No decade of the recent American past is more distorted by popular culture than the 1950s. Commonly depicted as a time of complacent tranquility and rigid conformity, American life was instead unsettled and often contentious. Much of the turmoil was linked to the rise of a youth culture of unprecedented scope and importance – one that catered to the “teenager,” a term invented in the 1950s to capture a stage of late adolescence between the dependency of childhood and the responsibility of adult life. The dynamics of the emerging youth culture often reinforced messages of conformity, but just as often they did not, and the emotions and expressiveness unleashed by rock ‘n’ roll music or adolescent pop movies could not always be monitored or checked by authority. During the same time, the modern black freedom movement engaged in struggles that echoed elements of the power dialectic of youth culture. Mobilizing well-accepted notions of American life, civil rights leaders argued on behalf of enfranchisement or consumption opportunities for African Americans, even ones as seemingly banal as enjoying a drink at a soda fountain. Thus, while the dominant cultural script of American values survived the decade intact, its narration and particular applications changed – at times, radically so.

Not to be overlooked in a more careful assessment of the 1950s are the many tensions and transformations that were present within white middle-class America. While disaffected outsiders challenged dominant social norms, these norms also imposed hardships and entailed power negotiations among even those who subscribed to them. The familiar appearance of 1950s harmony projected in celebrated images of female domesticity masked, and to some extent helped mollify, concerns about the large numbers of married women entering the workforce. Similarly deceptive is the story of the “organization man,” or male breadwinner, commonly supposed to have led a charmed life in the decade, but who in fact was tasked with new emotional responsibilities at home and professional obligations at work. Historian Alan Petigny refers to these subtle contests during the 1950s as a “subversive consensus”: an outward projection of conformity, but one that relied upon a reworked hierarchy of roles or understanding.