By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
American fiction, in the 1950s was completely different from that produced by American novelists in the 1930s. If one compares it with John Steinbeck’s work, his was the literature that dealt with people whose poverty was very real. They had pressing and urgent material things to worry about. The 1950s novels, however, were all about psychological anxieties and did not speak of the danger of going hungry. It was a different mood. It was the dissatisfied literature of success.
The Rise of a Corporate Personality
William White’s The Organization Man, published in 1956, focussed on the rise of the corporate personality, the man who values teamwork and cooperativeness and belongingness much more highly than individuality.
A marvelous film depiction of The Organization Man is a Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine film, The Apartment, which comes from the late 1950s to early 1960s. It shows Jack Lemmon working; one of hundreds of men working at identical desks. The view one gets of the corporation is of this awful anonymous place, echoing William White’s description of The Organization Man.
A Feeling of Monotony
A lot of fiction took up the same themes as well. In 1955, a bestseller was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It was about a stifled, unhappy businessman who’s certainly materially successful, but feels that the material success is turning to ashes, because he’s no longer fulfilled as an individual. He’s just become part of the rat race. His family is also losing its distinctiveness.
Similarly, John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window, from 1956, calls America “a homogeneous postwar hell of work, greed, and duplicated monotony”.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Subliminal Advertising
Intellectuals point out, that, in the 1950s it was advertising that was more and more shaping Americans’ view of themselves and their world. In 1957, Vance Packard produced The Hidden Persuaders. It was a study of motivational research by advertisers and the way in which they attempt subliminal advertising.
For example, they experimented in movies, with including a photograph of ice cream that would just be on the screen for a tenth of a second, too quick almost for your eye to pick it up consciously, but our subliminal mind would get the message that we wanted to have ice cream. Packard followed it up with a book called The Waste Makers in 1960, on the wastefulness of American packaging policy.
Spending Big Money on Advertising
The historian, David Potter, wrote an influential study of the American character called People of Plenty, in which he pointed out that in the America of the 1950s, far more money was being spent on advertising than was being spent on either education or religion.
In other words, if one compares where people get their ideas from—church, school, and the ads—most of the money going into those things is going into the ads, and that’s surely a deplorable state of affairs.
Fear of Juvenile Delinquency
Stories at the end of the Korean War showed that American prisoners of war—prisoners taken in Korea—had been very vulnerable to brainwashing. That is, they hadn’t had the inner psychological resources to resist the mental assault on them of their captors. This also seemed like further evidence of the decline of the internal gyroscope.
Parents, then, understandably worried about their children’s future in this complex world. One concern was concern about juvenile delinquency.
Movies from the 1950’s, like Rebel Without a Cause—one of the famous James Dean films—or Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, were about what’s going to happen when the youth become completely alienated from the demands of our society.
American Public Education
Another bestseller from that period was Why Johnny Can’t Read. Paul Goodman too wrote Growing Up Absurd, a book about what he thought of as the futility of modern education, saying, many of the challenges of manhood, which earlier generations of men had to pass through, have been denied to this generation.
They live too cocooned by comfort and luxury to be able to grow up properly. Was American public education good enough? Could it meet the era’s challenges?
Interestingly, it was the launch of the Soviet Sputnik that galvanized all these fears in 1957. It led to passage of the National Defense Education Act to strengthen scientific and technological training in American schools. It was, thus, a period of anxieties as well as an era of luxury.
Common Questions about American Literature and Mass Media in the 1950s
William White’s The Organization Man, published in 1956, focussed on the rise of the corporate personality, the man who values teamwork and cooperativeness and belongingness much more highly than individuality.
Intellectuals point out, that, in the 1950s, it was advertising that was more and more shaping Americans’ view of themselves and their world. In 1957, Vance Packard produced The Hidden Persuaders. It was a study of motivational research by advertisers and the way in which they attempt subliminal advertising.
Movies from the 1950s, like Rebel Without a Cause—one of the famous James Dean films—or Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, were about what’s going to happen when the youth become completely alienated from the demands of our society.
