Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture

Children of Empire

Denis Jonnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317649472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society.

This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

1
Introduction

“An Unprecedented Recession from Adult Life”

Writing in 1968, at the peak of the “explosion of youthful unrest” which convulsed the US and much of the industrial world in the nineteen-sixties, the American social-psychologist Hans Sebald predicted what he called “an unprecedented recession from adult life” would be “the distinguishing mark future historians of Western civilization would assign the last decades of the twentieth century” (1). Struck by the “vast number of young Americans” caught up in the revolts of the sixties and the “astounding intensity” and “ferocity” of the youth “subculture,” Sebald was persuaded American youth had “evolved into a new class of native aliens” (4). This view and variants of it were not uncommon at the time. The educational theorist Edgar Z. Friedenberg would compare the young to “natives of a primitive tribe,” and advised teachers and counselors to approach their tasks like “anthropologists or missionaries sympathetic and understanding toward the people they are sent to work with” but whose fundamental objective was “to wean the young from savagery” (4). In a 1969 tract for Harper’s, essayist John Aldridge expressed alarm at a “new mutation in facial and body types which has made the very persons (of American youth) structurally and physiognomically different from our own.” Youth had metamorphosed into a new “species”—the antithesis of a physical type “represented by the early Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper” who seemed “like last survivors of some extinct superrace” (xv). Even those supportive of dissident youth were not immune to a rhetoric which characterized the young as primitive, alien, unassimilable other. Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, the groundbreaking study on continuing poverty in Appalachia and an outspoken supporter of the student antiwar movement, would announce that youth were on “the eve of psychic mutations” (51). For social historian Theodore Roszak the new youth culture resembled a “barbaric intrusion… an invasion of centaurs” (43). Indeed, as Richard Flacks, a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society, observed in his 1971 account of the sixties, youth were quick to embrace their status as something other-than-human and reveled in their incarnation as “freaks of nature” (53).

If some took these developments to be harbingers of civilization in decline—Ihab Hassan lamented that “radical change [in] the human form, including human desire and its external representations” meant that “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end” (qtd. Melley 201)— others were more sanguine in their assessments. For T. Allen Lambert the sixties were an auspicious moment, one in which “a fundamentally new kind of history and consciousness” had been inaugurated (17). For the sociologist Leon Sheleff, “there had never before been a generation so destined to bring about a deep-seated transformation in society” (4). J. Seeley discerned in the new youth culture “the beginning of a transformation analogous to the Renaissance or Reformation” (qtd. Bengtson 16). In a 1967 symposium organized by The San Francisco Oracle, Gary Snyder, poet, Zen practitioner and Beat collaborator, would tell fellow panelists Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts: “We’ve turned a corner. It’s a bigger corner than the Reformation… It’s a corner on the order of the change between Paleolithic and Neolithic. It’s like one of the three or four major turns in the history of man—not just culture—but man” (Ginsberg 170).

The changes were—or seemed—momentous. Writing as the student-led antiwar movement was mobilizing youth by the hundreds of thousands and a dissident youth culture was rejecting the work/marriage/family ethic of the postwar years, Benjamin De Mott announced that a “cultural revolution” was sweeping the nation; a “major change” had “occurred to the inner landscape of time” and young people were embracing “a wholly new sense of personal possibility” (106). If, in Kenneth Keniston’s view, American youth now looked to the future as “open… fluid… indeterminate,” what was most real was that which was waiting to be imagined, called forth, created (Young Radicals 41). It was a time of revelations, personal epiphanies and rebirth, in which all realms of experience—work, community, personal relations—were thrown open to question and critique, and reconceived in accord with new ideals of self and solidarity. Whereas traditional signposts still pointed the way to “security” and “success”—college, career, marriage—ever fewer seemed inclined to follow. Familial expectation, societal norm and the lure of career and a steady income had lost their power to compel, and there was engendered a visionary sense of personal, cultural and political transformation. As Tom Hayden writes in his memoir about growing up in the fifties and early sixties, the young were “propelled by a force that made all things seem possible” (xvi). Moving onto uncharted terrain, youth were caught up in a mystique of personal quests, new frontiers, as-yet-to-be-discovered realms, a world to be transformed. Timothy Leary, the Harvard University psychologist cum countercultural guru, conjured up images of youth as “spiritual voyagers furthering the most ancient, noble quest of man” (O’Brien 59), America’s young “utopian pioneers” advancing into “a world that lies beyond” (Roszak 66).

However one chooses to view the rise of an oppositional youth culture or its impact on American society—as initiating long overdue social and political change, or fuelling a “struggle between two apocalyptic politics that each saw the other as hellbent on the country’s annihilation” (Packer 51)—the emergence of youth as political and cultural force marked a fateful rupture in the life of a nation political scientists, sociologists, economists and other observers writing from the end of the Second World War into the early sixties had characterized as the strongest, wealthiest, most technologically advanced in the world. Building on the triumph of the Second World War, and all that war and victory over the Axis powers signified in terms of America’s global influence, industrial might and its political ideals, Americans had become the privileged beneficiaries of a standard of living and way of life the rest of the world could only look upon with envy. Against the backdrop of the country’s extraordinary success and the pride Americans could take in their country’s achievements—confronting and defeating the Axis powers, a booming economy, rapidly expanding educational and vocational opportunities offered to those of all social strata, the personal freedoms Americans enjoyed—the rise of a radical youth movement and the eruption of violent protests across the nation would leave many perplexed and groping for explanations. Why had white, educated, middle-class youth turned in such numbers and with such virulence against a society and the institutions—government, business, schools—which had offered the American people unsurpassed opportunity and unprecedented freedoms? If even the keenest observers were caught off guard by the fervor of the new militants—for Keniston, writing in 1968, the “upsurge of dissent among American college students was one of the more puzzling phenomenon in recent American history” (Young Radicals 247)—there was, nonetheless, no dearth of speculation as psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and the young themselves weighed in with an array of hypotheses to explain the rise of a dissident youth culture. Indeed, beginning with the first response by American psychologists and social scientists to the “juvenile delinquents,” “deviant” youth and teen “rebels” of the late forties and early fifties, there had been a steady stream of conjecture to explain what struck many as ever more overtly expressed antisocial behavior—whether sullen displays of apathy, militant alienation or open defiance—among of key segments of the young. How were “disaffected” or “maladjusted” or outright “dissident” youth to be understood, given the country’s affluence, the expansion of education and vocational opportunities, America’s commitment to upholding freedom? Why would youth—the “juvenile,” the “adolescent,” the “teenager”—come to be perceived by many at this historical juncture as a threat to social and political stability, a problem the causes of which needed to be identified, analyzed, addressed?

Observers, both those witness to events at the time, as well as social historians, cultural studies specialists and literary critics writing in the decades following the upheaval of the sixties, would adduce any number of factors in their accounts of the social and political forces shaping the behavior of postwar youth. The issues addressed and explored range from what were perceived as the broadest of social and economic forces shaping personal and social life in the postwar years to influences on the behavior and forms of expression specific to American youth—beginning with what was perhaps the most salient: the sheer scale of the economic and demographic change ushered in by the Second World War, change which would accelerate with war’s end and the outbreak of the Cold War. Eager for a return to some form of “normal” life, millions of veterans would enter colleges or receive vocational training, and would go on in unprecedented numbers to find jobs, get married, buy homes and start families. The baby boom which followed in the war’s wake underscored the eagerness of American servicemen and their brides to put the war behind them, and seemed to affirm broad faith in the country and its future. Despite fears that demobilization and cutbacks in defense spending would precipitate a new depression, the wartime savings accumulated by military personnel and the millions of men and women who had worked in the nation’s vast defense plants contributed to a surge in demand for housing, automobiles and a variety of durables—clothing, home furnishings, electric appliances, luxury items of all kinds—which had been subject to wartime rationing. Given a rapidly expanding economy and the aspirations of couples eager to provide homes for themselves and their children, American society would become, as commentators at the time were quick to note, ever more consumer- and leisure-oriented, with a burgeoning population of children placed at the center of personal and family life. Buoyed by a renewed sense of promise and opportunity, young parents sought to provide a supportive home environment for their children, to instill “positive feelings for life,” and to encourage their sons and daughters to develop into “sociable, secure” members of society. American children were growing up in what Steven Mintz has dubbed a “filiarchy,” and by the early fifties, the young had come to dominate the lives of vast segments of the American population (279–282). Living in a society which went to considerable lengths to cater to their needs and ensure their well-being—a society which “projected the belief that (American) youngsters and teenagers would achieve more and have greater opportunities than any generation before them” (Holt 17)—postwar youth would come, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, to perceive themselves as occupying an especially privileged place in the world into which they were born.

As the baby boom cohort advanced into adolescence, the postwar image of the “teenager” would be built up and promoted by Madison Avenue and magazine publishers eager to cash in on the growing purchasing power of the young. In the headlong rush to boost consumption, American business identified the adolescent as a distinct market demographic and tailored a range of products to suit their tastes. An article in Business Week acknowledged that “ ‘the teen years are a time of experiment,’ but it made clear that ‘Trying on new fashions, music, TV shows and movies, products is what being a teen is all about’ ” (qtd. Palladino xii). Wini Breines writes of postwar youth “imbibing the great American celebration in their milk, orange juice, television programs, Memorial Day parades, and Life and Seventeen magazine” (5). As American business boosted demand for youth-oriented apparel, cosmetics, for portable record players and transistor radios, for the latest 45s, the newest teen pics and the fan magazines that lined the shelves of the drugstores and supermarkets in the suburban shopping centers going up all over America, they contributed to a sense among adolescents that they were “the social and economic stars of the [postwar] boom” (Breines 144–145).

But if the demographics of the era and postwar prosperity might have persuaded America’s young they were living in a society that went out of its way to cater to their needs, the steady rise in GNP and standard of living also fuelled new and constantly rising expectations—for more education, better jobs, higher incomes, increased leisure, improved social status. As Paul Light would note in a late eighties assessment of the baby boom (he included those born between 1946 and the early sixties), postwar youth were subject to a host of demands and pressures largely unknown to their parents. The corollary of rapidly increasing numbers of young and expanding high school enrollments—in what would become for some observers another key cluster of concerns—was increased competition for places in colleges, for scholarships and subsequently for the jobs and rewards which the postwar boom so plentifully bestowed on the parental generation. Light contended that as baby boomers jostled for a stake in the “good life,” growing up in postwar America was not necessarily all smooth sailing. Referring to what in the eyes of many had appeared to be a widening “generation gap,” Light noted “it was not between the young and old. It was between the many and the few. It was between the large generation of the boom, painfully swollen with its numbers and trying to find its place in the world, and the small generation in power which was just as firmly resisting.” If the young confronted a growing number of obstacles, it was not in his account “with parents but with a society that could not accommodate them” (27). Bruno Bettelheim would argue that even as ever larger numbers of America’s youth were receiving college educations, traditional “liberal arts courses” no longer provided students with the knowledge required in the postwar economy: “young people understand that, despite or because of their liberal education, they are becoming obsolete in a technological economy. Trained as ‘gentlemen’ in an age that needs technicians, they become ‘derelict from progress’ ” (qtd. Harrington 44). Bettelheim would see the rise of youth culture and its sweeping critique of “technological society” as symptoms of failure, frustration and growing bitterness. The neo-Luddite reaction against technology, big government, new multinational corporations and the rampant consumerism of the fifties, which became, in the eyes of many, a hallmark of sixties youth culture, was, in Bettelheim’s account, symptomatic of youth compelled to make a virtue of necessity.

Against this backdrop emerge another set of perspectives which has stressed the growing autonomy of youth, their increasingly critical stance towards postwar society and the emergence of lifestyles at odds with expectations and norms associated with the early Cold War era responsibilities of adulthood. If psychologists and social scientists would characterize the young in the fifties as “maladjusted” or “alienated,” youth were developing their own sense of what America represented, of the nation’s position in the world, of their place in postwar society. Beginning in the early fifties, dissemination of work by young Beat writers eager to realize freedoms so zealously promoted in the early Cold War years (and equally harsh in condemning whatever thwarted them in their quest) signaled a radical new current in American culture, one which demonstratively celebrated alienation and turned its back on mainstream society. The rise of rock ’n’ roll, with its pounding beat and uninhibited lyrics, a form of music composed and performed by and for the young, displaced the casual, easy-listening music of Perry Como, Pat Boone and the Andrews Sisters. Along with the unfettered lifestyles which growing segments of American youth would adopt—indeed in many ways would come to take for granted—there were signs from the early fifties onward of discontent with what was perceived as the social discipline and political regimentation which, arguably, had provided the foundations of postwar economic growth and which would, in the eyes of many young Americans, become synonymous with adulthood. If the post-war family had been encouraged to provide a warm home environment, and Dr. Benjamin Spock and other popular dispensers of advice told parents to heed their children’s needs and desires (“trust your child”)—a view of child rearing which stressed the independence of the child (“children are driven from within themselves to grow, explore, experience, learn”) and strongly advocated the importance of play, games and “fun” (1)—early Cold War era appeals for commitment, responsibility and maturity would increasingly fall on deaf ears. While commenting on the factors contributing to the alienation of American youth, Roszak would view the emergence of youth culture as a declaration of independence, America’s young seeking to go their own way and to sever ties to the society in which they had grown up. Whereas the growing preoccupation among psychologists, sociologists and political scientists with childhood and adolescence emerged in part from concerns similar to those raised about young American servicemen suffering from “combat fatigue” during the Second World War, the experience of youth in the early Cold War era was of a qualitatively different order from that confronting young men on conventional battlefields. If some commentators expressed skepticism about the character of American youth—whether they possessed the resolve and requisite degree of commitment in the event of a new round of hostilities—others perceived the young confronting unprecedented challenges and situated youth in the context of concerns arising specifically out of the Cold War, in particular, the political, social and psychological implications of the atomic bomb and the massive destruction which would be inflicted upon the nation should a new war break out. These were issues which necessarily affected all Americans, but for reasons relating to national security and the role the civilian population was called upon to play in ensuring the nation’s “preparedness,” they were perceived to have special ramifications for American youth. Given the new forms of social and political unity deemed imperative by early atomic-era strategists, the marginalization and indeterminate social status associated with adolescence was perceived as an unknown variable and potential source of political and social instability. In Roszak’s view, the socially marginalized young and their position as “outsiders” was less a social problem or pathological symptom than a stage in efforts by a youthful vanguard to “fight their way free of technocratic entrapment” as they sought liberation from what they increasingly perceived as the implacable demands and impersonal, sterile world of Cold War America and organization-man society—government, corporation, military—with its cult of systems analysis and unrelenting calls for greater efficiency, higher productivity, more automation (Roszak 73). As Geoffrey O’Brien recalls, whereas “young people began to recognize that they had been born into the innards of a gigantic and destructive machine,” they also believed “a secret nation” had been “created”—a nation of young people reaffirming ideals of autonomy, community and self-realization (39, 130). Drawing on a tradition of social analysis extending back to the work of Max Weber on “rationalization,” Emile Durkheim on “anomie,” Ferdinand Toennies on “organic communities,” Roszak argued that the new dissidence signaled a youth-promulgated rejection of a regimented society dominated by the military and ever-expanding, ever more powerful governmental, corporate and educational bureaucracies. Seeking to recover the spontaneity and autonomy of authentic selfhood, to revive the powers of imagination, to experience the immediacy of the sensual, to create genuine forms of community, youth would come to constitute a broad-based political, social and existential movement committed to “digging our way out from under the entrenched estrangement of our being” (130).

A critical variant of the “alienation-cum-liberation”-thesis sought to explain teen rebellion, and ultimately the revolts of the sixties, as stemming from largely subjective, psychological causes: what, from various perspectives, would be characterized essentially as an antiauthoritarian oedipal impulse which, because universally experienced by an exceptionally large birth cohort, would assume a broadly collective form. In conceptualizing youth as challenging adult authority in all of its various guises, this account nevertheless located the roots of adolescent alienation in the youthful subject’s immediate experience of the family—desires, attachments, conflicts traceable to the child’s earliest experience of parental figures. Given the sheer size of the baby boomer generation, it was perhaps inevitable that the oedipal pattern (whether in fact accurate as a description of interaction between parent and child in the postwar family) would be perceived as a broadly generational phenomenon. If a child’s psychological development was comprehensible, as psychoanalytic theory had long postulated, only in relation to the child’s experience within the family-of-origin, Freudian revisionists of various stripes—including, among others, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Norman O. Brown, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and other figures associated with the Frankfurt School—would nevertheless argue the necessity of situating the family unit in its relation to the broader demands of society and, more specifically, the question of how the family functioned with respect to the nurturing and raising of children given social and political pressures specifically associated with the early Cold War years.

Whereas no account of postwar American youth or the rise of youth culture in the course of the nineteen-fifties and sixties can afford to neglect any of the issues identified here, I will be arguing that the conceptualization, representation and, in key respects, the privileging of youth in the postwar era can be fully grasped only in relation to a political and cultural dynamic which emerged as the full implications of American victory in the Second World War, the outbreak of the Cold War and the start of the nuclear arms race became clear both to policy makers and the American people as a whole. In exploring interaction between parent and the adolescent, post-adolescent or young adult child as represented in a broad spectrum of texts written and published in the early years of the Cold War—by psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, as well as by writers of fiction, drama and poetry—I will be exploring the extent to which the expansion of American power, a spiraling arms race and political developments associated with the Cold War determined the place the individual and the family would come to occupy in the early Cold War years, and why broad segments of American youth coming of age in the fifties and sixties adopted an initially ambivalent and then increasingly adversarial stance towards authority as vested both in parental figures and the American social and political systems more generally. While owing much to analyses published in the fifties and sixties—a time when notions of “deviance,” “maladjustment,” “alie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: “An Unprecedented Recession from Adult Life”
• 2 “Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Shoes”: Empire, Deterrence and the Origins of Dissent in Cold War America
• 3 Generational Politics, Fifties Freud and the “Fragmentation of the Oedipus”
• 4 The Parent-Apparent: “De-Parentification” and the Post-Oedipal Family in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• 5 Generation on Trial: Arthur Miller’s Theater of Judgment
• 6 Trauma, Mourning and Self-(Re)Fashioning in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: Reinventing Youth in Cold War America
• 7 “Racing with the Moon”: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the All-American Girl in William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness
• 8 The End of Adulthood: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
• 9 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “Oedipus Eddy” and “the Story of America”
• 10 Death’s Child: Lost Fathers, Bereaved Daughters and the Rise of Postwar Feminism—Rereading Sylvia Plath
• 11 The Comforts of Home: Generational Dialectics in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction
• 12 Conclusion: The Cold War, Vietnam, the Sixties and After
• Bibliography
• Index