1945-1953: Generally a forgotten era?

[FedoraFan112390]

You never really see modern day shows or films that showcase the period from just after WWII ended, to just before the beginnings of the Rock N' Roll era. It seems to be generally a forgotten era - from the birth of the Cold War, to the cold winters of Korea -

In popular memory, it doesn't seem like this period really seems to fit with either the "glamour" of the war years in pop culture (pinup girls, Nazis, Swing, Big Band, wartime romance, V-Day parades etc), or the "nifty '50s" (Rock N' Roll, atomic age homes, the space race, googie, fuzzy dice, tail fins and retro futurism). It seems to have been largely a forgotten time.

I'd like us here to celebrate/discuss some of the trends, fads, fashion, art and architecture of the post-WWII, pre-Rock era. I feel its one of the last truly wholesome times in American history - the heart of the Norman Rockwell era.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Aside from really awful popular music, the rise of the Dixiecrats, public book burnings, and compulsory loyalty oaths for kindergarten teachers, there were some interesting things that came out of this period.

*The modern era began for the Boys From Marketing in 1946 when Austrian expatriate Ernest Dichter, a trained psychologist, founded the Institute For Motiviational Research, and began offering his services to advertising agencies -- the idea being not just to sell stuff to people, but to find out why they chose to buy and to manipulatie the psychology behind those decisions in a very sophisticated manner. "Motivational Research" became the foundation for the science of modern marketing in the the decade to follow.

*An unwashed, shaggy, bearded, sandal-wearing fellow named eden ahbez (he also disdained capital letters) -- formerly a disillusioned nightclub pianist named George Aberle -- came down from his campsite in the hills outside Los Angeles to preach a philosophy of peace, love, and vegetarianism. As recorded most notably by Nat "King" Cole, his story became one of the biggest song hits of 1948, "Nature Boy."

*"Deep Freeze" units became the first big consumer fad of the postwar era, despite the fact that most people didn't know what to do with them once they had them. Stories of people stuck with entire sides of beef they couldn't stand to eat another bite of were laughed at around water-coolers from coast to coast.

*The word "geek" entered teenage slang for the first time in the Midwest around 1948, but with none of the modern-day technological or science-fiction-fantasy connotations. It simply meant what an Easterner might call a schmo or a schmuck.

*Teenage girls continued to annoy their elders by dressing in rolled blue dungarees, men's shirts with the tails hanging out, and voluminous, oversized sweaters. The March of Time, as ever viewing with alarm, even made a twenty-minute documentary film attempting to plumb the mysteries of "teen age" life.

*The publication of the Kinsey Reports on Human Sexual Behavior in 1948 and 1953 told Americans a lot of things about themselves that they'd tried to keep concealed, including their widespread indulgence in pre-marital intercourse, the commonness of abortion, the realities of the sex trade, and the fact that homosexual behavior wasn't the rare aberration they were taught to believe it was.

*Middle-class women rebelled against the ridiculousness of fashion's "New Look," only to be crushed into submission by an all-out assault by the Boys.

*New York television audiences went mad over the Tuesday night capering of Milton Berle, whose Texaco Star Theatre featured the cream of rump-sprung vaudeville acts surrounded by outlandish mugging from the host, and genuinely humorous commercials performed by a tall, fast-talking "sidewalk pitchman" character played by nightclub comic Sid Stone, who often upstaged the star himself. The rest of the country, seeing the show in blurry kinescopes or not at all, participated vicariously in the fad.

*It became the thing for radio comedians to "incorporate" themselves, and then sell their corporations to the highest bidder as a tax-reduction scheme. Amos 'n' Andy, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and Red Skelton all sold themselves to CBS in 1948-1949 for millions of dollars each.

*Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis replaced the declining Abbott and Costello as the most popular obnoxious comedy team in America. Bud Abbott grew a moustache in an effort to be even more obnoxious.

*Televised hearings before a congressional committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver exposed the extent of organized crime penetration into American cities. One of the leading hoods of the time, Frank Costello of New York, refused to allow his face to be shown on television, so the camera focused on his nervous, twisitng hands as he testified.

*Those actors, writers, and directors who escaped having their careers destroyed because they signed a petition for Russian war relief in 1944 or received a favorable review from the "Daily Worker" managed to create some really impressive, adult television in such live dramatic anthologies as "Kraft Television Theatre," "Philco Playhouse," and "Westinghouse Studio One." The rash of cheap, corny sitcoms and endless formula westerns that dominated television in "The Fifties" came along after television shifted its production center from New York to Hollywood in the latter half of the decade.

*With the Production Code Administration weakening with the waning influence of the fascistic prude Joseph Ignatius Breen, moviemakers began to rebel against its enforcement. Otto Preminger's adult romantic comedy "The Moon Is Blue" frankly treated a number of sexually-oriented topics, and when the studio refused to back down under a Production Code threat, the film became the first feature to be released without a Production Code seal since full enforcement of the code began in 1934. His power broken, Breen finally retired in 1954.

*It was an interesting time to be a baseball fan. The Yankees won five world championships in a row, from 1949 to 1953, and the Dodgers, after dramatically breaking the major league color line in 1947, reached the peak of their "Wait Till Next Year" mentality, ending up on the losing side of the World Series in three of those years, and losing the pennant in 1951 to a Giants team that cheated its way to the top down the stretch run. In 1950 the Philadelphia Phillies won only the second pennant of their lifetime -- and their first since 1915 -- only to be demolished by the Yankees in the World Series. The stability of the baseball map was shattered in 1953 when, late in spring training, the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. The St. Louis Browns left for Baltimore at the end of that season. The Philadelphia Athletics were hijacked to Kansas City after the 1954 season in a corrupt deal involving a Chicago real-estate manipulator backed by the New York Yankees. From his office on Montague Street in Brooklyn U. S. A., Walter F. O'Malley observed all this, gazed westward, and licked his lips seductively.

*For the first time it became possibel to dial a long-distance telephone call without the assistance of an operator. "Direct Distance Dialing" and the area-code system began to be rolled out in 1951. It would be another twenty years before the rollout was complete.

*Gruesome misogynistic violence became the favorite reading matter of millions of pissed-off ex-GIs, with the rise of Mickey Spillane, a former comic book hack who developed a knack for working out the power fantasies of frustrated, alienated men in a series of cheap paperback novels that dominated drugstore spinner racks for years. Spillane then perplexed his followers to announce that he was giving up Mike Hammer in order to become a Jehovah's Witness and go door to door with the "Watchtower" magazine.

*Mad magazine began its run, teaching a generation of readers to have a skeptical disregard for advertising, marketing, and all adult authority.

*Superman put Captain Marvel out of business with a lawsuit, a few years after the Man of Steel's proprietors put his own creators out of business in settlement of a suit filed against them. As Jules Feiffer would later observe, "Nothing is as super as a writ."

*The Army considered completely changing its uniforms because so many WWII surplus outfits were being worn by road construction crews, casual laborers, and convicts that the public was wondering why soldiers were being used for ditch-digging duty.

*Despite the strenuous objections of dairy interests, Congress repealed a federal tax on oleomargarine, revoking butter's official "Most Favored Fatty Table Spread" status.

*Gutter journalism king William Randolph Hearst died bitter and alone, but his papers continued to live up the the standard he established for them during his lifetime.

*Inflation had nearly doubled the cost of a bag of groceries over what it had been in the late 1930s.

*After more than sixty years, the price of a Coca-Cola went up from five to six cents in 1951. The Coca-Cola Company, concerned about declining profits from vending machine sales in the wake of this price hike, petitioned the government to mint a 7 1/2 cent coin, but their request was denied.

*Faced with profit issues of its own the Pepsi Cola Company abandoned its famous "twice as much for a nickel too" jingle and introduced a new formula with a much higher sugar content than the old, promoted under the new slogan "More Bounce To The Ounce!"

*A patent medicine called "Hadacol" swept the country as an all-purpose vitamin tonic, helped to popularity no doubt by its bracing 12 percent alcohol content.

*Bored housewives amused themselves by getting together to play canasta. Bored husbands complained about "the seven year itch" and slipped out at night to consider their options.

*A chubby, goofy tummler named Jerry Lester became America's first late-night TV comedian by declaring himself to be a beanbag, and ogling the pneumatic bosom of his sidekick, a dead-eyed blonde named Dagmar. Other men preferred to satisfy their premature-weaning fixation by gazing at the thrusting decolletage of daytime TV hostess Faye Emerson.

*Conspiracy buffs whispered about "The Shaver Mystery," and its stories of a sinister underground civilization that sent its "Detrimental Robots," or "Deros," to abduct surface dwellers and subject them to horrific physical torture.

*Little children yelled "Point of order! Point of order!" and "Are you now, or have you ever been..." on playgrounds across an increasingly tense and deeply paranoid America.

 

[sheeplady]

*Gutter journalism king William Randolph Hearst died bitter and alone, but his papers continued to live up the the standard he established for them during his lifetime.

I snorted tea out of my nose. This is incredibly unfair, it was hot.

--------------

Admittedly, I don't know much about this period in detail. I know there was an extreme housing shortage after the war as the baby boom started. My maternal grandparents had bought a small cape in the city where they lived right after the war. My grandmother did not like the neighborhood, she didn't have space to make a garden. So my grandfather put the house up for sale, and got an offer significantly above asking price a few days later, and sold the house.

Unfortunately that left my grandparents with no place to live. So they moved back in with my grandmother's mother and father and eventually rented a place... out in the country and far away from my grandfather's job, which must have been isolating for my grandmother with only one car and a toddler at home and my grandfather being gone long hours at the mill. They got a large console radio in 1950. My mother listened to Howdy Doody on it.

My grandparents weren't able to buy until 1957(?) because there just weren't enough houses. They moved closer to the city where my grandfather worked, but still rural.

Also, it was the last period polio really had it's hold on infecting people in the US.... with some of the largest outbreaks. My mother was a polio pioneer in 1954. The rest of the US would only wait until 1955 for a licensed vaccine. My husband lost his only aunt, aged 5 in 1952, to having measles and scarlet fever at the same time, although many locals said she died from drinking milk from a local farmer that was already disliked. She died less than ten years before the measles vaccine would be introduced.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

across an increasingly tense and deeply paranoid America.

No change there then.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

As an addendum to Lizzie's encyclopaedic entry: "Geek" was originally a carny name for the animal-human hybrid "wild man" of the freakshow. He bit the heads off animals and generally behaved like a rock star without the glitter. William Lindsay Gresham wrote a best-selling sleaze novel about a carny "mentalist" (what we now call a psychic) titled "Nightmare Alley" (1947) It chronicled the rise and fall of a con man who became a superstar stage mentalist only to decline to the status of a sideshow geek. It was made into one of the greatest of the film noir, also in 1947. It was this film that introduced the term to the general public. The 1992 Steve Martin vehicle "Leap of Faith" borrowed large chunks of Nightmare Alley, including the introductory "cold read"of a local cop, updating it with computer technology to supplement the mentalist's showbiz talent. Interesting trivia: Gresham was an abusive husband and his wife, Joy Gresham, left him, went to England and married her long-time pen pal, C.S. Lewis. Lewis wrote book about his late-life marriage titled "Surprised by Joy."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Also, it was the last period polio really had it's hold on infecting people in the US.... with some of the largest outbreaks. My mother was a polio pioneer in 1954. The rest of the US would only wait until 1955 for a licensed vaccine. My husband lost his only aunt, aged 5 in 1952, to having measles and scarlet fever at the same time, although many locals said she died from drinking milk from a local farmer that was already disliked. She died less than ten years before the measles vaccine would be introduced.

The 1949-52 period was the all time peak of polio in the US. Prior to this most epidemics had been regional, and relatively small -- in the thirties, an epidemic usually involved about 5000 reported cases -- but the postwar epidemics were national in scope and provoked a genuine panic across the country. The epidemic of the summer of 1952 was the largest of all, with nearly 58,000 cases reported. The majority of cases were among children between the age of five and nine -- which included the first wave of Boomers, further impressing the epidemic on the national consciousness.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

The only things I'd known about this era beforehand were that my grandparents were married in 1949, and 1953 respectively, and that Marilyn's career was taking off, and plaid jackets for men were a very hot trend, as were peg-pants (per my grandmother) for men and rolled up t-shirts (again, per my grandmother).

 

[Benzadmiral]

The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. Not sure when it first appeared in America -- that year or the next, I suppose, as the TV series Climax! broadcast their considerably bowdlerized version of it in 1954.

Inkstainedwretch wrote, "Interesting trivia: Gresham was an abusive husband and his wife, Joy Gresham, left him, went to England and married her long-time pen pal, C.S. Lewis. Lewis wrote book about his late-life marriage titled 'Surprised by Joy'."

Fascinating. That was the relationship at the focus of the 1993 film Shadowlands, then? Debra Winger as Joy, and Anthony Hopkins as Lewis? That would be a "modern" film dealing with the 1945-1953 era.

 

[2jakes]

All I know is that *spanking* was allowed in school.
And man oh man...did it hurt!

 

[LizzieMaine]

The only things I'd known about this era beforehand were that my grandparents were married in 1949, and 1953 respectively, and that Marilyn's career was taking off, and plaid jackets for men were a very hot trend, as were peg-pants (per my grandmother) for men and rolled up t-shirts (again, per my grandmother).

Marilyn tremored across the screen very briefly in 1949, in a slipshod, low-budget Marx Brothers film called "Love Happy." The budget ran out for that picture before it was finished, and the producer was able to raise money only by selling advertising space in the last reel to various sponsors. Which is why in the climactic chase scene, Harpo rides away from his pursuers on the Mobilgas Flying Red Horse.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Aside from really awful popular music, the rise of the Dixiecrats, public book burnings, and compulsory loyalty oaths for kindergarten teachers, there were some interesting things that came out of this period.

*The modern era began for the Boys From Marketing in 1946 when Austrian expatriate Ernest Dichter, a trained psychologist, founded the Institute For Motiviational Research, and began offering his services to advertising agencies -- the idea being not just to sell stuff to people, but to find out why they chose to buy and to manipulatie the psychology behind those decisions in a very sophisticated manner. "Motivational Research" became the foundation for the science of modern marketing in the the decade to follow.

Sounds like the beginning of the "Don Draper" era.

*"Deep Freeze" units became the first big consumer fad of the postwar era, despite the fact that most people didn't know what to do with them once they had them. Stories of people stuck with entire sides of beef they couldn't stand to eat another bite of were laughed at around water-coolers from coast to coast.

Will definitely have to look into this.

*The word "geek" entered teenage slang for the first time in the Midwest around 1948, but with none of the modern-day technological or science-fiction-fantasy connotations. It simply meant what an Easterner might call a schmo or a schmuck.

Huh. I didn't know this. Do you know when around it became the slang for sci-fi/fantasy fans? It is funny how words evolve. It went from meaning a schmuck, to a fantasy fanboy, to being a badge of pride.

*Teenage girls continued to annoy their elders by dressing in rolled blue dungarees, men's shirts with the tails hanging out, and voluminous, oversized sweaters. The March of Time, as ever viewing with alarm, even made a twenty-minute documentary film attempting to plumb the mysteries of "teen age" life.

Anywhere I can look to see this? Am curious to see this whole dungaree/shirt with tails look. Never knew about it.

*Middle-class women rebelled against the ridiculousness of fashion's "New Look," only to be crushed into submission by an all-out assault by the Boys.

Fashion's New Look? And how did they rebel?

*Those actors, writers, and directors who escaped having their careers destroyed because they signed a petition for Russian war relief in 1944 or received a favorable review from the "Daily Worker" managed to create some really impressive, adult television in such live dramatic anthologies as "Kraft Television Theatre," "Philco Playhouse," and "Westinghouse Studio One." The rash of cheap, corny sitcoms and endless formula westerns that dominated television in "The Fifties" came along after television shifted its production center from New York to Hollywood in the latter half of the decade.

Any reason why it moved from NY to Hollywood?

*With the Production Code Administration weakening with the waning influence of the fascistic prude Joseph Ignatius Breen, moviemakers began to rebel against its enforcement. Otto Preminger's adult romantic comedy "The Moon Is Blue" frankly treated a number of sexually-oriented topics, and when the studio refused to back down under a Production Code threat, the film became the first feature to be released without a Production Code seal since full enforcement of the code began in 1934. His power broken, Breen finally retired in 1954.

It's a shame it didn't die off much sooner, or better yet, had never happened.

*For the first time it became possibel to dial a long-distance telephone call without the assistance of an operator. "Direct Distance Dialing" and the area-code system began to be rolled out in 1951. It would be another twenty years before the rollout was complete.

Hmm. I know as of 1960, when my mother entered 6th grade, we (in Brooklyn, NY) were still using the old system. On her school record, from 1960, her dad's work number is given as Sh. 8-5752. Home phone number was given as Te. 6-7241. However, by the 70s, my uncle's work number (on a card in my grandpa's wallet) is given with a (212) area code. So, it seems it really did take a long time to implement.

*Gruesome misogynistic violence became the favorite reading matter of millions of pissed-off ex-GIs, with the rise of Mickey Spillane, a former comic book hack who developed a knack for working out the power fantasies of frustrated, alienated men in a series of cheap paperback novels that dominated drugstore spinner racks for years. Spillane then perplexed his followers to announce that he was giving up Mike Hammer in order to become a Jehovah's Witness and go door to door with the "Watchtower" magazine.

Can't forget EC Comics...Or was that later?

*The Army considered completely changing its uniforms because so many WWII surplus outfits were being worn by road construction crews, casual laborers, and convicts that the public was wondering why soldiers were being used for ditch-digging duty.

What did they consider changing it to? I loved the look of the 1940s era uniforms.

*Conspiracy buffs whispered about "The Shaver Mystery," and its stories of a sinister underground civilization that sent its "Detrimental Robots," or "Deros," to abduct surface dwellers and subject them to horrific physical torture.

This I definitely have to read about.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Some family pix...Maternal Grandparents dating and honeymoon, 1948-1949:

And my paternal grandparents circa 1953

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^
Great images FF,
Thanks for sharing!

 

[tonyb]

I don't expect to find many kindred spirits in this regard around this place, but I'm a big fan of what was then cutting-edge architecture in the immediate post-War era. The earliest of the Case Study houses, a program spawned by California Arts and Architecture Magazine, date from then. Great designs, most of them. And, like great designs of any era, they still appeal to the modern eye.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The "March of Time" short on teenage culture was shown on TCM a few years back. Might turn up there again sometimes. "Life" published a photo essay on teenage girl culture around the same time as the short was made.

"Geek" picked up its current meaning by the 1990s. By the '70s it meant an awkward socially-incompetent person, and the rise of computer and gaming culture in the '80s gave it is modern shading.

TV moved west in the mid-fifties because that's where the movie studios were. A few series, notably "I Love Lucy" and "The Amos 'n' Andy Show," were shot on film in Hollywood in the early fifties but it wasn't until Warner Bros. went full tilt into producing filmed shows for television in 1954 that the rush began. By the end of the decade all the major studios had turned their short-subject departments into units churning out filmed TV.

Middle-class women hated the "New Look" because it was fussy, overrestrictive, wasteful, uncomfortable, ugly, and impractical. They formed "LBK Clubs" -- "Little Below The Knee" -- to protest being force-fed clothing styles they didn't want, but their resistance collapsed after a barrage of heavy-handed marketing and cut-price sales around Easter time in 1947. Working class women generally didn't pay much attention to fashion one way or another, though, so they wore want they wanted and laughed at the Better Classes stumbling along in their overlong poofty skirts and their skyscraper shoes.

EC Comics were a part of that same trend -- crime and horror comics had a heavy readership among the same classes of men who read Mickey Spillane, but most of those comics didn't have the edge of sophisticated satire that the EC line offered. EC books were self-consciously aware of what they were, and had a very strong sense of what moderns might call "irony" about them. Their rivals and imitators, for the most part, did not.

The Army eventually adopted the "Army Green" uniforms in 1956 in part as a response to the widespread civilian use of surplus WWII wear. This meant the end of the OD wool uniforms, the "Ike jacket," and brown shoes.

The "Shaver Mystery" was a favorite topic of late-night radio personality Long John Nebel, the Art Bell of the 1950s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And here is a typical teenage girl in 1945.

 

[2jakes]

I don't expect to find many kindred spirits in this regard around this place, but I'm a big fan of what was then cutting-edge architecture in the immediate post-War era. The earliest of the Case Study houses, a program spawned by California Arts and Architecture Magazine, date from then. Great designs, most of them. And, like great designs of any era, they still appeal to the modern eye.

Googie Architecture Online - Space Age City

 

[Benzadmiral]

Lizzie wrote, "EC Comics were a part of that same trend -- crime and horror comics had a heavy readership among the same classes of men who read Mickey Spillane, but most of those comics didn't have the edge of sophisticated satire that the EC line offered. EC books were self-consciously aware of what they were, and had a very strong sense of what moderns might call 'irony' about them. Their rivals and imitators, for the most part, did not."

Stephen King has written of the EC Comics from, I guess, a little later than the period we're discussing. He was born in 1947, so he'd have been devouring comics around 1955 and later. But he was quite fond of them and their edge. He quotes the Cryptkeeper character who "presented" a lot of the comic stories as saying, "Irony, dearie . . . it's good for your blood. . . ."

 

[ChrisB]

You never really see modern day shows or films that showcase the period from just after WWII ended, to just before the beginnings of the Rock N' Roll era.

Aside from Korean war movies, the only one I can think of set in that time period is "The Last Picture Show". Can anyone think of any others?

 

[LizzieMaine]

There have been a bunch of recent ones. "Carol" and "Brooklyn" are two from just the past year. Early-postwar films have been much more common in the last decade or so than films set in the 1930s.