How the Fifties Became the Sixties: A Response

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 11 is almost as if Blanche DuBois had somehow married into the family of Willy Loman. In straightening out the husband that Tennessee Williams gave her, Kazan's film adaptation entwined the special ideological inflections of the 1950s—and inadvertendy disclosed why such impulses could not last. StephenJ. Whitfieldholds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilisation at Brandeis University. Among his many works on 20th-century America are The Culture of the Cold War, rev. ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and In Search of American Jewish Culture (University Press of New Engknd , 1999). Robert Lowell, "Memories of West Street and Lepke" and "Inauguration Day: January 1953," in Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 187, 117; Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Doubleday, 1979), 81. Quoted inJonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (University of California Press, 2004), 68; Louis Ginsberg to Allen Ginsberg, December 12, 1955, in Allen and Louis Ginsberg, Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and a Son, ed. Michael Schumacher (St. Martin's, 2001), 32. 3 Quoted in Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, 1994), 327. ' Norman Mailer, The PresidentialPapers of Norman Mailer (Bantam , 1964), 38, 43, and "The White Negro" (1957), in AdvertisementsforMyself (GV. Putnam's Sons, 1959), 356. s Hilary Mills, Mailer: A Biography (Empire Books, 1982), 290, 291. ' Mailer, "White Negro," 347; Eldridge Cleaver, Soulon Ice (McGraw -Hill, 1968), 13, 14. ' Wilfrid Sheed, "Norman Mailer: Genius or Nothing" (1971), in The MorningAfter: Essays and Reviews (Warner Paperback Library, 1972), 39. ' Leonard Bernstein, "American Musical Comedy" (1956), in The Joy of Music (Simon & Schuster, 1959), 172. ' Stephen Sondheim, "America" (1957), in Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, eds., Reading Lyrics (Pantheon, 2000), 587. m Richard Ben Kramer,Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Simon and Schuster, 2000), 358. " C. Wright Mills, White Collar: TheAmerican Middle Classes (Oxford University Press, 1951), 328. 1! Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), 21. " Youth in Turmoil CTime-Life Books, 1969), 15-16, 19, 37; Gitlin, The Sixties, 344. James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: CreatingAmerican Television, 1948-1961 Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 135-36. 15 Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam WarRememberedfrom AllSides (Viking, 2003), 343. Lionel Trilling, The LiberalImagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Viking, 1950), 261n. 17 Malcolm X, "At the Audubon" (1964) and "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches andStatements, ed. George Breitman (Grove Press, 1965), 128, 36. Tennessee Williams, A StreetcarNamedDesire (Signet, 1974 [1947]), 95; Steven Cohan, MaskedMen: Masculinity andthe Movies in the Fifties (Indiana University Press, 1997), 254-55. How the Fifties Became the Sixties: A Response Terry H. Anderson Stephen Whitfield is to be applauded for tracing the literary and cultural Fifties origins of the Sixties, and he is correct when he states that the first era became the second because the "discrepancy between the official or popular culture and the realities on the ground could no longer be disguised ." This is particularly true of the civil rights movement, for as one activist stated in 1960, the sit-ins were a "mass vomit against the hypocrisy of segregation ." Moreover, a new generation of activists had been raised in Cold War America. The Fifties were an unusually patriotic era in which teachers had baby boomers begin the school day with the Pledge of Allegiance, "with liberty and justice for all," and then students memorized the words of the Constitution, "We the People ," and the Declaration of Independence, "All Men Are Created Equal." Yet when some of those students later marched in the South, they quickly realized that such words rang hollow. "The whole country was trapped in a lie," said Casey Hayden. "We were told about equality but we discovered it didn't exist." Congress of Racial Equality march in memory of those killed in Birmingham bomb ings. Photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran, September 22, 1963. Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-U9-10515-6A]. There also were three technological developments that influenced the Fifties and led to...