For all these reasons, adolescents became more isolated from other generations in the 1950s. Teenagers’ primary orientation to the family unit, previously reinforced by economic necessities, was weakened and supplanted primarily by the school. After conducting the most comprehensive survey of adolescents undertaken to that time, James S. Coleman wrote in 1961 that the child is
cut off from the rest of society, forced inward toward his own age group…he comes to constitute a small society, one that has most of its important interactions within itself…In our modern world of mass communication and rapid diffusion of ideas and knowledge, it is hard to realize that separate subcultures can exist right under the very noses of adults—subcultures with languages all their own, with special symbols, and, most importantly, with value systems that may differ from adults (3).←12 | 13→
Coleman points to the importance of the high school as the most significant site for the transmission and development of youth culture in the 1950s. If rock ‘n’ roll and television were the primary tribalizing influences, high school was the locale where teenagers processed the new information and formulated their individual and collective responses. While high school had been an important part of young life for most of the twentieth century, the social dynamics underwent a seismic change in the 1950s. High school populations increased significantly in that decade due to the baby boom and a reduction in truancy, the latter a reflection of both greater enforcement of compulsory education laws and a greater public appreciation for the civic and economic advantages afforded by matriculation. Among minority groups, especially Blacks and immigrants, education was firmly established as a means of upward social mobility.
Not only were there more high school students in the 1950s, but an almost wholly new activity rapidly moved to the center of their social universe: dating. Where most after-school activities had previously been designed for groups, and were often chaperoned, in the 1950s dating became an entrenched ritual that was almost exclusively engaged by couples, contributing to a hothouse environment that revolved around constant romantic positioning and negotiation. Although Seventeen Magazine was founded earlier (1944), it helped inculcate many teenage girls in the middle-class self-absorption of high school life in the 1950s. Along with dating came a greater emphasis on maturity symbols such as smoking, drinking, and, in the suburbs, driving. Not only was there an intensification of the pressure to be “popular,” but an increased need for larger allowances to pay for movies, meals, and gas. If 1950s rock ‘n’ roll both reflected and fomented the possibility of youth emancipation and transformation, high school was the locale where the youth culture was expressed, tested, and affirmed.
Although it has been exaggerated (and remains an issue of contention in contemporary culture wars), there was also a trend towards permissiveness on the part of parents and educators in the 1950s. This shift from religious-based and restrictive responses to child behavior to a more liberal and science-based framework was influenced by the mainstreaming of Freudian psychology and John Dewey’s ideas regarding the value of personal experience in learning. In the 1950s, greater freedom of expression began to be considered not only salutary but humane.
As adolescents were recognized as a distinct social group, the word “teenager” entered the lexicon, and what would become “the norms of modern childhood” were established (Mintz 3). This recognition was a mixed blessing for adolescents. On one hand, parents and psychologists better understood the unique emotional←13 | 14→ and psychological aspects of this age group, but teens were effectively segregated from the world of adults, looked upon as prisoners of their own hormones, and defined by risk-taking, exhibitionism, and other anti-social behaviors. This broad-brush diagnosis was seized upon by many in the cultural mainstream as the source of broader societal problems, and teens were often scapegoated. Janet Finn’s longitudinal study of the human services shows how behaviors that had previously been perceived as within the range of normal for adolescents came to be pathologized (167–191). And Thomas Hine describes the rise of the juvenile court movement that began to treat “youth crime as a problem of personal development rather than as a transgression against society” (70). Teenagers didn’t have problems, they were the problem.
The disaffection and disapproval of young people was also reflected in the arts. In literature, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) exposed teenage angst and alienation as social issues, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) gave expression to the view that young people were infected with all the dark aspects of (adult) human nature.8 But anti-youth sentiment and parental paranoia were projected most vividly in film, notably in a series of “teenpics” from American International Pictures such as Hot Rod Gang and High School Hellcats. To make matters worse, the teen menace came to be personified in popular films featuring Marlon Brando and James Dean. Their characters in the movies The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1954), respectively, were alarming to adults, for whom adolescence was becoming nearly synonymous with juvenile delinquency.9 When Brando’s character in The Wild One is asked, “What do you rebel against?” he responds, “What have you got?” To older viewers, this exchange perfectly encapsulated the alarming combination of negativity and irrationality they associated with teenagers. Predictably, the more volatile and negative the reaction to these black leather-clad hoodlums, the more young people identified with them. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, “…despite all the developmental psychology and high school ‘life adjustment’ texts, maturity just wasn’t sexy” (57). The defiant Brando and the wounded Dean were. But more than literature or film, rock ‘n’ roll became the defining feature of adolescence.←14 | 15→
Figure 1.1: Marlon Brando, as an endearing delinquent in the 1953 film The Wild One.
Source: The Wild One. Directed by László Benedek. Stanley Kramer Productions, 1953. Amazon Prime Video. https://www.amazon.com/Wild-One-Marlon-Brando/dp/B001NQ31S8
It is worth noting that, although much alarm was raised in the 1950s about the impact of rock ‘n’ roll on the values and behaviors of young people, the factual basis for such broad concern remains strictly anecdotal. James Leming, an authority in the field of moral education, surveyed the research on the relationship between rock music and youth socialization and concluded that “one searches in vain for evidence that rock ‘n’ roll has had any influence on the values or social behavior of youth” (364). Although his survey was conducted in the 1980s, subsequent attempts to establish a cause-and-effect between popular music of any genre and anti-social conduct have also failed. Perhaps the most significant impact of rock ‘n’ roll on adolescents in the 1950s (and beyond) was that it gave them their first inkling of the possibility of forging a collective identity apart from the mainstream.
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Robert Albrecht asks us to consider music as a form of energy, a “gestalt of sensory perceptions and experiences, physically felt and emotionally embedded from head to toe” (4). He theorizes that music was a precursor to language. In this view, what←15 | 16→ began as a simple mimicking of sounds in nature evolved over time into a more complex set of utterances, allowing for increasingly sophisticated interlocutions. Music differs from other art forms in that it is immaterial. It can be translated into a concrete form of written notation, but loses its sonic properties in the process. Except in the human memory (and, one could argue, in the form of echo), music exists solely in