Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (55 page)

Some adult Americans pretended not to be upset by the frenzy surrounding rock 'n' roll. Like many other fads, it might go away. (Elvis, they said, was not so bad—he bought houses for his parents, said his prayers, and did not smoke or drink.) But there was no doubting that the popularity of rock 'n' roll exposed the nascent rise of a sometimes restless "youth culture." And many older people openly revealed their sense of alarm. A psychiatrist, writing in the
New York Times
, proclaimed that rock 'n' roll was "a communicable disease" and "a cannibalistic and tribalistic kind of music." The racist metaphors here went unchallenged. Another critic, writing to a Senate subcommittee on delinquency, lamented that "Elvis Presley is a symbol, of course, but a dangerous one. His strip-tease antics threaten to rock-n-roll the juvenile world into open revolt against society. The gangster of tomorrow is the Elvis Presley type of today."
⁷⁸

M
ANY OF THESE FEARS
about juvenile delinquency, rock 'n' roll, and youthful rebellion reflected contemporary confusion and anxiety amid the rapid social, demographic, and economic changes that were transforming the nation. They also addressed real phenomena, for increasing numbers of the young were indeed beginning to rebel against accepted ways. Some of these young people identified with Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of J. D. Salinger's novel
The Catcher in
the Rye
(1951). Older people, Holden said, were "phonies." Others among the young—few in numbers but much noted by contemporary trackers of social trends—became "beats" who claimed to reject the materialism of the consumer culture and affected bohemian styles of life.
⁷⁹
Many others identified with a peer group culture of their own—one that highlighted a new consumer-driven world of drive-in movies, fast-food hangouts, jalopies, and malls. It was small wonder that many older Americans, bewildered by the pace of social change, began to feel greatly threatened by a "youth culture."

Still, many of the "threats" to older ways of life in the 1950s were exaggerated. Statistics on juvenile delinquency (and on crime in general), while unreliable, did not show increases during the 1950s. Moreover, while many young people were restive, they saw no clear routes to collective social action. Not even rock 'n' roll, for all its liberating potential, could provide those. Instead, restless young people in the 1950s tended to rebel on a fairly small stage in which parents and neighbors remained the major impediments to gratification. Except for blacks, who grew increasingly militant in fighting against racial injustice, young people who were unhappy with the status quo did not much concern themselves with larger political or social problems. Most educators in the 1950s detected a "silent generation," both in the schools and in the burgeoning universities.

What the restless young still lacked in the 1950s was the greatly magnified sense of possibility—of open-ended entitlement—that was to give them greater energy and hope in the 1960s. Instead, they encountered still strong cultural norms that prescribed traditional roles for "growing up": "girls" were to become wives and homemakers, "boys" were to enter the armed services and then become breadwinners. Few young men, Presley included, imagined that they should avoid the draft: half of young men coming of age between 1953 and 1960 ended up in uniform, most for two years or more.

By the late 1950s millions of Americans were enjoying the bounties of affluence and the consumer culture, the likes of which they had scarcely imagined before. In the process they were developing larger expectations about life and beginning to challenge things that had seemed set in stone only a few years earlier. Older cultural norms, however, still remained strong until the 1960s, when expectations ascended to new heights and helped to facilitate social unrest on a new and different scale.

13
Race

Color-consciousness has always blighted life in the United States. Light-skinned people, fearful of "pollution" from "coloreds," historically erected formidable barriers against "non-white" Americans. Between the late 1940s and 1960 these barriers opened up a bit, and a few outsiders crept through the cracks. But only for a little way. The vast majority of non-whites—including not only African-Americans but also American Indians, Asians, and many Hispanics—could not get through.
¹
In matters of color and of racial consciousness the United States held firm.

T
HE TREATMENT OF
A
MERICAN
I
NDIANS
had long demonstrated the virtual impenetrability of such barriers. Thanks in part to military campaigns against them and mainly to the killing diseases that Europeans brought with them to the New World, the number of native people in what became the United States dropped drastically from many millions in 1600 (most estimates of these numbers now range between 4 and 7 million) to a low of around 200,000 in 1900.
²
Whites, having subdued all "Red" resistance and consigned most survivors to reservations, then further cheated Indians out of their land and tried to force them to adopt white ways. In 1924 Congress decided that native-born Indians were citizens of the United States, but neither the national government nor the states gave tangible meaning to that citizenship. Some states denied Indians the vote until the early 1950s.

Between 1934 and 1945, John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, tried to promote an "Indian New Deal" that would value native cultures, increase federal support for health and education, and provide for greater self-government on the reservations. Collier was high-handed and paternalistic, and many natives refused to cooperate with his plans. Still, his policies offered hope for a more liberal treatment of the Indians, some of whom—then and later—were encouraged in their quests for resistance and self-determination.
³

Collier came under fire from conservative critics and resigned in 1945. His successors gradually undermined his efforts, especially after 1953, when Congress sought to end the special status that Indians had had under the law as wards of the United States. Over time, Congress then declared, Indians would be subject to the same laws, privileges, and responsibilities as other American citizens.
⁴
The "termination" policy, as this approach was called, aimed to cut off public aid to Indians and to get them to fend for themselves. In 1954 the Menominees, the Klamaths, and several smaller groups agreed to be "terminated" and embarked as individuals into the non-Indian world.

Termination thereafter soon lost some of its standing as official policy. A number of Indian groups joined white sympathizers to protest vigorously against the new approach, which they said was abandoning the majority of Menominees and Klamaths to lives of neglect. Other advocates of government responsibility to native people succeeded in 1955 in transferring Indian health facilities and programs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (long considered an unsympathetic and corrupt bureaucracy) to the Public Health Service, which did a better job. Congress also provided modest financial aid to assist the growing number of individual Indians who sought to leave their reservations and relocate. In 1958 the government backed away from efforts to impose termination, and the policy—in eclipse during the 1960s—was formally ended by President Nixon in 1969. By then Indian activists were beginning to take matters into their own hands.

Still, the termination approach signified a central fact about national attitudes in the late 1940s and 1950s: the continuing power of white assimilationist thinking. Indians, it was agreed, must be forced to adapt to white ways. This thinking coexisted uneasily and in some manners inconsistently with white assumptions about Indian inferiority. As in the past, whites who paid attention to Indians tended to think that native cultures were crude and uncivilized. Most Americans, moreover, did not give much thought to Indians, in part because the natives were mostly out of sight and out of mind. Indeed, they remained a tiny minority: the census enumerated 334,000 in 1940, 343,000 in 1950, and 509,000 in 1960.
⁵
Relegated to reservations (or scattered in remote areas), they had little formal education or political power. Many were poorly nourished and ill. The vast majority lived in poverty. The miserable condition of most American Indians in the 1950s, as throughout United States history, testified to the continuing strength of white ethnocentrism and institutional discrimination in the country.

Asian-Americans, another group that had encountered racist treatment in the past, fared slightly better than did American Indians in the 1940s and 1950s, during which time new immigration laws opened a tiny bit of space. In 1943 Congress finally repealed legislation dating to 1882 that had barred Chinese workers from emigrating to American shores. The repeal, establishing small quotas for Chinese (105 per year), reflected wartime sympathy for China, an ally against Japan. In 1946 Congress did the same for Asian Indians and Filipinos—people who in effect had been barred from emigrating to the United States since 1917. In 1952 Congress approved the McCarran-Walter Act, a major effort to recodify immigration statutes. Although it contained tough sections that widened grounds for deportation, the act loosened some restrictions. It repealed laws that had excluded Asians from settling in the United States, and it eliminated "race" as a barrier to naturalization, thereby enabling Asians to become American citizens.
⁶

The practical effect of these new laws, however, was not great. Hatred and distrust of Japanese-Americans, inflamed during World War II, persisted. Moreover, the McCarran-Walter Act reaffirmed the quota system that had been enshrined in legislation of 1921 and 1924. These laws had established very low quotas for unwanted groups, especially those from southern and eastern Europe. The McCarran-Walter Act aimed to ensure that 85 percent or more of immigrants would come from northern and western Europe—areas of "Anglo-Saxon stock." It was especially hard on Asians, setting annual quotas of 185 for immigrants from Japan, 105 from China, and 100 for each of other countries within a so-called Asia-Pacific Triangle. (Family reunification provisions, however, permitted a great many more close relatives of Asian-American citizens to come in as "nonquota" immigrants, thereby boosting numbers. Some 45,000 Japanese and 32,000 Chinese thereby immigrated to the United States in the 1950s.) Although President Truman vetoed the measure, calling it restrictive and discriminatory, Congress (Democratic in both houses) resoundingly overruled him.
⁷
The McCarran-Walter Act formed the essence of American immigration law until 1965, when Congress approved more liberal legislation.

Latino-American people did not encounter nearly the same levels of exclusion and legal discrimination that marginalized Indians and Asians in the United States. Many "Hispanics," after all, were light-skinned. Puerto Ricans were American citizens who could and did enter the United States without restrictions.
⁸
Mexicans had been periodically lured to the Southwest, whenever American commercial farmers needed cheap labor. Primarily because of such demand for workers, Mexicans and others from Latin America had never been assigned quotas: immigration from the Western Hemisphere knew no legal limits. In 1942 Mexico and the United States approved a program whereby Mexican
braceros
—workers under government contract—might stay for specified periods of time as farm laborers in the Southwest. This arrangement was regularly extended in the 1950s. In 1959 the program peaked, admitting 450,000 workers. By 1960
braceros
made up 26 percent of America's migrant farm labor force.
⁹

But the United States was hardly a haven for Mexicans and other migrants from south of the border. On the contrary, they faced systematic discrimination, including segregation in housing and schools. The
braceros
were widely exploited by their employers. When demand for farm labor receded (as happened from time to time), American authorities rounded up Hispanic aliens (as well as some people who were American citizens) and deported them.
¹⁰
Dismal economic conditions south of the Rio Grande, however, drove ever more people across the border in the 1940s and 1950s, including "illegals" who did not want to be tied to labor contracts. Many
braceros
overstayed their presence rather than return to the even greater poverty of their native land.
¹¹

Many of these Mexicans, angry Anglos complained, were
mojados
, or "wetbacks who should be deported forthwith." Mexican officials, too, requested a crackdown on the "illegals" in order to protect the contracts of the
bracero
program. American authorities responded to such complaints in the early 1950s with Operation Wetback, as it was called. Raiding restaurants, bars, and even private homes, they captured and deported as many as they could find. Some of those who were caught in the net suffered harsh detention and other violations of civil liberties. A number of estimates conclude that as many as 3.8 million Mexicans were rounded up and sent away between 1950 and 1955.
¹²

Efforts such as Operation Wetback (which nonetheless failed to stop migrations) cannot be seen as purely "racist." Working-class Americans in the Southwest, confronting mass migrations of people who labored for next to nothing, understandably sought to stem the flow of outsiders who threatened to take away their jobs. Still, it was clear that Hispanics, whether
braceros
, "wetbacks," or others, faced substantial hostility and discrimination in the United States. Like Indians and Asians, many Anglos were saying, people from south of the border were inferior and undesirable.

I
T IS DIFFICULT
to generalize about the status of African-Americans in the 1950s. Much larger as a group than Indians, Asians, or Hispanics, they numbered 15.8 million people in 1950 and 19 million in 1960, or around 10.6 percent of the population. As in the 1940s, blacks continued in the 1950s (and 1960s) to flee the South in unprecedented numbers: by 1970, 47 percent of black people lived outside the South, most in the Northeast or Midwest, as compared to only 23 percent in 1940. Many of these migrants settled and resettled several times, concentrating in cities, in their restless quest for a better life.
¹³

Those who left the South in the 1950s sought to escape a world of black-white relations that remained more systematically oppressive than anything experienced by other racial groups in the United States and that had changed very little over time.
¹⁴
Negative stereotyping of black people, to be sure, became a little more subtle in the 1940s and 1950s: the NAACP succeeded in driving "Amos 'n' Andy" off of TV in 1953.
¹⁵
More important, whites were less likely in the postwar era to resort to violence. Reported lynchings of blacks, which had averaged twelve a year in the 1930s, fell to a total of thirteen between 1945 and 1950.
¹⁶
Thereafter the NAACP dropped federal anti-lynching bills as its first priority and focused instead on fighting other forms of racist behavior. But black people in the South during the 1950s still struggled in a Jim Crow society that segregrated everything from schools and buses to bathrooms, beaches, and drinking fountains. Despite campaigns by black activists for voting rights, only a token few black people in the Deep South states were permitted to register or to vote.
¹⁷
Daily humiliations continued to remind black people of their third-class status. Whites never addressed black men as "mister" but rather as "boy," "George," or "Jack." African-American women were called "Aunt" or by their first names, never "Miss" or "Mrs." Newspapers rarely reported the names of black people but instead described them as "negro," as in "a man and a woman were killed, and two negroes." Whites did not shake hands with blacks or socialize with them on the street. When blacks encountered whites in public places, they were expected to take off their hats, but whites did not remove theirs in the same situation, or even in African-American homes.
¹⁸

Flight to the North provided relief from some of these practices, especially in the booming manufacturing sector of the economy, where thousands of blacks found industrial work in the 1940s and early 1950s. But change came slowly.
¹⁹
As in the past, employers consistently discriminated against African-Americans in hiring, advancement, and salary. Unemployment was normally twice as high for blacks—especially males—as for whites. Poverty afflicted 50 percent or more of blacks even in the economically good years of the mid-1950s. (White rates were around 20 to 25 percent at the time.) Key unions—in construction, plumbing, sheet metal trades, and electrical work—virtually barred blacks from membership. Even the United Automobile Workers, which supported civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, continued to be dominated by whites. It elevated no blacks to its executive board until 1962, by which time black auto workers were seething at daily humiliations on the shop floor.
²⁰