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Social Guidance
Or, How to be Normal in the 1950s:
(And trust me, you want to be normal.) First things first. Learn how to be socially acceptable the same way kids in the 1950s did in Health Class: through educational videos on how to be a well-adjusted, properly repressed, pillar of society!
How to be Well Groomed (1949)
Learn how to make your appearance pleasing to other people. This is especially important for ladies who want to be attractive to men!
Improve Your Personality (1951)
Learn how to change your personality to get what you want from your parents and peers! It's not manipulation! It's good manners!
A Date With Your Family (1950)
How to make dinner as elaborate and stressful as Thanksgiving (for the women) every night and also pretend to be shiny, perfect people without emotions!
Remember, kids: refusing to conform is letting the Communists win!
And if you think that's a joke, you aren't quite getting the 1950s yet.
Small-Town Life
Welcome to Kansas
Although the playwright does not specify the name of the town, simply calling it "a small Kansas town," Inge likely drew inspiration from Independence, Kansas, the small town where he grew up. Independence is also about 15-20 minutes from Cherrydale, KS, which is where Howard Bevans runs his shop.
Independence and Cherryvale are in Montgomery county, located in the southeast corner of Kansas near the Oklahoma border.
About Independence:
First, it's small.
Population (1950): 11,335
Population (2020): 8,548
To put this in perspective, the population of St. George in 2023 was 104,578 - almost ten times the population of Independence in 1950.
Cherryvale is even smaller, with a population of 2,952 in 1950.
The childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder is located in Independence. Her experiences while growing up in an Independence homestead inspired her nine-novel Little House on the Prairie series and a highly popular television show by the same title in the 1970s and '80s. A replica of the Wilder's family home stands on the original site and is now a museum.
The climate of Independence is categorized as humid subtropical. This means that summers are hot, sticky, and stagnant, a breeding ground for mosquitoes that especially swarm at night. The play takes place on Labor Day, when the height of the summer heat is just about to let up.
Helen Potts wishes for a tornado stir up the suffocating still air and force it to circulate. The tornado is a metaphor for the chaos and destruction that come with change. Tornados destroy arbitrarily, leveling one house and leaving untouched the home next door. Kansas is the most tornado-ridden state in the U.S., and although the end of summer also marks the end of tornado season, one can hit at any time.
Small Towns
In the United States, the 1950s was the era of the suburb. Suburbs were planned communities near bigger cities. Cities were considered dirty
and crime-ridden (not to mention diverse), an inappropriate environment to raise a family, but cities were also where most jobs were. Suburbs were designed to allow a man to commute to work while his family lives a sheltered, insulated life in an idyllic cookie-cutter house away from the dangers of the city. The first suburbs were also inhabited only by white people. The Levitts
only sold to white buyers a even required a contract forbidding owners to sell or rent to anyone who wasn't white, which was later thrown out as unconstitutional. Suburbs were for the privileged.
Small towns function differently. Unlike the neat rows of houses in a fully designed community, small towns build up around things like agricultural centers, factories or other industry, and train stops. Small midwestern towns, like Independence, are situated within rural expanses rather than the outskirts of a nearby metropolis. Each small town develops its own character and culture. Shops and other businesses are located in a town center, usually with a Main Street and a few surrounding streets. Most of Inge's plays are set in small American towns. He explains:
"I've often wondered how people raised in our great cities ever develop any knowledge of humankind. People who grow up in small towns get to know each other so much more closely than they do in cities."
Small towns also create yearning, the type of longing that lends itself so well to dramatizing. Young people dream about seeing the world, but escaping a small town is difficult.
Religion starts to become a significant element in small-town America in the 1950s. The Catholic Church and the Protestants were staging their own quiet Cold War, building churches all over the country and competing for dominance. By the mid-1950s, about half of the U.S. population went to church on Sundays.
For more insight into how these towns operated, watch:
A Day in the Life of a 1950s Small Town (1952)
Red and Lavender
Widespread Paranoia
The 1950s wasn't the first (or last) time in U.S. history that "Communists" would be used as the great scapegoat. The anti-communist propaganda spread during two separate Red Scares (1917-20 and 1947-54), the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations (1940s and 50s), the McCarthy communist hearings (1954), and the Cold War (1947-91) in general, has been one of the longest-standing and most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Even today, the widespread fear of communism persists in the United States. This campaign began after the Bolsheviks in Russia overthrew the czar (or king), executed Czar Nicholas II and his entire family, and installed a communist system. It makes sense that any government would want to strongly discourage their populace from following suit.
It's important to note that believing in and arguing (even publicly) for communism as a system is 100% protected by the first amendment: the right to freedom of speech, making the persecution of suspected communists a violation of their constitutional rights.
Propaganda Clips (c. 1950s)
Here's some communist propaganda, including some coverage of a communist "pageant" held in Mosinee, WI, in which the town staged a fake communist takeover!
Accusations of communism affected thousands of people. Only two (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed, but hundreds were imprisoned. Many more lost their jobs.
The Lavender Scare
In the Cold War, communism wasn't just communism. It was expanded beyond political ideology to include all kinds of so-called "deviant" behavior - being in interracial relationships, wanting better work conditions, smoking weed, having extramarital sex, and just about any refusal to conform to strict rules of social propriety. In particular, homosexuality (and any forms of non-hetero sexuality) were linked to communism in what was called the Lavender Scare.
During the Lavender Scare, President Eisenhower issued an executive order requiring federal employees and applicants to be investigated for "trustworthiness," which tacitly singled out LGBTQ+ people, who were widely believed to be morally weak and therefore easily manipulated into spying and giving out classified information, assuming that they weren't already communists. It's estimated that 5,000-10,000 government employees and civil servants lost their jobs. Many had their lives upended, and some even committed suicide.
Even being suspected of being gay - or proximity to a gay person - meant most likely being subjected to the same ostracizing and punishment. It was far safer to stay closeted, which innumerable gay people (including Inge) did to avoid having their lives burned down. A law prohibiting anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in granting security clearance wasn't passed until President Clinton signed it into law in 1995. In 1998, Clinton signed an anti-discrimination law for government jobs.
You can learn much more about the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare on the main history page, America in the 1950s.
In an era that values conformity, perhaps it's safest to just learn about Changing "Deviant Behavior (c. 1950s) in general!
Dating and Sex
Expectations, Myths, and Realities
The 1950s are widely considered to be an era of sexual conservatism, and a widespread fear of sexual expression linked chaotic sexuality to Communism and the threat of moral decline. And all sexuality was chaotic unless it was contained within marriage. Girls were expected to remain abstinent, and they were to blame if they went parking and let things go too far with their boyfriends. Since the birth control pill wasn't approved by the FDA until 1960 and condoms were gate-kept by pharmacists and difficult for young people to obtain, sex was risky.
But although some teens stayed abstinent until marriage, premarital sex was still widespread in the 1950s, just as it has always been in every era. It was just taboo to admit it!
Instructional videos on love, marriage, and sex focused on learning how to shape and change oneself to be attractive to a potential partner, keeping most dating relationships casual (and abstinent), and figuring out whether the person you're dating is marriage material!
Here's the kind of thing that Madge and Millie might watch in high school Health Class. As Flo Owens already knows, love and passion in a marriage only get you so far!
Some Educational Videos:
Social Attitudes About Sex (1953)
Two teens learn "healthy" attitudes about love, sex, and procreation - that's to say: only within marriage.
Choosing for Happiness (1950)
A young college girl learns that she needs to be willing to change herself and stop being so difficult if she ever wants to get married!
What to Do on a Date (1950)
How to show a girl a good time without doing any planning, going broke, or ending up alone together!
Marriage and Gender
Why Should a Woman Get Married?
To be honest, for the bulk of human history, marriage has never exactly been a great deal for women. In the United States, women fought their way out, one right at a time, from being their husband's legal property. Traditionally, the foundation of marriage is the expression of expected gender roles, which are rooted in Christian doctrine. These norms designate the man as the head of the household, which translates into not only breadwinning but winning enough bread to allow his wife to stay in the home to serve him. Women were owned (practically if not legally) by their husbands, and they did all of the domestic labor, including child-rearing. Women, their labor, their bodies and sexual availability, and their children were her husband's property to protect. If a woman had to work outside the home, it was a failure of both husband and wife to meet gender standards. Gender roles throughout history are always variations on these themes, and by the 1950s, they had been solidified and were consistently reinforced in media.
However, the 1950s were also a moment of realization for many women, as during World War II, seven million women answered the call to join the workforce and take the places of the men overseas. But just as suddenly as they were recruited to do "men's work," which they could clearly do competently, they were sent back to the kitchen. Representations of women shifted from Rosie the Riveter to a beaming housewife. Having briefly experienced what it was like to be in charge of their own lives, why would women want to go back to marriage and subservience?
After the war, men came home ready to start their nuclear families, which was the patriotic thing to do. Women were no longer being forced into marriage and traded like livestock, but they were bombarded with imagery that pressured them to find a husband and become the perfect, smiling housewife. The marriage rate in 1950 was 90.2%, the highest in American history, the average age at marriage was 20 for women and 23 for men. There was intense social pressure for a woman to get married by her early twenties, lest she become an old maid. Getting married and having children was the ultimate achievement. Women attended college, but their goal was often a so-called "Mrs. degree" instead of their own education.
In 1953, Simone De Beauvoir published her controversial book The Second Sex, in which she identifies the deep sense of dissatisfaction in married women, despite the cheerful housewives and mothers displayed on their new television sets in sitcoms that continued throughout the decade. The humor of these sitcoms often arose from the housewife's mistakes or other undermining of the perfect nuclear family, further pressuring women to be perfect or be laughed at.
How Did Being Married or Unmarried Affect Women's Lives?
*Naturally, women who weren't married had to work to support themselves, but they were relegated to certain "pink-collar" jobs, such as secretaries, teachers, and nurses.
*Many school districts, firms, and hospitals had a "marriage bar" policy that called for the immediate termination of a woman when she got married.
*Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, financial institutions could and did refuse to write mortgages for unmarried women, sometimes approving married women with their husband's permission. And although women were granted the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, until the ECOA, banks could and did refuse without a husband, brother, or father to cosign. Unmarried women were also not allowed to have credit cards.
*Although "wife beating" became a crime in all fifty states by 1920, it wasn't until the 1970s that authorities began to treat it as a crime rather than a private family matter.
*Before the mid-1970s, it was legal for a man to rape his wife, and marital rape was not considered rape at all. In 1993, with Oklahoma and North Carolina as the last holdouts, marital rape was finally illegal in all fifty states.
Selling Gender Roles
Questionable Representations of Women in Advertising
The widespread representation of women depicted them as smiling, perfect domestic servants who must often be treated like a child and disciplined if they do anything without considering their husband's needs. To be clear, these representations are not real or obtainable, but they keep women occupied so they won't start asking questions.
Cultural Context
Rock n' Roll
The 1950s are known as the era of rock n' roll, although rock music started to take shape in the mid-1940s. It started with the blues, a musical form that had existed for decades, created by Black musicians and performed for primarily Black audiences. Then white musicians started to cover these songs, giving them wider exposure. Musicians began experimenting with the sound, incorporating influences from a mixture of genres, such as latin music, calypso, spirituals, country, jazz, boogie, and R&B.
Alan Freed, a Cleveland radio DJ, is credited with bringing rock n' roll to the masses and breaking down racial barriers between musical genres so that Black and white teens began listening to the same music.
Here are some examples of this emerging style:
*The song exploits the sexual double entendre of the phrase "rock n' roll."
*It was covered and recorded by Elvis Presley in 1954 as his second single.
Roy Brown
"Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947)
Jimmy Preston
"Rock this Joint" (1949)
*This song is considered by some historians to be a template for future rock n' roll songs.
*One musician claimed that it was the source of the term "rock n' roll," which was first used by radio DJ Alan Freed to describe the music he was instrumental in spreading.
Goree Carter
"Rock Awhile" (1949)
*At least one historian believes that this is the first rock n' roll song.
*Music historian Robert Palmer states that the prominent electric guitar makes "Rock Awhile" rock n' roll, and the influence can be heard in Chuck Berry's later albums.
Johnny Ray
"Cry" (1951)
*Ray's emotionally-charged performance of "Cry" is considered a precursor to the explicitly embodied sexuality that would characterize Elvis Presley's performances and cause women to faint. Tony Bennett, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Elton John cite Ray as a major influence.
Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats
"Rocket 88" (1951)
*Most music historians agree that "Rocket 88" was the first rock n' roll song. It was extremely successful and influential on the genre.
*The band billed as the Delta Cats was actually Ike Turner's band with Brenston singing the vocals.
Big Mama Thornton
"Hound Dog" (1952)
*This song is likely very familiar to you, but you've probably never heard it like this. Big Mama Thornton first recorded it in 1952 and it was a major hit, selling 500,000 records and spending seven weeks as number one on the charts.
When Inge wrote Picnic in 1953 the country was on the cusp of rock n' roll's dawning as a popular, mainstream genre and a cultural phenomenon.
Here are some examples rock n' roll's next steps:
Bill Haley and his Comets
"Rock Around the Clock" (1954)
*In 1954, "Rock Around the Clock" became the first rock n' roll song to be ranked as number one on the pop charts. It remained in the top hundred for a record 38 weeks.
*The song is often credited with launching rock music into the popular arena.
Chuck Berry
"Maybellene" (1955)
*Chuck Berry is sometimes called the "Father of Rock n' Roll," and "Maybellene" (yes, that's the correct spelling) was his first hit.
*Other recognizable hits include "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957), and "Johnny B. Goode."
Little Richard
"Tutti Frutti" (1955)
*Little Richard was another formative artist in rock n' roll, and "Tutti Frutti" was his first hit.
*The song originated some of the key characteristics associated with rock music, such as the loud, powerful vocal style and what would become a common rock n' roll beat.
Elvis Presley
"Hound Dog" (1956)
*No list about rock music in the 1950s would be complete without Elvis Presley's iconic performance of "Hound Dog" on the Ed Sullivan Show.
*His performance (and his outrageous hips) scandalized the country's conservatives and gave him the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis."
Elvis Presley's performance of "Hound Dog" and his gyrating hips in front of an audience of screaming, euphoric girls, marked a significant moment in the development of rock n' roll and in the middle of the decade. There was a clear divide between those who wanted to keep the conformity and conservatism of the 1940s and those who wanted to push ahead to the experimentation of the 1960s. This line is apparent in the play as the older generation wants to keep the young people safe and close to home, but the younger generation is longing to escape.
In 1953, at the start of the decade, rock n' roll is on the verge of exploding and breaking open the repression of the decade. In Picnic, the tension of this moment permeates the characters' lives, manifesting through anxiety and longing, capturing an ethos of a historical moment when even Inge didn't know what would come next.
Historical Context
A Timeline
For more in-depth world history, visit America in the 1950s.
1949
January 25th:
The first Emmy Awards are presented at the Hollywood Athletic Club, but they are limited to TV shows produced and aired in Los Angeles.
February 10th:
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman opens on Broadway, running 742 performances.
June 8th:
George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 is published.
June 14th:
A rhesus monkey named Albert II becomes the first primate to survive being launched into space, although he died during the return flight.
April 12th:
President Roosevelt dies and Vice President Harry Truman is sworn in.
May 8th:
After Hitler's suicide (Apr. 30), the war ends in Europe.
August 14th:
Japan surrenders after the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Aug. 6/9), ending World War II.
October 8th:
A patent is approved for the first microwave oven.
1945
1946
July 5th:
The first bikinis debut on a beach in Paris, soon popular internationally.
October 1st:
The Nuremberg trials end, convicting 19 surviving Nazi leaders for war crimes.
October 28th:
The first photos of Earth from space are taken from an unmanned rocket.
December 26th:
In Las Vegas, the mob-owned Flamingo Hotel becomes the first luxury hotel-resort built on the Strip.
1947
February 21st:
The Polaroid camera is introduced at a convention. When it hits stores in 1948, it sells out in minutes.
March 12th:
In a Congress joint session, Truman's new foreign policy of intervention in international conflicts to contain Soviet expansion (The Truman Doctrine) marks the start of the Cold War.
April 15th:
Jackie Robinson becomes the first Black baseball player in the major leagues.
September 18th:
With the National Security Act of 1947, Truman establishes the CIA as a permanent government organization to replace temporary, wartime-only agencies in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intel.
1948
January 30th:
Mahatma Gandhi, a leading activist in the fight for India's independence from British colonization, is assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.
March 8th:
In McCollum v. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules that religious instruction in public schools is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
June 24th:
In the first major crisis of the Cold War, the Soviets blockade all travel between Soviet-occupied East Berlin and West Berlin.
July 26th:
With Executive Order 9981, Truman desegregates the U.S. military.
1950
February 9th:
In Wheeling, VA, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gives a speech alleging "enemies within," or Communists infiltrating the government. He would lead publicized hearings against the accused in 1953-54.
June 17th:
The first organ transplant, a kidney, is performed. It functions for 53 days.
June 25th:
The Korean War begins when Soviet-occupied North Korea invades South Korea. Truman commits U.S. forces to help resist Communist control.
October 2nd:
Charles Schultz's first Peanuts comic strip is published.
1951
February 27th:
The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, limiting presidents to two terms in office.
June 27th:
CBS introduces "The World is Yours!", the first regularly-scheduled color TV program.
September 4th:
In San Francisco, Truman's opening speech for the Japanese Peace Treaty conference is aired as the U.S.'s first live coast-to-coast television broadcast.
December 20th:
The world's first experimental nuclear power plant opens in Idaho.
1952
February 6th:
After the death of King George VI, Princess Elizabeth II is crowned the Queen of England.
July 2nd:
Jonas Salk began testing for his long-awaited successful polio vaccine.
November 1st:
The United States detonates the first hydrogen bomb at a test site in the Marshall Islands.
December 1st:
News outlets report that Christine Jorgensen, a Danish transgender woman, is the first patient to receive successful gender-affirming surgery.
1953
January 20th:
Dwight D. Eisenhower is inaugurated as the 34th President of the United States.
April 25th:
James Watson and Francis Crick publish their paper revealing their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.
June 19th:
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed for espionage based on accusations of sharing classified information about U.S. atomic weapons to the Soviets.
December 1st:
Hugh Hefner publishes the first issue of Playboy Magazine with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, selling 54,175 copies.
1954
April 7th:
President Eisenhower explains his famous Cold War "domino theory" of how Vietnam falling to Communism would cause "dominoes" to fall throughout Asia.
May 17th:
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declares racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional.
June 14th:
The phrase "Under God" is added to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance as a Cold War push to separate Americans from the "godless" Communists.
July 29th:
In London, The Fellowship of the Rings, the first in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, is published.
1955
January 7th:
Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first Black singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
April 15th:
Ray Kroc opens the first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois.
July 17th:
Disneyland theme park opens to the public in southern California.
August 28th:
14-year-old Emmett Till is lynched in Mississippi, galvanizing the Civil Rights movement.
1957
March 12th:
Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, publishes The Cat in the Hat to immediate critical acclaim.
September 24th:
President Eisenhower sends federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the racial integration of Black students into schools.
September 26th:
West Side Story, a musical by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim, opens on Broadway and runs for 732 performances.
October 4th:
The USSR launches their satellite Sputnik, kicking off the space age and the Cold War space race.
1959
January 3rd:
Alaska becomes the 49th state, followed by Hawaii as the 50th on Aug. 21st.
February 3rd:
Buddy Holly, a major artist in the formation of rock n' roll, decides to charter a plane to escape the tour bus, bringing along two up-and-coming musical talents: Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, to travel to the next stop. The plane crashes, killing all three men and the pilot, becoming known as "the day the music died."
March 11th:
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry becomes the first play produced on Broadway written by a Black woman playwright.
September 15th:
Invited by Eisenhower, Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev and his wife arrive in the U.S. for a 12-day tour. Although both Krushchev and Eisenhower hope that the trip will ease Cold War tensions between the two countries, the Cold War would continue for another three decades.
1956
February 22nd:
With the single "Heartbreak Hotel," Elvis Presley makes it on the charts for the first time, jumping right to the top.
March 12th:
Ninety-six U.S. Congressmen sign the "Southern Manifesto," a petition in protest of the Supreme Court's decision to desegregate schools.
April 19th:
Film actress Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco, leaving her successful Hollywood career to become Princess Grace.
December 20th:
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in 1955 after Rosa Parks's arrest and became a major protest of the Civil Rights movement, comes to an end when the Supreme Court rules segregated buses to be unconstitutional.
1958
January 13th:
9,000 scientists from 43 different countries band together to petition the United Nations to institute a nuclear testing ban.
March 24th:
At the peak of his music career, after two prior deferments, 23-year-old Elvis Presley is drafted into the army and reports for duty.
July 29th:
President Eisenhower signs the act that establishes NASA in response to the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, continuing the Cold War space race.
August 18th:
Investigations begin into multiple televised game shows based on accusations of rigging the competitions to benefit ratings and sponsors.
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