AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light , North Carolina.
Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City , Harper Collins.
Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare , Oxford.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society , Mariner Books.
Allen Ginsberg, Howl , City Lights Books.
David Halberstam, The Fifties , Fawcett.
Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew , Chicago.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road , Penguin.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound , Basic Books.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita , Vintage.
Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community , ICS Press.
Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age , Wesleyan.
David Riesman, Abundance for What? , Transaction Publishers.
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd , Yale.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center , Transaction Publishers.
Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War , Johns Hopkins.

Note: Not all of these books will be required for all students. In several instances (e.g., Lolita and On the Road ) students will asked to choose between two different texts for their reading. We will be finalizing these assignments in the first or second week of classes.

Let me begin with a proposition, one that we can profitably spend much of the semester examining, confirming, and denying: The Fifties were arguably the first years of "our" times, the years in which we see the full-blown emergence of a new way of life, one that seems recognizably similar to our own today---similar in a way that the America of the 1890s, or even the 1930s, does not. It was a way of life built around the phenomena of mass production, mass consumption, mass s, suburbanization, universal automotive transportation, a growing service sector, large bureaucratic corporate organizations, expanding and activist government---all phenomena so utterly familiar to us today as to be commonplace. Perhaps that very familiarity has made it difficult for us to make sense of those years past, and harder still to do justice to them. For if there are ways that the Fifties seem very close to us, there are just as many ways---in the texture of social life, particularly with regard to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and public morality---in which they now appear as remote as the Victorian age. Indeed, we often speak of the Fifties, whether nostalgically or contemptuously, as a vanished time. But nostalgia and contempt are both powerful emotions. Is the presence of so much affect whenever we speak of the Fifties perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that those decades remain alive for us, and yet a puzzle for us---a part of the unvanished and unvanquished past?

So how then are we to make sense of these paradoxes and dualities in the Fifties? Is it possible to formulate an adequate characterization of American culture in those years? And if so, how would one go about doing it? Or does the concept of culture imply a degree of homogeneity that simply did not, and does not, exist in a modern liberal society? Such are some of the central concerns that will be motivating the work of this semester.

It is perhaps a good measure of the difficulty of our task that the extant historical writing on the Fifties (or more generally, the post-World War II era) so often resorts to the most tortured and ambivalent formulae to describe the subject. One fairly typical account has compared the Fifties to a "troubled feast," a period of simultaneous prosperity and anxiety, of carefree and affluent "happy days" coming in tandem with pervasive fear, of an intense quest for individual freedom coexisting with the questionable comforts of stifling conformity. But does such formulations really help us to get at the essential character of those years? Or are they merely clever if improbable combinations of words that cloak the fact that we don't really know what inner forces held the culture together in those years? Can we come up with any better metaphors than a Rolaids-inducing vision of a "troubled feast"?

It also is commonplace to contrast "the Fifties" with "the Sixties," a move favored both by admirers and detractors of that latter decade's political and cultural experimentalism and upheaval. Such thinking is driven by generational rivalries, and by the rather widespread convention that we ought to assign a distinct "character" to each decade of American history. But this is a way of thinking about history that we ought to be cautious about endorsing. It often leads one to overstress superficialities and ephemera, in preference to the broad continuities and slowly unfolding meanings that are the distinctive mark of a truly historical understanding of the past. For our purposes, it will be important to ask ourselves: in what ways did the Fifties mark a genuine departure from the years that preceded them? And in what ways did they represent the extension of ongoing trends in society, economy, culture, and politics? And, perhaps most interesting of all, to what extent does the tendency to contrast the Fifties with the Sixties conceal the seamless continuities that link the two decades---the extent to which the Sixties were "fed" by the Fifties?

We also will want to be aware of the ways in which understandings of the recent past have evolved over the past half-century. Have the perspectives brought by the passage of time, and by the most recent scholarship, tend to confirm or deny our previous understanding of these important years? What effect does the end of the Cold War, which some have argued marked the end of a "short" twentieth century (from 1917 to 1989), have upon our relationship to the Fifties, years in which considerations of the Cold War were never far from people's minds? The end of the Cold War perhaps allows us to answer, better than we could have before, the question of just how pervasive the Cold War's effects on American culture were. What were the characteristic intellectual and ideological formulations that arose with the Cold War? To what extent are these formulations still valid today, and to what extent have they been superseded?

This seminar course will explore these and other questions, through the reading and discussion of a wide variety of works, both primary and secondary, dealing with such issues as foreign policy, the Cold War, suburbia, the rise of social criticism, modern art, Beat poetry, the "new conservatism," the automobile, consumerism, race relations, family life, white-collar work, religion, advertising, and popular culture. The class, being a seminar, will primarily consist of relatively free discussion, which will take its bearing from the papers that students will write in preparation for each class session.

There will be no examinations in this course. Instead, students will be required to write a weekly paper of 5 pages or so, dealing with some aspect of the reading material assigned for that day. In general, students should strive to produce papers that are interpretive or critical, rather than being mere summations or reports. Because we will be using these papers as a starting place for much of our seminar discussion, students should come to class prepared to read their papers aloud. I will be describing the papers in greater detail during our first class meeting.

It is futile to use a mathematical formula to determine a final grade in a course like this one. For one thing, there is simply no way that I can adequately recognize the varying strengths and weaknesses of particular students if I am bound to a rigid formula. It is often the case that the best writers are among the poorest oral discussants, and vice versa. A reasonable and flexible grading system, which gives the instructor maximum latitude, will be able to accommodate this fact. However, students should be aware that, in rough terms, I weigh their writing and their contributions to seminar discussions approximately equally.

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