Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (60 page)

Other opponents of racial discrimination also recognized that the boycott did little to weaken the larger edifice of Jim Crow. The Montgomery Improvement Association, although very well organized and unswerving, did not change formal practices much in Montgomery. Schools, public buildings, hotels, lunch counters, theaters, and churches remained segregated. "White" and "Colored" signs confronted people entering public places. There were still no black bus drivers or black policemen. And would future boycotts be a viable strategy? It would do no good, for instance, to boycott a restaurant or park from which one was already excluded. In late 1956, when the boycott in Montgomery ended, it was far from clear what methods of protest might bring down the fortress of Jim Crow in the future.

It was also far from clear that the boycott changed white opinion outside the South. In the 1956 campaign neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson, his opponent for the presidency, paid much attention to civil rights. Both declared that they could never imagine a situation that would induce them to send in federal troops to enforce desegregation. Disgusted with the Democratic party, Harlem's Democratic congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and many other blacks supported Ike.
⁸²
King then established an organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to carry on his efforts against racial discrimination. But the Conference, dominated by Negro ministers, was ill organized and aroused limited enthusiasm outside some areas of the South.

After the year-long excitement of Montgomery, militant activism for civil rights actually abated.
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A great many black people, to be sure, had been inspired; they remained angry about discrimination and eager for change. But most white Americans had never paid much attention to the plight of minorities—whether they were Indians, Asians, Mexicans, or blacks—and for the remainder of the decade they did not much bestir themselves to improve race relations in the nation. Martin Luther King notwithstanding, they seemed more interested in enjoying the blessings of the Biggest Boom Yet. It was not until the 1960s, when a massive increase in civil rights activism arose, that they were forced to sit up and take notice.

14
A Center Holds, More or Less, 1957–1960

Public opinion polls in the late 1950s and in 1960, one historian reminds us, reported that the American people were "relaxed, unadventurous, comfortably satisfied with their way of life and blandly optimistic about the future."
¹

A few writers, however, have perceived a more restless citizenry. The scholar Morris Dickstein, a college student at the time, recalled these years as "a fertile period, a seedbed of ideas that would burgeon and live in the more activist, less reflective climate that followed."
²
Richard Pells, a historian, adds, "Beneath the ordinary American's placid exterior, there seemed to lurk a hunger for corrosive wit, jangling sounds, disruptive behavior, defiant gestures, a revival of passion and intensity."
³

People who perceived blandness and optimism pointed to varied phenomena: the apparently indestructible popularity of Eisenhower, the weakness of political pressure for social legislation and civil rights, the nearly total disarray of the Left. Millions of Americans still listened happily to "oldies" by Pat Boone, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra, laughed at the adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and flocked to watch movie stars like John Wayne. As John Kenneth Galbraith complained in
The Affluent Society
(1958), Americans seemed dazzled by the glitz of the Biggest Boom Yet.

Those who challenged this serene view of American society in the late 1950s countered by citing evidence of cultural unease. "Beats" derided middle-class ways. Teenagers more than ever reveled in the rock 'n' roll of Chuck Berry and the gyrations of Elvis. The comedian Lenny Bruce, foul-mouthed and abrasive, assaulted mainstream values. Norman Mailer wrote a widely discussed essay in 1957, "The White Negro," celebrating the wonders of a loose, free, "hip" life-style. The comedian Tom Lehrer—"So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb, So don't wait up for me"—attracted enthusiastic audiences of college students who roared at his brilliantly crafted songs against Cold War paranoia and nuclear overkill. Anti-war activists formed the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), also in 1957.

Alienated dissenters from centrist politics could be discovered here and there. At the Highlander Folk School in the hills of Tennessee a former Socialist party organizer, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker, who was soon to be a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, ran workshops for southern civil rights workers, including Rosa Parks. By 1959 Highlanders were singing a transformed gospel song as "We Shall Overcome." Hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts, Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer, formed the John Birch Society in 1958. The Birchers, as critics called his followers, accepted Welch's far-right view that Ike was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." Birchers claimed to be 40,000-strong by 1963.
⁴

Which observers of the late 1950s to believe? The answer depends in part on what one tries to find. Idealistic Americans, cherishing increasingly grand popular expectations about forging a new and better society, unsettled aspects of national culture and politics in these years. In the 1960s these dreamers began to shake the society.
⁵
As late as 1960, however, they did not much divert the mainstreams of American culture and politics; between 1957 and 1960, moderates and conservatives continued to win more battles than they lost. Cold War passions remained especially intense. The moderate-to-conservative center that had dominated the United States in the early and mid-1950s, while weakening, managed to hold.

A
SIDE FROM THE FOLLOWERS
of rock 'n' roll, the "beats" (critics came to call them "beatniks") represented perhaps the most publicized form of dissent from mainstream culture between 1957 and 1960. By far the best-known of them were two former students at Columbia University. One, Allen Ginsberg, had graduated from the university in 1948. He was a poet, a political radical, a drug user, and a pansexual. In 1956, at the age of thirty, he rose to fame following highly public readings of "Howl," a poem he had written while under the influence of peyote, amphetamines, and Dexedrine. "Howl" foresaw a coming apocalypse: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness / starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." When police then seized
Howl and Other Poems
from a San Francisco bookstore, they ignited a sensational, widely reported trial that brought Ginsberg and beats to national attention.
⁶

The other featured beat was Jack Kerouac, who was thirty-four years old in 1956. (The best-known beats were approaching middle age in the late 1950s.) In 1951 Kerouac had composed a long stream-of-consciousness-style manuscript about his restless wanderings. Rewritten many times in the next few years, it finally appeared as a book,
On the Road
, in 1957. An early, much-cited passage captured its theme: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
⁷
The book sold well and brought much further notice to the beats. Then and later
On the
Road
was a sacred text of sorts not only for the handful of self-proclaimed beats but also for many others, most of them younger than Kerouac, who responded to the message of escape from convention extolled in the book.

Some of those who were attracted to the beats became prominent a few years later. The folksinger Bob Dylan grew up in the 1950s as Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota. He greatly admired Ginsberg and left the University of Minnesota in 1961 to live in Greenwich Village, a center of beat and bohemian life. Tom Hayden, perhaps the best-known "New Left" leader of the early 1960s, was drawn to Kerouac and moved to San Francisco to experience the beat environment in 1960. Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who claimed to be a follower of Ginsberg and other beats, began his mind-altering experiments with drugs—on Harvard students—in 1960. Ginsberg himself soon became one of Leary's acolytes.
⁸
All these people absorbed in one way or another a major message of the beats: Americans must reject the excesses of materialism, conformity, and the consumer culture.

The attention given the beats by the media in the late 1950s—and the fear that they aroused among conservatives—suggest that they tapped into a reservoir of discontent, especially among the young. They were a symbol of greater unrest that was to come. Still, it is a stretch to regard the beats as initiating a major cultural trend in the late 1950s, let alone to see them as comprising a "movement" that threatened a larger cultural center in the United States. Estimates of those who actually became beats range from several hundred to a thousand or more, only 150 or so of whom did any writing. They had little if anything in common with many other cultural rebels, such as fans of rock 'n' roll, or with political leftists, at the time. Leary notwithstanding, the beat phenomenon faded a bit by 1960. The media tired of it and moved on to new stories. The vast majority of Americans by then seemed either bored, disgusted, or mildly amused by beat behavior.

I
N POLITICS, AS IN CULTURAL MATTERS,
opponents of a conservative status quo also seemed to be gaining ground in the late 1950s, especially after a recession struck in 1958. Democrats triumphed in the 1958 elections, greatly increasing their numbers on Capitol Hill. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts cruised to victory in his quest for re-election and set sail for the presidency in 1960. Other, more liberal Democratic senators, such as Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Herbert Lehman of New York, and Paul Douglas of Illinois, took the offensive in Congress by demanding passage of federal aid to education, a public system of health insurance, and governmental assistance to "depressed areas." To combat the recession they called for expansion of federal spending on public works and for a tax cut. Their legislative initiatives set the economic agenda for Democratic presidential efforts in the 1960s.
⁹

In the late 1950s, however, liberal Democrats scarcely came close to success. Congress did manage to conduct some important business, including the admission to statehood of Alaska and then Hawaii in 1959. In 1960 it approved a modest federal-state program to help the elderly with their medical costs. But Democratic moderates, led by Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, set the main agenda. This consisted primarily of acquiescing in the conservative domestic policies of Eisenhower, whose still formidable personal popularity they feared to challenge. For these and other reasons no liberal bills of significance succeeded during Ike's second term. Long-standing socio-economic problems, including poverty, continued to fester, and newer ones, such as a slowdown in manufacturing, were allowed to undermine the security of working-class people in the cities.

Nothing more clearly revealed the frustrations of liberals in the late 1950s than the state of race relations. Civil rights leaders, led by King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, sought to stir up sentiment for racial justice by staging a "Prayer Pilgrimage" at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957, the third anniversary of
Brown
. The turnout of 25,000, however, failed to attract much attention from the national media or politicians in Washington.
¹⁰
Activists on the local level, often led by women who belonged to youth chapters of the NAACP, had slightly greater success: sit-ins in Wichita and Oklahoma City in 1958 succeeded in desegregating drugstores. These and other sit-ins between 1957 and 1960 showed that black people were ready for direct action, especially in the border states and Upper South. But the sit-ins, like the Prayer Pilgrimage, did not arouse the conscience of America's white majority to the cause of civil rights.

In the Deep South, meanwhile, racist whites continued to act with virtual impunity. Public schools remained almost wholly segregated, and black colleges sympathetic to civil rights suffered cuts in state funding. A black professor at Alcorn College who tried to enter the summer session at the University of Mississippi in 1958 was arrested and placed in an insane asylum. Whites laughed, "Any nigger who tries to enter Ole Miss
must
be crazy." A black army veteran, Clyde Kennard, who sought to register at Mississippi Southern College in 1959, was harassed by police, arrested on trumped-up charges (for "reckless driving" and stealing a bag of chicken feed), and ultimately sentenced to seven years in jail. In 1959 a black Mississippian, Mack Charles Parker, was jailed on charges of raping a white woman. Two nights before his trial nine masked men snatched him from his cell at Poplarville, drove him to the Pearl River between Mississippi and Louisiana, shot him twice through the chest, and flung him into the water. His body was found nine days later. Many local people were said to know the killers, but none came forward, and no one was tried. At the impaneling of a grand jury on the case in November a circuit court judge, Sebe Dale, told the jurors that Supreme Court decisions probably caused Parker's death. The Court, said the judge, was a "board of sociology, sitting in Washington, garbed in judicial robes."
¹¹

Civil rights leaders hoped desperately that federal officials might help. Some of these officials tried. The FBI worked hard in a futile effort to bring Parker's murderers to justice. And Attorney General Herbert Brownell supported a civil rights bill that came to the floor of the Senate in mid-1957. Hardly a tough measure, the bill nonetheless garnered support from liberals who hoped that it could be stiffened so as to provide protection for black voters in the South. Eisenhower, however, continued to believe that progress in race relations would happen only when popular attitudes were ready for it. Clearly uninterested in the bill, he amazed reporters at a news conference in July by telling them, "I was reading that bill this morning, and there were certain phrases I did not entirely understand." Reporters, he advised, should talk to Brownell. Eisenhower also made it clear that he had no stomach for military enforcement of racial justice. "I can't imagine any set of circumstances," he said in July, "that would ever induce me to send federal troops into any area to enforce the orders of a federal court, because I believe that [the] common sense of America will never require it."
¹²

Although Eisenhower's half-hearted support of the bill did it no good, the main problem facing the measure was the threat of a southern filibuster. To prevent this from happening, Senate majority leader Johnson resolved to compromise. He softened southern opponents with an amendment guaranteeing defendants charged with criminal contempt (for violating voting rights) the right of trial by jury. Many supporters of the bill hotly opposed the amendment, for they recognized that the provision for juries—of whites—would protect defendants from conviction. But Johnson, a shrewd parliamentarian, managed to persuade enough moderates, including Democrats such as Kennedy, that it was either the bill with the jury trial amendment or filibuster and no act at all. The amendment succeeded by a vote of 51 to 42. The bill then passed, 72 to 14.
¹³