Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 369recalled feeling safe in their new suburban home, or taking a ride in their new
car. The stereotype of the postwar era, which many held with great sentiment,
was that it was a carefree and, except for the threat of the Soviet Union and
nuclear annihilation, safe time, a “golden age” before things like Civil Rights,
Vietnam, and Hippies tore the country apart.
That view, though sentimental, would be in large part a myth. The peri-
od from 1945 to 1960 was marked by affluence and conformity, but there
was another culture, a counterculture, that was growing in that era too. Despite
the images of the era in movies such as Grease, there were stirrings of unease
and dissent, and they would motivate millions to take a new look at the
Cold War, at race relations, and at the promise of American society and
democracy. These alternative cultures were not hard to find if one looked
for them. In music, movies, clubs, magazines and elsewhere, millions of
Americans were acting quite differently than what one would believe if bas-
ing his or her views on the TV show Happy Days or other popular culture
re-enactments of that period. While parts of the “traditional” 1950s are
valid, we also need to look at the “other” 1950s to get a full flavor of that
period.
To start, the “typical” family, like the Cunninghams in Happy Days, was not
the norm. By 1960, despite the postwar economic boom, one-third children
lived in poverty, and overall poverty rates were 25 percent for the total popu-
lation, and 50 percent for Black families. Fewer than half of the students
entering high school in the late 1940s ever even finished, and a substantial
number of those who did graduate, despite the G.I. Bill, never went to college.
Despite nostalgia about “traditional” families, about half of the marriages that
began in the 1950s ended in divorce. Unwed motherhood rates were high too;
in 1957 females in the 15-19 age group gave birth twice as many times as
those in that range in the early 1980s. In fact, the sharpest increase in unwed
motherhood took place between 1940 and 1958, and then leveled off between
1960 and 1975–all this after the “permissive” 1960s culture allegedly ruined
traditional morality. Clearly, such data show that many of our preconceptions
of the postwar era were just wrong. There was not then–if ever there was–a
“typical” culture or a “traditional” morality. Large numbers of Americans have
always lived outside what the media and politicians considered “normal” or
“mainstream,” and the culture of the 1950s, or “counterculture” if you prefer,
was quite vibrant.