear bordering on paranoia was writhing and twisting, always just below the surface of casual conversation among adults. But it was also in the minds of kids like me who grew up within the circumference of the hula-hoop on one hand, and under the shadow of what was ominously known then as…”the bomb”…on the other.

Germany had surrendered in May of 1945, followed by Japan that August.  The war and its theft of much that was good, was still a vivid memory in every American household.  And that memory was just beginning to fade when Russia tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, forever exploding the hope that war itself had also been conquered.  A year later, our unpopular involvement in Korea was a sharp reminder that war or its threat was now another thing to consider when building your dream home.

In 1951, the first publicized bomb shelter was built by Mrs. Ruth Calhoun in Los Angeles.  And for many, they were the new normal in home construction. A little different from our modern fire pits and home theaters. The following year, the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands.  Russia tested its first H-bomb in 1953, followed the next year by our second H-bomb test.  Right in this mess, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table in the Polish Embassy in Moscow and shouted, "We will bury you!” Some today believe that threat’s still on the table in modern Moscow.

In the midst of this frenzied search for global power, Albert Einstein made a frightening prediction nearly 70 years ago:

Radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.

Then, in October of ’57, Russia stunned the world by putting Sputnik, a 184-pound man-made satellite, into orbit. While the world was trying to wrap their minds around this, Russia performed two more launches, one of which contained a dog named Laika. The space race had begun, and the U.S. was still trying to get its gym shorts on!  

It would be both naive and foolish to overlook the impact this had on those of us growing up in the Fifties as we were herded regularly to our school basements for air raid drills. In the back of our minds was the gnawing question: “Is there a future for us?"  A decade later, during the Sixties, when my generation was coming of age, this question would evolve into: "What is the meaning of life?” But, that’s for a future episode.

As dark as these forebodings were, they were not the profile of the national psyche in the Fifties.  In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were elected to the White House.  Their promise was to maintain the momentum of prosperity the war had created.  Reflecting back on the Eisenhower era in the late 80’s, Watergate conspirator, the late Chuck Colson, captured the Fifties in a single paragraph:

After fifteen years of depression and war, unemployment and rationing, Americans were determined to make up for lost time—and as the years went on, times were good. . . . For the first time in history nearly everyone could afford their own home; millions of returning veterans went to college on the GI Bill; business boomed.  Eisenhower's 1956 reelection theme, "Peace, Progress, and Prosperity," captured the mood of the nation.

 The burst of economic prosperity was nearly intoxicating for the majority of Americans.  I recall my dad, a typical member of the blue-collar working class, and a first-generation child of Italian immigrant parents, telling me he wanted his three sons to have all the things he never had, not the least of which was a proper education.  The whole lifestyle of what we call the "middle class,” got a total makeover during Eisenhower's eight years in the White House. It would have made for great reality TV.
 Let me give you a sample of what the “Prosperity” part of Eisenhower looked like:

                                                                                     1950                              1960
ITEM                                                                      (millions)                     (millions)        (%) Increase
lawn & porch furniture sales.....................$53.6                          $145.2                 270%
hot dog production (lb.)................................ 750                               1,050                140%
gin production (gal.)..........................................6                                      19                    317%
vodka production (gal.)..................................0.1                                      9                   9,000%
encyclopedia sales...........................................$72                              $300                  417%
musical instrument sales...............................$86                              $149                  173%
Little Leagues......................................................776*                          5,700*                735%
Girl Scouts & Brownies....................................1.8                                4.0                     222%
forest camper.......................................................1.5                                6.6                    440%
bowling alleys.......................................................0.5                                1                        100%

Let me just single out two of these data streams: The increase in hot dog production and lawn furniture resulted from the birth of backyard barbecue.  The explosion in alcoholic beverage sales was due to the popularity of cocktail parties. Can you imagine what it would have been like if craft beers had existed then? These two phenomena are good pointers to America's increased emphasis on leisure, as opposed to the previous decade's necessary preoccupation with survival and hard work.  After nearly a decade of learning to fight, America learned to play in the Fifties. But unfortunately it also seems she forget how to think.

During the Eisenhower era there was a pendulum swing toward accumulating “stuff.” Or as historian Paul Johnson put it in his classic, Modern Times:  “It was the Twenties prosperity over again, but less frenetic and more secure, with a far wider social spread. . . . The Fifties was the decade of affluence, a word popularized by the fashionable economist J. K. Galbraith in his 1958 best seller, The Affluent Society.”

At the end of the day, people eventually closed up their bomb shelters, exhaled, and settled down to enjoy a recent technological miracle called—television!  While politicians were waging what was known as “the cold war,” most of the rest of us were watching the escapades of desperados on TV Westerns like, “Gunsmoke" and "Have Gun, Will Travel."  Or, the marital antics of “I Love Lucy,” and the model American family on "Leave It to Beaver.” Animals got into the entertainment business in the Fifties too. there was the unbelievable adventures of a dogs like “Lassie" and “Rin Tin Tin,” or horses like “My Friend Flicka” and “Fury.”

In 1950, three million homes had televisions.  By 1955 there were 32 million!  By the end of the decade, the average American family spent six hours a day in front of a screen. Peeking through the window of the average American home would have revealed entire families with their faces bathed in gray light. Sounds kinda familiar, doesn’t it?

This new national euphoria is best illustrated, however, in the dominant music at the beginning of the Fifties — it was called, ”pop music."  This style of music was basically a slightly modified carryover of the music of the forties, which was characteristically labeled "mood" music.  From 1950–1955, the voices of Patti Page, Brenda Lee, Harry Belafonte, Pat Boone, and Bing Crosby floated through the white suburbs like the smell of hamburgers.

The Winds of Change

So…life was great in the Fifties—at least for the adults.  But what about us kids, the first generation to grow up after the birth of nuclear weapons?  How were they responding to this new prosperity?  How were they handling America's schizophrenic attempt to believe it was the best of times while fearing that it was the worst of times?

I’m painting with a broad brush on a small canvas when I say this, but I think it’s accurate. I’m going to suggest that the youth of the Fifties responded to the materialism of the adult middle class in three different ways.  These responses might seem unrelated, but I think all were direct results of the recent adult preoccupation with "things."

One response occurred in the urban centers.  The decade between 1950 and 1960 saw an astonishing rise in violent urban gangs.  In New York City, from 1955 to 1956, murders of teens rose 26 percent, auto theft rose 36 percent, and the possession of dangerous weapons increased 92 percent.  Rival gangs staked off their "turf," and fought to protect it.  In their book, Home of the Brave, John Alexander Carroll and Odie Faulk indict TV as a prime causal factor in the rise of violence, because it visually portrayed things the urban youth would never own or experience.  Life in the white suburbs was a constant and appealing carrot dangling in their faces from the TVs in their homes.  Their rebellion was against a larger culture in which they seemed to be persona non grata.  And as generally is the case in a battle between "haves" and "have nots," their rebellion took the form of action.

As parasitic on social ills back then as now, the entertainment industry hijacked the urban gang phenomenon and turned it into money-making ventures.  Fifties films like, High School Confidential, Blackboard Jungle, Teenage Doll, and Wild One romanticized urban gangs, ethnic tensions, and teen violence.  The urban unrest motif even found its way onto Broadway in the musical, West Side Story about this time.

Urban violence was one of the responses to "Peace, Progress, and Prosperity," as inner-city youth groped for some sense of identity in a larger culture that had loosed itself from a meaningful shore.  But, in the Fifties, these gangs made up a very small part of what we now call the boomer generation.

A second, and even smaller response to this marathon of materialism emerged among a quasi-intellectual elite.  On the East Coast, at Columbia University, a handful of disenchanted WW2 veterans and college dropouts began to drop out even further.  In coffeehouses and apartments called,”pads," they wrote and performed offbeat poetry in the context of a loose orientation toward sex and drugs.  They were the self-proclaimed “beat generation"—the name being an abbreviation of beatitude.  The media quickly and cynically labeled them, "beatniks," parroting the recent launch of Sputnik by the Russians.  But, and this is huge, these first revolutionary "drop-outs" were not unpatriotic.  In fact, many were vets.  They were "un-American" only in the sense that they found this new “American Dream,” shallow and empty, and used it as an excuse for a lifestyle headed in the opposite direction as mainstream middle-America. They were, in a word, the counter-culture.

But, and this is important. The beats of the Fifties were politically passive, not active. Jack Kerouac, one of their leading prophets said it best:

Recently Ben Hecht said to me on TV "Why are you afraid to speak out your mind, what's wrong with this country, what is everybody afraid of?"  Was he talking to me?  And all he wanted me to do was speak out my mind AGAINST people…Eisenhower, the Pope, all kinds of people like that habitually he would sneer at with Drew Pearson, AGAINST the world he wanted, this is his idea of freedom, he calls it freedom.  Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty.

 Keroauc didn’t want to blast anyone. It wasn’t so much what he was against, as what he was for. This passive nature of the “Beatniks” or “Beats” is important to get right, because their mutant offspring, the "hippies," had very little in common with them, other than wanting to live in the opposite direction as mainstream middle-America.

There were a number of influential folks in the Beat movement. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  These and other gurus of the Beat scene migrated widely, pronouncing their blessings in poetry and song to other "hip" souls who would listen.  Like Facebook they had people who “followed,” but the followers were congregated more as philosophical oases in different cities, rather than any sort of coherent movement. The Beasts didn’t really have an “agenda.” They didn’t have a headquarters. They didn’t have a platform. They wanted to be left alone. You were welcome to join of course.

And, they would most likely have remained small, scattered, clandestine huddles of nonconformists, had it not been for all the media attention.  Ginsberg's book, Howl, came out in 1957, and was nearly banned in San Francisco, until a judge ruled that it had some "redeeming social importance."  The trial and verdict catapulted the Beats into the national eye, and gave them some degree of social legitimacy.  Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, was released two years later and became a national best-seller, no doubt partly due to the notoriety the media had given Ginsberg earlier.  The word Beatnik was soon a part of everybody's vocabulary, right along with Chevy and Ford.  I vividly recall my parents going to costume parties dressed as beatniks, even though they had never heard of Kerouac or Ginsberg.  The closest most of us had come to the beat generation was through a sensitive but scatter-brained beatnik named Maynard G. Krebbs on the Fifties TV show, "Dobie Gillis". 

So, what began as a small number of rather isolated individuals just trying to make a statement through an alternative lifestyle, became a permanent fixture in the intellectual DNA that would give birth to the Sixties.  The basic message of the Beats was, "We see what's going on in white, middle-class America and we don't like it, don’t agree with it, and we won't participate.  See ya! We’re dropping out."  Theirs was a rebellion of passive aggression—a rebellion rooted in identity.  The Beat movement, though temporary, would colonize American culture in the next decade through its stepchildren.  For it gave birth to what sociologists and historians like Theodore Roszak would call the counterculture in the Sixties.

Okay, so we’ve talked about two small segments of mainstream Middle-American youth culture, but what of the majority of white, middle-class kids who were growing up in suburban homes, immersed in the "good life" of the Fifties?  What was happening to those who knew only about “beatniks," and nothing about the real-life Beats, and whose only exposure to inner city gangs was seeing Marlon Brando in Wild One?  In other words, what was happening in the world I grew up in?

Well, let’s look at this a little from the top-down. The attitude of most of us kids in middle-America was captured in the title of another classic movie in 1955, Rebel Without a Cause. The now iconic James Dean suddenly became an American folk hero.  A sort of poster child for disillusionment with middle-America. American youth were restless, for sure, but there was no focus, no clarity to the frustration.  Best-selling author Stephen King, was interviewed by Annie Gottlieb in her book on the Sixties, Do You Believe in Magic?, King pinpointed the inner agony Dean vicariously experienced for himself, and millions of us kids in the Fifties:

I couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old when I saw Rebel Without a Cause, . . . And I still remember the intense emotional reaction I had.  This kid comes home, and he's been beaten up and treated badly, and his father, says (simpering), "Well, let's have some milk, and then we'll make a list.  That always helps me."  And the kid says (screaming), "YOU'RE TEARING ME APAAART!"  And it was like somebody opened a window inside my own heart.  Somebody had said the truth.

  And just like the young Stephen King, the American "good life" of the Fifties was offered to us middle-America youth without wondering if it was really best, or even if maybe we wanted something more meaningful.  In her book, Annie Gottlieb accused the parent generation of the Fifities of substituting materialism for love, without asking or even wondering themselves if there was more to life than accumulating stuff. What had given meaning to their own lives, before the “stuff” showed up?  These questions and a host of others floundered in the collective psyche of lots of kids in middle-America.  We sensed something was wrong somewhere, but the youth of the Fifties didn't know what was wrong.  And even more important, no one dared talk about it. It wasn’t the time to ask questions…yet.

The Sound of Music

This free-floating anxiety eventually found a banner under which to gather in the most unexpected of places: the failing attempt by adults to launch a new form of music.

I mentioned briefly that in the early Fifties, pop music was supreme. It was the music de jour of every cocktail party in the land, and occupied the unchallenged top tiers of all record charts.  My own childhood memories contain colorful recollections of the voices of Bing Crosby and Harry Belafonte drifting up to my room from the "rec room," where my folks and their friends were dancing the night away.  But the winds of change would soon begin to blow new ideas into the music of youth.

Record companies were trying to create a new musical hybrid by mixing three strands of historically black music: gospel, with its emphasis on vocal harmony, “boogie,” or “jug bands” with their percussion, and blues with its themes of romance and sex. This new music would eventually be given the erotic genre of "rock-and-roll."  But, these initial attempts in the adult music business to break the monopoly of pop failed. "Sh-Boom" by the Chords, and the now well-known classic, ”Rock Around the Clock," by Bill Haley and the Comets, huffed and puffed but couldn't blow the house of pop down. Both groups were too old to appeal to the generation that identified more with James Dean, than Pat Boone. What was needed was some young, charismatic personality to galvanize this generation of "rebels without a cause" and fuse them to this new genre. Well, they got what they wanted. A twenty-one-year-old truck driver from Memphis, playing a fusion of country and rhythm & blues. His name was Elvis Presley.  

Pop Music never knew what hit it!  Elvis “the Pelvis" put rock-and-roll on the radio and in the stores.  Music has never been the same since 1956 when "Tutti Frutti," "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel," and a seemingly endless list of other hits dominated the phonographs of America.  Jackie Gleason, the well-known comedian of the day stated, "We'll survive Elvis.  He can't last.  I tell you flatly, he can't last."  I don’t think Jackie could have imagined just how we would NOT survive Elvis.  Elvis captured the heart of young America.  And even today, 43 years after his death, there’s an urban legend that he's alive!  

Elvis blew open the way for a multitude of other recording artists, both black and white.  Rock-and-roll became the closest thing the United States has ever had to a state religion.  Elvis handed the then boomer generation something distinctly their own—a new music. Their own music. From 1957 on, the youth of middle-America had their own medium, something that was to become essential for the spread of the ideology of the next decade.  Rock-and-roll was the social media of middle-American youth for nearly fifty years.

Rock-and-roll was also more sexually explicit than pop, and obviously offensive to the parent generation, which only served to widen the gap of rebellion between those rebels "without a cause” and their parents.

But, in all fairness, rock-and-roll itself certainly was no “cause.”  It was masterminded to sell records, not ideologies.  When Elvis swung his hand across the strings, smacked his knees together, and swooned, "A bop-bop-a-loom-op a-lop bop boom!  Tutti Frutti, au rutti," he wasn't making some profound philosophical statement about the meaning of life!  But still, rock-and-roll became the velcro holding together a generation foraging for a reason to exist.  And, this music would eventually become the vent pipe for the generation’s uneasiness and discontent, which was coming to a boil just below the surface.

What about mainstream Christianity? What about the Church and the gospel? In the Fifties, the American Church was pretty much still considered part of the fabric of the American tapestry, along with the home, government and education. Perhaps even a vital part. It wasn’t unusual for priests and pastors to be asked their opinions, as caretakers of the soul of the nation. Because Christians in America always seem to equate prosperity with God’s blessing and favor, American Christianity relished the prosperity of the post-war era. In the Fifties, for a lot of people, being a Christian was at least part of what it meant to be an American in the first place. This religious mainstream was pretty complacent in the Fifties. The focus was a type of moralistic patriotism. “Enjoy the good life God’s given you. Be good, go to church, work hard, be thankful.” 

Unfortunately, God had made a sobering connection between prosperity and spirituality twenty-eight centuries ago that's worth paying attention to today. Speaking of his people, he said, “When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me.” Complacency induced by satisfaction always leads to stagnation. A Christian’s greatest need is to remember he is needy. The worst deprivation is no deprivation. But, the American Church in the Fifties was just that—American. In its love affair with peace and prosperity, the Church surrendered a distinctly biblical worldview. It saw itself as a slice of the American Dream, rather than an God’s outpost, or the conscience of the nation. But to be fair, most people didn’t need the Church to be their conscience then. They had one of their own…at least for the moment.

Another distinctly evangelical puzzle piece in the Fifties, was the birth of two campus ministry organizations that would play a significant role in the next two decades. In 1951, on the campuses of UCLA and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, two aggressive evangelists brought their particular brand of evangelism and discipleship onto the college campus. Dawson Trotman took his regimented approach to the spiritual life that had worked so well among sailors during World War II into the less disciplined world of the campus, about the same time a businessman named Bill Bright brought his business model of evangelism onto the campus of UCLA. The Navigators and Campus Crusade for Christ both launched their collegiate ministries that year. Extremely different in methodology, yet united in a passion for evangelism, they also reinforced the American values of patriotism and marketing. But, they would also become a vital force in the next decade, when the institutional Church was first mystified and then horrified by what was happening to its children. I know…I was one of them, and I was there.

Okay, let’s wrap up this first leg of our journey “there and back again,” As the curtain on the decade closes, and the Sixties is waiting in the wings, let’s revisit this idea of rebellion in Middle-America in the Fifties. Among the majority of middle-American kids, rebellion was not yet a rebellion of action, like we saw in the urban gangs.  And, to be honest, most of us middle-American kids also were not enamored with the sort of rebellious identity embodied in the Beatniks. At the end of the day, most of us in the Fifties may have been feeling restless, but we were pretty much okay with the very things us Boomers would sarcastically call, “The System,” and eventually mistrust completely in a few years—the recognized institutions of authority. So… times were good—at least better than they'd been for some time. As the decade ended, we didn’t mistrust our parents, the government, the church, or our schools. Demographer Cheryl Russell described us pretty well when she said,

“The allied victory in World War II gave Americans confidence in their institutions and leaders.  The politicians and the military had achieved an enormous success, convincing Americans of the benevolence of authority—whether that authority was a politician, a minister, a psychiatrist, or a doctor.”

Yet…among us youth living in Middle-America, there was a sort of ambiguous, free-floating opposition to the “American Dream.”  We intuited that there was more to life than the emblems of success created by the Eisenhower era. Life became boring, as it inevitably does for those who have everything. And…we were about to flood the university campuses of America.

The kindling was ready, the smoke had begun to appear, but at the decade's end there was still no fire.  That was about to change—forever.  The best of times was about to be swallowed up by a worst of times that had nothing to do with the threat of war with Russia.  Middle-America was about to encounter an enemy in the camp. See ya next time.