Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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and Ivanhoe, the nineteenth-century West through Broken Arrow and High Noon. When drive-ins arrived, we piled into the station wagon, already in our pajamas, supplied with drinks and snacks, ready for a new adventure. In time, we were allowed to go on the trolley with our friends to the matinees. We thrilled to every technical innovation, especially 3-D and Cinerama. Across all genres—westerns, musicals, mysteries, romances, comedies—we entered with utter credulity into fictional worlds as they formed our sense of our real world, not only in the past, but in the present.
Another medium, however, was on the rise. In the early 1950s, television came to everyday America in a big way. Suddenly, the small-screen box seemed to dominate every house, and our eyes were glued to the wonders of Howdy Doody, Frontier Playhouse. TV dinners were piled into supermarket shopping baskets. Daily and weekly routines were reorganized around television schedules. New rituals clustered around the new presence. We excitedly returned greetings from presenters and breathlessly shouted warnings to characters in trouble. We identified with cowboys—Roy Rogers, Matt Dillon, the Lone Ranger—as they brought law and order to the frontiers of the American way as it expanded westward, and we gloried in their victories over bandits, cattle rustlers, and Indians. The crime series brought the same motifs into a more contemporary and urban setting. How secure we felt in a world in which Joe Friday, Mike Barnett, and Perry Mason were standard bearers in the inevitable triumph of good over evil. The adventure series chronicled the same struggle in mountain and sea rescues, exotic jungles, and military maneuvers. All was set to rights by Sky King, Ramar of the Jungle, Superman, Fury, Lassie, and Rin Tin Tin. Women usually came into the picture more as the rescued than the rescuers. The spy series in their turn showed good versus evil in terms of the forces of religion and democracy locked in deadly combat with those of atheism and tyranny. Capitalism was the “free world,” as a bulwark against communism, the dark, sinister world behind the “Iron Curtain.” Agents of foreign powers constituted the enemy within. What cold, alien, menacing creatures they were in I Led Three Lives, the story of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist Party for the FBI. Across these genres, there prevailed an iron confidence that good would be rewarded and evil punished. Whatever terrors came into play, we could be sure that by the end of each episode, all loose ends would be tied up in a comforting happy ending. We knew, too, that the resolution would come through acts of individual heroism. Whether embodied by the Lone Ranger, Joe Friday, or Superman, perfect righteousness unfailingly foiled the demonic designs of the villain of the week. We knew the formulae of every show, yet we thrilled again and again to the ritual.
Another prominent prime-time television genre was family drama for family viewing. All of these, whether serious or sitcom, unfolded in a world in which the nuclear family was the secure and stable base of all human interaction. The ups and downs of domestic life were all tidily sorted out in the virtuous glow of the world of I Remember Mama and Father Knows Best. There were other dramatic genres not meant for children. These were the daytime soap operas scheduled during school hours and the anthology plays scheduled for when we were supposedly in bed. However, many of us saw as many of these as school holidays and parental indulgence would allow. These dealt with more problematic areas, although within clearly defined and very restricted boundaries. Whatever the problems and pitfalls encountered by these characters in their pursuit of the American dream, they never ceased to believe in it. It was later at night in the anthology drama series that the outer limits of what television could do in this period were explored. These dealt with the lives of people very much like their audience: people who didn’t look like Hollywood stars, people who didn’t carry guns, people like Marty, a simple Bronx grocer trying to cope with loneliness and a need for love in Paddy Chayevsky’s “marvelous world of the ordinary.” They registered social change in their own way. The pull of tradition against the push of modernity was a recurrent source of dramatic tension. These plays were among the brighter sparks that emerged from the darkness that severely circumscribed the creativity of those who managed to work in the industry at this time, that is, the whole Cold War atmosphere surrounding them and the specific pressures of the witch-hunting and blacklisting focused on film and television. The ideological parameters surrounding television production were carefully policed.
Life was not altogether unlike what appeared on the television screen, especially in the dramas of domestic life. Most American citizens really were patriotic and law-abiding, almost childishly trusting of the powers that be, unquestioningly loyal to “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Both on television and off, there was a striking lack of psychological probing. Class consciousness and sociological awareness were equally absent. Popular media portrayed most of America as middle class, defined by white collars and white picket fences rather than relationship to the means of production. The working class was confined to blue-collar manual workers in the image of Ralph Kramden, Chester Riley, or Ernie Bilko, dreamers and schemers in the grip of get-rich-quick fantasies and rags-to-riches myths. Like many others, my family saw itself as middle class, because my father wore a white collar and tie to work and we lived in a mortgaged suburban house, though we depended no less on wage labor than did the families of bus drivers and plumbers. No one questioned the prevailing division of labor, patterns of exchange, or distribution of wealth. There was no sense of how it was all structured or how it could be structured differently. People were rich or poor, that was it. It was an inherent right to be born rich—but at the same time, with a bit of luck and effort, anyone might strike it rich. There was no querying the right of those who produced nothing to consume lavishly, while those who did produce bowed and scraped before them. Any disaffection seething beneath the surface tended to be of the inarticulate rebel-without-a-cause type or the campy, anarchist beatnik. There was high culture, too, of course, but it was not part of our world. In Philadelphia, as in most US cities, it was possible to attend theater, ballet, opera, and art exhibitions, and to read challenging books and journals, but no one I knew growing up did so. Even in universities, life revolved more around sororities and fraternities, football scores and grade-point averages, upwardly mobile careers, and suburban dream homes than around any sort of critical thought or alternative visions.
School might have been expected to open a wider cultural and intellectual perspective, but it did not go very far in that direction. I began school in 1949 at Saint Luke’s in Glenside. I couldn’t wait to start. From my first day in kindergarten, I saw the nun standing in front of the class and wanted to become her. All my teachers, from kindergarten to eighth grade, were Sisters of Saint Joseph. One Halloween, my mother made me a costume that was a small but exact replica of the SSJ habit. I not only donned it that night to collect candy bars, but also wore for years afterward on the porches of Rosewood Avenue “playing school,” with me as the teacher and my playmates as the pupils. I showed them no mercy, bossing them around and working them hard. It is a wonder that anyone would play with me. One of their fathers named me Sister Mary Impatient of the Outrageous Order. (Unlike those who dreamed of becoming baseball stars only to become insurance agents, I later lived out my childhood fantasy.) There were Catholic schools from primary and secondary schools on to university level staffed by various religious orders. Primary schools were mostly coeducational, but high schools and colleges were not. Catholic boys who aspired to attend university could choose between Villanova, La Salle, or St. Joe’s, while girls could go to Rosemont, Immaculata, or Chestnut Hill. No one spoke of Harvard or Princeton or even Penn or Penn State. It was unimaginable.
Every morning we gathered in the schoolyard. When the bell rang, we lined up and marched into our classrooms in our blue and white uniforms. We pointed our hands to heaven and said our prayers, followed by the pledge of allegiance, which was recited, hands on our hearts, in the same voice and with the same solemnity as our prayers. I had already started to read, but the process stepped up in school, starting with the primers of the day that featured the bland adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally with their pets Spot and Puff. From there, we moved to stories of saints and crusaders and missionaries and statesmen. I frequented the public libraries and was especially keen on biographies. They were hagiographical accounts of the lives of Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, but I knew no better at the time. Lessons were organized around rote learning. We memorized prayers, hymns, poems, multiplication tables, answers to catechism questions, lists of presidents and dates of battles and state capitals. We competed in spelling bees. We spent much time practicing penmanship. None of these activities encouraged critique or