Transcript

By the 1950’s the Cold War had become the dominant force in world politics and, certainly, in American life. At home, the Cold War tended to promote conformity.

Americans felt it was very important to present a unified front against Soviet communism. That was manifested in movies that talked about communism very explicitly, in the fears of communist subversion in the United States, in fears of spies in the United States, in television shows that tended to promote American values over communist values, and in the way that people actually lived. The new suburban communities tended to promote conformity—lookalike houses and neighborhoods.

Conformity was also a factor in shaping cultural life. People were reluctant to do anything that might seem critical of the American way of life, of American values in the face of this overpowering fear of communism. President Eisenhower himself in some respects a symbol of that conformity. He very much wanted to be a middle-class, moderate, centrist president who would defend America from communism and reassure Americans that they were going to be secure and stable in the face of the threat of communism. It was president Eisenhower who felt the need to highlight America’s Christian tradition and faith by putting “In God We Trust” on the American currency, which Congress agreed to do. Eisenhower encouraged Americans to be a religious people in the face of communistic atheism.

Race relations were also affected by the Cold War. The United Nations, which was of course created after World War II, became a showplace for the Cold War, with the Soviet delegate constantly using the podium to express communist values and the American delegate doing the same in promotion of democratic capitalism. Race relations were affected to the extent that Americans became embarrassed by the continuing practice of racial segregation in the south because the Soviets were taking advantage of the practice in order to win over friends in the African continent.

All of this created a superficial conformity, within which cracks and crevices and rebellion began to emerge as the 1950’s unfolded. One example would be films where rebellious characters like James Dean and Marlon Brando became quite popular. Another was the rise of juvenile delinquency wherein more and more teenagers rebelled against parental authority and conventional values.

Still another manifestation, perhaps the most powerful manifestation of youthful rebellion against the conformity of the 1950’s, was the emergence of Rock-n-Roll as a musical form, and the way in which it took young America by storm in the 1960’s.

This tension between the war against communism abroad and the need for conformity to American values at home provided one of the major aspects of American development during the 1950’s and 60’s. By the 1960’s this rebelliousness would explode in the form of the Anti-War Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. All of this is to say that what seemed to be a conformist America was, in fact, and America still struggling to define itself in the middle of a Cold War.

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