America Dreaming Read online

  From these events, American politicians concluded that the threat of Communism had to be met forcefully and completely in order to be stopped. This lesson, however, would come to haunt them in the years to come, particularly with regard to the Vietnam War. What few seemed to realize at the time was that nothing can be reduced to a simple ideal or solution, let alone something as complicated as war. America was poised to discover this, painfully and violently, in the coming decade. But in the early years of the ’60s, the amazing miracle of American prosperity made happy endings still seem possible.

  THE FINAL FRONTIER

  Kennedy did not limit his vision of the United States’ influence to just the boundaries of Earth. In 1961, he committed the nation to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

  This proclamation did not come out of the blue. Four years earlier in 1957, the Soviet Union had sent the first satellite, Sputnik, into space. Weighing just 184 pounds and orbiting the earth at the lightning speed of 18,000 miles per hour, this launch represented a dawn of a new era as well as a humiliation for the United States inflicted by its bitter enemy. Though Sputnik would transmit rudimentary signals for only a few weeks, the symbolism of the act was not lost on the American public. It was truly a shock. America had been experiencing incredible prosperity, which fueled an exaggerated sense of America as standing head and shoulders above the rest of the world. With the Soviet space program, many of these illusions came crashing down. It appeared that American science—and America as a whole—had been left behind, while the Soviet space program triumphed. Nuclear scientist Edward Teller called it a technological Pearl Harbor, referring to Japan’s surprise attack on Hawaii that caused the United States to enter World War II.

  Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr., America’s first astronaut

  Critics began declaring that America had lost its edge. We were simply too materialistic and self-indulgent. If only our children had been learning science and mathematics in school, this would never have happened. “The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads,” Senate Majority Leader, and future Vice President and President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed ominously. “Later, when men moved to sea, the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. It is not very reassuring to be told that the next year we will put a ‘better’ satellite into the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.” Like many others, Johnson believed the very survival of the country was at stake.

  “What a beautiful view! Everything A-OK.”

  —Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr., during America’s first manned space flight

  In 1961, Kennedy recognized how critical it was to the country’s moral stance not simply to be a leader in prosperity but to lead in every area. On May 25 of that year, twenty days after Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr. made a fifteen-minute flight that took him 115 miles above the earth and made him the first American in space, Kennedy outlined his ambitious $7–9 billion moon project. Kennedy proclaimed that landing on the moon “may hold the key to our future on Earth.” Although Shepard had gone only a fraction of the distance logged by Uri Gagarin, the first Soviet in space, and his capsule had a top speed of only a quarter as great as Gagarin’s, he did maneuver his craft in space by firing small rockets, an achievement the Soviets had not claimed.

  “The Soviets have the Sputniks, while the Americans, Kaputniks.”

  —A joke told after the Soviets’ satellite launch

  A NATION UNITED THROUGH A MASS MARKET

  As Kennedy was trying to unite the country around the notion of a national purpose, the nation was gathering every night in front of the television. By 1960, 80 percent of the country had at least one television in their home. The average American watched six hours of TV daily, bringing an entire nation together each evening in front of the tube. Everyone was watching TV shows like Gunsmoke, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. In a sense, America was transformed from isolated regions with unique customs and accents to a nation where everyone owned the same kinds of homes, appliances, cars, and television sets. The marketplace was national, not regional.

  By its simple efficiency and overwhelming presence, the national marketplace began to dominate the country. The world had become so interconnected that local ideas, products, and values had become usurped by national ones. In the ’50s, rock-and-roll grew through an underground economy of word-of-mouth, mob-owned juke-boxes, and radical DJs. By the ’60s, this music marketplace had been replaced by “hit factories” located almost exclusively in New York city.

  Rock-and-roll wasn’t the only rebel culture to be brought out of the shadows into the mainstream. One of the most popular TV shows in 1963 was Hootenanny on ABC. It melded hipster, Beat culture and the folk music scene, which was based in protest music, to make an incredibly innocuous music show out of these subversive cultures. Each week ABC would set up at a college campus and bring a collection of nonthreatening folk groups, such as the Kingston Trio, The Rooftop Singers, and the New Christy Minstrels, to perform songs such as “Tom Dooley,” “Walk Right In,” and “Green, Green.” All of the songs on the show essentially cut folk music’s subversive message off at the legs. Hootenanny was a showcase for the most well-scrubbed and well-shorn of politically neutral groups, who offered evocative and inoffensive sing-alongs, such as “Michael Row Your Boat” and “Greenfields.” Essentially, the show offered up a fraternity man’s doo-wop. Populist folksingers included Pete Seeger, whose songs about the downtrodden and politically disenfranchised were banned from the tube. Those kinds of songs might make the viewing audience feel uncomfortable and change the channel.

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  WONDER

  WHITE BREAD BECOMES A METAPHOR

  Only a decade earlier, a shopper would go to a local market to buy a loaf of bread produced by a baker down the street and produce grown a few miles away. By 1960, people were wheeling large shopping carts into vast warehouses of food, newly dubbed “supermarkets,” to buy bread produced, not baked, by large national corporations. The derogatory term “white bread” came out of this phenomenon. It describes anything that seems mass-produced, full of air and of little nutritional value, much like the familiar fluffy white loaves being offered by companies like Wonder Bread. Like the name of that company, it seemed truly a marvelous “wonder” how all this was possible.

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  The word lifestyle—a word born out of luxury—made its first appearance in Webster’s dictionary in 1961.

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  Rolling Stone magazine described how songs were now written, recorded, and made into hits:

  INSIDE THE HIT FACTORY

  BRILL BUILDING CHURNS OUT CHART-TOPPING SIXTIES POP

  Gerry Goffin finished his day job as a chemist and arrived at his small midtown Manhattan songwriting office around 10 p.m. “Carole had left a melody on a little Norelco tape recorder,” he says of his then-wife and songwriting partner, Carole King. “I played it, and the lyrics came to me almost instantly.”

  The song, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” was “different from other bullshit we were doing,” Goffin says. “It sounded like a standard.”

  At the same time, Goffin and King toiled for Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, owners of the publishing company Aldon Music and key figures in the “Brill Building sound,” which ruled the pop charts in the early Sixties. Located near Times Square at 1619 Broadway in New York, the Brill Building was literally a hit factory: The ten-story office building housed more than 160 music-related businesses—songwriters, publishers, record labels, studios and radio promoters—each trying to outdo the other. You could write a song, sell it to a publisher, cut a demo and sell that to a label just by walking up and down the halls. “It was exciting,” says Neil Sedaka, who grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as King and dated her in high school. “We were literally teenagers writing about teena
ge life.”

  Goffin and King, along with the other prominent pairings of Sedaka/Howard Greenfield, Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil and Jeff Barry/Ellie Greenwich, actually worked at Aldon, across the street at 1650 Broadway. Each pairing was housed in a windowless cubicle with a piano. If you scored a hit, you were moved to a cube with a window. “The competition was fierce,” says King. “Don would give us an assignment: ‘The Shirelles are up—they’re looking for a follow-up to “Tonight’s the Night.”’ If you didn’t write it, someone else would.” After a demo of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was completed, Kirshner played it for the Shirelles’ producer, Luther Dixon, who then took it to the group. “We didn’t like it at all; it sounded like a corny country and western song,” says the Shirelles’ Beverly Lee. “But Luther made us do it, and after he put the strings on it, we fell in love with the song.”

  Six weeks after its release in November 1960, the song hit the top of the charts, kick-starting the girl-group phenomenon and establishing Griffin and King as top dogs on the Brill Building’s talent roster. The pair would go on to write hits for Little Eva and the Chiffons, but for Goffin, the sweetest hit was the first. “I remember Carole and Don pulled up to my lab in a limo,” he says. “Carole was waving a $10,000 check, and she yelled, ‘Guess what? You don’t have to work anymore!’”

  While Hootenanny attempted to strip folk music of its underlying politics, another show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, presented Beat culture as a sort of benign adolescent style choice rather than a rebellion against the dominant culture. On the show, the character Maynard Grebs sported a sloppy beatnik style, wrinkled clothes, messy hair, and a goatee. Maynard was a character not to be taken seriously. His humorous antics on the show involved the many creative ways he avoided work. The message was that the Beats’ essential trait was laziness, which was why they avoided work, not because of some exalted philosophical stance against America’s values.

  Beat philosophy was also trivialized with America’s materialistic appropriation of its culture’s most visible touchstones. By the early ’60s, the rage in the suburbs was no longer backyard barbecues, but rather beatnik parties. Couples would throw parties where everyone donned berets, wore black clothes, and played bongo drums. As well, teens began setting up coffeehouses in basements and performed folk songs on acoustic guitars. In the mass culture, Beats were transformed from a threat to consumer America to a “lifestyle” that was no different from any other in the marketplace. Its products—black turtlenecks, acoustic guitars, berets—could be purchased in just about any community in America. In this way, the rebel ideas behind Beat culture were reduced to a product bought and sold in retail stores. The awesome power of America’s new consumer culture could make anything—even the most radical ideas—into products to be sold.

  A BULLET TO THE HEAD

  On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, whatever hope America held that everything would be okay was destroyed with one bullet. President Kennedy was assassinated in a Dallas motorcade. It was as if everyone in the country stopped and collectively held their breath. Almost every person who was old enough to remember still has that moment etched in his or her memory. “I was doing laundry when a neighbor called and told me to turn on the television,” remembers one young mother. “I just sat there and watched while I held my son in my lap.” Within hours, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson had been sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

  For the first time, an entire nation gathered in front of their television sets to witness the events unfold live. More than 100 million Americans watched John Kennedy’s funeral. John-John, Kennedy’s three-year-old son, stood bravely at the grave site and saluted, breaking hearts across the country. Dressed in black, Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s wife, wore a mask of grief. Hour after hour, the three television networks presented the same pictures to a mourning nation.

  Perhaps prophetically, the country also witnessed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, gunned down in front of the police by Jack Ruby on November 24. This vigilante execution came to underscore the powerlessness of the government to protect us from evil. With the Cold War having been ramped up by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with the assassination of President Kennedy, the too-short years of unlimited possibility seemed to come to an end. As historian David Farber concluded, “With his death, Americans confronted the grim reality: not all of America’s possibilities were good.”

  “I don’t know if you know how cynical most people of our generation have become about patriotism. When Kennedy spoke, he managed to instill a feeling of pride in me because I, too, was an American…. It takes a great man and now he’s gone.”

  —Taken from one of more than 1,000,000 letters of condolence sent by Americans to Jacqueline Kennedy

  SITTING AT THE COUNTER

  BLACK COLLEGE STUDENTS LEAD THE WAY TO CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORIES

  Around 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, long after the lunch hour rush, Frank McCain, Junior Blair, Joe McNeil, and David Richmond sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Nearly everyone gasped. One of the black waitresses motioned for the young men to leave, warning them not to sit there. The counter where they had seated themselves was reserved exclusively for whites; McCain, Blair, McNeil, and Richmond were black. No African American had ever sat at the whites-only counter before. Years later, Joe McNeil recalled that quiet winter afternoon at Woolworth’s:

  I don’t think there’s any specific reason why that particular day was chosen…. But we did walk in that day…and we sat at a lunch counter where blacks never sat before. And people started to look at us. The help, many of whom were black, looked at us in disbelief too. They were concerned about our safety. We asked for service, and we were denied, and we expected to be denied. We asked why couldn’t we be served, and obviously we weren’t given a reasonable answer and it was our intent to sit there until they decided to serve us. We had planned to come back the following day and to repeat that scenario. Others found out what we had done, because the press became aware of what was happening. So the next day when we decided to go down again, I think we went with fifteen, and the third day it was probably a hundred and fifty, and then it probably mushroomed to a thousand or so, and then it spread to another city. All rather spontaneously, of course, and before long, I guess probably fifteen or twenty cities, and that’s when we had our thing going.

  “We had our thing going.”

  Woolworth’s Lunch Counter in Greensboro, North Carolina Reporter:

  “How long have you been planning this?”

  Frank McCain, Junior Blair, Joe McNeil, and David Richmond:

  “All our lives!”

  CIVIL RIGHT

  DEFINITION OF A CIVIL RIGHT According to Constitutional law, a civil right is a personal and present right, possessed by each individual. He or she can demand that it be honored at once.

  Within days, protests had spread across the South to fifteen cities in five states. Over the next two years, lunch counter sit-ins occurred across the South. Whites, however, reacted strongly to the protests. In Greensboro, it took seven months of sit-ins to desegregate public facilities there. In Marshall, Texas, the local authorities used fire hoses to disperse sit-in protesters. Most of the sit-ins were met with heavy resistance, with whites pouring ketchup and mustard over the heads of the protesters and committing other physical assaults. In a wade-in at a public beach in Biloxi, Mississippi, as many as ten African Americans were wounded by gunfire. In Jacksonville, Florida, a race riot erupted and at least fifty people were injured. In Atlanta, Georgia, acid was thrown in a protester’s face.

  In the end, more than seventeen school districts and countless stores, beaches, libraries, and movie theaters were integrated. The success of the sit-ins taught young African Americans that they did not have to wait for their elders in more established civil rights organizations such as the NAACP to take action. They did not have to wait for arduous court cases to wind their w
ay to the Supreme Court, only to be ignored by local authorities. They didn’t have to wait for big companies to see how discrimination hurt their business. They could lead the fight to end racism and discrimination with direct and immediate action.

  The lunch counter sit-ins marked the first civil-rights events of the ’60s. What set them apart from previous protests against segregation was that these actions occurred on a national, not just a local, level. This would make them the model for the mass protests on college campuses and around the country that would follow in the coming years.

  RACISM IN AMERICA

  In America, racism has a long and varied history, and the dramatic strides against it that came in the ’60s did not begin there. African Americans have been fighting racism ever since they were brought here against their will to be slaves. They fought for emancipation from slavery again and again before the Civil War. Afterward, during Reconstruction, they struggled to ensure their freedom in a country that did not truly consider them equals. They were thwarted by the government and the Supreme Court in its 1896 ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld “separate but equal” laws. Between Reconstruction and World War II, blacks made little measurable progress against institutional discrimination, but organizations such as the NAACP laid the groundwork for the progress that would come. During the economic boom of the ’50s, blacks were able to make real strides in dismantling state-sponsored discrimination.