https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/05/12/beyond-1968-or-2-12-cheers-for-the-1950s/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 10 Jun 2026 07:24:21 -0400<![CDATA[In an essay in yesterday&#8217;s New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio offered a useful corrective to the obsession with 1968 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that fateful year. It really was fateful, but Donadio is right to point out that much that we associate with &#8220;the Sixties&#8221; really had its origin in the 1950s. She focuses on 1958&#8211;an important year, no doubt, though one could make a case for other years as well (1956, for example, saw the publication of Allen Ginsberg&#8217;s preposterous, though immensely influential, poem Howl). &#8220;Fifty years ago,&#8221; she writes, &#8220;Eisenhower was in the White House, the country was in a recession and the American intellectual scene was crackling with energy.&#8221; Quite right, though not often acknowledged by those partisans of the Sixties whose paeans to the Purple Decade always seem to begin by running down the 1950s as a culturally and intellectually era distinguished chiefly by sexual repression, Joseph McCarthy, and an unhealthy obsession with Communism. The list Donadio offers is not, to my mind, entirely edifying, but it certainly shows that the 1950s were alive and kicking. Nineteen Fifty-eight, she notes,]]>Mon, 12 May 2008 07:30:20 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2008/05/12/beyond-1968-or-2-12-cheers-for-the-1950s-n114815