The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [54]
Atomic bullets! What a concept! The carnage was thrilling. Until Asbestos Lady stole into my life, capturing my young heart and twitchy loins, atomic-war comics were the most satisfying form of distraction there was.
Anyway, people had many other far worse things to worry about in the 1950s than nuclear annihilation. They had to worry about polio. They had to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. They had to worry that Negroes might move into the neighborhood. They had to worry about UFOs. Above all, they had to worry about teenagers. That’s right. Teenagers became the number-one fear of American citizens in the 1950s.
There had of course been obnoxious, partly grown human beings with bad complexions since time immemorial, but as a social phenomenon teenagehood was a brand-new thing. (The word teenager had only been coined in 1941.) So when teens began to appear visibly on the scene, rather like mutant creatures in one of the decade’s many outstanding science-fiction movies, grown-ups grew uneasy. Teenagers smoked and talked back and petted in the backs of cars. They used disrespectful terms to their elders like “pops” and “daddy-o.” They smirked. They drove in endless circuits around any convenient business district. They spent up to fourteen hours a day combing their hair. They listened to rock ’n’ roll, a type of charged music clearly designed to get youngsters in the mood to fornicate and smoke hemp. “We know that many platter-spinners are hop-heads,” wrote the authors of the popular book USA Confidential, showing a proud grasp of street patois. “Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention.”
Movies like The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Confidential!, Teen-Age Crime Wave, Reform School Girl, and (if I may be allowed a personal favorite) Teenagers from Outer Space made it seem that the youth of the nation was everywhere on some kind of dark, disturbed rampage. The Saturday Evening Post called juvenile crime “the Shame of America.” Time and Newsweek both ran cover stories on the country’s new young hoodlums. Under Estes Kefauver the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency launched a series of emotive hearings on the rise of street gangs and associated misbehavior.
In point of fact, young people had never been so good or so devotedly conservative. More than half of them, according to J. Ronald Oakley in God’s Country: America in the Fifties, were shown by surveys to believe that masturbation was sinful, that women should stay at home, and that the theory of evolution was not to be trusted—views that many of their elders would have warmly applauded. Teenagers also worked hard, and contributed significantly to the nation’s well-being with weekend and after-school jobs. By 1955, the typical American teenager had as much disposable income as the average family of four had enjoyed fifteen years earlier. Collectively they were worth $10 billion a year to the national balance sheet. So teenagers weren’t bad by any measure. Still it’s true, when you look at them now, there’s no question that they should have been put down.
ONLY ONE THING CAME CLOSE to matching the fear of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism. Worrying about Communism was an exhaustingly demanding business in the 1950s. Red danger lurked everywhere—in books and magazines, in government departments, in the teachings of schools, at every place of work. The film industry was especially suspect.
“Large numbers of moving pictures that come out of Hollywood carry the Communist line,” Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gravely intoned to approving nods in 1947, though on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly