Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up Read online

  BOOMERS

  BOOMERS

  The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

  VICTOR D. BROOKS

  BOOMERS. Copyright © 2009 by Victor D. Brooks. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago 60642, a member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

  www.ivanrdee.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Brooks, Victor.

  Boomers : the cold war generation grows up / Victor D. Brooks.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-56663-724-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Baby boom generation—United States. 2. United States—History—

  1945– I. Title.

  HN57.B655 2009

  305.240973'09045—dc22 2008052622

  For James T. Kane

  PREFACE

  ONLY SECONDS after noisemakers and fireworks welcomed the New Year of 1946, a seemingly minor event occurred fewer than two miles from the birthplace of American nationhood. As millions of people celebrated the first full year of world peace since 1939, the wife of a navy machinist gave birth to a daughter at Philadelphia Naval Hospital. The arrival of Kathleen Casey rated a short feature in the hospital newsletter but initially seemed to have little significance beyond her immediate family. Twelve months later, Kathleen’s arrival would gain rising importance for the simple reason that more than 3.5 million other babies had followed her into American households in that one year, a number that dwarfed the infants born in both the 1920s and 1930s. Confident predictions that this surge was a one-year postwar phenomenon seemed to unravel when 3.8 million new babies arrived in 1947, and were shattered when the count passed 4 million the next year. Gradually, as maternity wards set new records with the arrival of each new decade, terms such as “spike” and “bubble” gave way to longer-term labels of “Population Explosion” and the “Baby Boom.” The physical manifestation of this new reality in twentieth-century American culture emerged in Washington, D.C., in the lobby of the Commerce Department. A supremely modern version of a tolling bell, a newly installed Census Clock, flashed multicolored lights every 7.5 seconds to record the birth of a new American citizen, a frequency that would not slow until the end of 1964. When the Baby Boom was over, 76 million children were dominating communities from Levittown, New York, to Pasadena, California, and renewing Americans’ sense of optimism and purpose.

  This book is a chronicle of the “great invasion” of the United States in the period between the end of World War II and the close of the 1960s. It was a unique kind of invasion—noisy and occasionally even threatening, but also fascinating and even enjoyable for adults and children alike. A national psyche that seemed tentative and frightened during a depression that dominated the 1930s, and feared a resumption of the same after the guns of World War II were stilled, was prodded into cheerful renewal by an army of young people who brought prosperity in their wake. This is the narrative of a postwar world where, if far too many children experienced the sting of racial, religious, ethnic, or gender bias and discrimination, the stage was also set for a more equitable, more sensitive, and more caring childhood for many other young people.

  The story begins with the marriage and parenting activities of the “Greatest Generation” after World War II and ends with the tumultuous events in the late sixties. There are a number of fine books on the Boomer experience, ranging from Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties to Tom Brokaw’s Boom, but I have attempted to consider the period from new perspectives.

  I have perused a great many published books on the era but also much less commonly utilized sources, including popular magazines ranging from Life and Look to Parents and Jack and Jill, to DVDs, videotapes, and even kinescopes of period television programs and films. I have also conducted hundreds of interviews of Boomers, seeking informality and free-flowing responses, which revealed cultural trends and offered a spontaneity that could not have been accomplished with more formal questions and quantitative analysis. This process was furthered by the enthusiasm of individuals or groups of Boomers to relate their special childhood experiences, which then allowed me to construct the larger picture.

  My research and the extensive conversations with Boomers have prompted a number of the focal points of this book—for example, what people of the era wore and ate, their home environments and level of technology, and relationships between parents and children and between siblings. Boomer children were also enormously influenced by the explosion of popular culture and mass media in the fifties and sixties, and in turn they influenced these trends to an even larger degree. This is a recurring theme of the book. The Boomers attended school in larger numbers and for longer periods than any previous generation; educational issues occupied an important portion of their childhood experiences. Finally, a significant segment of the Boomer generation grew up at the peak of the East-West confrontation that we remember as the cold war, which paralleled the impact of the Great Depression on children of the 1930s and World War II on young people of the 1940s. The cold war could mean the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the alarm of the Sputnik launch, or the elation of Apollo XI, but it was always present in some sense, from the yellow signs that directed students to school fallout shelters to the Life magazine articles that compared student life in American and Soviet schools.

  A personal acknowledgment: I was born early in the second year of the Baby Boom as the oldest of four children of a Catholic Democratic mother who had been a secretary and was now a full-time homemaker, and a Protestant Republican father who had served as a major in the army air corps during World War II and was in the process of becoming a college psychology professor. For my first twelve years I lived in a suburb of Philadelphia in a 1930s-era twin (semidetached) house. Our neighborhood was composed primarily, but not exclusively, of relatively equal numbers of white Catholic and Protestant families with a significant minority of Jewish households and a smattering of relatively recently arrived Latinos from Guatemala and Asians from Taiwan. In the twenty houses on our street lived families with three to six children; just one family had only two children, and an older couple had no young children.

  The crowded living conditions of six people in a small, one-bathroom, attached home prompted subsequent moves to a 1920s stone Tudor, a brand-new 1960-model split-level, and finally a 1964-model spacious colonial on a large lot. Frequent sleepovers with relatives who lived in Levittown-style ranches and Victorian-era single-family houses provided an opportunity for me to experience most of the major housing arrangements of the Boomer era.

  My diversity of housing experiences was matched by a variety of educational venues, including a parochial elementary school, a public high school, a Catholic college, and an Ivy League university. Each of these experiences gradually added to my wonder at the complexity of my Boomer generation, as my peers at each school had both much in common with and yet major differences in outlook from those in the other institutions I had experienced. The fascination of trying to understand the role of children in an adult world was substantially expanded when I became a single parent soon after the birth of my third son. As many single parents understand, the merging of maternal and parental roles produces grand opportunities along with daunting challenges. In the case of my three highly verbal children, this meant not only endless questions about the world in which they lived but also questions about the world in which I grew up. Nothing prompts a book about childhood in the past bette
r than answering the questions of children in the present.

  My adult support for this project came from a variety of sources. I wish to thank James Marten of Marquette University and Ivan Dee for their confidence in my proposal for this book. Dr. John Johannes, vice president for academic affairs; Rev. Kail Ellis, O.S.A., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Dr. Connie Titone, chair of the Department of Education and Human Services, have given me great support and encouragement in the Villanova academic community. Anne Feldman of our departmental staff not only is one of the few people who can translate my handwriting but also provides stylistic suggestions that have always improved the text. Graduate students Amanda Meltz and Christina Beebe joined in the pick-and-shovel work of interlibrary loans and proofreading.

  Finally, I wish to dedicate this work to my recently deceased uncle, James T. Kane, who spent his late adolescence in the front lines of the Korean War, preventing a bloody conflict from turning into a nuclear war. Corporal Kane and many others like him were too young to be part of the Greatest Generation of World War II and too old to be Boomers. Yet their sacrifices allowed the Boomer generation to spend their childhoods in relative peace and security while ensuring that the magic of their youth could be passed to their own children and grandchildren.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 Genesis of the Baby Boom

  2 Home and Family in Early Postwar America

  3 School Daze: From Split Shifts to Sputnik

  4 Leisure World

  5 Sibling Rivalry

  6 Camelot Kids

  7 Boomers in Transition: High School to College

  8 Growing Up in the Great Society

  9 Challenging the Establishment

  10 The Summer of ’69 and Beyond

  11 A Good Time to Grow Up

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  BOOMERS

  PROLOGUE

  WEDNESDAY, August 15, 1945, dawned sunny and hot across vast reaches of the forty-eight states that formed the American republic. Paperboys cycled on their delivery rounds, barely noticing the seemingly endless succession of small blue-starred banners in living-room windows that reminded passersby that one or more occupants of that home were active members of the armed forces of the United States. An ever-increasing number of the blue stars had been replaced by gold ones, a silent reminder that a family member had made the supreme sacrifice in the service of his or her country. Nearly 400,000 windows now held gold star banners in this 1,347th day since the Day of Infamy at Pearl Harbor had plunged the United States into World War II.

  As the sun rose higher, housewives and mothers made their daily excursions to grocery stores, butcher shops, and clothing stores, carefully clutching multicolored booklets of ration coupons that largely determined the eating habits, clothing styles, and transportation arrangements of every American over thirty days old. Butchers informed customers what meats were available that day, grocers apologized for the absence of several varieties of canned fruits and vegetables, and restaurant patrons breathed a sigh of relief that today was not a meatless Tuesday or Friday so that a relatively complete menu was available.

  Housewives were not the only people on the street. Children walked, ran, or roller-skated with the carefree abandon of pupils on summer vacation; teenage girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes playfully teased boys in baggy pants and crumpled fedoras; older men sat contentedly in the sunshine in the town park or played checkers with cronies. Yet a casual visitor would soon notice that this picturesque scene included very few young men. Millions of young Americans were either overseas in war zones, preparing for combat in training camps, or working in the never-shuttered factories that made the weapons for a conflict that General Dwight Eisenhower had recently named the Great Crusade.

  The 130 million Americans of 1945 who were living in this time of high drama and significant personal sacrifice were part of a society that seemed incredibly modern and fast moving, compared even to the relatively recent turn of the century just four decades earlier. Daily newspapers, lavishly illustrated magazines, and theatrical films and newsreels were major elements in a sensory bombardment that addressed the entire enterprise called the “War Effort.” But the most intimate yet universal source of knowledge was the radio, which had become the centerpiece of virtually every family’s living room. Whether it took the form of an ornate mahogany console with rows of illuminated dials or an inexpensive table model with a few functional knobs, a radio was the lifeline to the outside world as authoritative, well-modulated voices kept listeners informed of the dramatic, sometimes tragic, events that marked a nation engaged in total war.

  In the preceding twelve years, even before the terrible news of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the most recognizable voice on the radio was the melodious, confident diction of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, through his “fireside chats,” seemed to become an additional family member in the parlor. Just as the Nazi Reich entered its final days, a radio voice trembling with emotion announced that the commander-in-chief had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. A grief-stricken nation mourned its fallen leader, even as it heard of the death of Hitler and the surrender of the German Wehrmacht.

  A new voice now entered American living rooms—the flat, businesslike cadence of former Missouri senator Harry S. Truman, who was catapulted from relative obscurity into the Oval Office. Thus when network announcers notified their audience that the president would address the nation at 2 P.M., Eastern War Time, on this summer afternoon, the voice that followed still seemed a bit strange, especially to the millions of American children who had known only one president in their living memory.

  Harry Truman may have sounded a bit too abrupt to be pictured sitting by the family fireside, but the message he delivered was likely the best news in the lifetimes of most Americans. After almost four years of war, 400,000 American deaths, and 50 million worldwide fatalities, the Emperor of Japan had accepted Allied surrender terms, and peace was about to return to the United States. Twelve million American servicemen and servicewomen would now return to civilian life and experience every conceivable type of reunion, from family picnics to engagement parties to wedding celebrations. Marines occupying the bleak landscape of Iwo Jima, airmen stationed on bomber bases in England, sailors serving on destroyers in the Pacific Ocean, soldiers manning foxholes against the last sporadic Japanese resistance on Okinawa, and nurses captured on Bataan and held in Manila internment camps for three years were all coming home. Some would come home to spouses and children, others to fiancées, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Many had met someone special during their service activities. However these young American men and women had developed relationships that led to marriage, they would produce a second legacy beyond winning World War II and securing the American way of life and the dreams that accompanied it. During the next two decades this “Greatest Generation” would in turn create a new generation of almost 76 million boys and girls who, despite enormous differences in lifestyle, education, and attitude, would share membership in a group that would soon be called simply the “Baby Boomers.” America would never again be quite the same.

  1

  GENESIS OF THE BABY BOOM

  NEW YEAR’S DAY 1946 represented more than the usual festive celebrations that mark the transition of one year to the next. For the first time in seven years there was neither war nor the threat of war on the horizon, and now something other than military campaigns might capture the public’s attention. A nation that had just steered through the treacherous shoals of a global conflict now found itself free to look farther back and farther forward for inspiration. One of the first news stories of 1946 was the 81st annual encampment of 67 Union Army veterans in Cleveland, where 102-year-old Robert Ripley of New York was elected commander-in-chief with a mandate to invite Confederate veterans to a joint reunion that summer.

  Despite the eight decades that separated the American Civil War from the 1940s, tangible links to
the conflict remained. During their childhoods, many of the returning World War II veterans had met Civil War participants. The wife of Gen. James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s deputy at Gettysburg, was photographed riding in the back of a convertible at an Independence Day celebration, and Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of American forces in the battle of Okinawa and the most senior general to die in combat, was the son of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr., one of Ulysses S. Grant’s closest friends at West Point and the first Confederate commander to surrender to the future Union commanding general. Older men and women still regaled wide-eyed children with stories of glimpses of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, or even early memories of life as a slave.

  Yet if America was still tethered to links with the Civil War era and nostalgic aspects of nineteenth-century life, an equally powerful attraction was the world of the twenty-first century that lay just over the horizon. The January 1946 issue of a national news magazine followed an article on Civil War veterans with a feature on the “Great Electro Mechanical Brain,” describing MIT’s follow-up to the University of Pennsylvania’s breakthrough ENIAC “differential analyzer,” with its computing machine that “advances science by freeing it from the pick and shovel work of mathematics.” The new mechanical brain in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used two thousand vacuum tubes and two hundred miles of electrical wire in one hundred tons of hardware and metal that could solve in thirty minutes a problem that would take human scientists more than ten hours to complete. The four members of ENIAC’s technical crew fed data to the machine that “could advance the frontiers of knowledge by liberating scientists from everyday equations for more creative work.”

  The exciting world of the “Atomic Age” future was a feature of current advertising. An early 1946 ad for the Hotel Pennsylvania illustrates the New York City of the twenty-first century with futuristic helicopters landing businessmen on the hotel roof. The copy insists that “many things are sure to change our lives in the new era of a new century. However, whether you come by helicopter or jet car, the Hotel Pennsylvania will never serve concentrated food pills as even in the future, we will still have full and robust meals.”