Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:37:14.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The 1950s and 1960s: Open and Hidden Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Paul Buhle
Get access

Extract

The usual stories of 1950s influence upon the 1960s have now been retold, and so often as the autobiography of a generation, that they may be said to have achieved emblematic textbook status. The Beats, with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, are said to have reopened a closed culture of McCarthyism; and rock ‘n’ roll, if it did not actually save the souls of the teen participants, prepared them for the multiracial youth culture dreams of the following era.

Type
Special Section: The Politics of Culture in Cold War America
Information
Prospects , Volume 20 , October 1995 , pp. 467 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Lipsitz, George, Time Passages: Collective Memory and A merican Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 159Google Scholar; and Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1965), 300–301Google Scholar. See my expansive comment on Lipsitz in “America: Post-Modernity?” New Left Review no. 180 (03–04 1990): 163–76.Google Scholar

2. See, for instance, Riesman, David, Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1954)Google Scholar, which among other characteristic perspectives urges an acceptance of alienation as a part of modern life and castigates the Frankfurt school theorists for their critique of capitalism.

3. Marc, Davic, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984): 12–13.Google Scholar

4. Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 136.Google Scholar

5. Buhle, Paul, “Interview: Harvey Kurtzman,” Shmate no. 6 (Summer 1983): 24–25Google Scholar. This unusual item, an issue on Jewish humor, has many other suggestions along the same line, including studies in Yiddish humor, Jewish film and gramaphone stereotypes, and Jewish humor in sports, literature, and televison.

6. “A Furschlugginer Genius,” Spiegelman's spread on Kurtzman in the New Yorker 03 29, 1993, 76–77Google Scholar, underlined these points but is likely to be “read” as a comic strip itself, even at this late date. Adam Gopnik's accompanying “Postscript: Kurtzman's Mad World,” is effusive in tribute but short in word space, less than another major cultural figure would be likely to receive in the same publication.

7. This is not to dismiss the extraordinary energy, diversity, and freedom of expression possible in comics of the 1970s–90s. See my early and positive assessment, “The New Comix: Underground in America,” in Literature in Revolution, ed. White, G. A. and Newman, Charles (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973)Google Scholar; and my later commentary on particularly self-conscious artistic currents, “Of Mice and Menschen: Jewish Comics Come of Age,” TIKKUN 7 (05–06 1992): 9–16.Google Scholar

8. Lhamon, W. H. Jr., Deliberate Speed (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), 28.Google Scholar

9. Bell, , End of Ideology, 300.Google Scholar

10. From an interview in the Rhode Island Labor History Project, Rhode Island Historical Society. Excerpted into Buhle, Paul, ed., Working Lives: An Oral History of Rhode Island Labor (Providence: Rhode Island Labor History Society, 1987).Google Scholar

11. I leave aside here other genres (such as slapstick, a favorite of left writers) and issues (such as the aesthetics of “red” wartime films). Unfortunately, no secondary literature successfully treats the accomplishments and the contradictions of this milieu. Oral history materials in the UCLA Library and the Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, offer the best avenue for information. See, however, Schwartz, Nancy Lynn, The Hollywood Writers' Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar; and Myerson, Harold and Harburg, Ernie, Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz? Yip Harburg, Lyricist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for partial treatments.

12. The most interesting memoir of the period is Pohl, Fredrick's The Way the Future Was (New York: Ballantine, 1978)Google Scholar. Unfortunately Pohl, a lifelong socialist, dropped out of political activity after his days in the Young Communist League in the late 1930s, as did the YCL's other sci-fi sympathizers in the Futurions, including Asimov. Their political aesthetics and the changing literary market for science fiction are important subjects still not adequately treated anywhere. Alan Wald has, however, made an important beginnning.

13. Sutin, Lawrence, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York: Harmony, 1989), 86–95.Google Scholar

14. Attali, , Noise, 140–41.Google Scholar

15. Wright felt driven abroad, into a Paris exile; Hughes, writing some of his best material for the black press, scarcely escaped the ravages of McCarthyism; among other internal and external exiles, one could count Chester Himes, Margaret Walker, and of course W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Only Ellison, with his Invisible Man, received just recognition, and then (one could suggest) as proof that “Negro” themes had not been banished, only the radicals who adopted them. Among my Hollywood-area interviews, a tape with William Marshall is most instructive; blacklisted for decades, he reemerged in a box-office triumph as the star of Blackula.

16. James, C. L. R., American Civilization, ed. Grimshaw, Anna and Hart, Keith (London: Blackwell, 1993), 139Google Scholar. This hitherto unpublished manuscript is in no sense a polished essay, but contains many germs of precious insight.

17. Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970)Google Scholar, originally published as an issue of the Students for a Democratic Society journal Radical America, itself heavily under the influence of C. L. R. James and edited by Paul Buhle.

18. From Rosemont, Franklin, “Introduction”Google Scholar to Breton, Andre, What Is Surrealism? ed. Rosemont, Franklin (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), 21–23.Google Scholar