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Three pivotal phenomena changed the American cultural landscape in the mid-1950s. First, television established itself as the dominant communication medium of its time. Second, the first wave of the baby boom generation reached adolescence and the term “teenager” came into common usage.1 Before this time, people between the ages of twelve and twenty were recognized as an age group, but as the baby boomers came of age they gained a unique cultural identity and unprecedented influence. Third, rock ‘n’ roll emerged as a distinct form, a hybrid of several earlier streams of American music, including blues and rhythm ‘n’ blues (R&B) created primarily by African Americans; country and western swing created primarily by Whites, and other pop, jazz, folk, and spiritual influences. Rock ‘n’ roll was interdependent with the new teenage audience, but the relationship of both to television was problematic and sometimes adversarial.
The 1950s are often recalled and unfailingly portrayed as an era of innocence and bland conformity, tranquil suburbia, reassuring Dr. Spock, and the faceless efficiency of the Fordism economic model.2 The rapid growth of the middle class, near-full employment, and new leisure activities helped keep post-war anxieties at bay, but unease festered on a subterranean level. As Karl Mannheim put forward in the 1920s in his Theory of Generations, each generation is a sociological phenomenon unto itself, shaped by the historical conditions and events of its time (286–88). Historians frequently cite Mannheim as they identify fissures in the←9 | 10→ social cohesion forged in the crucibles of the Depression and World War II. Although there was a widespread sense of economic security and opportunity, the 1950s was also the era of Sputnik, the Cold War, McCarthyism, bomb shelters, polio epidemics, planned obsolescence, and a new kind of alienation that resulted from increased mechanization and bureaucratization.3
The 1950s also saw the impacts of the Great Migration, during which millions of African Americans move from the rural south to the industrial north and Midwest. While escaping the worst of overt Jim Crow oppression, urban Blacks were victims of red-lining and other forms of discrimination, leading to ghettoization and the formation of a permanent underclass. These conditions created tensions that galvanized the civil rights movement.
Similar restiveness could be detected in other quarters as well. Empowered by their labor and leadership on the home front during World War II and inspired by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Merriam, women were beginning to express dissatisfaction over their limited roles as housewives and mothers. And a group of iconoclastic writers who came to known as the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, created a romantic ideal out of wholesale rejection of mainstream values.4 The political aspects of this romanticism were not widely embraced in the 1950s, but the call of the open road, literally and metaphorically, began to resonate. These rumblings of discontent coincided with technologies that offered unprecedented possibilities for personal fulfillment, which crystallized for young people as a goal in and of itself for the first time in history. This energy would soon be expressed, and exponentially multiplied, by rock ‘n’ roll.
Despite creating considerable anxiety, however, the chinks in America’s social armor were seldom highlighted in the 1950s, certainly not in mainstream media. Middle class Americans were beginning to fall under the spell of television, with its steady diet of variety shows, situation comedies, and advertisements.5 One of the few visible ripples on the cultural waters was created by the popularity of comic books. Comics had evolved from newspaper strips into cheap youth-oriented magazines in the 1940s, published by maverick entrepreneurs amenable to themes and images with little other outlet beyond pulp paperback novels. The depictions of sex in these comics were tame by contemporary standards, but the juxtaposition of scantily clad women and wanton, often grisly violence, evoked howls of protest. Under pressure from Congress, a code of standards was developed by an organization calling itself the Comics Magazine Association of America, imposing what David Hajdu termed a “monument of self-imposed repression and prudery” (291). Mad Magazine adopted the sub←10 | 11→versive comic book sensibility, adding its own brand of iconoclastic satire to the mix, providing many baby boomers with their first taste of political analysis and irreverence, but sidestepping themes of horror and sex. As Hajdu indicates, the firestorm that erupted over comic books presaged the battle to come over rock ‘n’ roll. By the mid-1950s, television was luring teenagers away, but the upstart comic book publishers had created a business model for the independent record producers who would soon bring rock ‘n’ roll to the fore.
Although he did not coin the term “generation gap,”6 Bob Dylan’s 1963 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’” pitted the baby boomers against their parents in no uncertain terms (“your sons and daughters are beyond your command”). New world or old: one had to choose. But it was in the 1950s that nearly every question vexing society, from education and crime to economics and politics, was recast in generational terms. Even as the middle class migrated to suburbia to enjoy their yards and appliances, sociologists such as Paul Goodman saw something more troubling going on. He likened 1950s America to “a closed room with a rat race as the center of fascination, powerfully energized by fear of being outcasts” (234). The darker side of the 1950s may not have permeated mainstream culture, but it impacted those who lived through it, especially young people.
Adolescence
Before exploring the interplay of television and rock ‘n’ roll, it is important to identify the antagonists in this generational quarrel. On one side were the well-documented adults of “the greatest generation,” survivors of the Depression and victors in World War II. On the other side were their offspring, too busy enjoying unprecedented leisure time, social mobility, and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and the phonograph to appreciate how different their lives were than their parents’ had been.
For most of human history, children were looked upon simply as small people with limited competencies. The notion of childhood as a distinct phase developed in the Victorian nineteenth century, when the life cycle was viewed as being comprised of three stages: dependence, semi-dependence, and independence. But in 1904, psychologist G. Stanley Hall put forth a scientific definition of adolescence based on the process of physical maturation and the onset of puberty.7 Many of Hall’s methods and conclusions have since been questioned, but he focused attention on the unique condition of the teenage years before the term “teenager” existed. Erik Erikson and others would refine Hall’s data, identifying a set of←11 | 12→ characteristics unique to this age group, especially the crucial process of identity development.
A consensus now exists among sociologists, psychologists, and educators that childhood cannot be defined simply by chronology or biology. As Steven Mintz puts it, “childhood is not an unchanging biological stage of life but is, rather, a social and cultural construct that has changed radically over time” (viii). In each era, society adopts its own views and myths about children that inform the laws, policies, and mores that dictate how children are treated. This was certainly the case in the 1950s, when adolescence came to be viewed as a stressful period of acclimation to the responsibilities of adulthood. Developmental psychology, a relatively new concept at the time, suggested that stress from societal pressures and raging hormones served as a proximate cause of unsanctioned teenage behaviors, but many adults were afraid that the kids were out of control. This fear, projected onto and fuelled by the media, became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Joseph Kett places 1950s adolescence within the larger context of industrialization, identifying