Baby Boomers

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Tina Gianoulis

Suburban life in the 1950s and early 1960s is almost always stereotyped as dull, conventional, and secure. In many ways, these stereotypes contain truth, and some of the roots of the baby boomers' later rebellion lay in both the secure predictability of suburban life and the hypocrisy of the myth of the perfect family. While baby boomers and their nuclear families gathered around the television to watch familial mythology such as Father Knows Best, quite another kind of dynamic might have been played out within the family itself. The suburban houses, separated from each other by neat, green lawns, contained families which were also isolated from each other by the privacy which was mandated by the mores of the time. Within many of these families physical, sexual, and emotional abuse occurred; mothers were stifled and angry; fathers were overworked and frustrated. Communication was not encouraged, especially with outsiders, so the baby boomers of the suburbs, prosperous and privileged, grew up with explosive secrets seething just beneath the surface of a shiny facade.

The peace and prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s also contained another paradox. The atomic bombs that the United States dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had opened the door to a new age--the possibility of nuclear annihilation. The baby boomers had inherited another first--they were the first generation to know that humankind possessed the power to destroy itself. Coupled with the simmering tension of the cold war between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, nuclear war seemed a very real threat to the children of the 1950s. Bomb shelters were built, and schools carried out atomic bomb drills where students learned to hide from nuclear attacks by crawling under their desks. It was not the security of the 1950s, but the juxtaposition of the facade of security with preparation for unimaginable destruction that sowed the seeds of the baby boomers' later revolt. It was a revolt against racism and war, a revolt against conventionality and safety. But most of all, perhaps, it was a revolt against hypocrisy.

While World War II had brought death to thousands of Americans in the military and prosperity to many on the homefront, it had also brought unprecedented opportunity to African Americans. Having worked next to whites in the defense industries, serving next to whites in the armed forces, and having gone abroad and experienced more open societies, American blacks found it difficult to return to their allotted place at the bottom of American society, especially in the segregated South. When the civil rights movement began in the 1950s and 1960s, it attracted young baby boomers, both black and white, to work for justice for African Americans. As the movement began to build, many young white college students came south to participate.

Almost simultaneously, another movement was beginning to build. Though the U.S. government had been sending military advisors and some troops since 1961 to preside over its interests in South Vietnam, it wasn't until 1964 that the war was escalated with bombings and large troop deployments. The war in Vietnam did not inspire the same overwhelming popular support as World War II. As the conflict escalated, and as the brutal realities of war were shown on the nightly television news, opposition to the war also escalated. In 1965, the first large march against the Vietnam war drew an estimated 25,000 protesters in New York City. Within two years, similar protests were drawing hundreds of thousands of people. Though there were war protesters of all ages, it was the baby boomers who were of draft age, and many did not want to go to a distant country few had heard of, to fight in an undeclared war over a vague principle. Draft cards were burned and draft offices were taken over to protest forced conscription. Students held demonstrations and took over buildings at their own colleges to draw attention to the unjustness of the war.