Many people remember the 1950s as a sleepy decade, when Americans were cowed into political apathy by the McCarthy purges, finding refuge in conformity and in the comforts of materialism and suburban life. While there's some accuracy in the stereotype, the 1950s deserve more credit than they receive for igniting the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s.
Senator McCarthy
The anti-Communist purges were already well under way when the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, loaned them his name. He entered the fray on February 9, 1950, with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he charged that some 205 Communist Party members were "shaping policy" in the State Department. The accusation was well timed, coming less than three weeks after former State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury after denying that he had once been a Communist spy.
McCarthy wasn't Congress's only red-hunter. The Senate Internal Security SubCommittee under Senator Pat McCarran also conducted hearings charging, among others, Owen Lattimore, the Institute for Pacific Relations, the Department of Defense and the United Nations with subversion. McCarran was also the sponsor of the Internal Security Act, which set up the Subversive Activities Control Board and the McCarran-Walter Bill, which severely limited immigration while easing the way for deporting "dangerous" aliens.
In June 1950, the cold war suddenly became hot when troops from the United States and other UN nations faced off against North Korea. When the UN forces moved toward the Chinese border, China entered the war, resulting in General MacArthur being relieved of his duties by President Truman. The war was fought to a standstill until an armistice was declared in 1953. Southeast Asia would be the next battleground, with the United States being drawn into the fighting in Vietnam after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu.
The Korean War combined with a weakening economy and the increasing vitriol about subversion to help sink Truman's popularity. He declined to run for President in 1952, leaving Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic candidate. The Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower with Richard Nixon as his running mate. The Republicans won handily. Stevenson and Eisenhower faced off again in 1956 with the same result.
McCarthy's reign of terror had run its course by then. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 led to his censure. Alcoholism took his life in 1957. By then, an untold number of people had lost their careers, or, in the case of the Rosenbergs, among others, their lives to the hysteria and false testimony by professional informants such as Harvey Matusow. By the mid-to-late '50s, the Hollywood blacklist began to weaken. The industry was embarrassed in 1957 when an Academy Award for best screenplay was awarded to Robert Rich, which turned out to be a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten.
In 1953, Josef Stalin died. In a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress three years later, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin-era purges. Word of the speech and the purges was leaked. The news sent the Communist Party USA into a tailspin when many of its remaining members resigned in protest of its previous pro-Stalinist politics. Although Stalin had died, the CIA used anti-Communism to support a coup in Iran, which placed the Shah as the country's titular head and in Guatemala, after the country had nationalized United Fruit's banana plantations. The CIA also watched wearily as Fidel Castro's band of guerrillas began a six-year battle to overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Castro completed the takeover when his army marched triumphantly into Havana in January 1959.
The nuclear weapons race intensified when the United States exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1952. Russia got out of the box first in the space race, however, becoming the first state to successfully launch a satellite -- Sputnik -- in 1957.
The same month that Sputnik was circling the skies and creating panic around America, a more insidious fear permeated the streets of Little Rock, Arksansas, after a small group of Negro students attempted to register at the city's all-white Central High School. The situation quickly became threatening, and President Eisenhower (who had already seen a similar crisis at the University of Alabama in 1956 after Autherine Lucy tried to register) was forced to call the in the National Guard to quell the tensions. The move would prove to be one of the first turning points in the civil rights movement, which was beginning to jell, two years after the murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white girl. Already, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, had won a major victory when a boycott of city buses organized by the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. showed that nonviolent direct action could succeed. In Montgomery, the boycott forced the desegregation of the city's bus system. There were also victories in the Supreme Court under new Chief Justice Earl Warren, which handed down a series of decisions dismantling Jim Crow, most notably the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
The cudgels against repression were also taken up in the world of popular culture, and the results would be as far-reaching as any political battle fought in the decade. In jazz, bebop artists like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk created a major new musical form. The Beats (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others) were living and working in Greenwich Village, New York and North Beach, California. They created new forms of literary expression while thumbing their noses at the establishment. Hollywood picked up on the theme with youth-oriented films such as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, starring Marlon Brando and James Dean, respectively. Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" (featured in another movie about youth in revolt, Blackboard Jungle) and a young truck driver named Elvis Presley helped lead a musical revolution that had social scientists shrieking about juvenile delinquency. Alas, they had no idea that in ten years, when students all across America were rebelling against authority, Elvis's swiveling hips would seem pretty tame.
The 1940s
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