« Presidential Christmas Presents | Main | An Untold American Success Story; Part 5 »
December 27, 2008
An Untold American Success Story; Part 4
The Baby Boom was a unique demographic phenomenon, one in which the largest generation in American history would be born and raised during the interval between a "just" World War they wouldn't be able to remember, and a more ambiguous and remote Asian conflict they would be expected to fight in right after High School.Their childhoods had been spent in an era of unparalleled economic prosperity in which more material things were made more available to more Americans than ever before.
The prosperity that would characterize the Fifties began under the genial stewardship of World War Two hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who might have had either major party nomination for the asking but, as an ex-general, was a natural Republican. He defeated Adlai Stevenson rather easily in '52 and the new prosperity made him nearly invincible in '56. Shortly after Ike took office, America ended its Korean combat with a shaky truce that still endures; we then overthrew the Iranian government with a CIA coup that continues to haunt us while maintaining our (expensive) military stand-off with the Soviets. While we did (providentially) transfer responsibility for space exploration to a civilian agency under Ike, his expansion of the Interstate highway network deepened our commitment to the automobile and cheap petroleum, while encouraging flight to burgeoning suburbs that quickly became the focus of TV advertising aimed squarely at a white, increasingly prosperous (and unionized) middle class.
Those benefits came at considerable social cost: more frequent divorce, greater dispersion of fragmented families, the de facto segregation of blacks within inner city ghettos, and the constant stress of possible nuclear annihilation.
Just before leaving the Oval Office, a less ebullient Ike, perhaps chastened by the U2 incident, Sputnik, and the Cuban debacle, presciently urged America to beware its growing Military industrial Complex.
Long before Ike's election, while WW2 was still in progress, two naive aspiring young authors met at New York’s Columbia University through a mutual association with Lucien Carr, a youth, they both admired for his sophistication. Although from very different backgrounds, they shared an intense desire to write and a contempt for contemporary American social norms. From the first, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg became friends, lovers, and long term associates who would, within a relatively brief interval, achieve considerable literary success in the mid-Fifties that was, to a degree, mutually interdependent and the beginning of their transition into both cultural icons and nominal founders of a literary movement.
Ironically, the Beat Generation had already been named by another mutual friend John Clellon Holmes when Ginsberg's reading of Howl facilitated publication of On The Road, bringing attention to him, Kerouac, and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Although the Fifties is the decade they are most identified with, it was clearly during the Sixties that the Beats exerted their greatest impact on American (and global) popular culture through their influence on the Hippie and larger counterculture movements, an influence which still revererates loudly in our troubled modern world.
The best historical overview of the Beat phenomenon I’ve found has been that of David Halberstam, who died tragically about the time I was reading his pivotal book, The Fifties, for the second time. The Chapter on the Beats (Twenty-Two) begins with the unlikely relationships that blossomed when Kerouac, Lucien Carr, and Ginsburg met at Columbia in 1943 and in a mere twelve pages, efficiently captures the Beats' political and cultural significance in every important sphere except the one which is, ironically, perhaps the one they should be best remembered for: personal drug use.
If there was one thing beyond literature that united the Beats, and set them apart from their uptight fellow Americans, it was their propensity for exploring and using drugs.
Unfortunately, events would unfold in such a way that facilitated the election of Richard Nixon, a man Ike supported, but certainly didn't particularly admire. Nixon's election would foreclose any possibility of honest discussion of drug issues for another four decades. Before speculating on current possibilities for holding that long overdue discussion, it will be necessary to add a bit of history about another pivotal figure who wasn't a beat himself, but whose charisma and use of psychedelics undeniably influenced both them and their era.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 27, 2008 06:29 PM