Most Americans associate seismic cultural upheavals - like women'sliberation and rock 'n roll - with the 1960s. But a new book assertsthat those changes were actually rooted in the supposedly drab 1950s,and by end of that decade, they had come to a head.
Even half acentury after its release, Miles Davis' 1959 album, ,retains a whiff of the avant-garde. By ignoring the classic scales ofjazz, the renowned trumpeter expressed the daring experimentalism thatsuffused many areas of life that year in areas as diverse as art,politics, social relationships, and science.
"Youlook at 1959, there was an enchantment with the new," says Fred Kaplan.The Pulitzer Prize winning author of points to aviation as one area that embodied the high flying spirit ofthe year. 1959 saw the first transatlantic passenger jet flight. It wasalso the year America's Mercury astronauts were chosen.
Indeed,magazine seemed to express the public's "gee whiz" enthusiasm mostebulliently in a publisher's note following the Soviet Union's launchof Luna 1 rocket on January 2, 1959. It was the first human artifact toescape Earth's gravity.
"It hailed the achievement as 'aturning point in the multi-billion year history of the solar system,'"Kaplan says, "in that 'a creature of the sun had evolved to a pointwhere he could break free of his planet's gravity.'"
Thatevent seemed to epitomize what was going on at the time, the authorsays. "It's all kinds of people in different walks of life breakingfree of the gravity that had been holding their predecessors down." That, he says, "created the world that we came to know over the nexthalf century."
Kaplansays events of 1959 led to the blurring of lines between public andprivate, literature and pornography that we see today in the InternetAge.
In 1959, publisher Barney Rosset successfully suedthe United States Post Office for confiscating copies of D.H.Lawrence's sexually explicit novel . It was alsothe year American writer Norman Mailer published , which fused literature, personal confession and socialcommentary in new ways.
1959 also saw the first mainstreamrecord release by iconoclastic comedian Lenny Bruce, and his firstappearance on national television. "Lenny Bruce would talk aboutpolitics and the church and sex and race in ways that nobody had everspoken before in public," says Kaplan. "And anything you see now ofthis sort - HBO or Comedy Central or Showtime or George Carlin - allstems directly from Lenny Bruce."
Many Americans think of the1960s as the 20th century's most explosive era. But it wasn't the BabyBoomers, born after World War Two, who lit the fuse, Kaplan says. "Itwas a people who grew up through the Depression and World War Two, andwho were dissatisfied with the state of things." They had expectedthings would change after the war, he notes, and they didn't.
In1959, John F. Kennedy was preparing to run for president. He wasCatholic and young, and so, many thought him unelectable. Yet Kennedyattracted young idealists in great numbers. He promised a "NewFrontier" where "the torch would be passed to a new generation ofAmericans."
For Kaplan, the "New Frontier" Kennedy meantwas the 1960s. "It was the future; it was tomorrow. So there was thissense of 'something is new over the horizon' and there was thisappetite for it."
1959 was also the yearthe U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill.By freeing women from the fear of getting pregnant, the Pill ushered inthe so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. It also allowed women toenter the workforce without concern that their careers might be cutshort by unplanned motherhood. That put women on the road toward socialand economic equality. It's a cultural change we're still adjusting totoday.
Fred Kaplan also emphasizes the importance of anotherinvention of 1959 - the microchip. One microchip was crammed withenough electronic circuitry to replace tens or even hundreds ofthousands of transistors, the state of the art technology at the time.
Microchips made high-speed computers possible, Kaplan says. "[Without microchips,] youcouldn't even have a handheld calculator, much less a high definitiontelevision or space communications."
Ofcourse, 1959 marked the height of the Cold War between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union, and many of that year's technologicalinnovations enhanced our capacity for destruction, as well creation. As Fred Kaplan points out in his book , we are still coping with, as well benefiting from, many of thechanges set in motion a half century ago.
