The 1950s were this century's Golden Age, a complex andfascinating period of explosive intellectual exploration,technological achievement and social ferment. It was a decade ofincomparable challenge and accomplishment, the product of unmatchedsacrifice and daring imposed by the Great Depression and World WarII.
No decade since then - most especially the current one - hasachieved such heights. And as we turn the corner into the 21stcentury, it's possible that no decade in the near future will.So why, you may wonder, am I having this sudden outburst ofrose-colored nostalgia and generational chauvinism?It might have something to do with this week's serialization oncable's History Channel of David Halberstam's opus, The Fifties.More personally, though, it was the conclusion I reached whilewatching the thoroughly enjoyable performance of "Buddy . . . theBuddy Holly Story" at the Apollo Theater this Thanksgiving weekend.Here's a guy who, contributing to a new art form, wrote and performeda dozen hits in an 18-month-long career. What amazing creativeproductivity.More to the point, my outburst has much to do with having had myfill of youthful sages who draw unremittingly nasty characterizationsof the '50s from watching reruns (where do they see them?) of "Ozzieand Harriet." Who think of the '50s as an age inhabited byuninspired, repressed, bland and conformist simpletons. Drab people,drab lives, drab culture, drab literature,drab music, drab everything.Uh huh.Except, for this: It was the drab, uninspired '50s that dared tobe different, to create a musical form - rock 'n' roll - that doesn'tjust survive today, but is celebrated by today's preciously cool whoact as if they invented it.Of course, no age isperfect. It was immoral that blacks were segregated,that they were forced to drink from separate water fountains andride in the back of the bus.OK, so, let's talk about racism and segregation, one of thebiggest knocks on the decade. The easily discovered facts,apparently unavailable to '50s critics, are that the '50s didn'tcreate Jim Crow. But it was the first decade to seriously andsystematically try to get rid of it. The Supreme Court, in 1954,ruled school segregation to be illegal and a president risked hispopularity by sending troops South to back up the court. It was inthe '50s that Rosa Parks and thousands battled bus segregation, andit was within months of the close of the '50s that lunch counterprotests picked up steam and the Voting Rights Act passed. Bypreparing the legal groundwork and planting the seeds for aremarkable change in society's attitudes, the '50s was the incubatorfor the civil rights movement.So, it is odd that today's self-described "agents of change"fail to recognize the unparalleled cultural, intellectual andtechnological change of the '50s. It was a decade that blossomed,actually erupted, from 20 years of sacrifice and personal denialimposed by the hardest economic times and greatest external threatsever faced by this country. If Americans who made it through thosetrials decided that their reward should be to sit around the suburbanfamily room, smoking cigarettes and watching "I Love Lucy," then whothe hell are we, from our lofty and smug perches 40 years later, tosay they shouldn't?But it's no fairer to characterize the decade that way than itwould be for the social critics of 2037 to characterize the '90s bywatching reruns of "Men Behaving Badly." In fact, the '50s were aperiod rich in social criticism and change, of James Dean and AllenGinsberg, of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and J.D. Salinger's Catcherin the Rye.Yes, the decade spawned Joseph McCarthy, but the '50s also wasthe decade that got rid of him. Gone too were the last racial andethnic barriers to naturalization.This was not some intellectually barren age; it was the age ofsuch giants as William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Tennessee Williams,Eugene O'Neill and Archibald MacLeish. It was an age that was largeand diverse enough for beatniks and Fulton Sheen.Television was an entirely new medium; not a vast wasteland,but a vast fertile field of experimentation that rose to the heightsof live drama and Ernie Kovacs. The '50s gave birth to spaceexploration. It nurtured jazz and blues. The AFL and CIO merged;union solidarity soared.With the introduction of the jet airliner, the creation of theinterstate highway system and the building of the St. LawrenceSeaway, American mobility and commerce also soared. Experimentationin design and construction flourished. New strides were made inmaterials, providing the flexibility, endurance and safety of, yes,plastics.Yet, the '50s, having its own war and book-ended by two others,wasn't allowed the kind of complacency that today is taken forgranted. The sight of the Nike missiles in the parks and forestpreserves to shoot down Soviet bombers (which were certain to invade)were a reminder to children of the threat of nuclear death. Thecertainty of the military draft and the possiblity of a painful,lonely death in a foreign land awaited every male child.For all children, the threat of polio was real andterrifying. This was when incurable diseases arose from theunknown, and not from known, avoidable behaviors.The challenges and the terrors were great, but so were thesenses of survival, self-preservation and achievement, virtues thatproved to be useful and enduring.So, call me when the '90s make some equally great and lastingcontributions.Dennis Byrne is a member of the Sun-Times editorial board.
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