Midcentury America Research Articles

For Those “Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter”: Morrison’s Home and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf

Toni Morrison’s novel Home replaces nostalgia for midcentury America with reminders of McCarthyism and the Korean War. She wanted to, as she said, “take the scab off the ’50s.” In doing so, she returns to a critical time in her own life and the authors who preoccupied her during graduate work at Cornell: William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Reading Faulkner, Woolf, and Morrison’s own master’s thesis alongside her recent novel draws out the critical slant of her fiction, as she uses the literature and history of an earlier era to lay bare the cultural cost of nostalgia.

From power to prejudice: the rise of racial individualism in midcentury America

From power to prejudice: the rise of racial individualism in midcentury America

Amy F. Ogata. Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. Marga Vicedo. The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America.

Amy F. Ogata. Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. Marga Vicedo. The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America.

Obscenity rules: Roth v. United States and the long struggle over sexual expression

For some, he was America's leading smut king, hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law--and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times--the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates--by using Roth's own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices. The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan's majority opinion--which on the one hand reflected the liberalising attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept obscene expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan's written words necessarily acknowledged. In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata (review)

Reviewed by: Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata Gary Cross Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. By Amy F. Ogata. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 320pp. Cloth $105, paper $34.95. In this welcome and refreshing contribution to the recent history of American efforts to shape the child, design historian Amy Ogata shows how the idea of the natural creativity of children was integrated into a wide range of educational, commercial, and childrearing initiatives in the generation after World War II. Ogata focuses on the shift from the biological and behaviorist childrearing ideas of Holt and Watson for the attentive, but tolerant and indirect, parenting methods advocated by Gesell, Spock, and Mead. She takes this familiar story further by stressing the impact of a group of psychologists who argued for the teachability of creativity in children through art, less didactic children’s literature (replacing Dick and Jane with Curious George or Maurice Sendak’s Max), and early imaginative TV programming (Winky Dink and You, for example, that culminated in Sesame Street in 1969). Despite concerns over consumerist conformity in this period, Ogata notes how much of this rhetoric of creativity was expressed through consumer choice, especially in a vast industry of “creative” playthings manufactured by Playskool, Holgate, and Creative Playthings. These companies sold open-ended educational toys after consulting with child development experts like Edith Kawin and modernist designers like Charles and Ray Eames. The creative playground movement abandoned the traditional swings and slides for “adventure” sites that offered children safe explorations of modernist forms and textures, hoping to educate children’s taste. Following the growing interest in the history of children’s space, Ogata offers an intriguing chapter on avant-garde housing designs of the period, which provided environments for children’s self-expression (for example, playrooms near the kitchen for supervision, but that featured vivid colors and simple, portable modernist furnishings, erasable wall surfaces, and little ornament to encourage individuality). Though designed for wealthy progressive parents, many of these ideas trickled down to the middle class in do-it-yourself magazines and books. Along similar lines, she explores how the school building boom of the 1950s and 60s substituted the multistory monumental schools of the past with their long halls and rows of iron-and-wood desks for one-story pavilion-type structures that offered children flexible classrooms (often with folding walls and moveable furniture, some arranged in circular spaces). Some, like the Educational Facilities Laboratories, went further in the 1960s and 1970s [End Page 330] with large spaces partitioned with folding panels allowing flexible individualized and mixed-grade-level learning. Finally, Otaga explores how the discourse of creativity impacted art and science education, showing especially how art became part of the standard curriculum in the postwar with the claim that nondirected art projects promoted creativity, emotional expression, and self-confidence in students. And manufacturers of art supplies like Binney & Smith adopted the language of creativity to promote sales with a staff of artists and educators, even promoting its crayons as “the quiet toy” in the late 1960s. She reviews the origins of junior museums (featuring children’s art), “hands-on” children’s museums, and unique sites like physicist Frank Oppenheimer’s innovative Exploratorium of San Francisco in 1969 that combined play and science. Otaga concludes her homage to the creative child movement by recognizing that many boomer kids never had playrooms or teachers who made their classrooms into “living rooms for learning,” but she insists that the creativity movement lives on in contemporary psychological research, concern about the decline of American innovativeness in the globalized economy, the persistence of imaginative playthings (at least in boutique stores), and the continuing success of children’s museums and unique museums like the Strong in Rochester, New York, devoted to creative play. Even in a commercialized form, this rhetoric continues to define middle-class parental aspirations for their children. As important as was the creative child movement, in Otaga’s effort to tell a positive story, she may overestimate its influence even in the boomer middle class, especially beyond New York and the affluent suburb from which she...

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America

Journal Article Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America Get access Amy F. Ogata. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xxii, 293 pp. Cloth, $87.00. Paper, $34.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1276–1277, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau126 Published: 01 March 2014

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata (review)

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata (review)

The Red and the Black: Gender, Genre, and the Romance of (Anti)Communism in The Woman on Pier 13

This article employs Robert Stevenson's The Woman on Pier 13 (US, 1950) as a privileged example of anticommunist film noir in order to explore the received left critique of the ideological and aesthetic properties of this subgenre — what one might call the unhappy marriage of film noir and anticommunism — as well as to demonstrate the way in which the discourse of anticommunism is intimately related, via the metaphor of marriage, to issues such as gender and sexuality. The crux of the essay is the argument that the political discourse of anticommunism cannot be dissociated from contemporary sociocultural notions about marriage, which receives its most charged expression in the film's figuration of femininity (the femme fatale) and homosexuality (the queer “commie”). Just as Diego Rivera's painting The Flower Carrier (1935) illustrates the ideological ambiguity of The Woman on Pier 13, so too does a stereophonic sense of the film suggest that the marriage between film noir and anticommunism — like that between film noir and melodrama — is rather stranger and therefore richer than heretofore imagined, revealing not simply the changing contours of classic noir but, among other things, the emergence of the “feminine mystique” in midcentury America.

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America

Designing the creative child: playthings and places in midcentury America

Designing the creative child: playthings and places in midcentury America

Gender and the Dies Committee Hearings on the Federal Theatre Project

This paper examines the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda's investigation into un-American activities in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it examines the performances of committee chairman Martin Dies and his Republican colleague J. Parnell Thomas, who led the interrogation of Federal Theatre witnesses. Relying on so-called “friendly witnesses,” usually disaffected former Federal Theatre employees or former communists, Dies and Thomas devoted three days to the testimony of Hazel Huffman, a WPA mail clerk, who never worked on the FTP, while allowing Hallie Flanagan and Ellen Woodward, the two women who directed the national theatre programme, just a few hours each. While Huffman gushed and flirted, Flanagan and Woodward refused to perform the version of femininity the committee demanded. The reordering of gendered roles that resulted was startling. The Dies Committee took to presenting itself as emasculated, a victim of masculine women and New Deal–communist conspirators, who were stripping not only them, but also America, of manhood. This paper suggests that it is only by analysing the powerful gendered performances of the key characters in this unfolding drama of un-Americana that we can understand how and why un-Americanism gained so strong a foothold in mid-century America.

From the Physician to the Marlboro Man

The “More doctors smoke camels” advertising campaign ran from 1946 until 1954. The campaign featured a series of advertisements centered around and celebrating the physician in American life. Neatly bookending the demise of the physician was the appearance, in 1955, of the Marlboro Man. The dominant figure in the Marlboro Man campaign was the cowboy. This shift away from the physician to the cowboy will be situated in the context of 1950s fears about smoking and health. The similarities and differences in the masculine virtues of the physician and the cowboy will be analyzed in terms of the relationship between men and health in mid-century America.

How Cleanth Brooks Read his Seventeenth Century News Letter: James Marshall Osborn, Joseph Milton French, and the Organization of English as a Profession in Mid-Century America

The founding of the Seventeenth Century News Letter, publishedNew Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1942–1951 and described in the Yale University Library online catalog as a “Quarterly (irregular),” marks a particular moment in English literature as a profession in mid-twentieth century America. The original newsletter offers a glimpse into the organization of literary scholarship in the period, and the practices by which English literature as a professional community functioned. This period, with its battles over the centrality of literary criticism and literary history, and with the heated opposition to successive fashions in literary theory, has been usefully studied, and within the context of Yale in particular, by Gerald Graff. Yet there are spheres of literary scholarship which Graff’s study does not address, in part through its focus on the workings of academic departments, and their courses and curricula, in university English departments. Important professional spaces—the library, most notably—andpractices, such as collecting and corresponding, are excluded fromthis study. These are precisely the spheres occupied by Osborn andhis colleagues in this period. This paper turns to two examples of Osborn’s work as a literary scholar and collector in the 1940s, to illustrate the networks by which professional practice was governed,and complicated, in English literature in mid-century America. In the imagined community of seventeenth-century scholarship found in the Seventeenth Century News Letter, and the collaboration between Osborn and literary critic Cleanth Brooks on a scholarly edition, one finds a lived experience of English literature which was by no means as polarized, as exclusionary, as that portrayed by Graff and others.

Foreign Bodies:

Foreign Bodies:

The South in the Shadow of Nazism

The South in the Shadow of Nazism Stephen J. Whitfield (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Could the evil of the Third Reich be entirely separated from consciousness of the evil of Jim Crow? Could the persecution of one minority provoke outrage, while official discrimination of another minority continued to induce indifference, silence, and rationalization? Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg, halftone photomechanical reproduction print from cigarette card, courtesy of the collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 57] In 1944 the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored the publication of a landmark study, with which historians of race relations in the United States are very familiar: An American Dilemma. Economist Gunnar Myrdal, a Swede, had been selected to direct the project and write the study because his nation had no heritage of slavery, colonialism, or imperialism; therefore his impartiality could be presumed.1 In mid-century America the Carnegie Corporation could not have conceived of assigning the project to an African American scholar—like W. E. B. Du Bois, who actually knew something about the subject, the fruit of a lifetime’s study and experience. But Myrdal’s comprehensive study—the book weighed in at over one thousand pages, with ten appendices and two-hundred and fifty pages of notes—set in motion the acute awareness of the disjunction between democratic ideals and Jim Crow. Exactly a decade later, the unanimous Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education would acknowledge a terrible historic injustice. Its footnote #11, in citing An American Dilemma, served as a justification for outlawing racial segregation in public schools, which violated what Myrdal called the American Creed of egalitarianism. In 1944 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sponsored the publication of a consequential book by another European author. But Raphael Lemkin had come to the United States not as an invited and welcome visitor but as a refugee from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the title he gave his 712-page scholarly tome. A Polish Jew, Lemkin could not pretend to neutrality on this subject. In the Final Solution he lost forty-nine of his relatives (including his parents), which made the fate of his family typical of Polish Jews, of whom only one in ten managed to survive the catastrophe. There were no exact precedents to the paranoiac fury with which an advanced nation was extinguishing with calculated efficiency two out of every three European Jews. What the German occupiers were doing in Eastern Europe, Winston Churchill asserted in 1941, was “a crime without a name.” The famously articulate prime minister was rarely if ever at a loss for words. But it was left to Lemkin, an attorney who had taught international law at Duke University upon his arrival in the United States, to supply a name for that crime. The key to its analysis was a neologism he coined to describe atrocities that were still unfolding: genocide. Since 1944 a huge scholarly literature has emerged that draws upon and amplifies Lemkin’s definition of that word, its applications, and implications.2 Though the political campaigns that have been waged under the rubric of human rights have extended what Lemkin was the first to name, the juxtaposition of the simultaneous publication of those two Carnegie volumes inaugurates an argument about historical change. In the course of the two decades after 1944, the momentum against bigotry and discrimination gained remarkable force. An ideal of democratic inclusion came noticeably closer to fulfillment, especially outside the region. The impossibility of reconciling the value of equality with the practice [End Page 58] of Jim Crow doomed the South to the crisis that erupted in the 1960s, when the federal government demanded that the region live up more fully to the American Creed and conform more closely to the rest of the republic. Because segregation was once believed to be impregnable, and because southern white attitudes were held to be immutable, an explanation is therefore needed for the striking political and social change that punctuated the 1960s. Historians have offered multiple explanations for the transformation, ranging from the moral authority and political effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement to the Northern effort to complete the liberal agenda...

Fatal Attractions: "Place," the Korean War, and Gender in Niagara

Niagara features a landscape or "place" as a star. Focusing especially on Niagara Falls' multilayered and traumatic history helps us understand the film's exploration of mental instability, eroticism, death, and even the ongoing Korean War. Yet the film's conventional plot structure is unable to resolve its gender, class, and other tensions, which reflect the fissures of midcentury America.

Private Eyes and “Little Helpers”: Doormen, Gatekeepers, and Racial Trespass in Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely and Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress

ABSTRACT Raymond Chandler's and Walter Mosley's protagonists move through different neighborhoods of midcentury Los Angeles and interact with various "gatekeepers" whose function is to maintain and reinforce the racialized urban boundaries of access between LA's neighborhoods, institutions, and other highly regulated public and private spheres. These encounters illuminate anxieties about the stability of racial categories, the physical urban space that these categories would control and organize, and notions of racial and class mobility in midcentury America.

Gone to the country: the New Lost City Ramblers and the folk music revival

Gone to the Country chronicles the life and music of the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, the Ramblers introduced the regional styles of southern ballads, blues, string bands, and bluegrass to northerners yearning for a sound and an experience not found in mainstream music. Ray Allen interweaves biography, history, and music criticism to follow the band from its New York roots to their involvement with the commercial folk music boom. Allen details their struggle to establish themselves amid critical debates about traditionalism brought on by their brand of folk revivalism. He explores how the Ramblers ascribed notions of cultural authenticity to certain musical practices and performers and how the trio served as a link between southern folk music and northern urban audiences who had little previous exposure to rural roots styles. Highlighting the role of tradition in the social upheaval of mid-century America, Gone to the Country draws on extensive interviews and personal correspondence with band members and digs deep into the Ramblers' rich trove of recordings.

Experimental Wounds: Science and Violence in Mid-Century America

Taken from a published report on wound ballistics research during World War II, Figure 1 depicts the abdomen of a cat that has been shaved, anesthetized, marked with a grid, and shot. The individual squares are frames, the caption says, “(2880 per second) from a high speed motion picture of a cat’s abdomen, showing the volume changes and movements caused by a 6/32nd inch steel sphere.” We can recognize in this image the conventions of scientific inscription. The technologies are sophisticated, quantitative, impressive. The image speaks for itself. Or does it? What exactly is happening when an anesthetized cat with a shaved abdomen painted with a grid gets shot, in a laboratory, and when that event is hyper-documented in high speed photographs, and deployed in a range of texts as evidence? And what do these human creations — these highly quantified experimental wounds — tell us about the culture and practice of twentieth-century science?

The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public (review)

Reviewed by: The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public Bettina Liverant Igo, Sarah E. — The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 398. The masses "are always the others, whom we don't know and can't know. Masses are other people," British cultural theorist Raymond Williams famously declared. Sarah Igo's investigation of landmark social research projects in mid-century America presents an intriguing counterpoint to Williams, showing that social surveys offered a technology that encouraged Americans to see themselves as members of mass society. The masses are not other people, her study insists; the masses are us. The story of The Averaged American unfolds in three steps as Igo explores the development and gradual (if often reluctant) acceptance of social research as an instrument of self-understanding. Bringing together Robert and Helen Lynd's studies of Muncie, Indiana, published as Middletown (1927) and Middletown Revisited (1933), the establishment of public opinion polling by George Gallup and Elmo Roper, and the reports on male and female sexual behaviour published by Alfred Kinsey and his staff in 1948 and 1953, Igo argues for a broad shift in collective consciousness. The cumulative impact of this work, she proposes, was more than the sum of its parts, offering a new way of seeing and being American. The tensions between a tradition of individualism and pressures of modern mass society were not resolved, but they could co-exist in statistical projects that represented America as a mass society of opinionated people. The selection of three projects offers the opportunity to explore the development of the social survey in considerable depth as well as breadth. Beginning with the Lynds, social scientists turned away from projects of social reform, promising instead the neutral collection and recording of social facts. The absence of moralizing was associated with the advance of scientific knowledge. Improvements in sampling technique and increasingly intimate questions produced detailed "statistical portraits," apparently able to bring the people of America into focus. At the same time, it is clear that, regardless of the authors' professed commitment to an objective science of statistical inquiry, each study systematically and deliberately skewed its sample in the effort to represent the American norm. The Lynds selected Muncie as prototypically American in part because of its unusually small immigrant population and did not include members of the city's sizable African American population in their analysis. Gallup and Roper presented their polls as exercises in democracy, but devised their samples to represent those they believed were most likely to vote and spend. Kinsey devised the "hundred percent method," claiming that intensive interviews with every member of a targeted social unit allowed him to produce a true cross-section of normal American sexual behaviour. In conducting his research, however, Kinsey heavily over-sampled college students, professionals, mid-westerners, and gay men, ignored African Americans, and drew nearly all of his working-class data from persons in prisons. The result of each of these efforts was a statistically skewed and incomplete image of American society, "more wished-for than real" (p. 59). [End Page 499] While one thread of The Averaged American is the increasing authority of science as the expert progressively displaces the man in the street, these studies addressed and found a large audience. All three attained best-seller status, surprising publishers and generating considerable interest in the authors, who became celebrities in their own right. Individual Americans may have challenged aspects of each study, but their representations of the national norm resonated with a public curious and apprehensive about mass society. The concerns of the academic community are noted, but the voices of Americans as they "talk back" to the surveyors, challenging the principles of representative sampling, questioning the appropriateness of prying into private lives, and disputing the ability of outsiders to understand the nuances of the local community, are captivating. Igo presents the public's reaction as it appeared in magazines and newspapers and in correspondence directed to the Lynds, Gallup, Roper, and Kinsey. We meet a sales representative for Squibb Pharmaceutical, concerned that he could not locate anyone who had been...