Americans: Square on the Surface
The booming decade of the fifties has been called the Nifty Fifties, the Good Old Days, the single decade when hip was hep and good was boss. Looking back, most Americans seemed to be "square," the men carefully dressed in suits and ties, the women with perfect hairdos and perky dresses, more interested in being part of the newly affluent middle class and enjoying their new prosperity than in protesting social inequality or political injustice. The majority of Americans were interested in finding a good, white-collar job with a benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a ranch house in the suburbs.
That they were eager to enjoy their new economic freedom is understandable in light of the traumatic events of the previous two decades: a devastating Depression followed by the horrors of World War II. When the young men who fought in Europe and the Pacific for four years returned home to their sweethearts, they wanted to get on with their lives and forget about the death and destruction overseas. It only makes sense that the focus was on fun and innocence, on "I Love Lucy," rock ’n’ roll, backyard barbecues, and being part of the status quo.
|
Ira Hayes. (1923-1955) |
|
|
|
The only thing sadder than a publicity seeker is maybe a person who shuns publicity but is forced unwittingly into the limelight. Ira Hayes was such a person, and it cost him his life…. Hayes was an American Indian, a member of the Pima tribe, born in the tiny town of Sacaton, Arizona. The eldest of four boys, he was the quiet son of a farm couple. The family was poor, living for a while in a one-room adobe hut with a dirt floor. They were patriotic and religious; one wall of the home was covered with the American flag, and another displayed biblical symbols and pictures. Ira stood five feet, seven inches and weighed 136 pounds on December 7,1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. World War II began for the United States with a declaration of war the following day. Pimas had a history of soldiering, from fighting the Apaches in Arizona to combat against the Germans in France in World War I. Hayes proudly enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in the summer of 1942. Hayes and his family knew about prejudice from white residents of Arizona. The young recruit suffered silently when fellow marines kidded him about carrying a tomahawk or called him "heap big chief." Once the soldiers got to know Hayes, however, the taunting stopped and a deep friendship began. Thrown together in a California boot camp, men from many different ethnic groups learned they had much in common. When friends of Hayes called him chief, he broke into a smile. The marines had the unenviable task of leading U.S. forces across the Pacific, retaking islands from the Japanese in vicious fighting amid terrible heat and driving rain. The Japanese were trained never to surrender, and this cost the lives of several of Ira’s friends. Overrun Japanese soldiers frequently blew up themselves and the marines rather than allowing their capture. Hayes wasn’t talkative, but such events made a lasting impression. Hayes carried a Browning Automatic Rifle and somehow managed to stay in one piece all the way to a Japanese home island, Iwo Jima. There, in February, 1945, the marines ran into enemy forces hidden in tunnels and suffered incredible casualties. After days of unending battle, Hayes and five other marines raised the U.S. flag atop Mount Surabachi, the island’s only hill. For better or worse, a wire service photographer was there to record the scene. Just three of the six men would survive the war, but those in the photo became instant heroes nationwide. Two of the dead men in the photo were misidentified, and this bothered Hayes. But the marines told him to keep quiet about the mistake, and the hypocrisy of this decision gnawed at him. He became a civilian and bounced around a number of jobs, drinking heavily. Not even a campaign to rehabilitate him by the wife of pop singer Dean Martin had a lasting effect. Hayes showed up puffy and aged in Washington in 1954 to dedicate the Iwo Jima memorial to the nation’s marines. He was only thirty-one. He returned to Arizona, but the best job he could find was picking cotton. On a cold January night in 1955, Hayes drank himself to sleep in an abandoned adobe hut and froze to death. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, a delayed casualty of war.
| |
|
|
|
|
|
But the fifties were not just a time of fun and innocence, of Buddy Holly, hula hoops, 3-D movies, hot rods, Mickey Mantle, and "Howdy Doody." As much as they wanted to, Americans could not turn their backs on the rest of the world and concentrate on their own prosperity. They emerged from World War II believing fervently in the system of capitalism and feeling that the U.S. had a moral destiny to make the world safe for democracy. The death and destruction of the world war ended in 1945, but they were followed by a decade of a tense and frightening Cold War and a nuclear arms race that made most Americans feel anxious and cautious. They were also haunted daily by the terrors of witch hunts for potential Communists, and deadly atomic tests. The safe thing to do was to conform as much as possible. Religion, home life, respectability, security, compliance with the system — these became the important values.
A booming postwar economy gave middle-class Americans more money than they ever had before. Suburbia, fast cars, and new highways provided an escape from the decaying inner cities and became the central features of the new American scene. Thousands of tracts of land were bulldozed to build housing developments of tiny ranch houses surrounded by shopping centers, schools, churches, and parking lots. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of American homeowners increased by over nine million, and the number of cars increased by over twenty-one million; over forty thousand miles of interstate highways were built to accommodate these new suburban developments.
Americans not only had more money in the postwar economic boom, they also had more leisure time. While Americans before the war had struggled just to survive the Depression, Americans in 1950 had more time and money to travel, garden, drink, watch TV, read, hunt, listen to music, even paint by numbers, than ever before. It became very fashionable to "do it yourself," which included everything from hanging your own wallpaper to building your own sailboat. Americans prided themselves on the fact that they could do just about anything themselves.
