At the Center

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...