from Atomic Narratives and American Youth

Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945–55

Michael Scheibach

The epilogue from Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945–55, this piece connects the threads that Michael Scheibach examined in his 2003 work on the effects of the atomic age on America’s youth.

Epilogue: 1955

We’re gonna rock, rock, rock… .

—Bill Haley and His Comets

By 1955, more than 30 million families tuned in each evening to watch game shows and situation comedies, original dramas and adaptations, news updates and lighthearted fare for the entire family. Television not only entertained an ever-expanding audience and reflected the country’s hopes and fears; it also began to alter the social landscape—to shape a more mainstream society while heightening awareness of America’s blemishes.

In May of that year, Americans received the news that the Supreme Court had finally issued its instructions in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, desegregation case heard the previous year. Justice Earl Warren ordered the district court to take “deliberate speed” in its efforts to implement the landmark ruling on the integration of public schools. That December, Rosa Parks sparked a bus boycott in Birmingham, Alabama, placing the plight of Southern blacks in the national limelight, this time aided by television, and introducing a young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., to a national audience. The exigency for racial harmony, a theme often encountered in postwar atomic narratives, had been acted upon.¹

Atomic survival, yet another theme, had become an everyday dimension of American life. Schools and communities conducted civil-defense drills on a regular basis, and the federal government did its part by sponsoring the annual Operation Alert. A girl graduating from high school in 1955 wrote, “[L]iving has been a difficult and insecure thing; at worst, an insurmountable wall of bewilderment and frustration…we’ve never lived a minute of our lives without war or the threat of war.”² A senior boy wrote the same year, “We of today’s graduating class are on the threshold of a new world. It is a world of possible destruction. It is also, we hope, a world of peace.”³ Remembers sociologist Todd Gitlin, president of SDS* in the early 1960s: “For us, the future was necessarily more salient than the past. The Bomb threatened that future, and therefore undermined the ground on which affluence was built. Rather than feel grateful for the Bomb, we felt menaced. The Bomb was the shadow hanging over all human endeavor. It threatened all the prizes.”⁴

Self-reliance became synonymous with self-preservation, as Americans built bomb shelters at an explosive rate. Film historian Andrew Dowdy, nineteen years old in 1955, remembers, “Some of us were going underground, immediately and literally, digging in from bomb shelter instructions available in two-dollar booklets.” But the ability to withstand the force of a hydrogen bomb was questionable at best, which led Time magazine to ask in June 1955 whether the best defense against the bomb was prayer. Not long after, the prayer was seemingly answered for many youth as the new Mad magazine, which had evolved from comic-book status to a 25-cent, bimonthly compendium of social satire, adopted the “What, Me Worry?” kid as its official mascot. Alfred E. Neuman, as the kid would later be known, became America’s quintessential fatalistic youth—and future “new man.” A poll taken the previous year by the American Institute of Public Opinion, in fact, found that 95 percent of respondents would not move to escape a hydrogen bomb, even though most believed one would be used against the United States. Why worry?⁵

5

On October 13, 1955, the young stalwarts of the Beat Generation—Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—gathered at San Francisco’s Six Gallery to hear poet Allen Ginsberg read his new work, “Howl.” Ginsberg, articulating the viewpoint of postwar rebels without a cause, lamented, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night /…who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,…” The voice of youth beat down by the finality of the atomic bomb was being heard.⁶

In 1954, Cashbox commented that white high school and college students in the South—largely “youthful hillbilly fans rather than the pop bobbysoxers”—were frantically buying rhythm-and-blues songs. White youth had been listening and dancing to black R&B for several years, assisted by disc jockeys like Cleveland’s Alan Freed. But when Billboard proclaimed in a banner headline, “1955—THE YEAR R&B TOOK OVER POP FIELD,” it marked the final explosion of rock ’n’ roll—the fusing of black R&B and white rockabilly that crossed geographic, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries. This also was the year “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets became the first rock ’n’ roll record to hit number one on Billboard’s pop chart.⁷ Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, and many others followed quickly: black and white performers covering the same tunes for the same audiences.

The deaths of actor James Dean and bop jazz improviser Charlie Parker occurred in 1955: one setting the style for white youth; the other setting the tone for African American youth. And R&B singer Johnny Ace took his life just a few days before 1955 began. That year saw the release of Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle, movies that created the young rebel as an icon fighting against a hostile, uncaring society. At the same time, teen-oriented radio and television programs, like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Philadelphia, were being joined by new magazines aimed at the burgeoning youth culture: Hep Cats, Teenager, Teen-Age Confessions, Teenage Rock and Roll Review, Teen Digest, ’Teen, Dig, and Modern Teen.⁸

By the mid-1950s, youth had solidified its place—its role—in society. “Youth culture,” historian W. T. Llamon, Jr., has written, “became largely the main culture; it became the atmosphere of American life.”⁹ This largely high-school–based, adolescent culture had taken form replete with a unique style and attitude. In the years that followed, this culture ultimately created its own social narrative to be interpreted by those coming of age in the 1960s, a new era of uncertainty.

Notes

1. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990) 32–33; Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1991).

2. Elizabeth Evans, “In Defense of My Generation,” Journal of the National Education Association 44 (March 1955): 140.

3. Robert Piper, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” American Mercury 81 (August 1955): 82–84.

4. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987) 22–23.

5. Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1975) 60; “Civil Defense: Best Defense? Prayer,” Time, 27 June 1955: 17; Maria Reidelbach, Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991) 32, 136–140; Allan Winkler, Life Under a Cloud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 5.

6. Barry Miles, Ginsberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) 195–197; Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1956).

7. Rock ’n’ roll did not magically appear in 1955, far from it. As Nick Tosches has discussed in his book, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years Before Elvis (New York: Harmony Books, 1984), white and black teenagers were listening to the sounds of rock ’n’ roll in the early 1950s, primarily on the jukebox and records. But it was not until 1955, with the emergence of Top 40 radio, transistors, 45-rpm records, a well-defined youth culture, and the recognition of the youth consumer market, that this music began to cross white and black boundaries. Also see Tom McCourt, “Bright Lights, Big City: A Brief History of Rhythm and Blues 1945–1957,” in Timothy E. Scheurer, editor, The Age of Rock (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989) 46–62; Michael Bane, White Boy Singin’ the Blues: The Black Roots of White Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982); N. K. Cohn, Rock: From the Beginning (New York: Stein & Day, 1969); and Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970).

8. New Serial Titles 1950–1970 (Washington, D.C.: R.R. Bowker Co., 1973). For more on media and youth, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

9. Lhamon, Deliberate Speed, 8.

(2003)