Teenagers

Prior to World War II, the word “teen-ager” was not part of Americans’ vocabulary, although marketers and popular culture began to focus on this distinct age group during the 1930s. First published in September 1941 in an article in Popular Science magazine, the term “teen-ager” took on added cultural force during the 1950s, when teens experienced unprecedented autonomy, economic opportunity, and social mobility. Products of the BABY BOOM, these teenagers helped create a dramatic teen subculture with their own distinctive set of social, moral, and cultural values.

Unburdened by the personal and economic sacrifices their parents encountered in the 1930s and 1940s, many teenage girls and boys, especially white, middle-class adolescents, spent their leisure time frequenting dances, drive-in movies, ice cream parlors, and pool and music halls. Advertising and marketing targeted adolescent consumers by peddling television sets, music records, trendy lash-ions, and automobiles to teens with allowance money that in earlier generations would have been recycled into the family budget.

In the 1950s, however, the social and economic autonomy of teenagers coincided with an increase in domestic unrest characterized by a rise in juvenile crime, sexual experimentation, and a general aura of youthful rebellion. The increase in teenage delinquency could be traced to several new cultural phenomena. First was the significant rise in access to automobiles, which provided many teens with a new way to escape the control of their parents. Marketing automobiles to America’s teens, advertising strategists and Hollywood filmmakers helped create new teen idols whose restlessness with the comfortable confines of their suburban culture helped popularize dark and brooding rebels like James Dean, who rode motorcycles, wore leather jackets, grew their hair long, and displayed an antiheroic mistrust of authority. By the middle of the 1950s, what critics had once dubbed the “silent generation” were now being labeled Beat Generation and “Greasers,” terms that mixed general teenage angst with a penchant for social promiscuity. The prominent novel of the period, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, highlighted America’s crusading youth movement. A controversial novel because of its excessive profanity and suggestive sexual behavior, the book’s seminal character and narrator Holden Caulfield became the icon of postwar teenage rebellion by exhibiting a jaded desire to repeal the established social conventions of the era. Another literary touchstone for this generation of teens was Mad Magazine. Founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, and marketed as a humor magazine to American teenagers, the magazine’s many articles parodied the cold war, the nuclear family, and consumer society.

The 1950s and early 1960s also witnessed the advent of a new form of music known as rock and roll. The term was introduced by Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed as a way to sell the “race music” of Alrican Americans to white America. Sonically, rock and roll encompassed an eclectic blend of rhythm and blues with the electric beats of urban street corners. When rock and roll singer Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan variety show in 1956 to a frenzied teenager fan-base, his black hair, flashy clothes, and gyrating hips suggested not only a new genre of music but a heightened state of sexuality that parents found distasteful and socially destructive. In the 1960s, popular rock and roll bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and American folk artist Bob Dylan underscored the youth movement’s desire to change the political and social landscape through the mass appeal of popular music. Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Chan-gin’” became the postwar anthem of adolescent rebellion and political activism that characterized the 1960s youth movement.

To government officials and cultural conservatives seeking domestic harmony at a time of cold war conflict, the youth movement and the rebellious culture it brought with it underscored the persistent need to rein in enemies both at home and abroad. As a result, throughout the postwar period, teenagers and their idols were routinely cast as communists or radicals who strayed from the cold war consensus preaching Christianity, conformity, and chastity. In the late 1950s, Elvis Presley’s records were censored by popular radio and labeled “Nigger music,” while the emerging teen drug and sex culture of the 1960s became a target of the FBI’s campaign to enforce law and order throughout American cities infested with domestic unrest and race riots.

Nonetheless, by the 1960s, American teenagers established themselves as a dynamic and socially powerful subgroup. The Beats and street rebels of the 1950s gave way to the COUNTERCULTURE hippies of the 1960s who preached peace and love, experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, and lived in utopian rural communes. For many American teenagers, the 1960s were a time of unprecedented political and social activism. Playing a leading role were African-American teenagers who vocally and actively assisted in the public demonstrations that characterized the 1960s Civil Rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized by African-American college students, incorporated many black teenagers who helped participate in lunch counter sit-ins at segregated eating facilities and who, together with other American students in colleges throughout the United States, helped wage active resistance to the Vietnam War. Together, American teens helped redefine American postwar culture and gave greater social and political awareness to young people.

Further reading: James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquents of the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

—David E. Goldberg