Yes, indeed.
I turned 13 in 1950 and have pretty clear memories of the era. Nixon was a swear word in my house (my mother thought he should not have been allowed to walk down the street without ringing a bell and chanting, “Unclean, unclean”) but we generally trusted most politicians. In 1952 we threw out the corrupt Republican administration in Philly that had ruled for, IIRC, 67 years. Eisenhower was widely respected. Then there was McCarthy, of whom the less said the better. But anti-communism was rife, it is true. But we believed most of the propaganda. And the income tax on incomes above $200K (think a couple million today) was 91% which left the impression that the government wasn’t run by the rich. Kennedy lowered that to 70% and it has been drifting down ever since, accompanied by increasing tax dodges so that bosses pay less than their secretaries. What we had in the 50s was that, with a few exceptions, we believed that most pols really wanted to improve things and not just raise money. The 50s and 60s saw significant civil rights legislation and the Dems are still paying the price for that. And they knew they would, even if they didn’t understand they would still by paying it 60 years later.
Not sure about this: “folk music” had a huge “protest song” element to it,
and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl includes lines such as
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!..
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!
So the Beat Generation had some clue
I think the mainstream of folk was a lot less controversial than 1950s rock. Maybe it made people think more, but it was still more acceptable. Successful artists like Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio weren’t going to be banned or ruffle feathers. It’s not like the 1950s where a safe alternative like Pat Boone had to be developed.
Pete Seeger might disagree. I think there are 2 ways to appraise rock and roll; musically, it might have been “edgy,” but politically, it posed no threat at all. There might have been some moral outrage at “Elvis the Pelvis,” but no one called him a subversive or red-baited the guy who would later pose with Richard Nixon. And no one complained about do-wop. The cynicism,or what we might call political awareness, was more likely to be found among the beats and folkies.
Most movies and TV shows may have been bubbly and upbeat in the 1950s, but this was also the heyday of film noir. There was a lot of grimdark in the novels and stage plays.
Pete Seegar and the Weavers were run out of the mainstream very early in the 1950s and barely appeared again until the 60s. Virtually all the folk singers took note and toned down the protest side and made the songs as innocuous as possible.
The Beatniks were an infinitesimal slice of American life and reviled by everyone outside their tiny circle.
Rock music garnered giant headline approbation throughout the 50s, including Congressional hearings. The roots of that hatred were mostly racial, but the music overall was deemed a menace to society. Hardly any of the stars made it out of the 50s, and the few who did were hardly rockers by the early 60s.
People do like to go back and cherrypick the 50s and run the rest through rosy filters, but the truth remains that it was an extremely oppressive and repressive decade. Being any kind of an outsider was somewhere between consistently unpleasant and actively deadly. That level of oppression normally creates backlash, and we saw that in the 60s, but the wild swing in the national culture in the 60s wouldn’t have been as gigantic without the forced conformity of the 50s.
The economic factors that led to increasing individualism and social atomization were the decimation of the labor movement in the current and prior decades, plus the Nixon Shock and later Volker Shock as responses to the inflation crises. These currents led to an “everyone for themselves because no one is coming to save you” attitude.
Socially, once the draft ended and McGovern got done in by his party, many young “progressives” checked out for good. Racial solidarity was no longer a priority for white people which left the door open for segregationist reactionaries to gain a foothold. Oh yeah and didn’t they kill Fred Hampton?
Approbation or opprobrium?
And comic books. It was an era of extremely subversive “graphic novels” (modern term), leading to much gnashing of teeth amongst the reactionary sect. Before censorship took hold in the latter part of the decade, there was an entire panoply of good stuff in that genre.
AAAAAAAAAArrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!
I actually laughed out loud imagining your Charlie Browning this.