Transformations in 1950s American Society

By the spring of 1953, nearly 50,000 Americans had returned home from the Korean War in coffins. People at home continue to wonder how much longer they would have to endure this strange war being fought in a strange land. I had two brothers who were serving in Korea at the same time and I was scared to death because I wanted my brothers to come home. And when they came home, it was like, thank you, Lord. Greatest day in the world. In that summer of 1953, the U.S. finally reached a truce agreement with the North Koreans and the Chinese. And Americans tried to put another war behind them. President Eisenhower had kept his campaign pledge to resolve the Korean conflict. Now he hoped to make America's domestic life his priority. I believe in the future of the United States of America. He was going to really take care of the United States. He was going to take care of us personally. And it was a good feeling. The time was right for Dwight Eisenhower. One of the things that I most wanted to do when he became president was to lower the rhetoric and lower the sense of crisis. His countrymen were more than ready to relax. With the war over and America bursting with energy, it was time to focus on a more promising future. By 1953, the American people had been dealing with one crisis or another since 1929. The Great Depression, World War II, the Berlin Blockade, and then Korea. Eisenhower felt it was now time to turn back the clock to the American people. of his childhood, a simpler country, where it turned out white males had the last word and where women kept the home fires burning and the business of America was business. At first, many Americans seemed happy to oblige, but as the decade wore on, Eisenhower and they would discover that not everyone was ready to return to the old way of doing things. By late 1953, the economic boom that had arrived after the Second World War had already transformed the country. We were a self-confident people for the first time since 1929. People putting money in the banks. The real wages were going up 4.5% a year. It's just incredible to think about that now. America in the 1950s was very rapidly becoming a consumer society. People were buying more and selling more than ever before in history. For the first time, more Americans were doing white-collar work than manual labor. Advertising, marketing, and public relations were now the preferred professions. I can certainly do with eight or ten thousand, but I don't know anything about public relations. Who does? You got a clean shirt, you bathe every day, that's all there is to it. In the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed almost patriotic to be part of the American economic miracle, to be a member of a corporate team and follow its rules. When I became a salesman, like a man with a gray flannel suit, I was told where to buy my clothes. It might not have been a gray flannel suit, but it better be a blue one. And there was a lot of choices of colored shirts, as long as they were white. You called attention to yourself if you deviated from the norm, and nobody did. Nobody did. We all look the same. I think people kind of like to be dressed alike and follow the same sort of social custom. You were expected to have at least two drinks at lunch, preferably martinis. If anyone said, I'll have a Perrier, they would have been laughed at. And when they advertised for secretaries, they specified good-looking. It was not a good time for women in the workplace. Miss Lawrence, this is Mr. Ryan. Miss Lawrence will be your secretary. How do you do, Miss Lawrence? Very glad to meet you. They always give a new man the prettiest secretary. There were no female managers. None. It wasn't even considered. In the 1950s, the woman's place was in the home, in the embrace of a loving husband. By 1957, 97% of all marriageable men and women were married. And if they cared to have a social life, they stayed that way. It was a couple's society. We did things in couples, barbecues, and it's always couples. If... If we knew that the person was divorced, we might have a second thought about asking them. The thing was to be married and keep the home together. More and more that home was on America's new crabgrass frontier. In an era that favored conformity, it was perhaps no surprise that by the end of the decade, a quarter of the population lived in the tract homes of the modern suburb. Moving in for us was the beginning of a happy experience, of a challenging experience. Everything was similar. One of my friends, Ruby, my phone rings and he says to me, Hal, I have a problem. I said, what's the matter? He said, I can't find my house. It seemed kind of remote and bleak if you look at them from the air. But in those little cookie cutter houses on those straight streets that met at right angles, a lot of good things were happening. Children were being born at a very fast rate. There were three obstetricians and the obstetricians were open till 2 a.m. in the morning. This was the place to raise children because it offered everything that they could want. I was here at my own home, I cross-seated at the neighbor's home, down the block at a friend's home, without any restriction, without any feeling that I was violating anyone's territory. The emotional core of the early 1950s was all about stability. Both my parents had experienced the Depression, both my parents had experienced the war. I know that they looked upon their little house in Lakewood as a refuge from many of the things that had troubled their early lives. The activities were centered around the home. We had a lot of parties. People were of the same age. Our interests were alike. We came together that way. We seemed all to be interested in what we were doing for the good of all of us. And life was getting better for a lot of American families. Propelled by the powerful economy, they were stepping into the middle class at a rate of more than a million a year. With extra money to spend and plenty of shiny new merchandise to choose from, people bought things whether they needed them or not. Sometimes just to match the pace of their neighbors. We had an eye on consumer goods all the time. Keeping up with the Joneses, when people would give us a call on the phone that the television set was just delivered, it wouldn't be long before we'd be down having soda, watching the new television. And as soon as we left there, we would say, that's what we have to have next. A new television would soon become the thing that everyone had to have next. It was in the early 1950s that one of America's most intense love affairs blossomed most brightly. We plug this thing in and turn on this box and there are people there. Well, I want to tell you, we did not move for days. You sat in front of that set even when there was nothing on but the test pattern. You thought, you can't tell, Elabra put on something right now. Television sets were rapidly becoming affordable for the average consumer, and as they did, the demand for new programming became overwhelming. That's right, boys and girls. Most television programs aired live with all the flaws of a live performance, yet even with mistakes, most viewers loved the tube. The television business was a sandbox where you could go in with almost any idea and you have a chance to do it. It was an amazing period of time. Radio, long the staple of family entertainment, was virtually abandoned. Nimble talents like Milton Berle and the famous newscaster Edward R. Murrow made the transition to the new medium. It brought us news. It brought us dramas. It had become an integral part of our life. And it wouldn't be unusual for your doctor to say, I'll see you at 7 o'clock on Tuesday, and you would say, I am very sorry. I love Lucy is on. I have to see Isla Fuseli. By the mid-1950s, only a few years after their commercial introduction, television sets were in three quarters of American homes. People now spent a third of their waking hours in the glow of the box. Lured by entertainment, they became a captive audience for the salesman. The queen is queen under the sun. These three windows, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were a window on a world that a family could sit down and look out of and see what they didn't have. Ah, I know what you're going to show us, a Westinghouse refrigerator. Mm-mm, a Westinghouse refrigerator. refrigerator everything that you did was geared at a family target audience it was a very conservative and repressive time but it was also a time that was the beginning of change underneath all the conformity you will see the beginnings of a change. Hugh Hefner was 27 when he started Playboy magazine, at the time a daring challenge to the country's obscenity laws. His first Playmate of the Month was a rising young starlet named Marilyn Monroe. But after that, the pinup was just as likely to be the girl next door. The girl next door notion of pinup photography was rooted in the notion that nice girls like sex too. That sex is okay. That was, for the 50s, a very sensational point of view, and potentially a dangerous point of view. It was risky enough, so I didn't put my name on the first issue. Within a year, Playboy was selling 100,000 copies a month, and it was not the only thing threatening the status quo. Nothing worried traditionalists more than the new kind of music being performed by singers such as Lloyd Price. Oh now la-dee la-dee la-dee miss Claudia, God will show no god. Well, it was really race music. We had maybe two radio stations in New Orleans that played that music. It had no name to it. It was just music. By 1955 the music did have a name. Rock and roll and young people everywhere were listening to it. Wisconsin native Marty Rosenbloom was then 15 years old. I got my own portable radio and at night I could pick up all the southern stations and I heard Little Richard for the first time. And my whole world changed. Everything changed. I would call WAPL in Appleton, Wisconsin, and ask them to play Little Richard, and they said that the station manager wouldn't allow Little Richard on the radio because his was the devil's music. So I knew he was good. It was a much more infectious kind of music than we'd ever heard before, and at an edge. There were suggestive things in it, and you know, it was kind of risque, and the parents were saying, this is going to... ruin our kids. Their concern was that their daughters and even their sons was falling in love with black people. Sam Phillips was the owner of Sun Records, a southern music label. You know what My answer was from day one was, I truly can look you straight in the eye and tell you they're not falling in love with black or white or green or yellow. They're falling in love with the vitality of the music. And it wasn't long before white musicians like Bill Haley and his Comets were making the charts with rock hits of their own. But the music was still waiting for its first superstar. And it never ended. In 1956, he arrived. I was in this little soda shop. And on came this song, and this guy started singing. And there was like stillness. And then everybody started dancing. And this like wave of energy came over the place. And I said, my god, this is great. wonderful. I turned around to the girl next to me and I said, who was that? And she looked at me as if I was like from another planet and she said just one word, she said, Elvis. The year that I saw Elvis Presley, the electricity was so high. Had you put that much energy in work, you would have collapsed. It wasn't just that Elvis was white and sounded black. His haircut and his hips spoke to rebellious feelings in young people all across America. And the funny thing is that you screamed so much you really couldn't hear him, but you felt you had to scream, and it was just... Kids were screaming with joy, and parents were screaming in protest. Elvis may have been white, but his songs and his moves still offended many. In July 1956, Elvis Presley's act was called vulgar and suggestive by the tremendously popular columnist and... television show host Ed Sullivan. Less than two months later, Sullivan booked the singer on his show. It's the Minister of Culture in America, the Minister of Morality, surrendering to the youth culture. And therefore that's a very big political moment. We cannot hold the line anymore. If I hold the line and keep Elvis off, I'm going to fail. And that's a very important moment. Here's going on in itself, it symbolized that it had happened. Rock and roll was here to stay. It had become the soundtrack for a new era of change. Here's Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls of Fire. You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. In 1957, a television program called American Bandstand went national on the ABC network. The show's target audience quickly demonstrated. its newfound power by turning Bandstand and its host, Dick Clark, into overnight icons. Every kid watched. There was a story about once the police chief was afraid a rumble was going to happen, a street fight, because no kids were around. And they conducted a door-to-door search and they found all the kids were watching the Bandstand. I remember feeling this tremendous feeling of confirmation. That I belong to a group of people called teenager and we have our own music. All of a sudden, you know, I just, I felt that I could, I could express myself. I could be free, I could dance and I could shake around and I could have fun. There was no stopping us, you know. The parents didn't have a chance. What must a poet look like? Another way that the young were breaking away was through their use of language. The beat movement thrived in the coffee houses of New York's Greenwich Village. As the wiper squeaked in time on the glass... like angry reptiles running from an enemy. The village has a life and language all its own. If you dig it, you're hip. If you don't, man, you're square. Beatniks were the forefathers of the 1960s counterculture, challenging the conformity of the 50s by ridiculing mainstream values. My mom wanted a new kitchen. She wanted new appliances. That was her self-identity. The beats were saying, why are you identifying with material things? There's more. An even more significant challenge to the complacent 50s came from America's black community. Living in the consumer society but having few of its advantages, they chose this moment to make white America live up to its ideals. Amazingly, 50s America had moved little beyond the days of Jim Crow. Particularly in the South, life among blacks and whites remained separate and unequal. It was no way you could be black in this country and not be affected by it. Here I was selling millions of records around the world, hero everywhere, and I couldn't get a hot dog in Baltimore unless it went to the back door. It wasn't right, but that's just how it was. That was just life. On December the 1st, 1955, on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, life began to change. By refusing to give up her seat to a white man, a tired seamstress named Rosa Parks quietly ignited a revolution. The day that Rosa Parks was arrested, a low murmur went through the whole city, and overnight, this thing bloomed. Led by a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King, the city's black community organized a peaceful boycott of the buses. They walked instead. We will do it in an orderly fashion. This is a non-violent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces. White policemen responded by arresting black carpool drivers. White extremists bombed King's home. Martin always said, you know, if you don't have anything that you die for, what do you have to live for? Nobody thought we could stay off the buses. None of those people wanted to lose their jobs. But Martin Luther had instilled in them so rightly that we must all make a sacrifice that the buses continue to run empty. They did for 381 days. On November the 13th, 1956, the Supreme Court ordered the buses desegregated. Martin Luther King was now the undisputed leader of the civil rights movement. The colored population idolized Martin Luther. We are not going back to the buses bragging about a victory. People experienced a self-esteem that they had never experienced before. And they had been given a light, a beacon at the end of the tunnel. That light reached Melba Beals, a 15-year-old high school student in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was very conscious of what was going on and wanting it to wash over me and wash over Little Rock. It was about to. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ordered the integration of all public schools. In its famous decision Brown versus the Board of Education, three years later that decision would be severely tested at Little Rock's all-white Central High School. Despite the federal court order, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had no intention of allowing black students to attend Central High and he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school. On September the 3rd, Melba Beals and eight other black students walked towards Central High. One, Elizabeth Eckford, became separated from her friends and was surrounded by a white mob that included Ann Thompson. There was just a lot of electricity in the air. It was almost a circus-like atmosphere. All these parents on the sideline urging us on and telling us, you know, get out there, don't let them get in. There are mobs on her heels, you know, like dogs, nipping at her. Policemen are watching this. Every time she tries to step between them, they close ranks on her. If Central High was to be integrated, it would have to be by order of the president. Eisenhower was at first reluctant to interfere. His record on civil rights was not a good one until 1957, the crisis at Little Rock. And there, a fundamental question was dealt with. Do the states have the right to impose their own social order in defiance of federal court orders? Eisenhower answered it decisively. He said, no, we have made a national commitment. We are going to desegregate this society. And if it takes the 101st Airborne to do it, so be it. This is awful. I mean, that is vivid still. You know, I could just see Little Rock just being in a state of siege by the troops. That was real fear. Three weeks after the Little Rock Nine returned away from Central High, they returned accompanied by troops of the 101st Airborne. We're all in an army station wagon, machine gun mounts. It's a pretty heady day. It's not what everybody gets to go to school. You got a thousand paratroopers, you got helicopters, jeeps in front, jeeps behind. And we stepped out of the jeep into this square of soldiers who were serious. You know, as I walked up the steps that day at Central High School, I can remember the click of the leather boots on those stairs. And I remember being so impressed by who they were. You know, these are Americans. I'm an American. And so the first time I get the feeling that there is hope, that there is a reason I salute this flag, that this is what America is about. I felt that Little Rock would never be the same again. We would never know life as we've known it again. Because nine people walked into a school building. My teenage models had been the kids who danced on American Bandstand. And all of a sudden had come the Little Rock Nine. And I can remember having the feeling that they've been tied and tested and they've survived. Someday, in some way, I'm going to be tested this way too. So I think when the movement comes along in the 1960s, I'm ready for it. By the late 1950s, driven by the powerful economy, the American people's long-running fascination with automobiles was changing the very fabric of the country. The car came to be the dominant symbol of American life and had an impact on American life that is difficult to exaggerate. Americans were now confronted with a dazzling array of choices on the showroom floors. So many that for the first time, people began to view cars the same way that they once viewed clothes or hairdos, as an emblem of their personality. Ford Thunderbird. Even the name had a ring to it. A yellow station wagon. A station wagon provides room in the back to carry the lawn mower that's broken. My boyfriend drove a Chevrolet, and I thought, that's the prettiest car I've ever seen in my life. I felt like a queen in that car. General Motors had a budget the size of Poland's. Nationwide, every seventh job was related to the automobile industry. The term drive-in became a part of the language. There was a national hotel chain created entirely for road travelers, and a restaurant that spoke exclusively to a newly mobile country. But the most profound effect of the car on American life, the one that actually altered the landscape, was the immense new federal highway system begun in 1956. The largest public works project in history, forever connected American motorists from city to city, from coast to coast. We used to study those maps. We would show you proposed interstate highway, interstate highway under construction, and then the payoff, completed and opened. And we'd get on those interstates and run those great big cars with the big fins on them. Just opened up the whole world to us. What most Americans did not realize was that the freeways had been built with an ulterior motive. The overpasses freedom-loving motorists were driving under were built 15 feet high in order to allow the easy movement of missile systems. President Eisenhower approved the project in part because he wanted military traffic to be able to move easily in the event of a national crisis. In the frivolous 1950s, people lived under the ever-darkening shadow of the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union each now had massive arsenals at their disposal. The Cold War struggle seemed to be everywhere. In Hungary, when people rebelled against the Russian occupation in 1956, they believed that America would intervene on their behalf. This was very difficult for the United States. After all, we've been saying the liberation of Hungary is important to the free world and so forth. Well, what were we going to do about it? What the Russians put in there was so much in the way of tanks and troops that this would have been a major war. It's just heartbreaking. At the height of the war, the crisis with the Russian tanks on the street below these kids in Hungary had control of the radio station and they were broadcasting SOS SOS the tanks are here we need help you promised to help us where is our help and there was no answer maybe 10,000 Hungarians died at the altar of the superpower competition a competition that was taking on apocalyptic overtones It had taken the Soviets four years to duplicate the American success with the atomic bomb. It took only eight months for them to do the same with the hydrogen bomb. I doubt that everybody was building them as fast as they could. We've got to build them. We've got to improve them. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. The need to test the new weapons was seen as so urgent that the U.S. government even put its own troops in harm's way. Ten seconds. Within a few months of the successful Soviet hydrogen test in 1953, several thousand American troops were ordered into trenches in the Arizona desert. One of them was Korean war veteran Risen Wehrheim. The purpose though it was to test the reaction of the troops to an atomic bomb. Shot one off, you see this real bright light. With your hands over your eyes, you can see the bones in your hands. There's this god-awful noise, it just feels like it's compressing your head. It's a feeling like you're in a vacuum cleaner, like your whole body's been vacuumed. The house that was in front of us was no longer in front of us. It was gone. Of the 2,584 men that were there, there's only three of us still alive. How many Americans were affected altogether can never be fully determined. The fallout from this explosion, known as Shot Simon, reached as far away as New Jersey, among the dirtiest of the 200 above-ground nuclear tests that took place between 1954 and 1958. The same frenzied pace of experimentation was applied to the rocket program. Both superpowers saw them as crucial for the delivery of powerful nuclear payloads. American scientists were not always having much luck. I saw the rockets that were pointed north go south and those that were pointed south go north. I saw one go straight up in the air and explode. I saw one go straight up and come straight back down again. Never during those 100 launches did I see anything go right. On October the 4th, 1957, someone did get it right. With state attention. All radio stations of the Soviet Union are broadcasting. The first artificial Earth satellite in the world has now been created. This first satellite was today successfully launched... This beep, beep, beep, beep, what is it? Sputnik. Sputnik is around the globe. Who did it? We did it. The Soviet Union. First in the space. I can remember going out to my backyard at night, looking up at this bright street going across the sky. And I felt a sudden sinking feeling, one of almost terror. Now, suddenly, you've got Soviet missiles that can reach into the Dakotas, can hit Chicago. With a surprise attack possible for the first time, Americans began to look at the sky differently. Now as a place from which terror might reign. And to learn some new terms like duck and cover. I felt that the threat to America... America had been increased, that the Soviet Union had upped the ante. While we were playing cops and robbers hide and seek in our backyards and our front yards, there was the gnawing anxiety that it could all end instantaneously. July 25th, 1959. At a U.S. exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Khrushchev and American Vice President Nixon discussed the relative merits of communism and capitalism. There are some instances where you may be ahead of us. For example, in the development of your, of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation. Both of them was built from the same material. They were tough and they want to show each other that their society is better. There may be some instances. for example, color television, where we're ahead of you. What became known as the kitchen debate seemed to demonstrate America's new insecurity in the world. Sputnik had been a technological Pearl Harbor. It began a tremendous sense of self-appraisal. Are we falling behind the Russians? What are we teaching our children? I remember Life magazine doing a whole spread on contrasting a Soviet and an American high school. And little Ivana and Ivan were studying rocket physics, and Jim and Sue were bopping in the high school gym. And the clear message of this was, you know, that in 10 or 15 years, we would be a client state of the Soviet Union because we were wasting our lives dancing away and dating while these people were working 20-hour days. Suddenly an American embrace of intellectualism was being seen on campuses, in libraries, and on new television quiz shows, including 21. And if she's the only one I can remember... Charles Van Doren was a contestant. He was the son of a celebrated professor. He performed so brilliantly that he became a national celebrity. He did. You've got 18 points. Every day he received hundreds of letters telling him he was America's hope for a more cerebral future. It was a false hope. In November 1959, Van Doren testified that he had been given answers to the questions he'd been asked. The show's producers had stage managed the contest in an effort to win ratings. It was another letdown. Back then, you believed people. You believe people when they told you something, you accepted it as face value. And here on television, they would lie to you? The medium had exposed its ugly side for all to witness. In the decade to come, Americans would discover that television was not the only beloved institution. That wasn't quite what it seemed. As the 50s gave way to the 60s, a new generation became a force in popular culture and in politics. That's on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. I'm Peter Jennings. We hope you'll join us.

In that summer of 1953, the U.S. finally reached a truce agreement with the North Koreans and the Chinese. And Americans tried to put another war behind them. President Eisenhower had kept his campaign pledge to resolve the Korean conflict.

Now he hoped to make America's domestic life his priority. I believe in the future of the United States of America. He was going to really take care of the United States. He was going to take care of us personally. And it was a good feeling.

The time was right for Dwight Eisenhower. One of the things that I most wanted to do when he became president was to lower the rhetoric and lower the sense of crisis. His countrymen were more than ready to relax.

With the war over and America bursting with energy, it was time to focus on a more promising future. By 1953, the American people had been dealing with one crisis or another since 1929. The Great Depression, World War II, the Berlin Blockade, and then Korea. Eisenhower felt it was now time to turn back the clock to the American people. of his childhood, a simpler country, where it turned out white males had the last word and where women kept the home fires burning and the business of America was business.

At first, many Americans seemed happy to oblige, but as the decade wore on, Eisenhower and they would discover that not everyone was ready to return to the old way of doing things. By late 1953, the economic boom that had arrived after the Second World War had already transformed the country. We were a self-confident people for the first time since 1929. People putting money in the banks.

The real wages were going up 4.5% a year. It's just incredible to think about that now. America in the 1950s was very rapidly becoming a consumer society.

People were buying more and selling more than ever before in history. For the first time, more Americans were doing white-collar work than manual labor. Advertising, marketing, and public relations were now the preferred professions.

I can certainly do with eight or ten thousand, but I don't know anything about public relations. Who does? You got a clean shirt, you bathe every day, that's all there is to it. In the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed almost patriotic to be part of the American economic miracle, to be a member of a corporate team and follow its rules.

When I became a salesman, like a man with a gray flannel suit, I was told where to buy my clothes. It might not have been a gray flannel suit, but it better be a blue one. And there was a lot of choices of colored shirts, as long as they were white.

You called attention to yourself if you deviated from the norm, and nobody did. Nobody did. We all look the same. I think people kind of like to be dressed alike and follow the same sort of social custom. You were expected to have at least two drinks at lunch, preferably martinis.

If anyone said, I'll have a Perrier, they would have been laughed at. And when they advertised for secretaries, they specified good-looking. It was not a good time for women in the workplace. Miss Lawrence, this is Mr. Ryan. Miss Lawrence will be your secretary.

How do you do, Miss Lawrence? Very glad to meet you. They always give a new man the prettiest secretary.

There were no female managers. None. It wasn't even considered.

In the 1950s, the woman's place was in the home, in the embrace of a loving husband. By 1957, 97% of all marriageable men and women were married. And if they cared to have a social life, they stayed that way. It was a couple's society. We did things in couples, barbecues, and it's always couples.

If... If we knew that the person was divorced, we might have a second thought about asking them. The thing was to be married and keep the home together.

More and more that home was on America's new crabgrass frontier. In an era that favored conformity, it was perhaps no surprise that by the end of the decade, a quarter of the population lived in the tract homes of the modern suburb. Moving in for us was the beginning of a happy experience, of a challenging experience. Everything was similar. One of my friends, Ruby, my phone rings and he says to me, Hal, I have a problem.

I said, what's the matter? He said, I can't find my house. It seemed kind of remote and bleak if you look at them from the air.

But in those little cookie cutter houses on those straight streets that met at right angles, a lot of good things were happening. Children were being born at a very fast rate. There were three obstetricians and the obstetricians were open till 2 a.m. in the morning. This was the place to raise children because it offered everything that they could want.

I was here at my own home, I cross-seated at the neighbor's home, down the block at a friend's home, without any restriction, without any feeling that I was violating anyone's territory. The emotional core of the early 1950s was all about stability. Both my parents had experienced the Depression, both my parents had experienced the war.

I know that they looked upon their little house in Lakewood as a refuge from many of the things that had troubled their early lives. The activities were centered around the home. We had a lot of parties. People were of the same age. Our interests were alike.

We came together that way. We seemed all to be interested in what we were doing for the good of all of us. And life was getting better for a lot of American families. Propelled by the powerful economy, they were stepping into the middle class at a rate of more than a million a year.

With extra money to spend and plenty of shiny new merchandise to choose from, people bought things whether they needed them or not. Sometimes just to match the pace of their neighbors. We had an eye on consumer goods all the time.

Keeping up with the Joneses, when people would give us a call on the phone that the television set was just delivered, it wouldn't be long before we'd be down having soda, watching the new television. And as soon as we left there, we would say, that's what we have to have next. A new television would soon become the thing that everyone had to have next.

It was in the early 1950s that one of America's most intense love affairs blossomed most brightly. We plug this thing in and turn on this box and there are people there. Well, I want to tell you, we did not move for days.

You sat in front of that set even when there was nothing on but the test pattern. You thought, you can't tell, Elabra put on something right now. Television sets were rapidly becoming affordable for the average consumer, and as they did, the demand for new programming became overwhelming. That's right, boys and girls. Most television programs aired live with all the flaws of a live performance, yet even with mistakes, most viewers loved the tube.

The television business was a sandbox where you could go in with almost any idea and you have a chance to do it. It was an amazing period of time. Radio, long the staple of family entertainment, was virtually abandoned.

Nimble talents like Milton Berle and the famous newscaster Edward R. Murrow made the transition to the new medium. It brought us news. It brought us dramas.

It had become an integral part of our life. And it wouldn't be unusual for your doctor to say, I'll see you at 7 o'clock on Tuesday, and you would say, I am very sorry. I love Lucy is on.

I have to see Isla Fuseli. By the mid-1950s, only a few years after their commercial introduction, television sets were in three quarters of American homes. People now spent a third of their waking hours in the glow of the box. Lured by entertainment, they became a captive audience for the salesman. The queen is queen under the sun.

These three windows, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were a window on a world that a family could sit down and look out of and see what they didn't have. Ah, I know what you're going to show us, a Westinghouse refrigerator. Mm-mm, a Westinghouse refrigerator. refrigerator everything that you did was geared at a family target audience it was a very conservative and repressive time but it was also a time that was the beginning of change underneath all the conformity you will see the beginnings of a change.

Hugh Hefner was 27 when he started Playboy magazine, at the time a daring challenge to the country's obscenity laws. His first Playmate of the Month was a rising young starlet named Marilyn Monroe. But after that, the pinup was just as likely to be the girl next door.

The girl next door notion of pinup photography was rooted in the notion that nice girls like sex too. That sex is okay. That was, for the 50s, a very sensational point of view, and potentially a dangerous point of view.

It was risky enough, so I didn't put my name on the first issue. Within a year, Playboy was selling 100,000 copies a month, and it was not the only thing threatening the status quo. Nothing worried traditionalists more than the new kind of music being performed by singers such as Lloyd Price.

Oh now la-dee la-dee la-dee miss Claudia, God will show no god. Well, it was really race music. We had maybe two radio stations in New Orleans that played that music. It had no name to it. It was just music.

By 1955 the music did have a name. Rock and roll and young people everywhere were listening to it. Wisconsin native Marty Rosenbloom was then 15 years old. I got my own portable radio and at night I could pick up all the southern stations and I heard Little Richard for the first time. And my whole world changed.

Everything changed. I would call WAPL in Appleton, Wisconsin, and ask them to play Little Richard, and they said that the station manager wouldn't allow Little Richard on the radio because his was the devil's music. So I knew he was good. It was a much more infectious kind of music than we'd ever heard before, and at an edge.

There were suggestive things in it, and you know, it was kind of risque, and the parents were saying, this is going to... ruin our kids. Their concern was that their daughters and even their sons was falling in love with black people.

Sam Phillips was the owner of Sun Records, a southern music label. You know what My answer was from day one was, I truly can look you straight in the eye and tell you they're not falling in love with black or white or green or yellow. They're falling in love with the vitality of the music. And it wasn't long before white musicians like Bill Haley and his Comets were making the charts with rock hits of their own.

But the music was still waiting for its first superstar. And it never ended. In 1956, he arrived. I was in this little soda shop. And on came this song, and this guy started singing.

And there was like stillness. And then everybody started dancing. And this like wave of energy came over the place.

And I said, my god, this is great. wonderful. I turned around to the girl next to me and I said, who was that?

And she looked at me as if I was like from another planet and she said just one word, she said, Elvis. The year that I saw Elvis Presley, the electricity was so high. Had you put that much energy in work, you would have collapsed. It wasn't just that Elvis was white and sounded black.

His haircut and his hips spoke to rebellious feelings in young people all across America. And the funny thing is that you screamed so much you really couldn't hear him, but you felt you had to scream, and it was just... Kids were screaming with joy, and parents were screaming in protest. Elvis may have been white, but his songs and his moves still offended many. In July 1956, Elvis Presley's act was called vulgar and suggestive by the tremendously popular columnist and...

television show host Ed Sullivan. Less than two months later, Sullivan booked the singer on his show. It's the Minister of Culture in America, the Minister of Morality, surrendering to the youth culture.

And therefore that's a very big political moment. We cannot hold the line anymore. If I hold the line and keep Elvis off, I'm going to fail. And that's a very important moment.

Here's going on in itself, it symbolized that it had happened. Rock and roll was here to stay. It had become the soundtrack for a new era of change.

Here's Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls of Fire. You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. In 1957, a television program called American Bandstand went national on the ABC network. The show's target audience quickly demonstrated. its newfound power by turning Bandstand and its host, Dick Clark, into overnight icons.

Every kid watched. There was a story about once the police chief was afraid a rumble was going to happen, a street fight, because no kids were around. And they conducted a door-to-door search and they found all the kids were watching the Bandstand.

I remember feeling this tremendous feeling of confirmation. That I belong to a group of people called teenager and we have our own music. All of a sudden, you know, I just, I felt that I could, I could express myself. I could be free, I could dance and I could shake around and I could have fun. There was no stopping us, you know.

The parents didn't have a chance. What must a poet look like? Another way that the young were breaking away was through their use of language. The beat movement thrived in the coffee houses of New York's Greenwich Village.

As the wiper squeaked in time on the glass... like angry reptiles running from an enemy. The village has a life and language all its own. If you dig it, you're hip. If you don't, man, you're square.

Beatniks were the forefathers of the 1960s counterculture, challenging the conformity of the 50s by ridiculing mainstream values. My mom wanted a new kitchen. She wanted new appliances.

That was her self-identity. The beats were saying, why are you identifying with material things? There's more.

An even more significant challenge to the complacent 50s came from America's black community. Living in the consumer society but having few of its advantages, they chose this moment to make white America live up to its ideals. Amazingly, 50s America had moved little beyond the days of Jim Crow.

Particularly in the South, life among blacks and whites remained separate and unequal. It was no way you could be black in this country and not be affected by it. Here I was selling millions of records around the world, hero everywhere, and I couldn't get a hot dog in Baltimore unless it went to the back door.

It wasn't right, but that's just how it was. That was just life. On December the 1st, 1955, on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, life began to change. By refusing to give up her seat to a white man, a tired seamstress named Rosa Parks quietly ignited a revolution. The day that Rosa Parks was arrested, a low murmur went through the whole city, and overnight, this thing bloomed.

Led by a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King, the city's black community organized a peaceful boycott of the buses. They walked instead. We will do it in an orderly fashion.

This is a non-violent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces. White policemen responded by arresting black carpool drivers. White extremists bombed King's home.

Martin always said, you know, if you don't have anything that you die for, what do you have to live for? Nobody thought we could stay off the buses. None of those people wanted to lose their jobs.

But Martin Luther had instilled in them so rightly that we must all make a sacrifice that the buses continue to run empty. They did for 381 days. On November the 13th, 1956, the Supreme Court ordered the buses desegregated. Martin Luther King was now the undisputed leader of the civil rights movement.

The colored population idolized Martin Luther. We are not going back to the buses bragging about a victory. People experienced a self-esteem that they had never experienced before. And they had been given a light, a beacon at the end of the tunnel.

That light reached Melba Beals, a 15-year-old high school student in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was very conscious of what was going on and wanting it to wash over me and wash over Little Rock. It was about to. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ordered the integration of all public schools.

In its famous decision Brown versus the Board of Education, three years later that decision would be severely tested at Little Rock's all-white Central High School. Despite the federal court order, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had no intention of allowing black students to attend Central High and he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school. On September the 3rd, Melba Beals and eight other black students walked towards Central High.

One, Elizabeth Eckford, became separated from her friends and was surrounded by a white mob that included Ann Thompson. There was just a lot of electricity in the air. It was almost a circus-like atmosphere.

All these parents on the sideline urging us on and telling us, you know, get out there, don't let them get in. There are mobs on her heels, you know, like dogs, nipping at her. Policemen are watching this. Every time she tries to step between them, they close ranks on her.

If Central High was to be integrated, it would have to be by order of the president. Eisenhower was at first reluctant to interfere. His record on civil rights was not a good one until 1957, the crisis at Little Rock. And there, a fundamental question was dealt with.

Do the states have the right to impose their own social order in defiance of federal court orders? Eisenhower answered it decisively. He said, no, we have made a national commitment. We are going to desegregate this society.

And if it takes the 101st Airborne to do it, so be it. This is awful. I mean, that is vivid still. You know, I could just see Little Rock just being in a state of siege by the troops. That was real fear.

Three weeks after the Little Rock Nine returned away from Central High, they returned accompanied by troops of the 101st Airborne. We're all in an army station wagon, machine gun mounts. It's a pretty heady day. It's not what everybody gets to go to school. You got a thousand paratroopers, you got helicopters, jeeps in front, jeeps behind.

And we stepped out of the jeep into this square of soldiers who were serious. You know, as I walked up the steps that day at Central High School, I can remember the click of the leather boots on those stairs. And I remember being so impressed by who they were. You know, these are Americans.

I'm an American. And so the first time I get the feeling that there is hope, that there is a reason I salute this flag, that this is what America is about. I felt that Little Rock would never be the same again.

We would never know life as we've known it again. Because nine people walked into a school building. My teenage models had been the kids who danced on American Bandstand. And all of a sudden had come the Little Rock Nine. And I can remember having the feeling that they've been tied and tested and they've survived.

Someday, in some way, I'm going to be tested this way too. So I think when the movement comes along in the 1960s, I'm ready for it. By the late 1950s, driven by the powerful economy, the American people's long-running fascination with automobiles was changing the very fabric of the country.

The car came to be the dominant symbol of American life and had an impact on American life that is difficult to exaggerate. Americans were now confronted with a dazzling array of choices on the showroom floors. So many that for the first time, people began to view cars the same way that they once viewed clothes or hairdos, as an emblem of their personality.

Ford Thunderbird. Even the name had a ring to it. A yellow station wagon. A station wagon provides room in the back to carry the lawn mower that's broken. My boyfriend drove a Chevrolet, and I thought, that's the prettiest car I've ever seen in my life.

I felt like a queen in that car. General Motors had a budget the size of Poland's. Nationwide, every seventh job was related to the automobile industry.

The term drive-in became a part of the language. There was a national hotel chain created entirely for road travelers, and a restaurant that spoke exclusively to a newly mobile country. But the most profound effect of the car on American life, the one that actually altered the landscape, was the immense new federal highway system begun in 1956. The largest public works project in history, forever connected American motorists from city to city, from coast to coast. We used to study those maps. We would show you proposed interstate highway, interstate highway under construction, and then the payoff, completed and opened.

And we'd get on those interstates and run those great big cars with the big fins on them. Just opened up the whole world to us. What most Americans did not realize was that the freeways had been built with an ulterior motive. The overpasses freedom-loving motorists were driving under were built 15 feet high in order to allow the easy movement of missile systems.

President Eisenhower approved the project in part because he wanted military traffic to be able to move easily in the event of a national crisis. In the frivolous 1950s, people lived under the ever-darkening shadow of the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union each now had massive arsenals at their disposal.

The Cold War struggle seemed to be everywhere. In Hungary, when people rebelled against the Russian occupation in 1956, they believed that America would intervene on their behalf. This was very difficult for the United States. After all, we've been saying the liberation of Hungary is important to the free world and so forth.

Well, what were we going to do about it? What the Russians put in there was so much in the way of tanks and troops that this would have been a major war. It's just heartbreaking. At the height of the war, the crisis with the Russian tanks on the street below these kids in Hungary had control of the radio station and they were broadcasting SOS SOS the tanks are here we need help you promised to help us where is our help and there was no answer maybe 10,000 Hungarians died at the altar of the superpower competition a competition that was taking on apocalyptic overtones It had taken the Soviets four years to duplicate the American success with the atomic bomb.

It took only eight months for them to do the same with the hydrogen bomb. I doubt that everybody was building them as fast as they could. We've got to build them.

We've got to improve them. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. The need to test the new weapons was seen as so urgent that the U.S. government even put its own troops in harm's way.

Ten seconds. Within a few months of the successful Soviet hydrogen test in 1953, several thousand American troops were ordered into trenches in the Arizona desert. One of them was Korean war veteran Risen Wehrheim. The purpose though it was to test the reaction of the troops to an atomic bomb. Shot one off, you see this real bright light.

With your hands over your eyes, you can see the bones in your hands. There's this god-awful noise, it just feels like it's compressing your head. It's a feeling like you're in a vacuum cleaner, like your whole body's been vacuumed. The house that was in front of us was no longer in front of us.

It was gone. Of the 2,584 men that were there, there's only three of us still alive. How many Americans were affected altogether can never be fully determined. The fallout from this explosion, known as Shot Simon, reached as far away as New Jersey, among the dirtiest of the 200 above-ground nuclear tests that took place between 1954 and 1958. The same frenzied pace of experimentation was applied to the rocket program. Both superpowers saw them as crucial for the delivery of powerful nuclear payloads.

American scientists were not always having much luck. I saw the rockets that were pointed north go south and those that were pointed south go north. I saw one go straight up in the air and explode. I saw one go straight up and come straight back down again.

Never during those 100 launches did I see anything go right. On October the 4th, 1957, someone did get it right. With state attention. All radio stations of the Soviet Union are broadcasting.

The first artificial Earth satellite in the world has now been created. This first satellite was today successfully launched... This beep, beep, beep, beep, what is it?

Sputnik. Sputnik is around the globe. Who did it?

We did it. The Soviet Union. First in the space. I can remember going out to my backyard at night, looking up at this bright street going across the sky.

And I felt a sudden sinking feeling, one of almost terror. Now, suddenly, you've got Soviet missiles that can reach into the Dakotas, can hit Chicago. With a surprise attack possible for the first time, Americans began to look at the sky differently.

Now as a place from which terror might reign. And to learn some new terms like duck and cover. I felt that the threat to America... America had been increased, that the Soviet Union had upped the ante. While we were playing cops and robbers hide and seek in our backyards and our front yards, there was the gnawing anxiety that it could all end instantaneously.

July 25th, 1959. At a U.S. exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Khrushchev and American Vice President Nixon discussed the relative merits of communism and capitalism. There are some instances where you may be ahead of us. For example, in the development of your, of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation. Both of them was built from the same material. They were tough and they want to show each other that their society is better.

There may be some instances. for example, color television, where we're ahead of you. What became known as the kitchen debate seemed to demonstrate America's new insecurity in the world.

Sputnik had been a technological Pearl Harbor. It began a tremendous sense of self-appraisal. Are we falling behind the Russians?

What are we teaching our children? I remember Life magazine doing a whole spread on contrasting a Soviet and an American high school. And little Ivana and Ivan were studying rocket physics, and Jim and Sue were bopping in the high school gym.

And the clear message of this was, you know, that in 10 or 15 years, we would be a client state of the Soviet Union because we were wasting our lives dancing away and dating while these people were working 20-hour days. Suddenly an American embrace of intellectualism was being seen on campuses, in libraries, and on new television quiz shows, including 21. And if she's the only one I can remember... Charles Van Doren was a contestant. He was the son of a celebrated professor.

He performed so brilliantly that he became a national celebrity. He did. You've got 18 points.

Every day he received hundreds of letters telling him he was America's hope for a more cerebral future. It was a false hope. In November 1959, Van Doren testified that he had been given answers to the questions he'd been asked.

The show's producers had stage managed the contest in an effort to win ratings. It was another letdown. Back then, you believed people.

You believe people when they told you something, you accepted it as face value. And here on television, they would lie to you? The medium had exposed its ugly side for all to witness.

In the decade to come, Americans would discover that television was not the only beloved institution. That wasn't quite what it seemed. As the 50s gave way to the 60s, a new generation became a force in popular culture and in politics.

That's on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. I'm Peter Jennings. We hope you'll join us.

Transcript for:Transformations in 1950s American Society

Transcript for:
Transformations in 1950s American Society