The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  In the frosty air!

  The proletariat will, this year, get

  To rock the night away.

  The Manifesto, from the get-go,

  Seems to work in theory, anyway.

  Hammer and sickle laid down at our feet,

  Capitalists are stopped.

  Lenin, Stalin, and old Chairman Mao,

  That’s the Communist, that’s the Communist,

  That’s the Communist bloc!

  FROM ANOTHER BILLY JOEL SONG (“LENINGRAD”): THE COLD WAR AND “WHITE FLIGHT”

  Billy’s song “Leningrad,” from side two of Storm Front (if you’re playing it on old-fashioned vinyl or cassette tape), mentions “Cold War kids … under their desks in an air-raid drill.” He refers to himself as being “a Cold War kid in McCarthy time.”

  The Cold War was the name given to the time of tense relations between the United States and the USSR. It wasn’t a regular war, in that no one was firing any missiles—it was fought with a lot of tough talk and a whole lot of spying. And, of course, with weapons stockpiles. Every time the United States got a new kind of weapon, the Soviet Union would have the same one a couple of years later. It may seem odd, but many people thought it was a good thing for the two countries to be just about even in the arms race, as the contest to build bigger and better weapons came to be known. The balance of power kept both countries from actually using any of the weapons. We never nuked Russia because we knew they’d nuke us right back. They never nuked us because they knew we’d nuke them back.

  But people were still scared to death that the bombs would start dropping any minute. Some people dug underground bomb shelters in their backyards.61 As useless as the bomb shelters would have been, nothing matches the air-raid drills that were held in schools in terms of pure futility. Public schools throughout the country installed air-raid sirens that would sound in the event of a nuclear attack (in case the huge explosions weren’t enough of a signal). Every now and then, schools would have the students participate in drills: if the siren went off, they were to “duck and cover” under their desks.

  Hahhaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaha!

  You can’t duck and cover and survive in the event of nuclear attack! “Duck and disintegrate” would be more like it.

  Even though it’s really about Russia, “Leningrad” is just bursting with U.S. history. Another line from “Leningrad” states that “children lived in Levittown,” an American town Billy Joel contrasts with the Russian Leningrad. Levittown (above right) is a town that some say symbolized the whole Cold War era of American history.

  The 1950s marked a huge movement of citizens (especially white ones) from cities out to the suburbs. When World War II ended, there was an immediate need for a lot of affordable housing, and several planners hit on the idea of building whole planned communities—mass-produced suburbs that seemngly sprang up overnight.

  There were actually four towns called Levittown, each of which was a prefab community planned by a company owned by Abraham Levitt. These towns were planned and built before anyone actually lived there. The company’s method of building rows and rows of identical houses was so efficient that by mid-1948, they were building thirty new houses per day in the original Levittown, which was in New York. The houses generally came in five models (differing mainly in color and window placement) and were equipped with modern appliances such as refrigerators and later, notably, television sets.

  By 1951, the company had built about seventeen thousand houses in Levittown, New York. Levittown became a symbol of the bland conformity of postwar suburbia—the American dream of home ownership was easier to achieve than ever (you could pick out a house and have the contract signed three minutes later), but these anonymous homes were mass-produced in towns that distinctly lacked character.

  MORE STUFF IN THE SONG

  ENGLAND’S GOT A NEW QUEEN: Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952. Thanks to television, this was the first chance most people had to see a coronation.

  MARCIANO: Rocky Marciano. Another boxer, who became heavyweight champ in 1952. Billy sure does like boxing!

  LIBERACE: A really, really flamboyant piano player who was very popular and had his own TV show in the fifties.

  SANTAYANA: George Santayana was a Spanish philosopher who died in 1952.

  JOSEPH STALIN: The prime minister of the USSR and America’s biggest enemy in the 1950s before his death in 1953. This guy was a serious jerk; many believe he was even worse than Hitler. But we never ended up fighting a real war against him.

  MALENKOV: Georgy Malenkov was the guy who took over after Stalin died. He was kicked out of the Communist party.

  NASSER: Gamal Nasser became president of Egypt in 1956.

  PROKOFIEV: Sergey Prokofiev, a Russian composer who died in 1953. Because the line in the song is “Nasser and Prokofiev,” the song makes it sound like he has something to do with Nasser, but he doesn’t.

  ROCKEFELLER: This is pretty vague, honestly, since there were a lot of really rich Rockefellers out there. The one in the song is probably Winthrop Rockefeller, who was the big Rockefeller in the fifties. We guess. They were all rich guys.

  CAMPANELLA: Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was one of the first black major leaguers. He was paralyzed in a car accident in 1958.

  COMMUNIST BLOC: The name given to countries controlled by the Soviet Union, against whom the United States fought the Cold War.

  ROY COHN: Joe McCarthy’s attorney, and one of his best pals. A real jerk.

  JUAN PERóN: Off-and-on president of Argentina, best known now for having been married to Eva Perón, the subject of the musical Evita.

  TOSCANINI: Arturo Toscanini, an Italian conductor.

  DACRON: An artificial fiber. Artificial stuff, like Levittown, was very big in the fifties.62

  DIEN BIEN PHU FALLS: The battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 led to the separation of Vietnam into North and South Vietnam, setting the stage for the Vietnam War, which is barely mentioned in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” perhaps because Billy felt that he’d already covered it in “Goodnight Saigon,” which he had recorded a few years earlier.

  In 1954, Bill Haley and His Comets, a swing band, released “Rock Around the Clock,” which, after being featured in the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 movie about juvenile delinquency, was the first rock ’n’ roll song to become a major national hit. For most people—especially most white people—it was the first taste of the rock ’n’ roll sound, and while many parents were horrified beyond all reason, teenagers were hooked.

  Most people assumed—hoped, even—that it was all just a fad. They never would have believed that “Rock Around the Clock” was only the beginning.

  JAMES DEAN

  Teenagers emerged as a major cultural force in the 1950s. They’d always existed, of course, but teenage culture barely did. Lots of things changed for teens in the 1950s. One of the most important things was that, all of a sudden, teenagers everywhere had cars, which allowed them to be alone with their dates. This had previously been a whole lot harder for them to manage.

  Somewhere along the line, drive-in movie theaters (where you would drive up and watch the movie through a windshield full of dead bugs while listening to the sound through a tinny speaker you hooked to your window) became popular. It was not a great way to experience a movie, exactly, but plenty of teenagers went to the drive-in regularly because all that time in the car made for a good opportunity for some serious making out, and movie studios began to make more and more movies that were marketed specifically to teenagers. And no teen idol of the day became a bigger icon than James Dean.

  MORE STUFF

  EINSTEIN: Albert Einstein (above), a physicist known for his Theory of Relativity and his work on the atomic bomb—which he really regretted in the end. Incidentally, he did not flunk math in school.63

  PETER PAN: Disney released its film version in the mid-fifties. We assume that’s what Billy Joel is talking about here.
Either that or this was the year he actually met Peter Pan and got to go to Never Land and fight against pirates and native Never Landians… . Yeah, the first one.

  DISNEYLAND: Opened for business in 1955.

  BROOKLYN’S GOT A WINNING TEAM: The Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the World Series in 1955 after losing for several seasons.

  STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:

  THE COONSKIN. AGAIN.

  No matter how bad the shows were, TV’s popularity, and its impact on culture and trends, was impossible to ignore. After Disney showed a series of TV movies about Davy Crockett, Crockett became one of the most famous and popular figures in American history, particularly among kids. Coonskin caps, which were never worn by sensible people to begin with, made a huge comeback among otherwise rational children. That year, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” was a huge hit record.

  In an era known for conformity, it was the “rebellious” movies, music, and people—the ones that scared their parents—that most excited teenagers. James Dean first caught national attention for his role in East of Eden, but he became an icon for his role in Rebel Without a Cause, a movie about a teenager who feels that no one can understand him. The movie was perhaps the most accurate portrayal of teen angst ever shown in movies, and Dean became the very personification of cool for a generation (some say he still is).

  At the height of his fame, Dean was killed in a car accident, which, of course, made him even more of an icon. Some people say he never would have become a legend if he hadn’t died young; he wasn’t around long enough to make a bad movie, weather a scandal, or lose his looks, all of which he surely would have had to face eventually. Instead, he remained eternally youthful and rebellious. Of course, these people are forgetting that he was also a heck of an actor. He only starred in three movies, but he was nominated for an Academy Award for two of them.

  There’s a lesson here, kids: drive safely and buckle up.

  ELVIS PRESLEY

  Continuing Billy Joel’s theme of teenage rebellion (after being interrupted, oddly, by the stuff about Davy Crockett and Peter Pan): if there was one star who really owned the 1950s and defined teenage musical taste, it was Elvis Presley. Teenagers in the 1950s had no idea that he’d go on to make a bunch of stupid movies, gain a bunch of weight, and appear in public wearing jumpsuits that were never, ever stylish.

  Elvis Presley burst onto the musical scene in 1956. The way he shook his hips while singing “Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show so frightened adults that for a minute they forgot all about being scared of nuclear war and worried about Elvis instead. People began to circulate rumors that he was a Communist or a gay, drugged-up devil worshipper.

  But this just made teenagers all the more fascinated with him. Though Blackboard Jungle had already shown parents that there was a link between rock music and teenage rebellion, Elvis was the first performer to combine the two really successfully. He became known as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, a title that stuck with him even after he’d stopped singing rock ’n’ roll music.

  Historians tend to cringe when people talk about “the old days, when people got married so young.” Through most of modern history, people actually married fairly late; Romeo and Juliet were teenagers, but most people in Shakespeare’s day actually didn’t marry until their late twenties. Getting married at seventeen or eighteen was common in the 1950s, though—far more so than it had been before and certainly more so than it is now.

  In the fall of 1956, his performances on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular variety show, were watched by upwards of sixty million people. Presley had become one of the biggest stars in the country, and had taken rock ’n’ roll music to a whole new level of popularity and cultural relevance, even though, on one appearance, they only showed Elvis from the waist up, so as not to frighten parents with his Hips of Doom.

  The government found an even better way to deal with Presley than simply censoring him: in 1957, he was drafted into the army (at the time, there was still a draft, even though there wasn’t a war on). Though he hastily recorded several songs to be released while he was away, many of which were hits, he was never quite the same after he got out of the army—most of his postarmy music was a lot tamer than his early stuff. By 1960, rock music was in pretty bad shape; some even said it was actually dead—which it pretty much was. It wouldn’t really come back to prominence or relevance until the Beatles hit America a few years later.

  ELVIS: DEAD OR ALIVE?

  An important thing for historians—or anyone else—to learn is to call baloney on conspiracy theories, but if it turns out that Elvis is alive, we here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide won’t be all that surprised. After all, this is the sort of conspiracy that only needs to involve a handful of people to keep the secret, which is more plausible than those theories where everyone in the government has to keep their mouth shut. Though most Elvis sightings are certainly nonsense, the fact that his middle name is misspelled on his tombstone at Graceland is a little suspicious to some people, who say that since the tombstone reads Elvis Aaron Presley, it may indicate that Elvis Aron Presley (as his middle name was often, though not always, spelled) isn’t buried under it (it’s not like the staff couldn’t afford to get the name right). Most of all, though, a phony death just seems like the kind of thing Elvis would have done.

  Rather than trying to stay ahead of the curve and inject new life into the genre, Elvis settled into the middle of the road. Many of the songs he recorded in 1960 were slow, conservative songs that didn’t sound rebellious in the slightest. In fact, many were so dull that people wondered what the heck the army had done to Elvis. He went on to spend most of the 1960s making rather silly movies that featured a few good songs but also tended to feature songs like “Yoga Is As Yoga Does,” “Ito Eats,” “The Song of the Shrimp,” and “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad.”

  By the time Elvis went back to performing live in the late 1960s, he had gotten some of his swagger back, but by then he was seen as old-fashioned and passé by many rockers. He died—or so they say—in 1977 in the bathroom at Graceland, his home in Memphis.

  ALABAMA

  The mention of Alabama at this point in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” probably refers to the bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956.

  In those days, the way the bus worked in Montgomery and throughout the South was that black people sat in the back and white people sat in the front. If the bus filled up, black people were required to give up their seats so white people could sit. There were a few instances of black people refusing to give up their seats, but the best-publicized instance was that of Rosa Parks. This technically wasn’t illegal, but she was arrested for failing to follow the seat assignment given to her by the bus driver. In Alabama in those days, when the driver on the bus said, “Move on back,” his word was law. She was fined ten dollars, plus four dollars in court costs, but she appealed, and the case became national news, which helped publicize a boycott of the buses led by a group of civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  One of very few public domain shots of Elvis: his “mug” shot, which was taken when he went to the White House in 1970. He looked a lot cooler than this in the 1950s. Of course, he’d practically have to.

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would go on to say that he had a dream that one day, people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide judge people by the content of their character freely, and occasionally harshly.

  OTHER STUFF IN THE SONG

  BARDOT: French actress Brigitte Bardot.

  BUDAPEST: The city in which the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a protest againt the local Stalinist government, took place.

  KHRUSHCHEV: Nikita Khrushchev (pictured) made a speech denouncing Stalin and his cult of personality in 1956. Stalin was too dead to be upset, but the speech was seen as a sign of a major power struggle in Russia.

  PRINCESS GRACE: Actress Grace Kelly, who in 195
6 married a prince and went from being an American actress to being the princess of Monaco.

  PEYTON PLACE: A bestselling novel that was considered awfully racy by 1950s standards. Keep in mind, this was an era when Elvis’s hips were considered just as big a threat as missiles.

  TROUBLE IN THE SUEZ: Britain, France, and Israel launched a military attack against Egypt in the Suez Canal in 1956 after Egypt tried to nationalize it.

  The segregation laws were ruled to be unconstitutional, but the case remained in appeal, and the boycott remained in effect, throughout most of 1956 until the Supreme Court finally upheld the lower court’s ruling. This certainly wasn’t the end of racial segregation, but it was one of the first major victories of the modern civil rights movement.

  LITTLE ROCK

  In 1954, in the landmark case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled—finally—that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. Eisenhower supported the ruling, and, in doing so, came about as close as any sitting president had come in decades to being a strong voice for civil rights.

  But actually getting the schools integrated wasn’t easy. In 1957, when nine black students tried to attend a previously all-white high school in Little Rock, the governor of Arkansas sent the Arkansas National Guard to block the door. Eisenhower had to send in the army to get the black students into the building; the students had federal protection for the entire school year to make sure they could get in every day. The city, intent on keeping schools segregated, actually went as far as canceling the next school year, forcing students to enroll elsewhere. Eisenhower’s civil rights legislation was pretty weak compared to what came later, but you can see what the guy was up against.