Fifties Discourse

Parents grew out of a Great Depression into a world at war. Time afterward saw a Europe half behind an Iron Curtain of Soviet occupation and a Western Europe in need of Marshall Plan assistance. Atomic bomb, Cold War containment of Russia, and Korean War haunted America. Parents who lived America’s Age of Anxiety later welcomed the Fifties’ peace and prosperity. Treaty of Detroit gave car workers economic security. So did IBM and California aerospace. Middle class suburbia conformed to Levittown patterns, but jobs, cars, and housing spread this nascent, middle class prosperity. Parents praised the postwar peace despite much conformity at work. White collar workers acted as organization men and blue collar workers automated into assembly line repetition. Levittown homes looked mostly the same whether in cape cod, ranch, or split-level patterns. There was conformity at work, in housing, and schools across the nation. Best way to do things turned into the only way. Parents traded off conformity at work for the good life at home. Suburbia was one’s middle class paradise two days a weekend and two weeks of summer vacation. Second half of the Fifties there emerged a new culture. A younger generation rocked and rolled. It discovered sunny California and its emergent culture. America grew concerned with civil rights for one and all. The immigrant America of their parents mixed and married into their one conformist middle class, while a younger America threw caution to the winds of change. The Sixties seen on the horizon beckoned with greater freedom, less conformity, and space, the final frontier.