Week 7 – Ike’s Years, the Beats, and Confessionalism

Question 1

Pearl Harbor & Hiroshima

Answer 1

• December 7, 1941 & August 6, 1945
• Pearl Harbor & Hiroshima emblematically stand for the beginning and the end of WW II in the Pacific
• Pearl Harbor had proven that the U.S. were vulnerable, after all.
• Hiroshima stood for America’s victory over Japan due to its technological superiority, but also for the fact that the entire world – including the U.S – was a less safe place than before.

Question 2

The Truman Years 1945–52

Answer 2

• The coming of the Cold War
• Winston Chuchill’s “iron curtain” speech in Missouri
• George F. Kennan outlines „containment policy” in 1947
• Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia, 1948
• Berlin Blockade, 1948
• Nato launched in 1949
• Red China 1949
• Post-war prosperity and conformity
• The race barrier still exists
• Truman orders desegregation of the army 1948
• Famous baseball player Jackie Johnson breaks the color line when he plays in Ebbet’s Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947
• TV begins its victorious march through American households
• Conservatism and family values
• The baby boom
• New Housing Styles (Levitt Towns)-

Question 3

What is Levittown?

Answer 3

• Designed to provide a large amount of housing at a time when there was a high demand for affordable family homes. This suburban development would become a symbol of the “American Dream” as it allowed thousands of families to become home owners.
• The Ford T-Model for living
• Architectural and social conformity
• Levittowns and Levitt-Families

Question 4

The Eisenhower Years 1952–60: Ike and the Cold War abroad…

Answer 4

• The first hydrogen bomb exploded at the Bikini Atoll, 1952
• The Korean War, 1950–1953
• First Soviet hydrogen bomb, 1953
• Riot by east German workers, 1953
• Overthrow of the Mossadeq regime in Iran and the installment of the Shah, 1953
• French surrender at Dien Bien Phu; division of Vietnam, 1954
• The Suez crisis, 1956
• Soviet invasion of Hungary, 1956
• The Sputnik shock, 1957
• Fidel Castro takes over Cuba, 1959
• U2 spy plane is shot down, 1960.

Question 5

The Eisenhower Years 1952–60: at home

Answer 5

• Prosperity increases (GNP rises by 250% between 1945 and 1960)
• Consumer culture – Advertising
• The creation of “Suburbia”
• The women’s role: Between Domesticism and Workforce
• The Kinsey Report (1948)
• The Age of Dr. Spock (1946)
• Popular culture: TV enters the living room
• Most popular TV-Show: “Father Knows Best”
• The Golden Age of American Churches

Question 6

Who is Norman Rockwell?

Answer 6

• American painter and illustrator
• Popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country’s culture
• Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades

Question 7

The other side of conformity

Answer 7

• McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch–hunt
• The HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) is established
• An anti-communist witch-hunt begins, which is lead (and mis-lead) by one of the most notorious post-war figures

Question 8

What is McCarthyism?

Answer 8

• Early 50s McCarthy claimed he knew of 200 card carrying Communist members
• commonly referred to as the “Red Scare”
• The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence
• The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition

Question 9

What’s Spy hysteria?

Answer 9

• Thousands of American intellectuals, writers, artists, and scientists are subjected to surveillance and hearings, among them J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the nuclear bomb and mastermind of the “Manhattan Project.”
• Even members of the cabinet such as Dean Acheson and George Marshall, mastermind of the famous “Marshall Plan” that helped to reconstruct Europe as a bullwark against the rising influence of the Soviet Union, are not exempt from suspicion.
• The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arouses public attention, which is brilliantly captured in E.L. Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel.
• McCarthy’s paranoia becomes politically unbearable, and finally leads to his political decline. He dies 1957, at age 48, without having dismantled a single communist.

Question 10

What’s the Marshall Plan?

Answer 10

On April 3, 1948, President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, who in 1947 proposed that the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe.

Question 11

Authors and artists that were victims of McCarthyism

Answer 11

• Leonard Bernstein (composer)
• Charlie Chaplin
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Langston Hughes
• Arthur Miller (The Crucible)
• Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon)
• Orson Welles
• Artie Shaw (jazz musician)
• Edward G. Robinson (actor)
• Pete Seeger (folk musician)

Question 12

50s Culture: Between Rebellion and Middle-Class Consensus

Answer 12

Popular culture: Television, 50s cars, Fast-food and drive-ins, Movies

Youth culture: Rock’n’Roll, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Rebels without a cause (James Dean)

Question 13

Victims of the Postwar (WWII) Years

Answer 13

• Two groups suffer most under the backlashes of 50s conformism.
• The women who were recruited into the workforce during the war efforts
• The Blacks who fought for their country during WW II
• While women are expected to return to their prior roles as docile housewives, African-American GIs have realize that their effort hasn’t changed much in the still racist outlooks of many US-Americans.

Question 14

Scratching the conformist surface: 50s counterculture

Answer 14

• Rock’n’Roll: Youth culture (Elvis “the Pelvis” is only shown from his hips upward)
• Sex and Drugs: The Beat Generation
  o Allen Ginsberg (“Spontaneous Poetry”)
  o Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

Question 15

Reclaiming the „real“ America

Answer 15

• The „Beatniks“ are reclaiming another, liberal and libertarian America that they feel the reigning conformism betrays.
• Whitman as important literary ancestor
  o sexual liberty
  o democracy as individualism
  o homosexuality (Ginsberg: “In a Supermarket in California”)

Question 16

Confessionalist Poetry: Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”

Answer 16

• Highly individual form of expression –the poetry of the personal “I”
• This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.
• The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression, and relationships were addressed, often in an autobiographical manner. The confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on paper; craft and construction were extremely important to their work. Some of their treatment of the poetic self was groundbreaking and shocking to some readers.

Question 17

“For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell

Answer 17

• He reassesses the American Dream, comparing a dystopian present, characterized by perpetually tearing down things to built something new, with the memorial devoted to the soldiers of an all-black regiment lead by Colonel Robert Shaw.
• The heroism displayed by the soldiers stands in stark contrast to the „drained faces of Negro school-children [that] rise like balloons.”
• Merging his own childhood memories (of the Aquarium) with the country’s past, the new America “greases along”
• The beautiful and precise merging of different levels – the personal, the public, the past and the present - through a metaphorical layering (i.e., aquarium, fish, bubbles, fishbone, fins) attests to the enormous craftsmanship that goes into Confessionalist Poetry.
• Here, like in many other eras, a phenomenon evolves that is typical for American Literature: An unquestioned “ought” is juxtaposed to an “is” that is shown to be a betrayal of the “ought” – without there ever arising the question whether reality might not only be a betrayal, but a RESULT of the ideals.