A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  The other unintended and ironic consequence of the war had to do with production for the military. In early 1942, Japan cut off supplies to the U.S. of coarse fibers from Asia, which were vital in the making of several war materials. In response to this, the federal government encouraged American farmers to grow hemp, also known as marijuana, which could be used as a coarse fiber in defense production. Marijuana had been effectively outlawed in 1937, but during the war all American farmers were required to attend showings of the USDA film Hemp for Victory, sign that they had seen the film, and read a hemp cultivation booklet. Hemp harvesting machinery was made available at low or no cost. Farmers who agreed to grow hemp were waived from serving in the military, along with their sons. During the war, 350,000 acres of marijuana were cultivated for the war effort, and the seeds for the pot culture of postwar America were literally planted.

  If World War II was a war for freedom, these are the reasons why.

  Part Four

  WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  13

  HOW JUVENILE DELINQUENTS WON THE COLD WAR

  After World War II, Soviet soldiers brought the virus home from the western front. It soon infected large portions of the Soviet population, then spread to other Eastern Bloc countries. Within a few years, the Communist Party leadership feared it would destroy the socialist fatherland from within. But it was not a biological disease that threatened Communism. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and his commissars called it an “amoral infection” in the minds of Soviet youth. It was “American primitivism,” “capitalist cultural imperialism,” and “bourgeois cosmopolitanism.” But it was really American renegade culture.

  In 1946, soon after Stalin’s chief aide Andrei Zhdanov warned that jazz would “poison the consciousness of the masses,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party ordered all state orchestras to stop playing the music. Also banned were saxophones, wah-wah trumpet mutes, the plucking of bass strings, the deliberate lowering of tones to create “blue notes,” and the playing of drums with too much rhythm. Brigades of music patrols monitored theaters and dance halls to ensure that nothing jazzy was being played. Couples caught dancing anything other than the waltz, the polka, or Russian folk dances were subject to arrest. Members of jazz bands were rounded up and sent to Siberian prisons or exiled to remote cities, where they were supposed to undergo “rehabilitation.”

  Soviet authorities were right to fear jazz, but they could not stop it. Bootleg recordings were sold by the millions on the black market. Stiliagi, or “style hunters,” appeared on the streets of all the major cities in the Soviet bloc, wearing zoot suits and ducktails if they were male or tight dresses—“stretched tightly over their figures to the point of indecency,” according to one state-run Soviet newspaper—and bouffant hairdos if they were female. They refused to work and loved to drink, “hang out,” read American comic books, and listen to African American music. With little access to American-made products, the stiliagi were forced to re-create them on their own. To make flashy, multicolored ties, they literally painted over their drab, state-issued ties, or affixed to them American cigarette packages. Because there were no hairstylists behind the Iron Curtain who could or would give them the look of their American idols, the style hunters used heated metal rods on one another’s hair. So, many sported not only fashionable ducktails but also burns on their necks. Instead of American chewing gum, many chewed paraffin wax. They smuggled as many of the real sounds of renegade America as they could but were forced to copy them in an ingenious way. A jazz-loving Soviet medical student discovered that he could inscribe sound grooves on the surface of X-ray plates, and invented a machine that allowed him to produce low-quality but sufficient copies of music recordings. From there, the stiliagi used the technique to take over the black market in American music. Swing and boogie-woogie were early favorites, then bebop and rhythm and blues.

  Every nation of the Eastern Bloc had its own stiliagi. In Poland, they were the bikiniarze. In Hungary, they were the jampec. And in Czechoslovakia, pásek overran the streets. When the police in these countries didn’t arrest the renegades, they gave them impromptu street haircuts or slashed their clothes.

  In East Germany, which had been granted to the USSR by the U.S. and Great Britain as part of the Soviets’ sphere of influence at the close of the war, so-called Hot Clubs for jazz sprang up in several cities in 1945 and 1946. According to the historian Uta Poiger, these clubs were “notorious for jam sessions where musicians improvised and played long solos, while the audience danced and clapped.” The popularity of jazz—especially the styles conducive to dancing—were seen by East German authorities as nothing less than the leading edge of American imperialism. The East German newspaper Neues Deutschland charged the United States with dumping “a mudslide of boogie-woogie” on Communist youth. And in 1950 one East German culture official, Kurt Hager, saw the ultimate symbol of American conquest in the bouffant, “rockabilly” hairstyle of East German youth who emulated Hollywood movie stars: “The hair is styled in such a manner that it rises from the base of the neck like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.” That same year, another East German official declared that by resisting jazz, his countrymen were defending their “national cultural tradition” against both “American imperialist ideologies” and “barbarization by the boogie-woogie ‘culture.’” Also in 1950 East German authorities disbanded informal jazz bands, barred jazz from East German radio, and confiscated jazz records at border crossings. As an alternative, East German youth agencies offered lessons for dancing “in a civilized fashion,” which meant no “excessive movements” of the hips, arms, or legs.

  In the 1950s, Halbstarke—young, aggressive males influenced by American popular culture—were accused of subverting the discipline of the Communist state. During the trial of Werner Gladow and his gang, which had conducted a spree of armed robberies across East Germany, Communist authorities blamed American cultural influences for creating the criminals. One East German newspaper argued that Gladow was shaped by “the sluttish kitchen of American gangster movies, of crime stories, of murder and [other] sensational trials, to whose influence he succumbed.”

  Communist authorities accused Tangojünglinge (Tango-boys) and other young males wearing American-style clothing of waging “provocations” that led to a massive popular uprising against the Communist regime in June 1953. For two days, thousands of people—mostly young—demonstrated across the German Democratic Republic. Demands of the protesters included shorter work hours, free elections, and in some cases the removal of the Communist government. Demonstrators in East Berlin tore down the Soviet flag from the Brandenburg Gate, while in other cities prison inmates were freed and members of the secret police were beaten on the streets. The uprising was crushed on June 17 when Soviet tanks rolled into the center of East Berlin and East German troops opened fire on stone-throwing demonstrators. The major East German newspapers immediately laid the blame for the demonstrations primarily on American cultural influences. “Saviors of the culture of the Christian West” in striped socks and half-long pants (part of the early rockabilly style), as the Junge Welt put it, had filled the East Berlin streets. The Neues Deutschland featured a photograph of one of the rioters wearing a T-shirt with a cowboy printed on it, “a Texas tie with a picture of nude women,” a bouffant hairstyle, and “a criminal’s face,” and identified him as one of “the typical representatives of the American way of life.” The East German prime minister, Otto Grotewohl, concurred with this assessment, alleging that “the Western provocateurs with the colorful plaid striped socks, with cowboy pants [jeans], and Texas shirts wanted to cause a large-scale political provocation.” Grotewohl’s speech, according to Uta Poiger, “was part of an outright campaign in the East German press that put West German or West German-influenced youths who sported Americanized fashions at the center of the June events.” Nonetheless, in response to the riots, East German authorities adopted economic polices that steered more resources toward con
sumer goods and entertainment.

  By 1954, when it was apparent that more East German youths than ever were sporting American styles, listening to jazz, and dancing the “boogie woogie,” leaders of the GDR were forced to soften their positions against American popular culture. The major Communist Party youth newspaper began to publish photos of jazz bands, though usually those associated with the “cool” rather than “hot” styles of the music.

  Unfortunately for the Communist leadership, the emergence of jazz fans behind the Iron Curtain was only the beginning of a process that ended in 1991. The historian Julia Hessler has written that, “in a real sense, the stiliagi heralded the advent of an individualistic, self-expressive approach to consumption characteristic of the consumer societies of the postwar West.” Not only did this “vulgar” and “decadent” culture continue to spread, but as the 1950s ended, it mutated into something even worse: rock-and-roll.

  ROCK THE BLOC

  In East Germany, when authorities eased restrictions on jazz, demands for even more renegade “Ami-Kultur” increased. In 1954, when rock music first made its way across the Iron Curtain, Halbstarke appeared on streets in virtually every East German town and city, and demonstrations calling for greater cultural freedom and access to consumer goods often resulted in riots. West Berlin theaters showing Hollywood movies and playing jazz and rock lined the border with East Berlin. Alarmed by what appeared to be a great number of East Germans crossing the border daily (this was before the building of the Berlin Wall), officers of the GDR conducted a study in 1956 and 1957 and found that each day, on average, some twenty-six thousand East Berlin youths attended movies and dances at the West Berlin “border theaters.” In some theaters, East Berlin teenagers made up 90 percent to 100 percent of the customers. At government-sponsored public forums designed to address the demands of East German citizens, many youth asked why Hollywood movies—especially music films with “hits”—were not allowed, why East German fashions were below Western standards, and why jeans and other tight pants were not available in the GDR. In 1956 riots broke out in front of several East German movie theaters that showed only patriotic or educational films.

  In 1957 East German authorities responded to the youth rebellion with justified despair for the future of Communism. Alfred Kurella, head of the new Commission for Culture in the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (the ruling, Soviet-controlled party in the GDR), warned of the “danger of growing decadent influences” that were spurring the “animalistic element” in East German youth. Kurella announced that it was time for good Communists to “save the cultural and social life of the … nation from this destruction” and to preserve “the true national culture.” The party’s Culture Conference in October 1957 declared that in recent years “damaging influences of the Western capitalist nonculture” had “penetrated” the GDR. By the following year, rock-and-roll had replaced jazz as the most dangerous of Western cultural products. In a 1958 announcement on rock, General Secretary Walter Ulbricht condemned “its noise” as an “expression of impetuosity” that characterized the “anarchism of capitalist society.” Defense Minister Willi Stoph distributed a warning, published in East German newspapers, that “rock ’n’ roll was a means of seduction to make the youth ripe for atomic war.” Stoph singled out Bill Haley and the Comets, who had toured West Germany in 1958. “It was Haley’s mission,” Stoph said, “to engender fanatical, hysterical enthusiasm among German youth and lead them into a mass grave with rock & roll.” State-run newspapers broadcast these warnings. Neues Deutschland called Elvis Presley a “Cold War Weapon,” and Junge Welt counseled its young readers, “Those persons plotting an atomic war are making a fuss about Presley because they know youths dumb enough to become Presley fans are dumb enough to fight in the war.”

  Hoping to steer rock fans toward “better” music, officers of the Socialist Unity Party heavily promoted Alo Koll, a Leipzig bandleader who played thoroughly safe music, and commissioned three dance teachers to invent a refined, respectable, civilized, “socialist” dance step, which became known as the “Lipsi.”

  East German youth weren’t interested. In 1959 groups of adolescents staged pro-rock, anti-Socialist Unity Party demonstrations in Leipzig and Dresden. They marched through the streets shouting, “We want no Lipsi and want no Alo Koll, instead we want Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll.” In Leipzig, one member of the “Elvis Presley Hound Dogs” shouted “Long live Walter Ulbricht and the Eastern Zone [East Germany],” to which the rest of the marchers answered “Pfui, Pfui, Pfui” [the German equivalent of booing] and chanted “Long live Elvis Presley!” That year internal reports on juvenile delinquency listed groups of “Presley admirers” in at least thirteen East German municipalities. Arrests of the pro-rock demonstrators and leaders of the Presley gangs, as well as the formation of a special police force to monitor state-run youth functions so that no improper dancing took place and to “extinguish the remainders of the capitalist way of life among adolescents” did not stop the rebellion. A 1959 report to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party showed that rock-and-roll protests, illegal trips to West Germany, acts of “outrageous instigation” against the GDR leadership, and youth crime had all increased rapidly. The report concluded that most of the youth in these incidents were “rock ’n’ roll admirers.” The following year, the Department for Youth Affairs of the Central Committee reported that despite an overall drop in crime, juvenile delinquency was 61.4 percent higher in 1959 than in 1950. The reason for this, the department asserted, was that Americans and West Germans “had increased their efforts to bring the youth of the GDR under their influence.” Among their “means of seduction” were music, comic books, and fashion.

  And so when East German authorities built the Berlin Wall in 1961, they did so not only to keep East Germans in but also to keep American cultural products out. They called it the “antifascist protection dam.”

  Despite the corrosive effects of American popular culture on Communist regimes, U.S. authorities refused for many years to promote it in the Eastern Bloc. From 1946 to 1955, American cultural centers (Amerikahäuser) set up in West German cities to spread U.S. influence provided libraries with open stacks, lectures, classical music concerts, and showings of educational films but did not show Hollywood movies or sponsor concerts of jazz or rock-and-roll. In fact, as Uta Poiger has pointed out, Eastern Bloc authorities learned to attack jazz, rock-and-roll, and Hollywood from others. Of course, the Nazis had condemned jazz as “decadent” and “degenerate,” but they too learned those terms from others. “The vocabulary of ‘decadence’ and ‘degeneration’ was not the invention of Soviet or East German authorities,” Poiger writes. “Rather … European and American writers from across the political spectrum had leveled such attacks against various forms of art as well as mass culture since the nineteenth century.”

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  As we have seen, until well into the twentieth century, jazz was attacked in the United States more often than it was praised. But no music has been the object of more apocalyptic fears than rock-and-roll in 1950s America. Liberal and conservative political leaders frequently found common cause in attacking the music. Committees in both houses of Congress conducted hearings through the second half of the 1950s on the power of disk jockeys to impose rock on the masses. As one witness before Representative Emmanuel Celler’s House Judiciary Anti-Trust Subcommittee put it in 1956, deejays and record companies were “responsible for rock-and-roll and the other musical monstrosities which are muddying up the airwaves… . It’s the current climate on radio and television which makes Elvis Presley and his animal posturings possible … it’s a set of untalented twitchers and twisters whose appeal is largely to the zoot-suiter and the juvenile delinquent.”

  In an effort to stop “the airwaves of this country” from being “flooded with inferior music,” in 1957 and 1958 senators John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater vigorously supported a bill that wou
ld have radically curtailed the ability of radio stations to “artificially stimulate” demand for rock—or as one witness in hearings for the bill put it, the “forced feeding of rock ’n’ roll music to the public.” One witness in hearings on the bill, a professor of music at Brown University, told the sympathetic senators that “we owe it to our children and our families to limit the consumption of cheap and questionable music on the air and at least provide light music of the best grade at our disposal.” Several members of a House subcommittee investigating rock-and-roll in 1959 declared their intentions to save the public from the “horrible things” being played on the radio. The chairman of the subcommittee, Oren Harris of Arkansas, asserted that “when this type of music, if you call it music, that is anything but wholesome is forced onto them at that age, I think it is the worst possible service that the medium could be used for.”

  Several cities banned rock performances, including Washington, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Hartford, Atlanta, Houston, Jersey City, Newark, Cleveland, Santa Cruz, San Antonio, Burbank, New Haven, and New Britain. In Tennessee, a judge ordered a local radio station to replace its new rock format with its older playlist of classical music. Police in San Diego and Florida forced Elvis Presley to sing without moving while on stage. In 1958 a scheduled State Department–sponsored tour of American disk jockeys through Europe was canceled when U.S. Senator Norris Cotton complained that it would damage the international reputation of the United States. The president of the National Council of Disk Jockeys for Public Service, Murray Kaufman, guaranteed that no rock would be played by his organization’s members in Europe and that all “hops” would be on U.S. Army bases under the supervision of the United Service Organizations. As the historians Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave have noted, the U.S. government rarely made an issue of Soviet and East German censorship of rock music “because the U.S. government did not like it either.”