The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  That was for lovers of speed, which did not then mean amphetamines. The vast majority of adolescents were much more interested in exploring sexual diplomacy. Unless he had been grounded—enjoined from the use of the family car—a young male who had taken his date to the passion pit would attempt to make out (the equivalent of the long-gone pitching woo) under cover of darkness. The eternal scourge of seducers and the most common of all female complaints was still known almost universally as the curse, or the monthly, though girls’ boarding schools in New England clung to the more proper, and more engaging, “off the sports list.” This could be frustrating for the fledgling roué, unless the date was a blind one and had been revealed to him, during a moment under a strong light, as a dog, or a beast. Of course, the girl also had discriminatory rights. If she reached the conclusion that her escort was a drag, she might incinerate him with “DDT” (drop dead twice). That was the ultimate insult. His position would then be extremely uncomfortable, or, to use his word for it, hairy.

  Teen-agers and their younger brothers and sisters were emerging as a major target group for national advertisers. They not only had their fashions; increasingly they had a voice in what their parents bought. David Riesman observed: “One must listen to quite young children discussing television models, automobile styling, or the merits of various streamliners to see how gifted they are as consumers… their influence in family councils must not be underestimated.” Eugene Gilbert, who was then establishing a consulting firm to advise businessmen on marketing policies for young customers, told his clients:

  An advertiser who touches a responsive chord in youth can generally count on the parent to finally succumb to purchasing the product…. It is not to be denied that a parent subjected to requests from the youngster who thinks he is in dire need of an item, witnessed on television, may find it easier to “give in” rather than dispute rationally with a highly emotionalized child.

  A survey found that 94 percent of the mothers interviewed said that their children had asked them to buy goods they had seen on television. Testers of small children discovered that they could recognize the word “detergent” before they could even read. Exposed to TV while still in their playpens and then put in front of the tube to keep them quiet, they looked upon the world of goods with a sophisticated awareness new to their generation. American Girl, the magazine of the Girl Scouts, noted that their subscribers “use their first lipstick, wear their first nylons and first bra sooner than girls ten years ago.” Brassiere styles for twelve-year-olds were named Allowance, Freshman, Little Angel and Littlest Angel—“the bra that expands as a girl develops.” Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, merchandising consultant for Seventeen magazine, told advertisers attending a “fashion clinic” that “Your fashion department is the wooing chamber. Get the teen-age fly to come into your parlor and little by little the web will be spun. Then when the girl marries you haven’t lost a customer. You’ve gained a goldmine.” Miss Fitz-Gibbon advised her audience to lure “the teen tycoons, not in the sweet by-and-by, but in the much sweeter now-and-now.” She described young girls as “women of means.”

  Often they were women of very substantial means. Teen Times, the magazine of the Future Homemakers of America, put weekly spending by seventh-graders at 30 cents to $8.50 and by high school seniors at $1.65 to $19.50, but in some cases it was much more. In a pictorial essay Life described the expenditures of a suburban seventeen-year-old girl who was given $4,000 each year. Among her budget items were $1,300 for bedroom decorations, $1,500 for clothes (including seven bathing suits), and $500 for entertainment, not counting “a jaunt to Hawaii for having survived high school.” Life noted that “more and more teen-agers will be moving into Suzie’s bracket.” It ended on what was meant to be a cheerful note: “Her parents’ constant indulgence has not spoiled Suzie. She takes for granted all the luxuries that surround her because she has had them all her life.”

  National statistics on this emerging leisure class of youth were awesome. As the flood of war and postwar babies approached puberty the new market expanded until there were between eighteen and twenty million of the new consumers in the country. Their annual purchases rose to 10 billion dollars, then to 25 billion. Gilbert reported that girls between fourteen and seventeen were spending 773 million dollars on “back to school” outfits alone. In one year of the 1950s, Teen Times found, the average American adolescent spent $555 “for goods and services, not including the necessities normally supplied by their families.”

  Entire industries retooled to accommodate the young. The phonograph record business offered them two lines, “singles” (45 rpm) for subteens and “albums” (33 1/3 rpm) for the teen-age market. Together they bought 43 percent of all records sold in the United States. Adolescent purchases accounted for 53 percent of movie admissions, 44 percent of camera sales, 39 percent of new radios bought, and 9 percent of new automobile sales. Each year the fifteen-to-nineteen group was spending 20 million dollars on lipstick, 25 million on deodorants, and 9 million on home permanents. The total spent annually on toiletries by teen-agers of both sexes was almost a third of a billion dollars.

  Some parents raised in the austere 1930s were becoming accustomed to such phenomena as a twelve-year-old daughter’s weekly trip to the hairdresser, or a fourteen-year-old son engrossed in a brochure on retirement insurance written for his age bracket. In certain places the younger generation had its own credit accounts, with such enticing names as the 14 to 21 Club, the Campus Deb Account, and the Starlet Charge Account. They might order merchandise over Princess phones in their own rooms, or exchange Going Steady rings ($12.95, “nothing down, payments of 50 cents a week”) with boyfriends or girlfriends. In California one firm built a $2,500,000 teen-age shopping center, with six stores, a milk bar, a swimming pool, an ice-skating rink, and a bank.

  On the evening of December 15, 1954, Walt Disney touched off a children’s craze that showed the whole country how very young consumers could be successfully wooed. Disneyland was then the high point of Wednesday TV for 40 million viewers, most of them youngsters and their parents, and that week’s program was the first in a series on Davy Crockett. As played by twenty-nine-year-old Fess Parker, a hitherto unknown actor, Davy was a hero of irresistible charm. Mesmerized by his folksiness, tiny America was easy prey for hawkers of Crockett pseudomemorabilia. By the following spring every playground and supermarket seemed to be populated by five-year-olds wearing coonskin caps. The price of coonskins jumped to $8 a pound. Before the boom ended the following summer 100 million dollars’ worth of coons had been marketed, not to mention Davy Crockett sweat shirts, sleds, blankets, snowsuits, toothbrushes, school lunch boxes, swing sets, playhouses, sandboxes, stools, toy guns, and bicycles. An entrepreneur overstocked with 200,000 pup tents stenciled “Davy Crockett” on them and sold them all in two days. Some adults were pushed past endurance; a department store buyer said, “The next person who says Davy Crockett to me gets a Davy Crockett flintlock over his head,” and it was a rare mother who didn’t want to stop her ears after the thousandth rendering of Fess Parker’s “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” which sold four million copies during his six-month hegemony:

  Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,

  Greenest state in the Land of the Free,

  Raised in the woods so’s he knew ev’ry tree,

  Kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.

  Davy, Davy Crockett,

  King of the wild frontier!

  Fred M. Hechinger of the New York Herald Tribune feared that a “passion for possession” might be putting a spiritual blight on youth. In that regard two forms of entertainment introduced in 1954 were troubling. The new music of Bill Haley and the Comets, billed as “the first R ’n’ R Pop Smash,” gave rise to fears that the children of the new prosperity, like those of the Twenties, might be seduced into a mindless hedonism. To this Stanley Kramer’s The Wild One added a prophecy of savage violence. Marlon Brando played the title character, Johnny, the apelike “president
” of a scruffy motorcycle club whose members wore skin-tight jeans and black leather jackets with a skull and crossbones painted on the back. In the film Brando’s gang rides into a quiet town on a lazy Saturday afternoon and, for want of anything else to do, takes the place apart. Obviously the movie was an indictment, but of what? Youth? Permissiveness? Disrespect for law and order? Most critics wrote that Kramer was showing a seamy side of postwar opulence, of crass acquisitiveness run amuck. Some, repelled by the movie’s brutality—in that gentler time it was rough—suggested that such censure might be carried too far.

  One small group of youthful Bohemians thought that no indictment of materialism could be strong enough. To them affluence was an outrage. They had grappled with it and lost. Now they conceded that they were beaten, or, more succinctly, beat. The beat generation first surfaced in the early 1950s amid the peeling billboards and crumbling stucco of Los Angeles’s seedy Venice West. Nurtured in dimly lit coffeehouses there, the movement then leaped 350 miles north and found a Mecca at 261 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, soon to be famous throughout the movement as the City Lights Bookshop. The store’s colorful co-owner was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a bearded native of Paris who had served in the Navy, worked at Time as a mail boy, and taken degrees at Columbia and the Sorbonne. In 1953 he and Peter D. Martin founded their emporium as the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. Ferlinghetti took the name from the Chaplin film. Expanding, he established City Lights Books, a publishing house. The first poet on its list was himself. The title of one of Ferlinghetti’s poems, “Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower,” gives some idea of how far he was from the typical merchant of the 1950s.

  The City Lights Bookshop served as an address for certain authors who had no fixed address of their own. They were unusual, even in their profession. Gregory Corso had been captured in 1946 for trying to seize New York City by carrying out a series of elaborate robberies with his friends; when arrested, Corso was attempting to coordinate the attempt with a walkie-talkie. After three years in prison he educated himself in Harvard’s Widener Library and wrote such poems as “Marriage,” in which he advised a young man planning an evening with his fiancée:

  …Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!…

  The ages of beat writers put them in the swing generation, though they had now opted out of it. As social prophets they advocated spontaneous expression, travel, Oriental mysticism, singing folk ballads, playing the guitar, the blues, sex in all its forms, and their version of the American dream. Some of them became celebrities. The most famous was a husky French-Canadian who had played football at Columbia, served as a merchant seaman during World War II, and taught at the New School for Social Research in the late 1940s. Born Jean-Louis Kerouac, he changed his first name to Jack for his first book, The Town and the City, in 1950. Kerouac rebuked commentators who called him and other new renaissance authors negative. He insisted that they were in fact passionately affirmative. On television Ben Hecht asked him why he didn’t write more about “what’s wrong with this country.” Kerouac wrote afterward:

  …all he wanted me to do was speak out my mind AGAINST people, he sneeringly brought up Dulles, Eisenhower, the Pope, all kinds of people like that…. No, I want to speak FOR things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out… for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D. T. Suzuki I speak out… why should I attack what I love out of life. This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, LOVE your lives out. When they come and stone you at least you won’t have a glass house, just your glassy flesh.

  His On the Road was written in three weeks. Truman Capote said of it, “It isn’t writing at all—it’s typing.” Yet it told people something they wanted to hear; they bought 500,000 copies. On the Road’s wenching episodes were dull, the visions of the characters were puerile, and for all their expeditions back and forth across the country they never seemed to get anywhere or find anything, not even themselves. But perhaps that was the point. At least Kerouac’s people were looking; they refused to be encapsulated by things they owned. The Beats were honest men offended by the sterile myths of their decade. Allen Ginsberg, a more powerful writer than Kerouac, was devastating on the cold war:

  America you don’t really want to go to war.

  America it’s them bad Russians.

  Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

  The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

  Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.

  That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

  America this is quite serious.

  America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

  America is this correct?

  I’d better get right down to the job.

  It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

  America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

  Ginsberg wasn’t really demented, but a year of psychotherapy had changed his life. That was in 1954 and early 1955. It ended his career as a fledgling market research consultant. Coming off the couch he turned out “Howl” in a nonstop frenzy. San Francisco policemen confiscated it as obscene, but a judge found “redeeming social importance” in the long poem, and Ginsberg joined Kerouac, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and other stars in the beat firmament.

  No sooner had they arrived than prim admirers tried to sanitize them. Entranced English teachers averted their eyes from Ginsberg’s homosexuality and Kerouac’s amorality. Beat, they said, was short for “beatitude”; these poets were blessed. The beats were understandably nettled. Whatever the intrinsic value of their work, and it is probably slight, they did succeed in their social purpose of raising doubts about thoughtless conformity. Denying them would have turned them into literary eunuchs. But there was little chance of the attempt succeeding; the continuing uproar over them assured that.

  Twenty years later the only odd aspect of their movement would be that it had been so controversial. It was never revolutionary. Its poets were yea-sayers and minstrels, not challengers of the social order. They broke no windows, planted no bombs, profaned no faiths, and were no threat to the establishment—a word which, in its later sense, did not then exist in the American language. Kenneth Rexroth, at fifty their senior citizen, did declaim sardonically, “I write poetry to seduce women and overthrow the capitalist system.” In reality, however, Rexroth was married, the father of two children, the proud holder of several literary awards, and, as a former popcorn salesman, something of an entrepreneur. So, in fact, was Kerouac; in The Subterraneans he ingenuously describes the hero’s disappointment and frustration when he learns that another beat writer has received a larger publisher’s advance than his own. Elsewhere Kerouac said, “We love everything—Billy Graham, the Big Ten, Rock and Roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all.” They didn’t, of course, and he didn’t expect to be taken seriously, but the beats were incapable of militance. The thought of them marching on the Pentagon or stoning National Guardsmen is ludicrous. They would have been startled by anyone who called policemen pigs, and the closest any of them came to a demonstration was Ginsberg wearing a sandwich board that said SMOKE POT.

  But that was enough to affront convention then. Smoking marijuana was believed to be wicked beyond imagining. In addition, beats were known to use foul language, sometimes in public. It was an intolerant time. Exotic life-styles were suspect. The me
re fact that members of the movement said they were different put them beyond the pale. “Beatnik” was coined as a term of opprobrium. Male beatniks wore khaki trousers, sandals, and beards. (Their hair, however, was short.) The movement’s females could be distinguished by their tousled hair and black leotards. Though they scorned lipstick, they put so much make-up around their eyes that they were sometimes called “raccoons.” Beatniks were said to live in what they called “pads,” surrounded by unwholesome books and records. They didn’t pick up after themselves. The beds were unmade—did not, in fact, have proper bedclothes. Reportedly they slept naked on bare mattresses and did disgraceful things in the dark, even when they weren’t married. Some had actually advocated bearing children out of wedlock.

  Eisenhower’s America was horrified. Fathers told daughters that they could not date beatniks. Ronald Reagan told jokes about football players in sandals. Slick magazine writers described beatnik debauchery. Commuters exchanged stories about beatnik orgies. Hollywood cranked out morality tales with beatnik villains. Even Helen Trent acquired a beatnik character. In Middletown, Connecticut, teen-agers in a convertible tried to run down a bearded man on a bicycle because they thought that such a defier of conventions must be beat. And at the bottom of all this commotion was nothing more sinister than a few romantic poets who recoiled from the prevailing life-style. They were individualists, and in that sense their claim to be the real Americans was valid. They asked only to secede from the majority, and they expounded nothing more than the eternal bohemia, as in this passage from On the Road: