[2 articles] Planting the Seeds of the Sixties
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090402172.html September 6, 2009 1959 The Year Everything Changed By Fred Kaplan Wiley. 322 pp. $27.95 In the pantheon of pivotal years -- 1815 (the Congress of Vienna), 1865 (Lincoln is assassinated, the Civil War ends), 1914 (World War I begins), 1945 (World War II ends) and 1968 (the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated) -- 1959 hasn't previously rated a mention. But Fred Kaplan's energetic and engaging new book makes a convincing case for its importance. Because it set the scene for the explosions of the 1960s, 1959 deserves special attention as a turning point in American history. Kaplan has a PhD in political science and writes about international relations for Slate, but he says he's spent more time writing about "music and movies" than he has about "politics and war," and the breadth of his knowledge and enthusiasms is evident throughout "1959." "It occurred to me that some of . . . my favorite books, movies and record albums were made in 1959," he writes. "The more I looked into it the more it struck me that this truly was a pivotal year. . . . In that sense this is a revisionist history of previously unnoticed linkages." The book includes mini-essays on topics from Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" to Herman Kahn's marathon lecture series on thermonuclear war (which helped inspire Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" a few years later), the invention of the integrated circuit (which made the personal computer revolution possible), the lawsuit by Grove Press that led to the publication of an unexpurgated "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Nikita Khrushchev's visit to America, Robert Frank's photographs and John Kennedy's preparations for his presidential campaign in 1960. Kaplan is particularly good at describing the impact of the beat movement led by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who set off an underground revolt against the conformity that suffused American life in the 1950s. The author uses Ginsberg's return to Columbia University for a poetry reading in the winter of 1959 to highlight the cultural shifts that would transform the country just a few years later. Ginsberg and Kerouac had met at Columbia as undergraduates in 1944, and Ginsberg had been a favorite student of Lionel Trilling, who was one of the most celebrated critics of his time. (Kaplan doesn't mention it, but Trilling was also the first Jew to become a tenured professor at Columbia.) Ginsberg's flamboyance was the antithesis of Trilling's moderation. Yet the work of the beats animated Trilling's private doubts about his own quiet posture. Kaplan notes that Trilling's wife, Diana, wondered whether any of her husband's friends realized "how deeply he scorned the very qualities of character -- his quiet, his moderation, his gentle reasonableness -- for which he was most admired in his lifetime and which have been most celebrated since his death." When Ginsberg made his triumphant return to his alma mater in 1959, Lionel Trilling stayed home to discuss forming an intellectuals' book club with W.H. Auden and others. But Diana Trilling went to the reading with a friend, and she was surprised by her own reaction to it. "I was much moved by" Ginsberg's "Lion in the Room," Diana wrote. "It was . . . a decent poem, and I am willing to admit this surprised me." But when she went home and expressed her admiration, she got the kind of reaction that would continuously split the generations in the coming decade: "I'm ashamed of you," Auden told her. Kaplan points out the synergy among all kinds of '50s revolutionaries. Thus a comic such as Lenny Bruce, who "uncorked elaborate monologues about sex, drugs, religion and politics," could have his "improvisations" likened to those of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane by jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason. A chapter titled "The End of Obscenity" reminds us just how different America was a half-century ago, when such crusading publishers as Barney Rosset of Grove Press had to wage court battles to get "Lady Chatterley" and the novels of Henry Miller published on this side of the Atlantic. Rosset viewed his press as "a valve for pressurized cultural energies, a breach in the dam of American Puritanism -- a whip-lashing live cable of Zeitgeist." As Rosset was fighting to publish "Lady Chatterley," a film distribution company was waging a simultaneous battle to overturn the New York Board of Regents' ban of a French film based on D.H. Lawrence's novel. When the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ban in 1959, the opinion written by Justice Potter Stewart greatly enlarged the scope of what the American public would be allowed to see and read. Stewart declared that the Constitution's "guarantee is not confined to the expression of ideas that are conventional or shared by a majority. It protects advocacy of the opinion that adultery may sometimes be proper, no less than advocacy of socialism or the single tax." Anyone old enough to remember the '50s will be astonished to discover how many revolutionary seeds were sewn in the final year of that decade. Others who read "1959" will get a compelling and concise lesson in American social, cultural and political history. -- Charles Kaiser is the author of "1968 in America" and "The Gay Metropolis." -------- 1959: A rocket, a pill and obscenity start a revolution http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705326502,00.html By Joseph A. Cannon Aug. 30, 2009 In the summer of 1959, our family moved from Salt Lake City to the San Fernando Valley, then a relatively sleepy, smogless suburb of Los Angeles. L.A. was a big vibrant city with, even then, the glitz of Hollywood. Yet it was a city full of optimism and more than the veneer of innocence. The Brooklyn Dodgers became the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1958 and promptly beat the Chicago White Sox to claim the 1959 World Series. "Bonanza" hit our TV screens in 1959, and other popular TV shows of that year included "The Donna Reed Show," "Perry Mason," "Howdy Doody," "Father Knows Best" and the now iconic pre-revolution series "Leave it to Beaver." Now comes Slate columnist, Fred Kaplan, with a new book, "1959, The Year Everything Changed." Though it overstates (Can one year really be the pivot point for a whole cultural change?), Kaplan shows that many of the seeds of what became the '60s sprouted in 1959. In his first chapter, Breaking the Chains, Kaplan notes that on Jan. 2, 1959, a Soviet rocket carrying the Lunik I space capsule blasted past Earth's orbit and became the first man-made object to revolve around the sun. "The flight of the Lunik set off a year when chains of all sorts were broken with verve and apprehension not just in the cosmos, but in politics, society, culture, science and sex. A feeling took hold that the breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing." One of the important pillars of his long rumination on the year 1959 is Kaplan's focus on the literary scene of that year and in particular, challenges to the literary establishment and to obscenity standards. There are a number of manifestations of the assault on then-settled sensibilities. While Norman Mailer had been publishing for more than a decade, it was in 1959 that he embarked on a new kind of book, "Advertisements for Myself," which reflected a new kind of writing. In "Advertisements," Mailer would, throughout the book, "interrupt the narrative, recount how he came to write the piece, what was on his mind and how he felt at the time, (and offer) the most blistering judgments of others." The book marked the beginning of "two literary genres that would transform American writing through the rest of the century: the confessional memoir and the New Journalism." 1959 also brought the resurgence of Alan Ginsberg and his friend Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac were initially rejected but later embraced by the literary establishment. In earlier years, they had been dubbed the leaders of the "beat generation." By 1959, the beat generation had been transformed into beatniks. Much of the assault on literary standards was fought in the courts. In the late '50s and into 1959, Ginsberg's "Howl and Other Poems" was declared obscene by customs officials. In early 1959, an unpublished novel by William Burroughs was seized by the postmaster general and declared obscene. Eventually D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" found its way into court. All these were tests of a 1957 Supreme Court decision defining obscenity. By mid-July a federal court ruled that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was not obscene. While this was not the end of obscenity cases, it clearly broke the back of obscenity prosecutions. Kaplan notes, "there was an appetite for forbidden fruit, wherever it was growing and an audience for anyone who spat its seeds in the faces of authority." If all this wasn't enough, Lenny Bruce made his first appearance on television in April 1959 on the Steve Allen Show. Then came The Pill. On July 23, 1959, G. D. Searle Pharmaceuticals filed an application with the FDA requesting permission to market the drug Enovid, explicitly as a birth-control pill. The availability of the pill was directly responsible for the dramatic decline of the American birth rate in the 1960s. But more than its demographic significance were the social consequences. Shortly after the pill was approved, Gloria Steinem would write in Esquire magazine, "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed," in which she predicted that the pill would sire a new breed of "autonomous girls" who, like men, would be "free to take sex, education, work, and even marriage when and how they like." Next week: More on the '50s and '60s. -- Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret News. E-mail: [email protected] . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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