Culture after 1945

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the institutions and material conditions that produced a more homogeneous postwar mass culture, including suburban housing, the corporation, the rise of network television, and the advertising industry that supported it.
• Identify the central books that named postwar conformity as a problem, including David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd of 1950, William Whyte's The Organization Man of 1956, and Sloan Wilson's novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit of 1955.
• Describe the cultural challenges to conformity that emerged in the same years, including the Beat Generation, rock and roll, Abstract Expressionism, the Kinsey Reports, and the early intellectual critiques of suburban domesticity that pointed toward Betty Friedan's later book.
• Account for the religious revival of the 1950s, including the Billy Graham crusades, the popular ministry of Norman Vincent Peale, the broadening Catholic acceptance that produced John Kennedy's election in 1960, and the Cold War rhetoric that paired American national identity with religious belief.
• Use Skill 4 (Contextualization) and the Continuity and Change reasoning process to situate the cultural conflicts of the 1950s as a precursor to the counterculture, the women's movement, and the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

The central historical question of Topic 8.5 is how the postwar United States produced a national mass culture more homogeneous than anything the country had seen before, and how artists, intellectuals, and rebellious young people answered it. Federal spending, the GI Bill, the interstate highway program, and the postwar wage settlement between organized labor and the largest American corporations had produced, by the early 1950s, a middle class that lived in detached single-family suburban houses, drove on the same federal roads, watched the same evening television programs, and read the same magazines. The College Board CED frames the topic this way: mass culture grew increasingly homogeneous in the postwar years, prompting challenges to conformity from artists, intellectuals, and rebellious youth (KC-8.3.II.A). Theme ARC, American and Regional Culture, frames the lesson; Learning Objective 8.F asks students to account for how mass culture has been preserved or contested over time; Skill 4.B asks students to situate that contest inside its broader Cold War, suburban, and demographic context (Theme ARC).

The first half of the story is the rise of postwar mass culture. Television moved from a novelty in 1948 to a fixture in nearly nine of every ten American households by 1960. The three national networks broadcast the same programs from coast to coast: I Love Lucy, the most popular situation comedy of the early 1950s; Father Knows Best, which ran from 1954 to 1960; and Leave It to Beaver, which premiered in 1957. These programs projected a uniform image of American family life into living rooms in every region: a white middle-class suburban household with a working father, a homemaker mother, and well-behaved children. Racial integration on early network television was severely limited; Black Americans, when they appeared at all, appeared in supporting or stereotyped roles. The same advertising industry that financed the broadcasts produced a national consumer market for the appliances, the automobiles, and the packaged foods that the suburb required, and it taught a generation of Americans to think of consumption as an act of national belonging.

The same suburb that the television set imagined was lived in by a recognizable male type. By the mid-1950s a cluster of social critics had named him: the corporate, suburban, white middle-class man in the gray flannel suit, conforming to the expectations of his employer, his neighborhood, and his television set. William Whyte described him as the Organization Man in 1956, a corporate employee whose loyalty to the firm displaced older loyalties to craft, region, or independent enterprise. David Riesman and his coauthors had earlier described the same character in The Lonely Crowd in 1950 as other-directed, a person who took his cues from his peers rather than from inherited conviction. Sloan Wilson made him fictional in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in 1955. Suburban domesticity for the wife of that organization man would become the subject of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the founding text of second-wave feminism and the critique that this lesson previews. Friedan's book belongs to the next decade, but the suburban world she would describe is the world this lesson sets up.

The second half of the story is the cluster of cultural revolts that the same years produced. The earliest and the most literary was the Beat Generation, a small group of writers centered on Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg's poem Howl, first read at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and published in 1956, indicted what its author called the destruction of the best minds of his generation by mass society; the obscenity trial that followed in 1957 made the poem a public event. Kerouac's novel On the Road, published in 1957, romanticized restless travel as a refusal of suburban settlement. The Beats articulated the first sustained literary critique of postwar conformity and gave the next decade's counterculture much of its early vocabulary.

The most commercially powerful revolt was rock and roll. The genre, built on a fusion of Black rhythm and blues with white country and gospel, broke into the national market in 1955 and 1956. Elvis Presley, a young white singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, recorded "Heartbreak Hotel" in January 1956 and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show three times before the year was out. Chuck Berry, a Black guitarist and songwriter from St. Louis, recorded "Maybellene" in 1955 and "Roll Over Beethoven" in 1956. Little Richard, a Black performer from Macon, Georgia, recorded "Tutti Frutti" in 1955 and "Long Tall Sally" in 1956. Their commercial success documented two things at once: the arrival of a youth market with disposable income, and a musical fusion that crossed the racial line that television and Hollywood largely preserved. The hostile reception that rock and roll drew from clergy, school officials, and civic leaders previewed the generational conflict that would mark the next decade.

Postwar painting and architecture mounted parallel revolts in the high arts. Abstract Expressionism, identified with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, displaced Paris with New York as the center of postwar painting and announced a distinctly American avant-garde. The International Style in architecture, brought to the United States by European refugees from the Bauhaus and built across the postwar corporate skyline by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, gave the corporation a new public face in glass and steel. Both were debated in the same magazines that ran the suburb's advertising, and both made their way into the same network television programs and the same Cold War cultural diplomacy that the State Department was running across Western Europe.

Sex and psychology entered the same conversation. The Kinsey Reports, two volumes by the Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey, were published in 1948 and 1953. The first volume documented sexual behavior in the human male; the second, sexual behavior in the human female. Both volumes argued, on the basis of thousands of interviews, that actual American sexual behavior diverged sharply from the public norms that magazines, churches, and schools described. Both became best-sellers, and both opened a public conversation about sexuality, marriage, and divorce that the postwar suburb had largely closed off.

The same years produced a sweeping religious revival. Church membership, which had stood at roughly half the adult population in 1945, rose to about two-thirds by 1960. The evangelist Billy Graham launched a national crusade ministry in 1949 that drew tens of thousands to football stadiums for revival meetings, and his radio and television broadcasts reached audiences in every state. The Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952; the book sat on best-seller lists for nearly three years. Congress added the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and adopted "In God We Trust" as the national motto in 1956. Cold War rhetoric paired American national identity with religious belief and contrasted both with what officials called atheistic communism. The Catholic share of the postwar electorate grew steadily, and John Kennedy's election in 1960 made him the first Catholic president and marked the broadening acceptance of Catholic Americans inside the Protestant majority.

Cold War culture also penetrated mass entertainment. The spy genre, in novels by Ian Fleming and a flood of Hollywood films, took the global confrontation with the Soviet Union into the multiplex. Anti-communist films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, encouraged by the same House Un-American Activities Committee that produced the Hollywood blacklist, filled the same screens that would later carry the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. By the end of the period, the cultural fault lines that this lesson maps, between suburban conformity on one side and Beat dissent, rock and roll, sexual frankness, and avant-garde art on the other, would supply the next decade with its protagonists, its argument, and a substantial part of its sound.

Five excerpts trace the cultural shape of the period from inside the suburb and from the cultural margins that pressed back against it. Each is paired with the verified host record from the curated topical-images library for Topic 8.5.

1. (Continuity and Change) Compare the image of American family life projected by I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver with the actual demographic composition of the United States in the 1950s. Identify two ways the television image distorted social reality and explain the consequences for which Americans saw themselves represented in mass culture.
2. (Causation) Account for the rise of rock and roll in 1955 and 1956. Trace the causal chain from the postwar youth market and the Black migration into northern and western cities to the commercial breakthroughs of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. At which step is the racial fusion most visible, and how does that fusion sit alongside the limited racial integration of early network television?
3. (Comparison) Compare William Whyte's Organization Man and David Riesman's other-directed type. What does each writer name as the central feature of postwar American life, and what does the comparison reveal about the way mid-century intellectuals understood the suburb, the corporation, and the school?
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for the postwar religious revival. How did Billy Graham's crusades, Norman Vincent Peale's popular ministry, and the Cold War rhetoric that paired national identity with religious belief shape the cultural environment in which John Kennedy was elected the first Catholic president in 1960?
5. (Causation) The Beat Generation, rock and roll, the Kinsey Reports, and Abstract Expressionism are often grouped together as the cultural opposition of the 1950s. Are they best understood as a single cultural revolt, or as separate movements that share only a common decade? Defend your answer with evidence drawn from at least two of the four.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.