Postwar America Research Articles

The Dady Brothers, Irish Music, and the Power of Place in Postwar America

The Dady Brothers, Irish Music, and the Power of Place in Postwar America Christopher Shannon The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were central figures in the revival of traditional Irish music in postwar America and Ireland. Liam Clancy, the charismatic front man of the group, concludes his memoir The Mountain of the Women (2002) by reflecting, somewhat ironically, on the decisive question posed by his initial brush with fame and fortune in the early 1960s: should he return to small-town Ireland, with all its provincial lunacy, or remain in cosmopolitan New York, with all the bohemian lunacy of Greenwich Village where he and his brothers first made their mark?1 Clancy’s dilemma was a starker version of the one facing the generation of Irish Americans who came of age in the decades following World War II: whether to stay in the old ethnic urban villages or leave for the “wider” worlds of 1950s suburbia or 1960s counter culture. Clancy chose Greenwich Village—a ticket out of Old-World provincialism that nonetheless required him to spend a career singing folk songs that celebrated the life of the world he had left. Most Irish Americans of his generation also chose some version of the wider world: with perhaps more sentiment than irony, many Irish Americans found in traditional Irish music—from the Clancy Brothers to the Chieftains to Riverdance—a way to connect to Irish culture free from the traditional social constraints that historically shaped that culture. Still, reports of ethnic fade have been greatly exaggerated. Many Irish continued to live in the old urban enclaves well into the late 1970s and the revival of traditional Irish music was an essential component of the broader ethnic revival that emerged in post-1960s America.2 The local dimension of this revival is well illuminated by looking at the life and career of the Dady Brothers, a duo based in Rochester, New York. Far from the great Irish music centers of New York, [End Page 135] Boston, and Chicago, John and Joe Dady developed a synthesis of folk, bluegrass, and Irish music that speaks powerfully to the place of Irish music amidst the broader developments in American popular music in the postwar decades. Just as significant, at a time when popular music played such a key role in drawing young Americans out of the communities of their birth, the Dadys succeeded as full-time, professional musicians largely because of their commitment to the local bonds of neighborhood, church, and community. The local world that shaped the Dady Brothers has been both the glory and shame of the American Irish—and Irish American intellectuals have felt that dividedness acutely. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Irish Catholics were a virtual synecdoche for everything that struck WASP America as foreign and dangerous about the city. The anti-Catholic vitriol inspired by Al Smith’s 1928 run for the presidency suggested that little had changed since the Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844. Ironically, the next two decades saw Irish Catholics gain center stage in the most dominant popular culture medium of the day, Hollywood film. Culminating in Going My Way (which won multiple Academy Awards in 1944), innumerable Hollywood films held up the world of Al Smith as not merely acceptable, but exemplary.3 Yet, reflecting on this cultural moment, such Irish American intellectuals as Daniel Patrick Moynihan have bemoaned the failure of the Irish in America to develop a high culture capable of transcending the level of popular entertainment represented by sentimental Hollywood films. Moynihan saw the American Irish as cut off from the earthy vitality of their working-class roots and prevented by a repressive Catholicism from embracing the modernist Irish literature of Yeats and Joyce; they seemed to live culturally adrift in a lower middle-class mediocrity.4 By the standards of high modernism, Irish American mediocrity was perhaps nowhere more glaring than in the field of music. The Hollywood films that redeemed the world of urban Irish Catholicism also revived the popularity of the Tin Pan Alley songs of Irish America that were once so central to American musical theater and vaudeville. In this...

Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016

This paper introduces a new long-run dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. The household-level data allow us to study the joint distributions of household income and wealth since 1949. We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because the composition and leverage of household portfolios differ systematically along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity. An important consequence is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. Housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth of households at the top of the distribution. This race between the equity market and the housing market shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods. The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970.

“Termites in the Temple”: Fundamentalism and Anti-Liberal Politics in the Post–World War II South

AbstractFrom 1946 to 1950, East Tennessee was embroiled in a bitter campaign over the radio preacher and evangelist, J. Harold Smith. More than a curiosity, this confrontation helps us understand a much broader struggle that cut deeply through American society in the post-World War II era. It was a conflict that grew out of a conservative political effort to roll back the New Deal, the union-led regime of collective bargaining, and the tide of modernist religion. These issues overlapped with concerns about African-American equality and the Soviet Union’s threat to the nation’s security. Although recent scholarship has revealed the symbiotic relationship between postwar evangelicalism and free-enterprise ideology, we know little about how and why that message resonated for many middling and working-class individuals. Fortunately, supporters of Smith’s radio program wrote thousands of letters that illuminate what normally anonymous people were thinking about God, society, and politics in the postwar years.In this paper, we use the events in Knoxville as a window into the broader contest over religion and politics in postwar America. Smith’s struggle in Knoxville occurred during an especially tumultuous time in the South. As such, it reveals one regional context for the unsettling political changes and religious conflicts that were occurring nationally. Finally, a study of the responses of Smith’s supporters affords a rare opportunity to analyze one base of postwar fundamentalism and what drew them to the politics and theology of men like J. Harold Smith.

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America by Merve Emre

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America by Merve Emre

The American Way of Farming: Pioneer Hi-Bred and Power in Postwar America

The American Way of Farming: Pioneer Hi-Bred and Power in Postwar America

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America by Merve Emre

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America by Merve Emre

The Cornell Kitchen: Housing and Design Research in Postwar America.

The Cornell Kitchen (1950-55) was produced at Cornell University by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in home economics, engineering, architecture, and psychology. It promised to deliver rational design, functional principles, aesthetic appeal, and emotional satisfaction in one prefabricated, easy-to-install package. This article sets out the kitchen's history from its design to its field-testing phase to its impact on postwar kitchens. It argues that the kitchen represents an important effort to approach housing in a more scientific way; scientific methods were deployed to understand both the physical and socio-psychological problems of dwelling. The project also sought to introduce a specific model for leveraging housing research into the real world, partnering with industry to mass produce scientific designs. Social scientific methods were hence used to create not only more livable but also more saleable products in an effort to appeal to manufacturers and consumers alike.

Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America by Rachel Kranson

Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America by Rachel Kranson

"The Fabulous Irishman": Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America

"The Fabulous Irishman":Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America Rachel Gordan (bio) Little remembered today, but much discussed at the time was the visit of the Jewish Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe of Dublin to the United States in the spring of 1957. Stranger-than-fiction, but also typifying what Cold War Americans wanted to believe was possible among their own Jewish citizens, Mayor Briscoe embodied an unexpected combination of religious and national loyalties. "The Lord Mayor," explained typical American newspaper coverage of Briscoe's visit, "embodies the unusual combination of a devout orthodox Jew and a zealous Irish patriot."1 The irony was that Briscoe was not American, proving that the freedom of opportunity and religion that Cold War Americans viewed as fundamental to their own purported exceptionalism, actually occurred to varying degrees in other countries—although often without the fanfare typical in the US context. Still, Briscoe's six-week American visit, the media's attention to it, and the television drama that Briscoe inspired, provide a view into Cold War American fears and desires around Jews, religious fealty, citizenship, and the particular way in which midcentury American discourses around religious freedom found a primary example in Jews, such as Briscoe, and their religion. At a time when a tri-faith image of postwar America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was widely accepted, Briscoe's presence and popularity in the U.S. helped to affirm America's embrace of religious freedom—albeit a freedom constrained to just three religions, and even more crucially, although rarely made explicit, to those individuals understood as racially white. As Kevin Schultz's study of "tri-faith America" explains of the era's credo: "The ethnic, religious, and racial divisions that had been predominant in pre-World War II America no longer had a place in the defining traits of good Americanism. With enemies such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the ideal of tolerance was sacrosanct, and during the war years the kind of tolerance that was [End Page 401] lionized most was that between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews."2 This tri-faith ideal had practical results, Schultz points out, challenging the nation to rethink the distribution of power and who was deserving of social, political, and cultural recognition. In line with this rethinking of American society, Robert Briscoe prodded American observers to reconsider their stereotypes of clannish Jews, and he affirmed postwar Jewish allegiance to religion as an ideological core of their identity. Although Briscoe was an "Irish import," America's reception of him during his spring 1957 tour symbolized the unusual role that Jews played in serving as evidentiary proof of midcentury America's ideal of religious freedom.3 Briscoe would spend six weeks in North America. In that time, he became a celebrity, as newspapers around the country followed his tour and as a result of his television and radio appearances. In its coverage of Mayor Briscoe, the media all over the country broadcast an image of the Jewish mayor as embodying religious freedom—an American value freighted with political saliency during the Cold War, which according to President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was a battle between those who believed in the moral laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition and those who found value in materialist secularism. When quoted in the press, Briscoe's messages were about Ireland's religious freedom, but American embrace of Briscoe nonetheless symbolized America's attachment to these values. "Briscoe Says He's Live Evidence There 'Absolutely Is No Bigotry in Ireland'" ran one typical headline in the Los Angeles Times that connected Briscoe's celebrity with his embodiment of religious freedom.4 As Leo Braudy, a scholar of American culture notes, fame in Western society has long been associated with the ideal of freedom, because fame can be understood as the "social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness." With fame, the celebrity is granted recognition and permission to be himself. "To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation, means you have come into your rightful inheritance...

Merve Emre, Paraliterary: the Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America

The valorisation of reading practices across disciplines and social groups is dependent on historical contexts, communities, and human agents acting within them. Such is the very plausible argument which Merve Emre’s book, Paraliterary: the Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, aims to put forward in the face of a lack of academic attention to reading practices in the field of 20th century literature. Few modern writers, perhaps, were so hermetic to the idea that their own intellectual pr...

Reconsidering the Composer-Educator in Postwar America

By the middle of the twentieth century, American universities had evolved into powerful institutions with aggressive cultural agendas. Renewed interest in the arts provided a platform for composers employed by these universities to grow into powerful civic leaders. This article investigates the contributions of four modernist composers—Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, William Schuman, and David Diamond,—who held academic and administrative posts at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Juilliard School of Music. During this period, these four composers used their academic positions to shape American classical music culture—not through their compositions—but by overhauling music departments, authoring textbooks, and extending the reach of universities and conservatories far beyond the campus walls. This project relies on primary and secondary sources, weaving together academic records, administrative reports, and composer correspondence into a narrative of educational reform, cultural patronage, and even urban renewal. This article endeavors to widen the historiographic focus on postwar composers like the Four to reconsider their relevance as music educators, cultural authorities, and practitioners of modernism outside of the concert hall.

‘A critique of culture’: Alan Watts, psychedelic Buddhism, and religious play in postwar America

ABSTRACTHeralded as a time of economic prosperity, the post-World War II period in America also experienced extraordinary religious awakenings of born-again evangelicalism, Prosperity Gospels, and an apocalyptic flare rendered palpable by atomic bombs and the Cold War. Postwar Christianity found itself reinforcing neoliberalism, sanctifying standardizations accompanying technological routinization, economic progress, and consumption-based lifestyles, resulting in alienating crises of spirit and culture. Amidst uncertainty and conformity, psychedelics offered sacramental means for bypassing postwar society’s mechanisms by uncovering expressions of mutuality and compassion. Outlined within Alan Watts’ work, psychedelics unveiled Buddhist wisdom, detailing existence not as a function of difference, but as an expression of absolute interconnection. Neither doctrinaire nor authoritarian, Watts’ psychedelic engagement with Buddhism invites us to investigate beyond differences, toward moments in which the subjec...

Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016

This paper introduces a new long-run data set based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. Studying the joint distribution of household income and wealth, we expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because of systematic differences in household portfolios along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own business equity. Differential changes in equity and house prices shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods.

Small presses and literary/artistic collaboration in the U.S. after 1945: The examples of The Black Mountain Review

The early 20th century European avant-garde movements have extensively shown the connection existing between the activity of independent publishers and the practice of literary/artistic collaboration. Such works as La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France (Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, 1913) or Facile (Paul Eluard and Man Ray, 1935), would have never been published if the little review Les hommes nouveaux or the small publisher G.L.M had not acted as facilitators to allow those works to reach an audience. The artistic and publishing context of post-war America, though different from that of pre and post World War I Europe, presents interesting parallels concerning the role of small presses in encouraging the activity of collaboration between artists and writers. By exploring the work of daring editors and publishers as Robert Creeley (The Black Mountain Review), Jonathan Williams (Jargon press), and more recently, of Steve Clay (Granary Books) it is possible to see how, during the latter part of the 20th century, American avant-garde poetry found a way to circulate and to express its unique voice by its association - and most of the time by its collaboration - with the visual arts. In the 1950s Creeley insisted to match, in the seven issues of The Black Mountain Review that he edited, the most innovative poetry of the time with the reproductions of works by contemporary artists, and this in a way that was totally unique at the time. Jonathan Williams, through his Jargon series of well-crafted books, echoed Creeley’s work and put an even stronger emphasis on the activity of collaboration between the artists and the writers that he chose to publish. In more recent times (1980) Steve Clay took on the movement started years earlier by Creeley and Williams and, by establishing his publishing house known as Granary Book, began publishing a long series of collaborative works where the specificity of the writing is directly embodied in the material aspect of the book.

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America

Review of: The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America, by Gretchen Buggeln.

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America. By Gretchen Buggeln . Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xxix + 345 pp. $140.00 cloth; $40.00 paper.

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America. By Gretchen Buggeln . Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xxix + 345 pp. 40.00 paper. - Volume 86 Issue 2

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar AmericaGretchenBuggeln. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 40, Issue 2 p. 202-203 Book Review The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America , Gretchen Buggeln. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Brad Eden, Brad Eden Valparaiso UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Brad Eden, Brad Eden Valparaiso UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12734Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume40, Issue2June 2017Pages 202-203 RelatedInformation

:The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGretchen Buggeln. The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. xxxix+345 pp.; 144 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.Marilyn J. ChiatMarilyn J. ChiatMinneapolis, MN Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 51, Number 2/3Summer/Autumn 2017 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695589 Views: 20Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American CultureDavidMelbye. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture David Melbye. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.In Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture, David Melbye provides meticulous analyses of the groundbreaking television series's use of irony as a narrative strategy to critique postwar America. Although other books on The Twilight Zone tend to serve as guidebooks to the series-see Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion (1989)-or nonscholarly book-length studies such as Peter Wolfe's In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling (1997) or critical biographies such as Gordon F. Sander's Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man (1992)-Melbye's study is the first scholarly examination of the show's use of irony as a narrative device. In his analysis of 140 of the series's 156 episodes, Melbye, who teaches a broad range of media studies courses in Southern California and has worked in the Hollywood television industry, has produced a mostly readable, if at times dense, account of The Twilight Zone's place in postwar American culture through its use of narrative irony.Melbye argues that The Twilight Zone employs irony as a tool of social critique in postwar America, a device the series consistently uses in each episode to such an extent, he claims, as to suggest that the ironic circumstances reflected in the series, in the series's moral universe, and in the series's larger social contexts cannot be separated. In making this argument, he responds to the work of M. Keith Booker's Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files (2002), a study that situates The Twilight Zone as a reflection of postwar culture and focuses on the formulaic, science fiction structure of the series. Melbye insists that The Twilight Zone is less a piece of formulaic science fiction as much as it is a series that, while still formulaic due to its reliance on the surprise twist ending, draws from multiple generic traditions whose main connecting thread is the presence of irony. As such, Melbye's book is an important study of not only one of America's most important and influential television programs, but it is also an important comment on how the series went beyond the confines of the science fiction genre to produce a complex critique of postwar America.Melbye divides the book into seven chapters. The first chapter focuses on the multiple cultural and personal influences on the show and on its creator Rod Serling, providing a useful overview of 1940s-1950's radio and television programming that inspired him to create an agenda for social critique. …

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America

In The Suburban Church Gretchen Buggeln weaves a fascinating story of the rise of the modern church-building movement in the upper Midwest, viewed as the “cradle of modern church architecture” (p. 17). The book provides a rich and detailed study of the intricate dynamics of designing and building hundreds of mid-twentieth-century Protestant churches. Buggeln investigates the complex processes of collaboration and compromise among creative architects, pastors, church-building committees, and congregations within the wider contexts of family growth and the emergence of automobile-enabled suburbs. How were these churches to be distinctive, practical, and attractive to the growing suburban population in an increasingly secular world? Momentum was created through local, national, and even international meetings, where important discussions concerned the relationship among religious belief, architectural form, and visual attractiveness. Architects provided distinctive designs for dignified, economical, beautiful, and functional sanctuaries, as well as rooms that fit the multiple roles of the suburban church. These churches broke from the restrictions of tradition and were rational and simple solutions to form and design, with architectural structure, materials, and simplified ornament honestly expressed, often using natural wood, brick, and glass to humanize the elegant spaces.