The 1950s
As much as Fahrenheit 451 is about a time in the not-too-distant future, Ray Bradbury’s novel is
anchored in the 1950s. Mildred Montag sits like a zombie in front of a telescreen. The sound of
jet fighters crosses the sky in preparation for war. A neighborhood sits full of cookie-cutter
houses and the complacent souls who live in them. All of these would have been familiar scenes
to a writer at work in 1953.
The era following World War II in the United States was known for its productivity, its
affluence, and its social conformity. The economy was strong. The technology of television, air
travel, and the transistor brought the future to the front stoop. The neighborhood Montag lives in
probably looks a lot like Levittown, the famous low-cost housing developments of the age that
ushered in the rise of suburbia.
Although the 1950s are remembered as a decade of peace and prosperity, they were
anything but. The Korean War, which ended in the year that Fahrenheit 451 was published, saw
tens of thousands of American deaths. The larger Cold War that lingered was a source of
constant anxiety. In the new atomic age, everyone was learning that the world could be destroyed
with the push of a button, a fate Bradbury more than hints at in his novel.
Not only were governments endowed with nuclear weapons, they exercised the power to
persecute suspected enemies closer to home. The congressional House Committee on UnAmerican Activities began investigating suspected espionage in 1946, and within a few years
Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was charging, without evidence, that dozens of
government officials were Communist Party members. Meanwhile, memories of Nazi book
burnings and Soviet censorship were still fresh in people’s minds.
As a result, censorship was alive and well in the media. Communists were assailed in the
press. Comic books were condemned as subversive by parents and educators. Images of the
“organization man” and the “lonely crowd” reflected changes in the American spirit.
For all their prosperity and rising expectations, the 1950s were a decade of atomic tests
and regional wars; racial segregation; government censorship and persecution; subtly enforced
social orthodoxy; and building angst. The social and psychological problems of the era are
watchfully scrutinized in Fahrenheit 451, a book that examines an intolerant society that seems
oddly un-American in its penchant for censorship and governmental control.
(The big read: http://www.neabigread.org/)
The Beats and the 1950s
The 1950's represented, what W. H. Auden called, an "Age of Anxiety," between the victory of
World War II and the specter of nuclear annihilation. The 1950s was also a time when many of the
nation's younger generation began to challenge Conformity. The Beat Culture began at this time and
continued with other countercultures and finally to the hippies of the 1960s.
According to John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the most important book of
the Beat Generation, "described the experiences and attitudes of a restless group of young
Americans, whose primary interests seemed to be fast cars, wild parties, modern jazz...and other
miscellaneous kicks:
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls,
visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl
would be handed to me (Jack Kerouac, On the Road,
Part 1, Ch. 1).
What differentiated the characters in On The Road from the slum bred petty criminals was
Kerouac's insistence that actually they were on a quest, and that the specific object of their quest was
spiritual. Kerouac wanted visions:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say
a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous
yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes "Awww!" ~ Jack Kerouac
The Beats weren’t looking for spirituality in church or school; following Emerson’s advice,
the Beats looked for spirituality in Nature and themselves. Perhaps the quest of the Beats might be
placed into a context of the vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he gave an address to the
Harvard Phi Beta Kappa society in which he claimed that character is higher than intellect, and
experience counts more than book learning. Emerson told that august crowd to get out of school
and experience life for themselves. Thoreau got it. And so did the Beats.
On the road, Kerouac and friends looked for a new American Identity, separate from those
dead ideas inherited from Europe. Out in the vast landscape of the American continent, an
individual, committed to self-reliance, novelty, and change, could make contact with the ultimate
inspiration:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old
broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over
New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one
unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that
road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of
it... and tonight the stars'll be out (Jack Kerouac, On the Road,
Part 5)
Historian Imre Saluszinsky has explored the connection between Emerson's call for a new
American Identity and the Beat Generation and today's culture. For example, Emerson taught that
spirituality can best be found in Nature:
In fact the Beat idea of the American continent as the ultimate
source of all inspiration comes from Emerson, who
singlehandedly convinced the young American poets and thinkers
of the 19th century that they could forget Europe and history, and
forge an original relation to nature. And the radical individualism
of the Existentialists, with its sense of all worldly power as corrupt
and corrupting: that is also there in Emerson, who writes, "Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of
its members."
Contemporary cultural icon, Bob Dylan, has been perfectly open about his early influences:
"I came out of the wilderness, and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene . . . it was Jack Kerouac,
Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti . . . I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic."
Saluszinsky suggests that today's counter-culture goes back to "Emerson's chief lesson --that memory and history are death to the creative spirit, which must be committed to novelty and
change --- is evident everywhere in Dylan who saw immediately that one way of changing the times
is simply to assert that they already are a-changin'...This spirit of Emerson and Hawthorne --- who
looked West from New England and there, in the opposite direction to Europe, found a symbol of
action and renewal ...Self-reliance is not in every respect a comforting or easy truth to live by: it
teaches that we must compete and struggle endlessly, if we are to escape the limiting influence of
others." As Dylan suggests:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you,
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you . . .
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
(http://www.umsl.edu/~ryanga/amer.studies/amst.thebeats.html, compiled from Auden and W. H. Auden and John Clellon Holmes stuff comes
from the textbook: The American Tradition in Literature, 11th Edition, Perkins and Perkins, McGraw Hill.and The Americans, authors Danzer,
Klor de Alva, Krieger, Wilson, Woloch, Online edition, 2003 (All page references here refer to the print edition 2003).
)