Shake, rattle & roll

Contrary to popular belief, the 1950s were crazy, man

Like Rodney Dangerfield, the 1950s get no respect.

The proverbial middle child, the ’50s always seem to suffer from being sandwiched between the wartime traumas of the ’40s and the revolutionary politics of the ’60s. As a result, the decade has emerged as a kind of cultural Stepford: a blissful Beaverdom of stay-at-home moms, Howdy Doody and Jello molds.

The Tumultuous Fifties at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum is a revisionist exhibition and alternative reading of the time through 195 black-and-white news photographs of disaster and dissent.

Rather than the tranquilized decade, according to this traveling exhibition, the ’50s were a veritable cornucopia of mad-craziness. Between the execution of the treasonous Rosenbergs — accused of selling secrets to the Soviets — and the traumatized black students trying to desegregate a Little Rock high school in 1957, there is plenty of photographic evidence to support the idea of the decade as a tinderbox for the kind of issues — of patriotism and race — that still obsess Americans.

The photographs in Tumultuous are drawn from what’s known in journalistic circles as “the morgue” — the copious vaults of images (estimated between 3 million and 6 million) archived by The New York Times over its history. Because of that origin, the images in Tumultuous often tend toward the dryly illustrative. Journalistic photography is a case of “just the facts, ma’am,” and it is rare for a photograph predicated on telling a concise story to also achieve the sublimity of fine art photography.

The cause for tumult is not always best served by photographs, as illustrated by a picture of the aftermath of a 1956 gas explosion at a clothing store, or another from 1957 of police searching for fingerprints after a jewelry store robbery. Weegee belly-crawl through the gutter it ain’t. Such tepid images of ’50s grit end up serving the enemy camp’s contention that the era was dull, dull, dull.

A certain degree of stodginess is not helped by the division of the material into subjects like: “Growing Up American” and “America in the World,” which sound like chapters in a high school sociology textbook and can trade tumult for tedium.

Far more interesting are the images, not of isolated incidents, but of mass movements, of pacifist demonstrations, May Day Communist parades, striking workers or primly dressed farmers’ wives protesting low market prices for their potatoes. It is images like those that demonstrate how the American tradition of protest and activism for social justice did not slow down in the supposedly brain-dead ’50s.

Some of the images in Tumultuous are genuine heart-stoppers and show that photojournalism can quickly jump from simple record to something deeper. “War in Korea” (1950), in which one soldier tenderly comforts his comrade who has just learned of his friend’s death, is an image, not just of the ’50s, but of the emotional price of war.

And the seeds of America’s fear of youth-gone-wild could find no better touchstone than the shot from 1958 of a sweetly grinning pair of teenagers, Caril Fugate and her lover Charles Starkweather. Starkweather patterned his look on JD icon James Dean, but took youthful rebellion to an ugly extreme when he murdered 11 people during an infamous killing spree.

The case for tumult is not just gloomy, though. For pure comedy, it is hard to top the 1959 photo of a Beatnik Mary Jane bust in which the three arresting officers wear pristine “undercover” berets.

Carlos Museum curator Margaret Shufeldt has added a quaint regional spin on Tumultuous with numerous photographs of Atlanta in the ’50s drawn from commercial photography sources. The result is in keeping with the native modus operandi of denying history in place of a bucolic vision of the sunny South: watermelon queens, hamburger huffing at the Varsity and a 1951 view of the Downtown Connector that makes it look like an unpopulated country road.

The images in Tumultuous capture only a fragment of the times framed within the conventions of news photography. To add a measure of material tangibility to the generation, the Carlos Museum has included an additional novelty: the original manuscript for one of the most important literary works of the 20th century, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The yellowed manuscript typed in a continuous, nearly 120-foot purgative rant onto translucent tracing paper is unfurled behind glass like some holy relic, complete with Kerouac’s copy editing marks in the margins.

Alan Trachtenberg, co-organizer of Tumultuous, asserts in an accompanying catalog essay that the 1950s could have been more accurately called the “schizoid decade.” Even as conservatism seemed to dig in its heels, enormous cultural shakeups like the Beats and rock ‘n’ roll were in the works.

And so by relentlessly focusing on the ’50s as some aberrant Bozoville of normality, we miss its many contradictions, which are our own.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafng.com