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Reassessing the History of Postwar America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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In the american popular imagination, the 1950s and 1960s stand in stark juxtaposition. The conformity of the 1950s contrasts with the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Consumerism was undermined by the challenge of youthful antimaterialism. Repressed sexuality gave way to sexual liberation. Political centrism yielded to polarization. A homogeneous mass culture fragmented into balkanized cultures. Consensus broke down into irrepressible conflict. For conservatives, the 1950s serve as a symbolic “golden age,” an era that atavistic (and terribly forgetful) Americans evoke when pondering current economic, cultural, and social problems. For those on the Left, the 1950s remain the “dark ages” of repression, corporate domination, and racial and sexual subordination.

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Special Section: The Politics of Culture in Cold War America
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

1. Conservative writers are particularly fond of contrasting the 1950s and 1960s. For two of many influential evocations of the fifties and sixties from the Right, see Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984)Google Scholar; and Magnet, Myron, The Nightmare and the Dream: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993)Google Scholar. One of many Left critiques of the 1950s is Jezer, Marty, The Dark Ages: Life in the U.S., 1945–1960 (Boston: South End, 1983).Google Scholar

2. A wistful evocation of the 1950s can be found in Halberstam, David, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993)Google Scholar. The titles of some recent histories of the 1950s and 1960s are paticularly revealing: Diggins, John Patrick, The Proud Decades (New York: Norton, 1988)Google Scholar; O'Neill, William, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Oakley, J. Ronald, God's Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner, 1986)Google Scholar. Contrast with histories of the 1960s, such as Matusow, Allen, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; O'Neill, William L., Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971)Google Scholar; Morris, Charles R., A Time of Passion (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; and Blum, John Morton, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961–1974 (New York: Norton, 1991).Google Scholar

3. A perceptive review of recent scholarship on the 1950s that has influenced my thinking on this topic is Echols, Alice, “Fiftysomething,” Village Voice, 09 20, 1994, 8688Google Scholar. Other synthetic essays that attempt to complicate narratives of postwar America are Chafe, William, “Postwar American Society: Dissent and Social Reform,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey, Michael J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Warren Susman, with the assistance of Griffin, Edward, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1937.Google Scholar

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12. The best introduction to the range of activities of Left-led unions is Rosswurm, Steve, “An Overview and Assessment of the CIO's Expelled Unions,”Google Scholar in Rosswurm, S., CIO's Left-Led Unions, 117Google Scholar; Sugrue, Thomas J., “‘Forget About Your Inalienable Right to Work:’ Deindustrialization and Its Discontents at Ford, 1950–1953,” International Labor and Working-Class History 48 (Fall, 1995), 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schatz, , Electrical Workers, 167243.Google Scholar

13. Isserman, Maurice, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic, 1987)Google Scholar; Brown, Lloyd, Iron City (1952), reprinted with an introduction by Alan Wald (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Swados, Harvey, On the Line (1957), reprinted with an introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Denby, Charles, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal (1956; rept. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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15. Hartmann, Susan, “Woman's Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Meyerowitz, Joanne (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 84100Google Scholar. A sweeping survey of family and gender roles in the 20th Century, with particular attention to stereotypical depictions of the postwar family, is Coontz, Stephanie, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic, 1992)Google Scholar. Figures from Chafe, , “Postwar American Society,” 170.Google Scholar

16. Stern, Mark, “Poverty and Family Composition,”Google Scholar in Katz, , ‘UnderclassDebate, 236–38.Google Scholar

17. Bao, Xiaolan, “When Women Arrived: The Transformation of New York's Chinatown,”Google Scholar in Meyerowite, , Not June Cleaver, 1936Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Automobile Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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19. Brienes, Wini, “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,”Google Scholar in Meyerowitz, , Not June Cleaver, 399400Google Scholar; and Graebner, William, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

20. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Davis, Madeline, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Stein, Marc, “The City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: The Making of Lesbian and Gay Movements in Greater Philadelphia, 1948–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994)Google Scholar; Berube, Allan, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990)Google Scholar; D'Emilio, John, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1785Google Scholar; and D'Emilio, 's pathbreaking, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar

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23. Bailey, Beth, “Sexual Revolution(s),” in The Sixties from Memory to History, ed. Farber, David (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 235–62Google Scholar; and Solinger, Rickie, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (New York: Free Press, 1994).Google Scholar

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31. Hayden, Tom, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988)Google Scholar; Levy, Peter B., The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Buhle, Paul, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar A number of historians took up the theme of American exceptionalism, particularly the “new urban historians” who examined social mobility. See for example, Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, which discusses the themes of “social control” and the “politics of consensus” in its discussion of 19th-century Newburyport, Massachusetts. Illuminating are the essays in Laslett, John H. M. and Lipset, Seymour Martin, eds., The Failure of a Dream (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).Google Scholar

32. The most influential work on resistance and politics in this period is Lipsitz, George, Class and Culture in the Cold War: A Rainbow at Midnight, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).Google Scholar Some of the earliest revisionist essays, focusing particularly on popular culture, can be found in May, Recasting America, esp. chs. 1014.Google Scholar See also the important rethinking of gender and domesticity in the 1950s by contributors to Meyerowitz, , Not June CleaverGoogle Scholar; and the pathbreaking essays on infrapolitical resistance and oppositional popular culture in Kelley, Robin D. G., Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), esp. chs. 3 and 7.Google Scholar

33. Important steps in this direction are Griffith, Robert, “Forging America's Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman,”Google Scholar in Lacey, , Truman Presidency, 5788Google Scholar; and Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).Google Scholar

34. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loic J. D., An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1718.Google Scholar

35. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Uses of the ‘People’,” in In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Adamson, Matthew (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1990), 150–55.Google Scholar As Bourdieu has argued, “Resistance may be alienating and submission may be liberating. Such is the paradox of the dominated, and there is no way out of it” (155). See also Bourdieu, and Wacquant, , Introduction to Reflexive Sociology, 7983.Google Scholar

36. See Buhle, Paul, “The 1950s and the 1960s: Open and Hidden Relations,” Prospects 20 (1995):467–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar