'1959: The Year Everything Changed' by Fred Kaplan
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-fred-kaplan19-2009jul19,0,1773067.story
The end of the 1950s was a pivotal time, a cabinet of wonders, the
author contends, that overshadows every other year, including those
of the '60s.
By Zachary Lazar
July 19, 2009
1959
The Year Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan
Wiley: 336 pp., $27.95
When a writer needs a break these days, he picks a year -- 1968 was
popular last year -- and spends a few hundred pages arguing how it's
central to our lives now. This year, we have Rob Kirkpatrick's "1969:
The Year Everything Changed" and now Fred Kaplan's "1959," whose
subtitle makes the same claim. Can it be true of both years? The
answer is yes, of course. That's the thing -- every year is the year.
In just this past June, we saw violent protests in Iran, a coup in
Honduras, the sentencing of Bernie Madoff, the death of Michael
Jackson, and the implosion, via sex scandal, of two Republican
presidential hopefuls. There's always a hailstorm of interest out
there. And the challenge is in making these disparate, interesting
things cohere and produce some sort of larger meaning. The challenge
for a book like "1959" is not simply gathering together all the
interesting data about Kaplan's favorite year -- and it is a
fascinating one -- but in presenting it with a style that's
meaningful and inventive.
Kaplan's premise is certainly a good one. He's arguing that the real
fulcrum of the 20th century and beyond is not -- as many argue -- the
1960s, but the unsung '50s. Forget Woodstock, forget LSD, forget the
peace marches and "I Have a Dream." Forget also Altamont, Vietnam,
race riots and the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Jr. "The truly pivotal moments of history are
those whose legacies endure," Kaplan writes. "And, as the mid-forties
recede into abstract nostalgia, and the late sixties evoke puzzled
shudders, it is the events of 1959 that continue to resonate in our own time."
This is an incredibly audacious claim, but it highlights a problem
with this type of book -- casual history, we might call it -- which
never seems to decide if it wants to be really serious or just kind
of fun. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an expert on any number
of subjects both political and cultural, Kaplan is capable of being
as serious as anybody, and yet it's when his book is at its most
serious that it feels least persuasive. What Kaplan really wants to
do, I think, is illuminate some personal icons: Miles Davis and
Ornette Coleman; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs;
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; Norman Mailer, John Cassavetes,
Berry Gordy. Indeed, all of these artists were engaged in radically
important work in 1959, tantamount even to a kind of renaissance. But
then, how do you connect painting or jazz to the invention of the
microchip (March 24, 1959)? Or the Cuban revolution (Jan. 1)? And
what about the civil rights movement (King was in India, Malcolm X in
the Middle East)? Or women?
Kaplan feels obligated to stop at all of these way stations, and this
inevitably forces him to make generalizations ("for all the added
risk and strain and restlessness, the breakaways and breakthroughs of
1959 eased, enriched, and emboldened the conditions and prospects of
American life"). Writing like this often makes us forget that we're
being presented with a cabinet of wonders.
There is John Howard Griffin, author of "Black Like Me," who -- after
helping Jews escape the Nazis, losing his eyesight in a bomb attack,
retreating to a French monastery to study Gregorian chant, regaining
his eyesight -- has his skin artificially darkened so that he can
tour the southern United States as a "black" man and report on how
he's treated.
There is a 31-year-old Fidel Castro eating an ice cream cone at the
Bronx Zoo -- not yet a feared enemy or despot but a kind of folk hero
in a United States that, after Venezuela, is the second country to
recognize his new regime. There is Ornette Coleman with a white
plastic saxophone, playing music so weird that one audience "beat him
up and broke his horn outside the club afterward."
There is Richard Nixon showing Nikita Khrushchev around an exhibition
of American kitchen innovations. "Khrushchev refused to be
impressed," Kaplan writes, "dismissing the Western wonders as either
commonplace ('We have such things. . . . We are up with you on this,
too') or contemptible ('Don't you have a machine that puts food into
the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you have shown us are
interesting, but they are not needed in life. . . . They are merely
gadgets.')." In just a few paragraphs, Kaplan give us the Cold War in
all its Strangeloveian absurdity, Nixon "like a nervous real-estate
agent, trying to close a big sale" and Khrushchev "boisterous,
bellicose, brimming with energy."
At its best, "1959" captures these flavors -- the coining of the word
"aerospace," the finned Edsel, the thin lapels, the dread of the
Bomb. Those who love the AMC series "Mad Men," set just after the
epochal year, will find much to love in Kaplan's book. Where it
stumbles, though, is in its larger argument, its dutiful potted
histories of the civil rights movement, the laws of censorship, the
progress of feminism and other weighty matters. We feel the writer
filling in an outline of what must be included if his book is going
to have a sufficient page length. Neither he nor we are having much
fun, and I wished that Kaplan had found a more radical way to
construct his book, one matching the verve of 1959 itself.
Was I persuaded that 1959 was the year that changed everything? I'll
give Kaplan the microchip, and the Beats, represented here by the
publication of "Naked Lunch" -- nothing in literature after the Beats
has managed to be as radical and popular at the same time. But I'd
bet on Warhol eclipsing any 1950s artist and a certain band from
Liverpool eclipsing him and everybody else (my apologies to the King
of Pop). Which is to say only that the year 1959 was absolutely
great, but maybe not the absolutely greatest.
--
Lazar is the author of "Aaron, Approximately," "Sway" and the
forthcoming "Evening's Empire."
--------
What were you doing in 1959?
http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090717/OPINION/907170308/1028/OPINION02
That year started a U.S. culture shift
By George Will
July 17, 2009
Fifty years ago, on July 21, 1959, Grove Press won permission to
publish D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Two days
later, G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company, sought government
approval for Enovid, the birth control pill. These two events, both
welcome, were, however, pebbles that presaged the avalanche that
swept away America's culture of restraint and reticence.
That change is recounted by Fred Kaplan, an MIT Ph.D. and cultural
historian, in 1959: The Year Everything Changed, an intelligent book
with a silly subtitle. There never has been a year - or a decade,
century or even millennium, for that matter - in which everything
changed. There are numerous constants in the human condition,
including (and because of) human nature. Furthermore, pick a year,
any year, in the last, say, 250 and you will find it pregnant with
consequential births and battles, inventions and publications that
made modernity.
Besides, one reason America got into so many messes after 9/11 was
the disorienting mantra that on that day "everything changed." Still,
consider how much 1959 did incubate.
Until into the 1940s, it had been a crime in Massachusetts to sell
Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, in which Roberta loses her
innocence to a factory foreman. In 1948, the Supreme Court affirmed a
New York court's judgment against Doubleday for publishing Edmund
Wilson's novel Memoirs of Hecate County, which depicted an
extramarital affair. In 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction
of a bookseller for mailing obscene materials, saying that
constitutional protection of free speech did not extend to obscenity,
as determined by the Department of the Post Office, which had its own
judiciary.
The court said, however, that the test of obscenity was "whether to
the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the
dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient
interest." And to be obscene, material must be "utterly without
redeeming social importance."
So, would Lawrence's novel be judged both prurient and worthless?
Barney Rosset of Grove decided to find out by alerting the post
office of his intention to import some copies from Europe. The post
office impounded them. Then a court abolished restraints on sending
them through the mail. Within weeks the novel was a best-seller, as
was Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Four months after the United States
slipped the leash of Earth's gravity by putting a satellite into
orbit around the sun, social restraints, too, were being shed.
In July 1959, Searle sought FDA approval to market Enovid for birth
control - not, as in 1957, to treat "menstrual disorders." When
finally the pill reached the market, U.S. News & World Report
wondered whether it would be considered "a license for promiscuity"
and "lead to sexual anarchy." The very idea of "community standards,"
the crux of the Chatterley decision, was becoming problematic.
Kaplan lavishes excessive attention on Norman Mailer, who today seems
marginal. It is a significant datum - signifying today's diminished
importance of words - that the poet Allen Ginsberg's 1959 recitation
at Columbia University caused the sort of commotion that only a rock
group could cause today. But Kaplan's judgment that Ginsberg "saw the
connection between freedom from structures in poetry and freedom from
structures in all of life" merely validates the axiom that everything
changes except the avant garde.
More serious change was coming, born of a mundane material, silicon.
On March 24, 1959, at an engineers' trade show, Texas Instruments
introduced perhaps the 20th century's most transformative device, the
solid integrated circuit, aka the microchip. It would help satisfy
what Kaplan calls Americans' "yearning for instantaneity," a cousin
of the spontaneity ("first thought, best thought" proclaimed
Ginsberg) so celebrated in the next decade.
Kaplan is especially convincing concerning jazz as a leading
indicator of more serious, because more disciplined, cultural
enrichment. On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis began recording Kind of
Blue, perhaps the greatest jazz album. On May 4, John Coltrane
recorded Giant Steps, on May 22, Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape
of Jazz to Come and on June 25, David Brubeck began recording Time
Out. The emancipation of jazz from what Kaplan calls "the structures
of chords and pre-set rhythms" proved that meticulously practiced
improvisation is not an oxymoron.
On July 8, 1959 - two months after President Eisenhower authorized
U.S. military advisers to accompany South Vietnamese units on
operations - in a hut 20 miles from Saigon, eight advisers were
watching a movie.
Viet Cong sprayed the room with bullets, wounding six. Two died, the
first of 58,220.
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