CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Allen Ginsberg in 1979. Photo: Michiel Hendryckx. CC BY-SA 3.0

The postwar Beat generation – and the ensuing counterculture — is remembered now, three-quarters of a century later, for one word, Howl, the title of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem.  It begins with the following lines:

In a tender introduction to the poem, William Carlos Williams reminds readers, “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.”  But, he adds: “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it.”

And Williams warned, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

After 15 years of the Great Depression and World War II, postwar America faced serious challenges, both internationally and domestically.  Foreign policy was shaped by George F. Kennan’s theory of “containment”–aka the Truman Doctrine — that sought to prevent the spread of Soviet communism.  And domestic affairs were shaped by a parallel notion of “containment,” a culture war to contain the unexpected excesses of affluence.

The postwar GI Bill helped fuel growing affluence and brought an improved quality of life for many. It facilitated the rise of suburbia, enabling urban renters to become first-time home buyers and saw high-school grads go to college; however, restrictive covenants and other policies blocked African Americans from much of the postwar prosperity.  Growing affluence fueled a mass consumer revolution marked by the purchase of millions of cars, TV sets and other products.  Marriage and birth rates rose exponentially. And sexuality was ever-increasingly commercialized in advertising, fashion and popular culture.

Even after the New Deal and victory in a global war, large segments of society fiercely tried to reinstall the “old” moral values.  As a new historical sensibility was being fashioned, many old-school Republicans and conservative Christians held on to traditionalist notions of masculinity, the family, class, patriotism and race relations. They felt threatened and sought to contain the tensions generated by an ever-increasing consumer society and its more “liberal” values.

The cultural and political tensions that profoundly split – and, in time, shaped — the country during a critical period of U.S. history.  These tensions gave birth to the more secular America that defined the country for decades to come, especially marked by the civil rights movement, the counterculture and the women’s........

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