Happy Birthday Jamaica! The end of colonialism

"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." And, for the next 450+ years, Western Europeans accumulated, at one time or another, dominion over the vast majority of land and peoples of the earth. Today is the 50th anniversary of the end of British colonial rule in Jamaica. As such, it is a fitting occasion for a brief discussion of one of the major international themes of the 1960s – the end of political colonialism.

By the 19th Century, the focus of colonial expansion had shifted from the Americas to Africa and Asia.  The British consolidated their hold on the Indian subcontinent, while dividing up Polynesia, Micronesia, the Middle East, Africa and parts of the Far East, mainly with France.  By the beginning of World War I, colonies belonging to England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy could be found throughout the world.  In 1922, Great Britain, with its roughly 43 million citizens, controlled almost a quarter of the land area of the Earth, with a total population of more that 450 million people – 20% of the world’s inhabitants. 

India Independence Day celebration- August 15, 1947

The Versailles Treaty that ended World War I, with its Wilsonian emphasis on political self-determination, was probably the real beginning of the end, philosophically, for 19th Century colonialism.  World War II certainly marked the start of its decline in fact.  The late 1940s saw the British depart from India (“the jewel in the crown”) in 1947, and from Palestine in 1948.  The pace picked up rapidly, sometimes spurred by revolutionary/terrorist movements (such as Palestine and French Algeria), but more often by peaceful withdrawal motivated by financial exhaustion, political agitation at home, and the growing international stigma associated with the system. 

 With apologies to Jamaica, let's use Africa as a convenient historical example.  Of the roughly 50 African colonies formerly controlled by European powers, almost 2/3s of them achieved their independence in the 1960s (more than half of those in 1960 alone).  The four African colonies that were liberated in 1962 were:

Rwanda, former Belgian colony, on July 1, 1962
Burundi, former Belgian colony, on July 1, 1962
Algeria, former French colony, on July 1, 1962
Uganda, former British colony, on October 9, 1962

While many of these new nations achieved stability, the avalanche of independence that swept along the others left many without the political background and infrastructure necessary for effective self-governance.   Adding to that unpreparedness was the economic chaos frequently caused by the abrupt separation from their former colonial systems.  Also, in many cases, the new nations merely mirrored the administrative units established by the controlling power and did not actually reflect the ethic divisions upon which true nationality-based sovereignty could grow.  The resulting politically and economic instability contributed to and, as we will see later in the decade, became part of another of the major themes of the 1960s, the Cold War.

Goodbye, Norma Jeane

Fifty years ago today, on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the ultimate sex symbol of all times, was found dead in her home from an overdose of barbiturates.  She was only 36.  

The circumstances of her death are one of the recurring fields for conspiracy theory.  An FBI file, which was disclosed in 2006, contained a report which speculated that then Attorney General Robert Kennedy had been having an affair with Monroe and that he promised to leave his wife and marry her.  According to the report, when Monroe decided that Kennedy had no intention of doing so, she threatened to make the affair public.  Since she had a history of publicity-seeking suicide attempts, she was allegedly urged to do so again, but this time she was allowed to die.  Not only Robert Kennedy, but actor Peter Lawford, Monroe’s psychiatrist, and others were also named as conspirators.  The report notes that the source of the story was unknown and the accuracy could not be authenticated.  This is only one of the many theories that add a provocative twist to this sad chapter.

As we’ve observed before in this blog, Monroe’s story really belongs mostly to the 1950s.  By 1962, she had developed the reputation as difficult to work with and unreliable, and only two of her movies were released after 1959.  Her importance to the story of the 1960s, aside from the historical significance of her death, was as a transitional symbol.  From the conservative, “Ozzie and Harriet” 1950s to the sexual revolution, “Love the One You’re With” of the end of the 1960s, Marilyn Monroe’s none-too-subtle sexuality clearly represents an important intermediate step. 

Bon appétit!

Julia Child was possibly the world’s most recognized chef.  She is unquestionably the most satirized, with her flair, her pearls, her distinctive voice, and her iconic “bon appétit!.  She is one of the minor but important personalities of 1960s culture.

Julia’s rise to fame started with the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, a book she wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle and which was intended to make French cuisine accessible to the everyday cook.  Her television career actually began on July 26, 1962, with an appearance on a book review show on Boston’s fledgling public television station, WGBH.  During that broadcast, she demonstrated how to cook an omelette.  The segment was so well received that it led to her own show, “The French Chef”, which premiered on February 11, 1963.  The show ran for ten years, and was followed by a number of other series and specials over almost forty years.  It is probably no exaggeration that Julia Child is the mother of modern cooking television.

 

One of the many interesting tidbits about this extraordinary lady was her service in World War II.  After being rejected by the army and navy because she was too tall (6’ 2”), she joined the Office of Strategic Services – the predecessor of the modern CIA.  Her mostly clerical service with the OSS included working directly with its legendary chief, Gen. Bill Donovan and, later, "registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications" for the OSS's clandestine stations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean.

If you like to cook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a joy to use with its step-by-step instructions.  Be warned, however, that its liberal use of butter certainly doesn’t meet modern standards for healthy eating.  Also, Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Julia in Julie and Julia is a lot of fun if you’re looking for an entertaining way to learn more about this remarkable character.  Finally, if you’re in Washington and want to get a sense for Julia, or just pay homage, her kitchen has been preserved in the Smithsonian American History Museum.

Starting a rock and roll avalanche

You get off the London Underground at the Oxford Circus station in the middle of London.  It’s past dinner time but still light.  You wander east on the right side of Oxford Street, heading to your hotel in the general direction of the British Museum. It's a warm summer evening - a Thursday.  Three blocks from the tube, you hear the blues song “Baby What’s Wrong" through the open door of a club just in front of you.  It's been a long day of sightseeing, and you need a break and a pint, so you make one of those fateful decisions people make every day without realizing it.  You follow the music inside.

The club's called The Marquee, and it's smokey and not very large or glamorous.  You sit down at the worn English pub table and order.  The cute cockney waitress casually mentions that the band’s on its third number, which shifts your attention to the show. Crammed on the relatively small stage are six young men - one energetic singer, three guitarists, one drummer and one on piano.   They're slightly scruffy but really good, as they run through another fifteen songs that include Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley's, and other recent rock and roll hits, although there's a Muddy Waters-bluesy feel that sometimes sneaks through. An hour later, after your second pint, it looks like the band’s set is about to wrap up.  Even though the music is REALLY good, you're tired and head out for your hotel.

Jones

Richards and Jagger

The date is July 12, 1962 and, while you didn’t realize it, you were a witness to one of the great moments in musical history – the first live performance of the Rolling Stones.  That night they were billed as "The Rollin' Stones".  On stage were Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones (guitar), Ian  Stewart (piano), and Dick Taylor (bass) and Tony Chapman (drums). Jones and Stewart wanted to play Chicago blues, but were agreeable to the Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs of Jagger and Richards.  Fifty years later, Jagger and Richards are still playing together, even though they haven't always been on speaking terms.

Stewart

Chapman

Taylor

The history of the 1960s is necessarily full of both events that were obviously significant at the time, and events, like the Stones' gig at The Marquee, that were insignificant at the time and only become historic because of what happened afterward.  Still, wouldn't you like to have been our imaginary tourist on Oxford Circus?

I couldn’t see the Olympics live?

Telstar I

No, there were no live overseas broadcasts before the 1960s.  Today we take for granted the pioneering technology that was one of the hallmarks of this remarkable decade. 

On July 11, 1962, Telstar 1, the world’s first private communications satellite, relayed the first television pictures through space — a non-public transmission of a flag outside the satellite earth station in Andover, Maine.  It had been launched the day before.  On July 23, 1962, it relayed the first publicly available live transatlantic television signal – a  broadcast featuring CBS's Walter Cronkite and NBC's Chet Huntley in New York, and the BBC's Richard Dimbleby in Brussels. The first pictures were the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Walter Cronkite

Thor-Delta rocket launch

 Belonging to AT&T, the original Telstar was part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National PTT (Post, Telegraph & Telecom Office) to develop experimental satellite communications over the Atlantic Ocean. Ironically, it was rendered inoperable only a few months later by high altitude nuclear weapons testing, but it remains in orbit to this day.

Campbell Soup? Really?

The first art-gallery exhibition of pop art on the West Coast opened on July 9, 1962 in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles.  It featured a one-man show by Andy Warhol, who was a leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. 

Andy Warhol

Pop art is a movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States.  It employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is generally understood to be a reaction to the ideas of abstract expressionism – the popular as opposed to elitist culture in art. It arguably reached its height of popularity in the mid 1960s.

“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

On July 5, 1962, noble laureate William Faulkner died of a heart attack at age 64.  Faulkner only became famous after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature n 1949. He won two Pulitzer Prizes – in 1954 for A Fable and again in 1962 for his last novel, The Reivers.  His significance to the history of the 1960s is primarily as a milestone in the passing of a literary generation that included Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  

Although he wrote his first novel in 1925, his income in the 1930s and ‘40s came primarily from screenwriting.  One of his most famous was the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.  Based on the Hemingway novel of the same title, It contains one of the classic movie lines of all times:

 If you like old movies and have never seen this one, it's definitely worth watching.

Hemingway and Faulkner had something of a rivalry.  Faulkner once said about Hemingway:

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway, in his turn, said of Faulkner:

“Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

"Wasteland" or "Wholesome"? TV in 1962

In honor of Andy Griffith, one of the icons of 1960s television, who died earlier this week, I thought a dive into the genre might be fitting (and fun).  So, here goes ….

By way of a quick overview, Wikipedia noted that shortly before the 1961-62 season on which we’ll focus (the television season started with premiers in the fall of each year) TV had been described by the Federal Communication Chairman as a "vast wasteland."  This season featured rearranged network schedules to accommodate the critics.

So much for the egghead stuff.  What was TV really like in the first half of 1962?  Here are some facts: 

• There were only three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), all of which were broadcast through local channels numbered between 2 and 13.   
• Little of the nation had access to higher numbered channels, which usually had terrible picture quality (even assuming the home had a TV set that could receive it).   
• Although public television had been around in some form for ten years, it was barely a blip on the radar (Sesame Street didn't begin until 1969).  
•  There was very little cable infrastructure – the vast majority of television was received through antennas, ranging from “rabbit ears” to large contraptions attached to the outside of homes.   
• TV programming started in most areas at 6 am with the "Star Spangled Banner", and ended around midnight the same way.  As strange as it may seem today, there was no television of any kind to watch between midnight and 6 am, and of course there were no home video devices to fill the gap.

Of the top ten shows, only two had episodes in color – the rest were in black and white.  The top three shows (four in the top twenty) were all hour-long western dramas.   In the rest of the top twenty, seven were half-hour comedies, three were one-hour variety shows, two were medical dramas (one-hour each).  The remaining four included a famous court-room drama (Perry Mason), a half-hour family animal drama (Lassie), Sing Along With Mitch (which is frankly hard to describe other than as a sing-along show – really, I’m not kidding), and the iconic Candid Camera.  Not a reality show in the bunch, and no story line that you wouldn’t have been comfortable discussing in church.   

Here are some additional (hopefully interesting) tidbits:

Theme music: 1962 TV featured some of the most memorable theme music of all times.  This group included:

Bonanza – The #2 program of the year (and the only one in color) was an atypical western, built around the Cartwright family on their huge ranch in Nevada.  It ran for 14 years, and among the co-stars were Michael Landon as “Little Joe,” who later starred in Little House on the Prairie.  

The Andy Griffith Show – Ranked 7^th in ‘61-‘62  Nielsen’s, this show was set in rural, small town North Carolina.  Aside from its classic whistling theme and of course Andy Griffith, it is best remembered for its child star “Ronnie” Howard, the later Academy Award winning director.

Perry Mason – In my humble opinion, this long-running courtroom drama (5th for the season), based on Earle Stanley Gardner’s numerous pot-boiler novels, has perhaps the most memorable TV theme music of all times.  

 

Westerns – As we mentioned above, the top three programs for the year were all westerns.  Ironically, the top-rated show, Wagon Train, is probably now the least memorable.  Some other trivia:

Gunsmoke cast, Burt Reynolds seated

Gunsmoke – The show’s 635 total episodes made it the longest running, prime time series of the 20th century.  It ranked third in this TV season.  One interesting tidbit is that Burt Reynolds played half-breed blacksmith Quint Asper from 1962–1965.

Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates

Rawhide – Although it only ranked 13^th  in this season, you can’t discuss TV westerns of the 1960s without mentioning Rawhide for at least two reasons.  The first is the classic rendition of the show's theme in The Blues Brothers, as the band desperately tries to find anything country enough to survive a drunken cowboy bar crowd.  The show’s other claim to fame is its main co-star for eight seasons – Clint Eastwood.

Comedies – The seven comedies that made the season’s top twenty ranged from classic to the silly to the completely forgettable.  In addition to The Andy Griffin Show, some worth noting, for good or bad, include:

Hazel – A completely inane premise based around a family’s white, middle class, uniformed housekeeper, the show actually was the 4^th highest rated program of the season. 

My Three Sons – The #11 show for the year is probably best remembered for its star, Fred McMurray, who started as a leading man in films in the 1930s and ended up making The Absent Minded Professor for Walt Disney.

The Real McCoys – This sitcom (ranked 14^th) involved a poor farming family lead by famous actor Walter Brennan.

Car 54, Where Are You? – Although it only ran three years, that was probably at least two years too long for this series.  Based on two idiotic police officers on patrol, it finished this season ranked 20^th.

Ed Sullivan

Variety Shows – Approaching the heyday of this genre, the top 20 shows of the season included The Red Skelton Show (#6), The Garry Moore Show (#12), and immortal Ed Sullivan Show (#19).  If you’re not familiar with this type of program, they featured guest acts of all kinds (including many rock and roll bands later in the decade), skits, monologs, and what could only be described as “general entertainment.”

 

Richard Chamberlain as Kildare

Medical Dramas – Two new programs in this season featured medical story lines.  Dr. Kildare (#9) and Ben Casey (#18) were really the prototypes for this type of programming. 








Honorable Mention – Let’s conclude this already-too-long discussion by mentioning two of the oddest programs of the season:

Candid Camera – This American hidden camera/practical joke reality television series (reality in the non-actor sense, not the contrived drama or competition sense of today) was produced off and on for decades.  It was truly original and groundbreaking (for good or evil).  It was the 10^th rated show in the ’61-’62 season.  The following is an episode called "The Power of Conformity."

Mitch Miller leads a song

Sing Along With Mitch - Mitch Miller was a household name in the early 1960s with his 15^th rated show Sing Along with Mitch, a community-sing program featuring him and a male chorale. As the title suggests, lyrics were shown at the bottom of the TV screen so viewers could sing along.  As corny as this sounds, remember that The Lawrence Welk Show was a prime-time Saturday night staple not yet half way through its 27 year run.

Wasteland or Wholesome?  You now have a pretty good idea of what popular television was like in the first half of 1962.  Would you describe it as “wholesome,” as many of the tributes to Andy Griffith have done, or would you chose “wasteland,” as the FCC chairman saw it in 1961?  Many of these programs can still be found in syndication.  Many of the formats – particularly sitcoms and medical dramas – have so far stood the test of time.  Certainly, some were completely inane. None were yet tackling the social issues that they would take on by the end of the decade, but there was also no reason for parents to censor their children’s viewing choices.  Wholesome or wasteland?  You decide.

Imagine America Without Walmart?

1962 turns out to have  been an important year in the modern history of shopping in the United States.  On July 2, 1962, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart Discount City store located at 719 Walnut Ave. in Rogers, Arkansas.   It is now, of course, the largest retailer in the world. Target and K-Mart were also founded in that year.  The three represented the trend toward larger, more diverse, somewhat more upscale discount shopping.  Later, they also exemplify the emerging dominance of national companies over local sellers.

At the time, the dominant retailer was Sears Roebuck and Co., which still had a thriving catalog business.  The Sears catalog was a staple of the first three-fourths of the 20^th Century, and its arrival in the mail an exciting event (especially during the Christmas season).  The other major sales leader was J.C. Penny’s, which was a classic department store.  Some of the important players of that era that no longer exist included Montgomery Wards, Rexall Drugs, TG&Y, and Woolworths/Woolco.

While there were certainly shopping malls in 1962, they were just beginning to hit their stride.  The baby boomers and urban sprawl were pushing the boundaries of all cities, and that spread created opportunities for newer and bigger malls, often leaving the original ones behind and failing.  

So, what was it like to shop in 1962?  Generally, it was not as mall-centered, the stores were more locally owned, and there were fewer retail choices.  And, if you can believe it, there was no internet.