Transcripts For CSPAN3 1950s American Culture 20170901

The introduction of this section says that there were three developments that characterized the United States after world war ii. Well start moving our way towards the 19d 60s and cultural revolution. They had paid more attention to whats regarded and really had its seeds planted in the 1950s. Someone describe who the old culture is like. It is sort of a shared American Culture of the 20th centuries. The little piece that i gave you from william book that describes americans of this generation. In a way victorianism which is considered conservative it was actually liberal in its day. It was advanced in premodern cultural patterns. Liberalism is sort of a new thing and principals of classic of the 19th century are considered conservative today. They are by Police Standards conservative. There were advanced with regard to sort of old world or premoderate traditionalism. How families are formed it was arranged marriages and were considered as property and a way of preserving property. The victorians made it more voluntary. Children were allowed to pick who their partners were. The process was still controlled through the ritual of court ship. It evolved into the 20th century where young people had more and there was still certain rules and regulations. Today we have evolved to hooking up where its common where we have it and i still dont understand what it is. Maybe you could explain it to me. Large herds of young men and women get together and drink excessively and fornicate. Thats what the process of sort of dating and court ship have evolved. The family and prehistoric unit of social organization with the tribe and over the course of time it was reduced to the extended family where you have several generations. In the victorian period this is the Nuclear Family. You had essentially parents and children living together. Over the course of the 20th century this dissolved into Single Parents or parents who are not just a Nuclear Family where there are two parents and maybe any combination of children in the same house. It is a progressive of the social force. Victorianism you can scay developed. It is really those that were by those within the church of england. They were important to deal with the transition that was going on in the 19th century of the urban and industrial revolution. The victorian morals were necessary as a way of maintaining social order in a rapidly changing world. Theres also an element of post millennialism in this. Social yes formers believed that the sort of protestant religion provided a way with dealing with all sorts of social problems. You could see this with the people who were very active in the anti slavery movement. All of those social reform movements, the campaigns against drinking, campaigns in favor of keeping the sabbath, Prison Reform, really all had their origins in this evangelical movement that we can christianize the social order. It is known as me ly it is a kind of perfectionism in protestant in 19th century america. The traditional view is jesus christ would come and thats premillennialism. It has origins in religion but over the course of time it sort of outlived its property tatest origins. You can see the way in which though he had lost his upbringing still advocated the protestant work ethic. All of those things were that religious, honesty, industry, temperance turn out to be valuable not for purposes of eternal salvation but for advancing and success in this world. The way to improve society, the material conditions of the world are very useful frankly. You can see the utility of the old puritan values. The way Benjamin Franklin is of the selfmade man, if you simply follow these moral principals there will be success in the world. The idea that social problems can be solved by the cultivations of these religiously based virtues. All right. This is understanding of the nature of machblt one that goes back to the very origins of western civilization, something you all explored in western heritage. The idea of the dual nature of man that we were creatures that had a rational and an element. Part of the job of human beings was to make sure they are rational capacities would control their animal capacities. They had it in their power to transcend. It is what religion and morality is all about. So it was selfcontrol. You could see his request that he would eliminate all of his vices, that he would be able to achieve a personal moral perfection. So it would be the chief virtue here. Have any of you seen the African Queen in it is a classic. You should all see it. You may remember he is a drunkard. He is one of his sprees and he is all hung over and he is pleading saying you have to understand what was her name . Its only human nature. She says human nature is what we are put on this earth to overcome. This is what the victor yall moral dra thma is all about. It is to be able to control ourselves to transcend our losses and our vices and our animal nature. So selfcontrol. I want to show you an example of this from major league baseball. This is an example of this sort of victorian type. He is famous for not being very expressive, right . For sort of controlling his emotions on the field. There is one moment thats a 1947 world series. It was the yankees against the dodgers. It was caught by the dodgers. Now, look at this clip. Its very quick. Not so much is going on. Its a long one. Back, back, back, back. He takes the dirt like that. That was as he ever got. He was such a model selfcontrol that was the remarkable thing about that play. He famously stoic and lost thhi temper. When you compare to athletes today you can see the difference between the old model and the new model. But because for a generation he really did sort of incapsule late that old idea of sort of a greatest generation stoic selfcontrol. Yes. Was that the same year Jackie Robinson broke in . It was. Also important because he was an italian american. This is an example of sort of immigrant ethnic assimilation. Italian americans had a reputation for having less selfcontrol than sort of british they were known as sort of volatile people. The fact that he had sort of absorbed this Anglo American stoic demeanor was a sign this is at time in the 1940s when the expression is still widely accepted. This is the point he has assimilated you and new ethnic groups are but they are adopting this sort of standards. All right. So thats sort of individual. It is a struggle for selfcontrol within the individual kind of ir rational capacities. Social policy follows the same model. The whole goal of social policy is to cultivate responsibility, do everything we can to get individuals to control themselves. Thats reward virtue. We want social institutions, economic constitutions, cultural institutions to cultivate virtues and minimize these vices. One of the things into the 20th century. One of the things thats changing fundamentally is that you had on the one hand an economy in which the federal government doesnt do much to regulate economic. Combined with that is a great deal of cultural regulation and control. The federal government doesnt get involved in that very much. State and local governments did a great deal of policing moral and cultural questions. Constitutional known as that. A society that is very free economically, but which there was a great deal of control is moral. Today it is rather just the opposite. The culture is libertarian. It is over the last century or so. As well see most of these institutions were designed in a way to make sure people are able to manage the Economic Freedom they have by the cultivation of these virtues. They were directly connected. If you engage in the right kind of behavior. It will lead to economic success. Thats the way to wealth. They saw a connection between the culture. The families at the center of all of that, by which individuals are socialized and the family was with hetero sexual. It was between one man and one woman only. Again, to emphasize the ways in which social standards were different than earlier ones no a arranged marijuanriages. It was not the extended family. It is a premodern society. It comes into shape in the 19th century and into the 20th century. The institution of the divorce is still limited. Legally no states had no laws until the 1960s. Divorce was meant to be expensive and difficult to obtain. It was still stigmatized. I can remember growing up in the 1970s and divorce was something that was rather skand police. Divorce was something that was socially frowned upon. It was also politically fatal. People like Nelson Rockefeller who was ineligible because hae had been divorced. So divorce had this because it was a threat to the family which is this Central Institution. And social policy that the assumption was and again, this goes back to Benjamin Franklin that vice is what lead to poverty and not vice versa. The idea today, social Sciences Come to see that vice is a result of poverty. People engage in bad behavior. If people are poor its because they have engaged in vicious behavior. This is part of the reason why it is so reluctant to adopt a welfare statement into the 20th century. Theres a connection. One of the things that changed this assumption is a Great Depression. 25 of the population cant be because of their morals. Something has broken down in the Economic System and thats one of the chief reasons why the new deal became acceptable. [ inaudible question ] yes. It reaches their height in prohibition and in fact go too far. One of the ways in which they actually took its the difference between temperance and prohibition. So charity, for example, the sold standard in the distribution is charity had to be limited to the deserving poor as they were called. The victorians recognize some are poor because of bad luck. It is because of their own vicious behavior are suffering from poverty. Those people you can take care. Most of the poor, if they are poor because of their own vicious habits you have to allow them to suffer the consequences. Its the only way they are going to reform. It would be subsidizing bad belaif yb behavior and youll get more of it. Income transfers would have the same effect. This is why one of the arguments against an income tax. Income tax is a tax on people with high incomes because they are engaging in the right kinds of behavior. So why tax them . Thats discouraging behavior. You dont want to do it anymore than you want to encourage vicious behavior. The assumption here is people are economically successful because of their virtuous behavior. Those are the assumptions of the connection between moral and economic outcomes that continued into the 20th century to take a beating with the Great Depression. When charity was administered it what was called indoor relief. What we want to do is take the deserving poor outside of their morally dangerous environment and put them into orphanages where we can protect them. The goal here is to improve the environment of the poor and remove them from circumstances and vicious neighbors and this is the whole Asylum Movement was about. This is what Prison Reform was all about not just to punish but to morally regenerate the pen tren penitentiary. You want to put them into institutions where they could be taught the right kind of behavior. These institutions didnt usually work this way but that was the moral theory. Like wise there were lots of laws especially at the state and local level that were meant to suppress fights and to help people control themselves by removing the temptations to gamble or all of those other things. Those were perfectly legitimate was something that the government did. This is the difference between temperance and prohibition. The victorians didnt try to prohibit alcohol together but in the early 20th century began to do so. The whole nation adopted briefly prohibition. Like wise the victorians held to a double standard. Prostitution was sort of an outlet that you needed males to have. So the thing to do about prostitution was to establish a red light district where it would be limited and regulated rather than doing away with it all together. So before world war one especially every major American City used to have its district where prostitutes were available. People would tell you stories this is the case in hillsdale michigan. I dont know if its the truth or not but where prostitution was legally tolerated in these districts. The progresses held to a stricter standard in this especially among 19th century. They objected to this double standard not because they wanted women to be able to engage in the same kinds of sexual behavior as males but they wanted them to exercise as much as females did. They wanted a unitary so they campaigned against prostitution all together. When the federal government made it a requirement if you wanted an Army Base Camp you had to do away with drinking and prostitution. The red light districts disappeared with world war i. There are some ways which the federal government did get involved in this. This would be the man act, the white slave act. It made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. It was designed to get at commercial prostitution. Later came to be applied to any kind of sexual relations in which state lines were crossed or which anybody that took place. It is kind of one of the assumptions. If any woman was having sex with a woman that wasnt her husband she was a prostitute. This law ended up being sort of nationwide campaign against any kind of sexual immorality. Like wise gambling. Although today states actually promote gambling and advertise for it. Every american state in 1,900 prohibited gambling and the publication that someone had won the country. One of the few ways is that it was a federal crime to transport lottery tickets across state lines. Every state suppressed and put down gambling. It is the legitimate function to try to remove the temptations device that will allow people to improve their morals. Like wise every American Church condemned artificial contraception. I think it was the first church to accept for married couples anyway, use of contraception. Later in the 1960s when every state had repealed laws the Catholic Church is about the only hold out prohibiting the use of contraception. Congress tried to then states that were known as the comstock act. It made it a federal crime to mail anything, to use federal mails for anything that was obscene or immoral. It included any information about abortion or contraception. They tried to help the states in their regulation of sexual immorali immorality. Another is that circumcision reached its high point in about 1940. Revival of circumcision for reasons that were not religious. It goes back to the early church in st. Paul that christians didnt have to be circumcised as jews did. But for reasons of sexual hygiene and belief it would help males exercise more selfrestraint is probably the reason for circumcision. It has been declining every since and in europe especially. There are signs of encouraging selfcontrol by the prohibition of various practices. All of this is especially concentrated among American Protestant denominations. Again, methodists, evangelicals of various kinds. As opposed to the protestants like your lutherans who are less enklined inclined and roman catholics were largely out of it. Part of the protestants were suspicious is they didnt fit into this sort of victorian culture entheusiasm for social reform. We can sort of achieve perfection by the cultivation of these morals. Traditional catholics were rather suspicious of protestants didnt believe that people had the capacity to improve the world in this kind of way. Catholics were considered too lenient about sin. And catholics were sort of other worldly in the way the protestant vision im talking about here is about perfecting the world we live in. And the traditional protestantism tended to protickpr proprotect the next world than this world. This ether is but a veil of tears, a place of vanishment of fears. Catholics had sort of a fatalistic view that life on this earth is not about achieving perfection and improvement. Its something you have to suffer through. So catholics just dont have an inclination to try to make these sort of inclusions that evangelicals are about. Success or poverty in this world may not have a clear connection between peoples morality and behavior. That sometimes the wicked do achieve great wealth and success, and sometimes good people are reduced to poverty. Catholics are just kind of not with this program of protestant perm and social improvement. But since most americans are broadly speaking protestants in one way or another, this is sort of the cultural tone of the 19dth and 20th century. And thus it was promoted in Public Education. Reading the bible, this kind of encouragement to the protestant work ethic in american schools was just taken for granted. They understood Public Education was essentially protstpt education. So American Public life even though you have no established church in the United States, there was this broad nondenominational protestant culture, but the widely shared sort of jew day o unraveling of the traditional judado christian logic, you can see this unraveling. For americans you really begin to see this in the 1920s. The disillusionment after world war i. But then it was sort of interrupted by the Great Depression and then the wars, both world war ii and the cold war. And the 1950s are really part of that. This is why you dont really begin to see American Society unravel until the 1960s, especially with the decline of cold war tensions as well as demographic factors like the baby boomers coming of age began to kick in. So the 1950s is sort of a period of hiatus where people are still security conscious. They still place a great deal on the family and social order because of the traumatic impact of the depression and the world war. The this is why the 1950s are considered a conservative decade, even though i said historians tend to emphasize the way of which their sort of continuity from the beginning of the 20th century. So the popular image of the 1950s is a decade of conformity, that americans were other directed is one of the phrases that sociologists used. There was less individualism than earlier there had been or later there would be. The idea was the old sort of protestant work ethic was about inner directed. About you sort of having some fixed absolute standard, one that largely came from religion and following that. That there was a sort of healthy kind of american individualism out of this inner directedness. And america in 1950s you had the society and the culture and the economy dominated by large organizations. A period where the American Economy was dominated more than ever before since by a small number of large corporations. Weve talked about the ways of which new deal Economic Policy and the war itself tended to dauns trait American Business in the mid20th century. Workers tend to be members of Large Industrial unions. In fact 1955 was the high point of union density. And of course government. The new deal had had established a big stral government that we had never seen before. And a large part of that, too, is the centralized media in the 20th century. You had a small number of large networks. Nothing like sort of the array of news outlets like you people have today. Did large corporations of the centralized government also combine with yeah, big governments, big corporations in the 20th century because weve given up the laissezfaire idea with the new deal. The new deal established you couldnt have Large Industrial unions without the wagoner act. Likewise the new policy was to help reduce competition, reduce individualism within the marketplace and have cartels. The new deal largely sucked away the that. The new deal liberalism hasnt adopted the cultural liberalism that you associate with today. So someone like fdr or many of the new dealers, they did attack the laissezfaire economic assumptions of victorianism but they did not have in mind homosexual rights or abortion rights or that kind of stuff. They were still very victorian in their social, cultural, moral beliefs. Thats all going to change very rapidly in the 1960s. Through some avantgarde intelle intellectuals. Oscar wilde, an essay he wrote in 1990, its a perfect illustration of this connection between the economic and the moral. You should all read that. Wilde makes the argument that once socialism takes care of the economic problem you have to believe that socialism is going to take care of the economic problem, then the individual will be free to create himself in any way that he wants. Marx makes a similar argument. That every individual will be able to be like oscar wilde. Economic socialism, collectivism in the economy is what leads to cultural individualism. But in the 1950s were sort of in a transitional phase where we have to some degree collectivize the economy. Its not socialist either but we have not embarked at least on the main stream of that cultural moral overturn. And the family is the Central Institution in this. 50s have the reputation offing conservative because there was the great baby boom, because its this great period of family formation in the United States. Again, this is why the popular images of the 1950s are very domestic. The certain father knows best sitcom image. A return to normal family life. Americans making up for a lot of the destruction of the Great Depression and world war ii and you have this great sort of domestic explosion. By the way, it was limited to the United States. This didnt happen in western europe. It didnt happen in japan after world war ii. This is a peculiarly american thing. Most historians try to explain why this happened was a higher degree of religious observance, that americans were more religion than western europeans. The more religious you are, the more family oriented you are. Theres a clear correlation to religious observance and family size, for example. Part of the reason for the demographic implosion we talked about on day one, those population pyramids, closely correlated to the decline of religious observance. About 76 million children were born between 1946 and 1964, the baby boomers. It reached a peak of about 4. 3 million that were born in the year of 1967. Thats sort of the peak of the baby boom bulge. To give you one example of what a massive and sudden increase in births this was, more children were born in the five years after world war ii than had been born in the 30 years before world war ii. Again, this is a tremendous expansion, boom in the population. The average female marriage rate had been about 26 in the the 1890s. It had fallen below 20 in 1926. It means that someone got married younger than that, reached a low point. There were two cohorts who made up the baby boom. One was older women who had delayed having children during the depression of world war ii, Getting Started late having children. But also younger women who were marrying earlier and starting earlier. So that the average American Woman in the 1920s had her last child when she was 26 years old. The first time are read this i thought thats a typo. No, they were done having children at age 26. And today most women dont start having children until theyre 26, and that leaves them more time to have more children the earlier it starts. Another thing about the baby boom is there was no part of the population that was not affected by it. Usually when we talk about sort of large scale social phenomenon, you Start Talking about differences based upon race, class, ridge, but there was none of that. This affected the entire American Population. If theres any indication of more of a great increase in the birthrate, it was among urban, educated whites. It was usually immigrants who had higher birth rates. It was usually less educated people have more children than more educated people, but its the opposite in the 1950s. Also very unusual. Also its not that americans were sort of returning to the 18th century family practices, having large families. Most family in the baby boom generation had three or four children. But what made the numbers so vast was almost none had no children. Almost everybody had three or four children. There are very few childless couples and very few people who didnt get married. Again, the incidence of marriage in the 1950s was still very high. I think we talked about this in the first day of class. I think it was recently that a majority of the adult women are not married, first time this has happened in American History. A vast majority of marriage age men and women are married in the 1950s. The other thing is more children who are born live. The greatest thing that kept the population down through all of history was infant mortality. The idea that half of children wouldnt make it through their first year and thus wouldnt produce the next generation. Most of that tremendous increase in human population in the 19th and 20th century was due to decline in infant mortality. Disease like polio and most dramatic stories was the conquest of polio, which was a terrifying disease that affected young people. Fdr having been affected by polio later in life. Diseases like diphtheria, rubella vaccines were developed for those. So the children that are born are living longer. 37,000 polio cases in 1954 was below 1,000 by 1962. It was almost completely eradicated. The year before i was born, that was a great rubella out break that produced 30,000 miscarriages. These sorts of things are unheard of. Epidemic diseases used to be a common part of life. Those children are now living longer as a result of these medical advances. Another thing that comes out of the baby boom was especially this generation of american women had not themselves been part of large families or extended families. One of the best selling books in all of American History was benjamin spocks book on child care. Over 30 million copies were sold. So advice to these large numbers of young women who are having children. And many people have pointed to spoks book that he was responsible for the generation of the 1960s, that his advice to raise children by per misi have standards was what accounts for the social turmoil of the 1960s. Which one of you is doing spock as your reading assignment . Thats one of the myths of this book. Compared to older victorian gir guides of child rearing, spock was relatively permissive. The old standard in the 19th century was children are little devils and their wills need to be broken. Thats what child rearing was all about. Spock compared to that was much more indulgent but not by later standards of permissive parenting. There were also things he advised that American People didnt follow. He counseled on breastfeeding, and thats made a big come back, though. When i was a child breastfeeding was out of fashion and formulas were the ways babies were raised. And in his book he sort of assumed boys were boys and girls were girls. He did counsel raising children according to traditional gender roles. So by todays standards spock was something of a sort of reactionary. What really made spock a controversial figure was his opposition to the vietnam war. And then people projected his sort of antiwar liberalism onto his child rearing books. But thats something of a distortion. So American Families are expanding a great deal in the 1950s, and mostly taken place in the suburbs. 19 a 55 is also a landmark year because its the year more americans live in suburbs. 1920s more people lived in cities than on farms. The suburban population doubled. From 36 million to 72 million by 1970. By 1970 the suburbs included more people than cities and farms combined. So the country was a majority suburban nation. And about a million acres of farmland was being developed into suburban housing every year. So the american landscape is changing fundamentally by this demographic change. About 83 of the population increased. And the 1950s were the decade of greatest population increase in American History with maybe the exception of the first or second decade of the 20th century. And it was all notably driven by natural increase. The American Population had increased in the past because of both National Increase put also because of immigration. By the 1950s immigration had almost been completely cut off. So this is all homegrown. Every major American City in the 1950s lost population, except los angeles. Los angeles is something of a suburban sprawl itself. Its not really a concentrated city. Also one of the political consequences of this is that big cities begin to lose their dominance in the state. So that boston doesnt dominate massachusetts it way it used to. New york declined from 55 to 45 of new york states population in this period. Theres been something of a reurbanization movement. Boston went from being 18 to om9 of massachusetts population. Chicago, losing to the suburbs in illinois. Cleveland went from being 13 of ohio population to 4 of ohio population. And detroit likewise. Once third of michigans population was in detroit. So, again, theres a great tide of exodus from cities into the suburbs. Whats happening in a lot of big American Cities is that the native born white population is moving ot to the suburbs. Talked about many ways the subsidies encouraged urbanization, highway act, banking policies, federal loans and things like that were racially discriminatory. So it was harder for blacks to leave central cities and suburbs than it was for whites. And the population of those cities were being replaced by black migrants from the south. Also puerto ricans, because they were part of the commonwealth. So the demographics of American Cities changes a great deal in the 1950s. All right, domestic culture. Television would be the most important sort of illustration of this. The development of television right about the beginning of the 1950s. You can say in the beginning of the 1950s it starts out virtually nobody has a television and then by the end everybody has a television. The numbers are about 172,000 in 1950 to 15 million between 1948 to 1952. This is a faster growth curve than any previous technological development. Radio really took off in the 1920s. Right after world war i almost no one had a radio. It became a massive sort of Consumer Product in the 1920s, one of the Fastest Growing Consumer Industries in the 1920s. Likewise, automobiles. Henry ford making mass production automobiles available to ordinary americans. What starts off as a luxury item then becomes a mass produced consumer good. Likewise, the telephone. These devices all were rapidly adopted but television was more rapidly adopted than any other. It may well be smartphones i havent looked into this, i can remember a time where nobody had a smart phone and then suddenly everybody has one. I would imagine the growth curve for those was faster than even television. Television was a rapid culturally transforming phenomena. The important thing about television is its connected to the family. It sort of replaces the fireplace as the center of the home. Thats the hearth. Its the thing that the family gathers around and brings American People together. And its replacing what had been previously the dominant form of popular entertainment and the biggest Entertainment Industry in the United States, motion pictures, the movies. In the 1946, it the peak of american movie attendance, about 90 million americans went to the movies every week in 1946. About 60 of americans lets say went to the movies each week. And that fell to about 45 million a week, half, by 1953. And this is perron still falling because of later Technological Innovations like vcrs and dvds or whatever that netflix, whatever it is, streaming, people dont go to the movies the way they used to. Patterson says television broke down the family unit because theyre watching and not talking. Do you disagree with that . Movies you could say bring people together and the description patterson gives of Movie Theater as cultural sort of civic institutions, very ornate, had a lot of services and began to decline as a result of television. Certainly television reduces personal interaction. Television is a mass produced commodity and so one of the things that its doing is sort of a homogenizing american tastes. Broadcast media where everyones watching the same things is one of the things that is sort of making American Life sort of bland and sort of interchangeable. Its true that television may well reduce the amount of a sort of culture that values conversation and by personal interaction. Theres truth to that. There is a degree in which there are sort of cross currents in these cultural developments. Television of course, when it started out in the early 1950s, when you had to have some money for television because they were still expensive, the programming changed over the course of the 50s, as well. Initially, there was a lot of high quality kind of high culture television. Things that were applied from the stage to early television. And as the audience got bigger as it became more of a mass audience, the quality of television declined in the 1950s. Cultural critics made a lot out of that, as well. Whenever you mass produce something, its always going to be pitched toward the lowest common denominator. Whats the largest audience share you can get, the quality will be reduced more people have access but the quality of it at least by some peoples standards declines. Okay. New york city, 55 Movie Theaters closed in new york city in just the year 1951 alone. This is changing the urban landscape. Movie theaters are places that drew people out of their homes and put them together in social space whereas television is reinforcing this idea of the family as the basic social unit. The only growth in Movie Theaters was naturally driveins in the 1950s because as america became more car oriented in the 1950s, thats the only place in which there was expansion in outdoor movie watching. Also, Television Changed the preferences that americans had for sports. Football was more well an dapped to television than baseball was. And this is the period in which football and later on basketball began to compete with baseball as the american pastime. Television had a lot to do with that. People to this day will tell you had he prefer to listen to a baseball game on the radio than to watch it. Whereas these other sports lend themselves more to the visual of television than to the old radio format. So television, you be sort of take it for granted today because the application of this idea of the image being and available to people. You have to imagine how new that was to people in the 1950s, right . That radio by bringing sound, the radio and phonograph into the home had a similar impact. Television changes that very dramatically. Youre so used to having what i would still call television at your fingertips. Youre sort of watching television or ins all the time. Some of you might well be doing that now if i didnt for bid you to bring your phones into the classroom. The ubiquitousness of this you have to imagine what it was like when this was all together was new, the idea of the image available for television was cutting edge. Another consequence of the baby boom was the development of a separate Youth Culture within the United States. The whole idea of adolescence, the teenager is something thats new in western civilization in the 20th century. For one thing, the United States became a lot younger country in the 20th century and as a result of the baby boom. The median age after the United States in this period fell to a little over 28. That was the average american was 28 years old. Over 38 today. The population has been aging ever since the baby boom. The socalled teen population and again, this is a cohort that really sociologists and people didnt recognize till the 20th century, there being a distinct teen phase of life or adolescence was a relatively recent development. So the teen niche or cohort increased, doubled from 10 million to 20 million between 1950 and 1970. All kinds of economic effects. Well talk principally about the cultural effects and effects in there being a separate Youth Culture especially. Again, in traditional society, there was no such thing as being a teenager. You were a child, and then usually at some point that sort of coincided with biological sexual maturity, you became an adult. There was usually an initiation process by which you went from being a child to being an adult. As western society and as the economy as all these demographic changes take place there comes an extended period between childhood and adulthood the teen years begins to take on an independent sort of population cohort, a kind of demographic. The number of years that people spent in school also was attenuated. It used to be at about the age of adulthood, lets say, most people didnt go to school beyond the eighth grade, didnt need to in sort of 19th society, they spend more and more time in school, extending this period of adolescence. Only about 13 of the High School Aged population, right, between say 14 to 18, were actually in high schools in 1900. High school was the thing that was limited to a small segment of the population, right . High school was a big deal. Only for the few, for the elite. Thats increased rapidly over the course of the 20th century. About half the population that is High School Age is in high school in 1930. Increased to 75 by 1950. Almost everybody. By 1965, almost everybody who is High School Age is in high school. Half of them go on to college. If you look at the college numbers, similar kind of replication. In the late 19th century almost nobody went to college and its increasingly common today. Today about twothirds of americans spends at least some time in college. Only about half of them finish. About onethird of the population are College Graduates. The vast majority of people spend some time now in higher education. Look what was for high school in the 20th century. Again, all of this is sort of extending the period of time this period of adolescence. So you get a separate Youth Culture, right . Again, advertisers are looking at this, young people begin to adopt their own styles of dress, the kind of music they listen to is very different. Theres a kind of segregation, a separation of Youth Culture from mainstream culture. And what you had was people who are physically adults, one of the things that happens in the 19th and 20th century is biologically speak, men and women became sexual lima tour at an earlier age, probably because of increased better nutrition and things like that. People are biologically adults did earlier but not expected to behave like adults especially to make a living for themselves till much later. So you have biological adults without adult responsibilities. Theyre still dependent upon their families and this dependence is being increased further and further. Right . Many of you may be thinking about this today. What are you going to do after you graduate from college in apparently i dont know what the numbers are, but an increasing number of College Graduates go home and continue to live with their families. Right . One of the big points in the obamacare debate was prey trump said that he wants too maintain the ability for kids to be on their Parents Health insurance till theyre like 26 years old. 26 is about the age which we might expect young people to go out and start making a living for themselves. Thats what im talking about the tension of the period of economic social dependence while you have earlier biological maturity. Here are the college numbers. About 2 million americans went to college in 1940. That quintuples and reaps 10 million by 1973. Thats further expansion of this Youth Culture. Also, more disposable income. Yeah. Go back quickly to your comment about biological adults first. Social adults. Right. So but what about theres evidence psychologically were not really adults, prefrontal cortex development finishes at 25 i think. Was there any belief in this in the 1950s, that psychologically, theyre not fully developed as adults . Well, again, the question of whether people are psychologically adults as opposed to reproduce, thats what im talking about here, people are able to reproduce without producing economically. Right . The idea that youre emotionally not your full self till youre in your 19, 20s, im not familiar with any work about that in the 1950s. There certainly was a sense in which this idea that this is a good way to put it. That children or adult adolescents instead of taking their social cues and being an cult rated by the previous generation, are getting it from their peers. It is peer rather than an adult an culture ration thats taking place. People are worried about this and patterson talks about the many people who thought juvenile delinquency was a big problem. This next generation was go be running wild. We talking about rock n roll and see what the musical expression of that was. Exaggerated but because nobody had seen before this such a large number of people who were in this sort of Twilight Zone biologically and economically. But there are aristotle said you shouldnt start to the study philosophy till youre in your 30s. Youre not mature enough to understand it till then. Argument to be made that even though biologically we became adults younger, but emotionally becoming adults later because of school and not having to sort of do adult things at a very young age like military and stuff. Theyre not being forced to grow up at an early age. You have the idea that children dont have to engage or be socially adults till a much later date because societies provides for them. Their paints provide for them. They have disposable income. In the early 20th century, even the adults didnt have much disposable income. There wasnt much money to spend on entertainment. Now the adults have it and allow their kids to have it and able to indulge in the kind you have consumer culture patterson describes as deferring the aim which people have to be adults is certainly taking place here. This had never happened before in human history. No society had the resources to be able to support such a large segment of the population without being productive. In a way, this is wonderful, this is the fruits of capitalism and of economic development. But it may well have these retarding social, emotional consequences. No Human Society had experienced this before. Also, youths are able to physically separate themselves from adult supervision by the automobile, right . Theyre able to the geographical mobility of the American People, automobiles and provide a place for young people who are sexually mature to be sexually active without adult supervision. For young people who are sexual lima tour to you know, be sexually active without adult supervision. Things like the transistor radio allowed people to have their separate different musical tastes indulged from adults. Young people were able to produce their own cultural setting. This had never been seen before the 1950s. Also, concerns about this is that as people, more and more people go to school, more and more children going to high school and college, there was a steady decline in s. A. T. Score as this baby boom cohort increased. And this was a matter of some concern. It appeared like the intellectual consequences of this new Youth Culture were not good. Theres no explanation for this. One possibility there does seem to be a clear correlation between a decline in standardized test scores and birth order. Youre having more and more second and third and fourth children. Theyre less apt to do well on the s. A. T. Birth order may be a consequence. Im the youngest of three myself but there is this statistical correlation. Educational decline in the 1950s. You could see theres sort of a panic. Americans periodically have these sense their educational system is in a crisis and especially in the 1950s as a result of we mentioned the development of sputnik by the soviets that they appeared to be ahead of america in terms of technological and military development and that we needed to do something to reform our educational system and this sort of decline in educational standards in the 1950s was another sense theres something wrong with American Youth and its displaying it in standardized test scores. The music of the 1950s is perhaps the most important development. The most important sign of there being a separate Youth Culture. The development of rock n roll in the 1950s. This was one that came together brought together earlier sort of zing and local musical cultures that came together into the mass form known as rock n roll. It arose out of country and western music on the one happened and rhythm and blues on the other. And they were brought together into rock n roll. In the 1950s, people made the argument there was earlier examples of this in the 1940s. The country and western music was considered sort of an zing sort of niche musical market. This is the way bill board magazine classified these various genres of music. Country and western was considered vulgar hillbilly music. Rhythm and blues, that was black music referred to as race music before they renamed rhythm and blues and rock and roll was taking these sort of two sub cultures and bring them to the white middle class, vast baby boom culture. And the person most important for this is Elvis Presley. Hes the one sort of the largest rock n roll phenomenon of the 1950s. Patterson tells phillips, if i could find a white man with a negro sound, i would be a billionaire. This is what concerned a lot of americans in the 1950s about rock n roll. It was taking music of the hillbillies and negros and our children will be affected by it. Many people believed that rock n roll was responsible for the increase in drug use, all these social pathologies that were associated with white people from the wrong side of the tracks and blacks. And you can go and listen to Elvis Presley and watch them a video of him. Its very hard for you today to imagine that people ever were concerned about him being a threat. He would seem sort of rather innocent and quantity to you. But at the time, that idea sort of crossover of these cultures into mainstream middle class white culture alarmed a great. People. Its interesting over the course of the 1950s, rock n roll eventually became more whitened, right . Lost some of the edges of its original rhythm and blues background. If you look at pat boone as an illustration, you can see the way in which rock n roll appeared to be tamed by the end of the 50s. Fitz. It was going to change in the 60s which changed by the british invasion which took on the beatles and the roll stones and the who. The idea rock n roll might have been a temporary phenomenon, by 1960, rock n and roll in its initial face, usually preferred to as rock n roll opposed to rock that was the audio manifestation of this Youth Culture. Let me stop there and well continue with the culture of the 1950s in our next class on thursday. Thanks for your attention. Is American History tv is in sunday night we take a look at anthony clarks book the last campaign. Every single comment ive received has been one of either two topics. How angry people are to learn whats happening or how blabb flabbergasted they are to learn whats happening. Why are they angry . The fact that we have these president ial libraries created to house records. And especially for the most recent ones the records wont be open for 100 years. Instead were paying for celebration and legacy building. Live sunday at noon eastern, author, speaker and radio host eric metaxes. Every ethnicity exists in america. Its not defined by religion. Every religion exists in america. Were the only country in the history of the world that was created and defined by an idea. Therefore, in order to keep the republican as franklin enjoined us to do, we must know those ideas, we must understand those ideas, we must buy into those ideas and we must live those out. Join our live conversation with mr. Metaxes live sunday at noon eastern on book tv on cspan 2. Now, on lectures in history, its James Madison university profess professor evan friss. He talks about how changes to home loan policies, the mass production of houses and the rise of