The Fabulous Fifties

A decade of contrasts

I grew up in the 50s. I entered kindergarten at the beginning of the decade and was in high school when it ended. Growing up in a small logging town in northeastern California, I was sheltered from most of what went on. The black and white newsreels we saw at the local theatre showed scenes of faraway places. We kids found them boring. They spoke of an adult world that we largely ignored. Things like:

• Testing of the H-bomb in 1952
• The Cold War
• The Korean War
• Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee that got many in Hollywood blacklisted for allegedly being communists or communist sympathizers. In some circles, even wearing an Adlai Stevenson button meant you were a “Pinko” communist.
• The election of Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower as President in 1952 signalled stability. Ike was a war hero with a penchant for peace. He presided over the post-WWII boom and warned of the dangers of the “Military Industrial Complex.”
• In 1956, Ike signed the Federal Highway Act that authorized construction of the Interstate Highway system to begin.
• Air travel became more prevalent. Jets were introduced with the Sabre Jet flying many missions during the Korean War.
• Completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 enabled shipping by ship from the east coast and Europe as far inland as Duluth in Minnesota.
• Iron ore from mines on the Iron Range in Minnesota shipped from Duluth to US steel mills in Gary Indiana.
• The NAACP grew in power with the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others. They railed against Jim Crow laws that institutionalized racism in the south. The NAACP sought through marches, boycotts and other peaceful protests to elevate and improve the social and economic condition of black people (then called “colored” or worst names in the south).
• In 1954 the Brown vs. Board of Education decision said separate schools for blacks and whites were inherently not equal. The battle to desegregate schools flared in 1957 when the Governor called out the National Guard to prevent desegregation of Little Rock high schools and President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to restore order and ensure desegregation, now the law of the land, was enforced.
• Prominent black athletes showed they were as good as or better than white athletes. Players such as Bill Russell — Boston Celtics who ran the court at lightning speed, and at 6'9" could block shots and dunk the ball with no problem.
• Willie Mays — the New York Giants “Say Hey Kid” — hit 41 home runs in 1954 and 50 the following year.
• Althea Gibson became the first black woman to compete in a major American tennis tournament.
• While Russell and Mays and Gibson may have been heroes on the court or field, they were treated like second-class citizens off the court, especially in the south. The same applied to black entertainers. Even the great Sammy Davis, Jr. had to deal with off-stage discrimination.
• Fast food became prevalent with the rise of McDonalds serving $.15 hamburgers in 20 seconds. McDonalds said to “buy them by the sack” and a friend of mine did. KFC and Burger King came along at about the same time.
• While Detroit had some car flops like the Corvair and the Edsel, GM became the largest corporation in the world.
• IBM gradually shifted from selling adding machines to computers.
• The launch of Sputnik in October 1957 set off the space race. After an initial failure when a vanguard rocket blew up on the launch pad, America went on to orbit many satellites including the Echo I satellite in 1960.
• Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government in Cuba in 1959 and turned to the Soviet Union for support of his fledgeling socialist regime.
• Television rose in popularity and sold everything from hair tonic to Presidential candidates. Spurred on by TV jingles such as those below, America became a prominent producer and consumer nation.

§“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

§ “I’d walk a mile for a camel.”

§ “Brylcream, a little dab will do ya…”

§ “Shake the can and see; then take home the MJB.”

• During the fifties, more than half of all goods were made in America.

But there were things that got the attention of us kids, perhaps chief among them “Rock and Roll” music. It started with groups like Bill Haley and the Comets popularizing tunes like “Rock Around the Clock” released in 1955.

The craze exploded when Elvis Presley began recording with “My Happiness” in 1953. He released “That’s Alright (Mama)” in 1954 and had his first big hit “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1955.

The 45-rpm record became a staple of tweens and teens. We had our own phonographs and would play stacks of these records, one song per record.

A few memorable books came out of the fifties. Among them The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (by Sloan Wilson, 1955). It told the story of America’s search for meaning and purpose in an age of conformity and consumerism.

Two popular books were considered so scandalous that they were banned. One was Peyton Place (by Grace Metalious, 1956). And the other: Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger, 1951). Now the latter is often read by adolescents. My mother read Peyton Place when it first came out. And, when she wasn’t around, I skimmed it for the zesty parts. This proved to me that the best way to generate an avalanche of readers was to ban a book.

In my early college days, The Ugly American (a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer) caught my attention. Describing America’s failures in Southeast Asia, it became quite a sensation in diplomatic and political circles. I later learned first hand that the “ugly American” often fit Americans living and working abroad in terms of their interaction with locals.

The 1952 book Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison set the problem of racial injustice squarely at the heart of the American character.

In the theatre, westerns like “High Noon” drew huge audiences. On TV, “The Rifleman,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” and “Gunsmoke” got high ratings.

“Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best” showed the ideal American family of the fifties, the image everyone felt pushed to emulate. Of course, few did. And, we learned much later, that Robert Young, head of the “Father Knows Best” household was an alcoholic and drank during the show’s production.

The relatively calm fifties were a prelude to the riotous sixties. The beat generation was born which led to the hippie culture of the sixties. Racial protests of the fifties became a breeding ground for protests against the Vietnam War.

My own “awakening” came when I went away to college in 1963. Very much a child of the fifties, I plunged into a totally different world on the campus of UC Berkeley. One morning, our political science grad student discussion leader showed up and expressed surprise that we showed up for class. He thought we should be out protesting. The thought to do so had never entered my mind.

If you’d like a deeper and broader dive, check out the eight-part miniseries, “The Fifties,” based on David Halberstam’s book by the same name. It aired in 1997 with CBS/NBC news anchor Roger Mudd as the primary host. “The Fifties” became one of the most viewed documentaries on The History Channel.

Happy Reading, Writing, Reminiscing and Connecting!

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