The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  KEROUAC

  The 1950s became the first era in which it was really, really popular in mainstream culture to make fun of hipsters. The hipsters in those days were known as beatniks, a shorter version of the Beat Generation, a term coined by author Jack Kerouac.

  OTHER STUFF

  PASTERNAK: Boris Pasternak, a Russian author, published Doctor Zhivago in 1957. It was quickly banned in Russia. Perhaps your teacher can make you find out why!

  MICKEY MANTLE: A baseball player for the New York Yankees. Perhaps the biggest baseball star of the late fifties and early sixties.

  ZHOU ENLAI: Zhou was the premier of China.

  BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI: A 1957 film that won seven Academy Awards despite its lack of teenage rebellion and a rock music score.

  LEBANON: A Middle Eastern country that was engulfed in various forms of turmoil, such as a civil war, in 1958.

  CHARLES DE GAULLE: A World War II general who became president of France in 1958.

  CALIFORNIA BASEBALL: The Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants moved to California, becoming the first baseball teams to have home fields west of Kansas City, Missouri. Some marked this as progress; others said it was the beginning of the end of baseball’s golden era.

  STARKWEATHER: Charles Starkweather, a murderer who killed eleven people before being captured. He was executed in 1959.

  THALIDOMIDE: Thalidomide was a drug commonly prescribed to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. It also turned out to cause birth defects. In the song, the line about this comes right before a very short but rocking guitar solo.

  The beatniks were a group, at least initially, of poets, writers, intellectuals, and assorted drug-takers who descended on San Francisco and New York in the 1950s. Soon, though, the term “beatnik” was applied to just about anyone who seemed unusual or unpleasant to “normal” people. Exactly what people meant by “beatniks” varied wildly—to some people, it meant bad artists who recited bad poetry while someone played bad jazz in a coffee shop, then went home to smoke marijuana and talk about Communism while having casual sex. To others, beatniks were no-good ruffians who rode around on motorcycles and hassled shopkeepers.

  But at the center of the group were some fantastic writers who helped create a whole new American style of literature. In 1956, Allen Ginsberg published “Howl,” a long poem that opened with the famous line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” The poem, which also featured quite a few words that we still can’t get away with printing very often, became the subject of a major trial after the publisher was accused of obscenity. “Howl” became a sort of manifesto for the Beat Generation, and one of the landmark poems of the twentieth century.

  Jack Kerouac, before he really got started drinking himself to death.

  A stereotypical beatnik.

  Because of the trial, many people heard about the poem, but very few people read it. Most people were first exposed to beat culture in 1957, when Jack Kerouac published On the Road, a wild account of traveling across the country with other beatniks. The sense of rebellion, freedom, and intellectualism in the book excited the imaginations of thousands of young people, who took to the road themselves and began hanging out in coffee shops writing free verse.

  The popular image of beatniks as guys with goatees and berets who called everyone daddy-o came more from television than from actual beatniks; the style was popularized by characters like Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip and Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Lives of Dobie Gillis. As with Elvis’s hips, many people (squares,64 in particular) thought beatniks would be the very end of society. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, even said that the three greatest threats to America were Communists, eggheads, and beatniks. Communists and beatniks are now generally considered fairly harmless in America, but keep your eyes open for those eggheads. There may be one sitting next to you right now!

  A replica of Sputnik. The Death Star it ain’t.

  SPUTNIK

  Besides the arms race with the Soviet Union, America was also involved in a space race, as technology for blasting things, including people, into space was developing rapidly. People believed that whichever country got to the moon first would be able to launch missiles at the other country from the lunar surface and take over the globe. Actually, even if they had gotten missiles to the moon, they wouldn’t have been able to fire them at anyone, but in an age when people believed that a particle-board desk could protect students from nuclear fallout, anything seemed possible.

  The Soviet Union got a head start in the space race by successfully launching Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite, into space in 1957. It wasn’t the most threatening device in the world—it was really just a ball of metal about the size of a basketball that had a flashing light on it—but it was a signal to the world that Russia was ahead of the United States in the space race. Anyone with a shortwave radio could tune in to the sound of the thing broadcasting a beep beep noise into space. A month later, the Russians launched another satellite, Sputnik II—and this one carried a live dog.

  Prior to this, everyone in America assumed that they were ahead of the Russians in all fields. Though people tried to brush Sputnik off as no big deal, the little satellites’ success felt like a smack in the face to many. The fact that the satellites the United States tried to launch had a tendency to fail (one was nicknamed Kaputnik) didn’t help matters much.

  The U.S. government quickly began several space initiatives, including the creation of NASA in 1958, but it would be years before people started to relax about the space race.

  BUDDY HOLLY

  Pinpointing when the first wave of rock ’n’ roll died has always been a popular sport. Some say it died the day Elvis went into the army. Others point to the Day the Music Died, the day in early 1959 when popular rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) were killed in an airplane crash in Iowa.

  In fact, by this point in 1959, rock seemed to be on its way out. When asked by an interviewer if rock was dying, Holly cheerfully replied that it looked that way. “It might pick back up,” he said, “but I doubt it.” He went on to say that he’d really prefer to sing something quieter, anyway.

  In winter of early 1959, Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper embarked on the Winter Dance Party tour, a tour of small, frozen Midwestern towns. To travel between towns, each band was crammed aboard a single crappy bus that tended to break down pretty regularly. After an Iowa show, the heater in the bus broke (not for the first time), and Holly, hoping to stay warm and save enough time to do some laundry (all of the members of the tour were starting to stink to high heaven), arranged for a small charter plane to take him and a few others ahead to the next stop in Minnesota. The plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. Rock ’n’ roll had indeed fallen on hard times.

  EXPERIMENTS TO TRY AT HOME!

  Make your own Sputnik. Terrify your neighbors and earn an honorary doctorate!65

  You’ll need some tinfoil and coat hangers. Wad the foil into a ball; then stick the coat hangers out of it (they should look like table legs). Then build a working R-7 rocket (see instructions on our Web page!), obtain government permission, and launch it into space. You are now officially smarter than American scientists from the 1950s. Congratulations … Doctor!

  HULA HOOPS (AND WHILE WE’RE AT IT, OTHER FADS OF THE 1950S)

  The age of television led to a golden age of fads—and the creation of new kinds of plastic led to the dawn of the Age of Cheap Plastic Crap. Never before had so much crap been on the market. Some of the fads of the 1950s actually lasted for decades and are still around today. Others, of course, just make our parents and grandparents look stupid in old photographs.

  Hula hoops, plastic rings that you spin around your hips, were among the biggest fads of the day. Over a two-year period, tens of millions of the things were sold.

  WINTER DANCE PARTY

  One of the last shows of the Winter Dance Party tour was held at the Duluth Armory in Duluth
, Minnesota. A young man named Robert Zimmerman was in the first row; after changing his name to Bob Dylan, he would become notable enough to get mentioned in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and to get a whole section devoted to him later in this chapter.

  This picture is actually from about fifty years after the first hula hoop craze, but the concept is pretty much the same.

  Many people assumed that things like rock music and television would just be fads, but movie people worried that television would be the death of every movie theater and began to work up gimmicks to keep people coming out to the movies. Some of these included 3-D movies, electric shockers in some of the seats (for a movie called The Tingler), wide-screen formatting, and Cinerama, which was sort of an early version of IMAX.

  STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:

  THE BEANIE

  The 1950s was a golden age of stupid hats. The beanie was worn by thousands of the people who ended up running the country when they grew up. Scary, huh?

  On college campuses, there was a rash of panty raids in the 1950s. Groups of male students would march into the female dormitories and demand that each of the residents give them a pair of underwear. Many of the female students actually claimed to get a real kick out of this, though others fought back at a couple of colleges by beating the raiders back with broomsticks and Coke bottles.

  When we picture dances of the 1950s, we picture girls in poodle skirts dancing at sock hops with greasy-haired guys in leather jackets, but some of the most popular dances of the day actually included the hokey-pokey and the bunny hop. People who think of the 1950s as a golden age of culture tend to forget that sort of thing.

  EDSEL IS A NO-GO

  By the end of the 1950s, the Ford Motor Company was no longer under the control of the Ford family. The new managers had plenty of cash to throw around due to the success of the Ford Thunderbird and decided to develop a spectacular new kind of midpriced car to unleash on the American public. The car they designed, the Edsel, was just about the biggest flop in history.

  They spent months, and millions of dollars, designing the car, and put considerable effort into naming the thing. They even invited the poet Marianne Moore to come up with a list of names, and she duly submitted names that ranged from the good (Thundercrest) to the odd (the Resilient Bullet) all the way to the just plain bad (the Intelligent Whale). The advertising firm Ford hired came up with thousands of possible names. For reasons that have never quite been determined, out of all of these, they ended up naming it Edsel, after Henry Ford’s son.

  OTHER STUFF IN THE SONG

  BEN HUR: A popular movie about the Ancient Romans.

  SPACE MONKEY: The United States made its first serious headway in the space race in 1959 by sending two monkeys, Able and Baker, into space. Of course, the USSR just had to do us one better by sending a human up around the same time—which they did—but they wouldn’t get a monkey into space until 1983. So there.

  MAFIA: The Mafia does not exist. La la la.

  CASTRO: Fidel Castro took over Cuba and made it a Communist country following a 1959 revolution there. He would be a thorn in America’s side for decades, and Cuba would be one of the last Communist countries still in existence by the end of the twentieth century.

  Having designed and named the thing, the company set out to hype it as the car to end all cars. Early advertisements didn’t even show the car, in an attempt to make it seem like a big mystery. They even had a television special, The Edsel Show, to introduce it to the public. The special starred popular actor and singer Bing Crosby and featured such notable guests as Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Hope singing songs, telling jokes, and talking about how great the Edsel was. Some of the music on the show was fantastic, but they wisely only showed the car for a couple of seconds.

  The car looked odd (though we here on the Smart Aleck Staff think it’s kinda stylish, honestly) and was set up in an unusual manner. The automatic transmission control was mounted on the front of the steering wheel, which probably seemed like an exciting and modern idea in the boardroom. On the road, however, people would try to honk their horns and end up switching gears.

  Edsel Ford, who must have been bursting with pride from the grave.

  After all the hype, the Edsel turned out to be a major flop. The Ford company lost a fortune and stopped producing Edsels after just a couple of years.

  We still think they look better than Hummers.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY

  In 1960, Vice President Nixon ran for president against John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a young senator. One of Kennedy’s most memorable official slogans was “We Can Do Better,” but the Democrats’ funniest move that year was circulating posters of a smarmy-looking Nixon with the caption WOULD YOU BY A USED CAR FROM THE MAN?66

  Kennedy and Nixon participated in the first televised presidential debate. Many people who listened to the debate on the radio thought that Nixon did pretty well, but those who watched on television saw Kennedy looking like a dashing young go-getter and Nixon looking like a nervous, sweaty slob who needed a shave.

  The election was a close one; some (Nixon included)67 felt that Kennedy’s people committed fraud in Illinois and Texas to put their guy over the top. People still argue about this today. Despite recounts and investigations in several states, Kennedy was declared the victor and became the youngest man ever elected president (Theodore Roosevelt was a younger president but wasn’t elected to a full term until he was older) and also the first Roman Catholic president.

  Kennedy had already captured the nation’s imagination; he was a young guy who seemed to understand the changes that were coming to America and the world better than someone older, like Nixon, really did. One of Kennedy’s first acts in office was to create the Peace Corps, a group that would help provide education and other forms of relief to third-world countries.

  MORE STUFF FROM 1960 TO 1966 MENTIONED IN “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE”

  U-2: A kind of U.S. spy plane, one of which was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960.

  SYNGMAN RHEE: The first president of South Korea. The CIA had to rescue him from being killed after people began to suspect he’d rigged the election.

  PAYOLA: A scandal came about when people found out that disc jockeys were given “payola,” or compensated by record companies, to play songs on the air.

  CHUBBY CHECKER: A singer who had a hit with “The Twist,” which became the biggest dance craze of the early 1960s.

  PSYCHO: A scary movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

  BELGIANS AND THE CONGO: The Republic of the Congo declared independence from Belgium in 1960. Belgium was not amused.

  HEMINGWAY: Ernest Hemingway, an American author who committed suicide in 1961.

  EICHMANN: The most wanted Nazi war criminal of World War II, Adolf Eichmann was finally captured in 1961 and was eventually hanged.

  STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: A science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein.

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: A popular movie.

  Everything we feel like saying about Kennedy’s presidency actually comes up later in the song, so for the moment, we’ll move on to a brief interlude about rock music.

  DYLAN

  Bob Dylan arrived in New York at the age of twenty in 1961. Less than three years later, he was already being hailed as the greatest songwriter in American history. A few of us here on the Smart Aleck staff (Adam in particular) are ready to punch anyone who says he isn’t.

  Dylan started out as a folksinger, patterning himself after Woody Guthrie and performing mostly old folk standards. He then hit on the idea of writing songs of his own, like Woody had a generation before, and had his first big success with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which became a huge hit when it was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, a wildly popular folk trio.

  By the time “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a hit in 1963, rock music had fallen on hard times. For a while, there seemed to be only two kinds of dances: the twist, and variations on the twist. For a brief, strange pe
riod, the popular music of choice among many young people became folk music. Protest songs, in particular, seemed very relevant in the age of the civil rights movement and the nuclear bomb.

  Most protest songs of the day, however, were really pretty awful. Most of them just tried to make a point by throwing the word “free” or “peace” into the lyrics as often as humanly possible, and more than a few ended with an ironic reference to “the land of the free,” which got old fast.

  Bob Dylan. If you say a word against him, Adam just might challenge you to a duel, Aaron Burr style.

  Dylan’s protest songs were, by and large, much better. Songs such as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “With God on Our Side” managed not to sound nearly as preachy as many other protest songs while making points about the world that people couldn’t ignore. Furthermore, Dylan’s combination of folk music with surreal, beatnik-inspired poetry redefined the way people thought of folk music. In 1965, when Dylan switched to playing rock music (which, by then, had been brought back to life by British bands such as the Beatles—see a later section), other rock bands followed his example and began to grow up a little. While early rock songs were mostly just songs about teenage love designed to make people dance, Dylan’s work made them realize that rock music could be artistic, too.

  If you want to learn more about Bob Dylan, there are probably about five hundred books about him at your local bookstore, and he might very well be playing a concert in your town soon. As this book goes to press, Dylan is in his late sixties and still playing about a hundred shows a year. And he’s still writing great songs.