As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, we are accustomed to think,
American life passed from a time of placidity to one of turbulence,
from complacency to dissent, from consensus to conflict, and from
behavioral conformity to the virtues or vices of individual
liberation. Some have celebrated this apparent transformation as a
necessary change, which helped undermine oppressive racial and
sexual hierarchies, challenge the unearned authority of experts,
and question the aura surrounding those holding social and
political power. Others, including even some critics of the order
of things in the Fifties, lament America’s subsequent
“unraveling,” due to the confusion and excess that accompanied
the erosion of strong foundations for social stability. Either
way—viewing the time as a “dark age” or “proud
decade”—historians and other observers have generally viewed
the 1950s as a period noteworthy for its holism. Things hung
together, before they fell apart. Over the past two
decades, however, historians have documented the variations and
unsettledness of experience, as well as persistent dissent and
agitation, that actually marked the 1950s in the United States,
despite the apparent unity and strength of “the American way of
life.” They have noted not only the depth of the growing black
freedom struggle and hints of women’s emancipation underlying the
seeming consensus on domesticity but also the presence of sexual
rebellion, pacifism, avant-garde aesthetics, and other forms of
nonconformity. Moreover, signs of fracture or strain appeared not
merely at the margins but in the mainstream of American life. In
her re-reading of Fifties women’s magazines, for instance, Joanne
Meyerowitz has shown how popular ideology operated in different
registers, celebrating domesticity at one moment and independent
women breaking into new fields of professional and public
distinction at another. We have now become accustomed to see
“mass culture,” often believed in that time to homogenize all
it touched, as a field in which different actors, different voices,
and divergent messages competed for attention. Even without
exaggerating the everyday presence of hidden “resistance” to
dominant paradigms, it has become much easier to see the midcentury
as a time, like others, in which tensions, inconsistency, and
uncertainty prevailed in the ways people made sense of their
experience. Nonetheless, this recent sensitivity to the
complexity of the 1950s cannot erase entirely that which set that
time (stretched in our view to span 1948 to 1963) apart from the
times before and after it. What was it exactly? Barriers and
hierarchies of race and sex were painfully, often brutally real,
prevailing alongside some new rhetoric of inclusion and harmony.
The growth of purchasing power in prosperous times—and its
unevenness—is well documented. The times witnessed the
exercise of US military might in the world at large and the
“mobilization” of civil society that accompanied it; from this
in particular followed a fairly widespread sense that silence or
stillness characterized public discourse, even though a few
“howled” against it. How do we reconcile the image and reality
of the decade as a time of repression with our new knowledge of how
much vitality and variousness also coursed through the period?
This book proposes that part of the answer lies in
recognizing the pre-eminence and pursuit of “centered” ways of
thought and imagination in that time, even as the record of
experience stubbornly eluded summation in a whole, ordered
existence. Intellectual life and cultural awareness (both
“popular” and “elite”) put a premium on grasping consensus,
coherence, theoretical foundations, ethical universals, and
wholeness in things (whether nations, persons, or bodies of
knowledge). In other words, American thought and culture in the
mid-twentieth century showed a penchant for making sense of things
in rounded terms, focused on durable points of orientation, or
centers of gravity. Moreover, this disposition held in fields far
from entirely “political” (i.e., in the uses of power, the
limits of opposition, or pressures to complicity). The urge to
determine or locate “centers,” foundations, universals, or
orienting norms prevailed across many registers of thought,
imagination, and practice. In At the Center, we will explore that
mode of perception and reflection as well as the varieties of
argument and expression that escaped inclusion within coherent
wholes.
Our unit of investigation is “the long Fifties”—a
span of time extending beyond the calendric markers of the decade,
from 1948 to 1963. The socialist writer and organizer Michael
Harrington once called 1948 “the last year of the 1930s,” in
part referring to the Henry Wallace campaign (and its electoral
debacle), the failure to repeal Taft Hartley, and the inability to
extend social welfare legislation. In the wake of that watershed,
American politics tended (despite the rightward lurch of
“McCarthyism” and the survival of a deep conservative current
thereafter) toward a decline in pitched battles over the key
elements of the New Deal state. Dwight Eisenhower’s emblematic
remark to his brother—that anyone who aimed to undo Social
Security and like protections was making a serious political
blunder—signaled that measure of consensus. At the same time,
although origins of the Cold War can be dated prior to 1948, that
year marked both its sudden crystallization and hardening abroad
and its institutionalization in national affairs. The other
boundary, the year 1963, identified with events such as the March
on Washington, the overthrow of Diem in South Vietnam, and the
assassination of John Kennedy, signaled a kind of disturbance that
would steadily undermine the assumption that centered perspectives
could adequately make sense of things. Although this book rejects
the old convention of a sharp, decisive break between “Fifties”
complacency and “Sixties” disruption, we also disclaim any
intention to depict the first as mere prelude to the second. Our
mid-century period bore characteristics that justify a historical
reconstruction of it as a distinctive time. Moreover, while
we cite political events to mark the time, we approach this period
in terms neither wholly political nor “depoliticized.” Apart
from explicitly governmental and partisan matters, politics may be
found in deep-lying and perhaps unvoiced sensitivities to war,
peace, order, conflict, change, security, and freedom—at levels
of experience both collective and personal. In this sense, politics
burdened, provoked, and haunted nearly all avenues of American
thought and culture in the long 1950s.
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