Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 379Reminiscent of Leadbelly’s story in “Bourgeois Blues,” Watson told Parks
about the racism and alienation of Washington, so he put her against the
backdrop of a huge American flag with a mop in one hand and a broom in
the other, a clear contrast to wartime propaganda about unity and patriotism.
Parks also ventured into Harlem, where he took photos of gang leaders and
criminals, even featuring a photo of a gangbanger in a coffin, again upsetting
the conformist imagery that the state wanted to present to the world. Parks
work also included photos of a black family huddled before what appears to
be a bureaucrat, perhaps seeking aid, fear in their eyes. Others show young
children in tattered clothes, and other scenes of poverty. In the later 1950s,
Parks went to Alabama [as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which we will dis-
cuss later, was taking place] and took photos of “Willy Causey and Family,
Shady Grove, Alabama” which showed the horrid effects of American apart-
heid on that family [the Causey family was forced to leave its home after the
photos were published due to the threats received from White supremacists].
The images created by Black artists such as Douglas, Biggers, and Parks, it
goes without saying, presented a vastly different view of American than one
would get from observing June and Ward Cleaver, or Richie Cunningham and
“The Fonz.”
Other artists, such as George Tooker, also challenged the conformity and
dullness of cold war culture. Tooker’s paintings featured everyday people, but
one could tell they were alienated from their lives, withdrawn and alone, and
the pictures had an eerie quality to them. In “Subway” [1950], Tooker showed
a group of people with blank or suspicious looks in their eyes, while others
behind them, virtually hidden in cubicles, were peering about to see what fate,
which was not going to be good, awaited them. Perhaps more potent in its
criticism of conformist culture was “Government Bureau” [1956], which again
depicted impersonal and perhaps frightened faces of municipal employees
who were waiting on lines of anonymous “consumers” of their services. If
“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” was the embodiment of the corporate
culture of the time, Tooker’s painting was the “anti-Flannel Suit” representa-
tion of non-conformity, showing how bureaucracies dehumanize people.
Richard Hamilton, a self-described anti-Capitalist, also criticized 1950s society
in his work, especially Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So
Appealing?, a collage featuring a “modern” home with its TV set, vacuum
cleaner, a ham in a tin, tape recorder, and a sexy naked wife lounging on the