American Experience; 2602; 1964; Interview with Susan J. Douglas, Historian, part 1 of 2

Susan Douglas, file one. So, where were you in 1964? In 1964, I was dividing my time between being a cheerleader, rolling my hair up in rollers the size of foster logger cans and being a huge fan of beetles. What was it like in the first time you heard them? I don't remember the first time I heard them. I heard them sometime in January of February of 1964 when they were exploding all over the charts in the U.S. but I remember vividly watching them in February on the Ed Sullivan show. I'm jumping all over, so I want to come back to them because your description of your hair color is so great. What's America like in 1964? What's it look like?

What's it feel like? It's almost a 1950s America when you really think about it, thinking about the world that's about to be churned up in jail. So I think the very early months of 1964 were tough because it was still the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and when Kennedy was killed, it wasn't just that a man was killed. It was almost like a whole vision of a youthful, forward-looking, progressive America was shattered and that's one of the reasons that the beetles were so important because the beetles did reinvigorate a notion that a youthful, forward-looking, irreverent, confident way of being in the world could happen again. So by the time 64 evolves, I mean, what a complicated year. And on the one hand, there's this pre-feminist ferment Betty Friedan's book is the number

one best-selling paperback in the country. So you're starting to get this notion that maybe women aren't as happy as everybody had told them they were. This gets tapped into by Bewitch in the fall of 1964. Here is a totally kitschy show in which women, a woman, has magical powers that her husband could go, I don't want to jump you far ahead too fast, I want to kind of go in each little chunks. Sure. What did your mom look like? What kind of house did you live in? What kind of neighborhood would you in? What did America feel like as a 14-year-old girl in 1964? All right, so in 1964, on the one hand, I think there were still kind of vestiges of the 50s, but they were really getting shattered.

The previous year, we had seen a lot on television about the Civil Rights Movement, which was already disrupting this lie we told ourselves about being an equal society. So that was beginning to shift. Other roles were beginning to shift my mother worked outside the home, increasing numbers of my friends' mothers were working outside the home, even if it was part time. So there were beginning to be changes around race, around gender, and I think for girls, they were beginning to sense that their possibilities might be a bit different than the ones for their mothers. We had been told in the 50s and early 60s, you're going to be just like your mothers, make macaroni and cheese, stay home and change diapers. Kennedy's presidency began to change that. And in 1964, with the success of the feminine mystique and increasing numbers of women going to college and joining Peace Corps, young women started to have a different sense of what

was possible for them. So I think the other thing, I'll say that. I think the other thing about 1964 is Kennedy had inaugurated a kind of sense of modernity and progress with the space program and all of the rest. And with the various products that were coming out, whether it was the Ford Mustang or other kinds of products, flip top cans, there was a sense that the country, despite the Kennedy assassination, was moving forward to some kind of new, modern, progressive, better place. Did your, what would your dad do when they were at that conventional time, he looked like that? Oh, God. So my dad, well, I don't know how relevant you find this, but my dad was a, a, a, life from the army. He was a cartoonist when he was a young man, he worked for Max Fleischer, he did cartoons for Popeye and he worked on Gulliver's Travels and he had cartoons

in New Yorker. And when World War II broke out, he, of course, you know, enlisted just like everybody. And he loved the army and he stayed in. And in 1964, coincidentally, my dad retired because they wanted to send him to Laos as start of the build up to Vietnam and he wouldn't go. So he retired. Is it a black and white America, not a mean in terms of race, but in terms of our perception of the kind of culture that it was? Actually, just do this video here on the left side. When you reached out, you just put a couple of hair there. Okay. I didn't even know I reached up, sorry. You know what I mean? The CCCs is being color and hippies and stuff. That's really, if anything, very late 60s or early 70s.

The 60s that we're talking about is, you know, if you look at pictures of your book photos from 1964, you guessed that they were 1950s in a way. And some of the boys are still wearing the kind of the dorky point extra glasses, the girls are still in there, little things. So I'm just trying to set up that there's this consensus, there's this sort of basic American culture that's going to start to now get undermined and changed and challenged by the events that are coming. Whoa. That's it people. Do you buy that? Is that a valid argument? Because I'm curious, just what it might have looked like or thought like. Well, you know, I think a lot of the way that we remember history is through old television clips and through old film clips and television was still primarily black and white. And you could see it as a black and white world.

You could see it as a very simple world where you had shows like the monsters and the Adams family and my favorite Martian. You know, these kitschy, innocent, politically naive, innocent programs. There is a way that if you just look through the media with a few exceptions on the one hand, it could look like a pretty simple consensus constructed world. And there's other shows like Dance Smoke and some of those even more traditional ones, right? They're still on. Yeah. You know, you have these traditional patriarchal westerns, you know, bananzas, still the number one show in the country with the patriarchal family and everything's copacetic except for the bad villains out there in the countryside. But you know, underneath lurking within and among so much of popular culture is rebellion is everywhere and change is everywhere. It's often expressed in a very metaphorical way, but it's there and it's really interesting to go back and look at it and find it there.

Got it, one little tiny hair that was sticking out. So let's talk about that, that's perfect, let's talk about these moments of rebellion. Why did the Beatles have such an impact on America? Okay. First of all, tell me what it was like on your couch when the adsellent show came on. Okay, I am in our, you know, TV room hugging a naga hide ottoman to help anchor me for when I am going to see these guys on television because we were all so excited. I actually had my father's real to real tape recorder out so I could tape them as if the sound quality would be any good. And I was there with one of my best friends and it was thrilling to see them. Oh, I mean, you just felt such joy watching them because they were such joyful performers. They were like cheerleaders up there.

They were not like these phony, Tommy Sands, Bobby Vintin, like fake manufactured idols. They were not like Elvis, you know, who had to be shot only from the way stop for obvious reasons. They did not have this kind of aggressive in your face masculinity and sexuality that Elvis did, but they were very sexy and it was there. And I think the other reason that young women in particular loved them was the Androgyny. They were finessing gender roles. There they were, but they're long hair and Paul's eyelashes and their heels and their red wardy and suits and they sang about us. They liked girls and they also felt the same pain that girls did. And it was just joyful to watch these young men who absolutely adored performing help you realize that there was masculinity and femininity in all of us.

I think that's one of the big reasons we all screamed our heads off. I was trying not to scream too loud, but we were literally beside ourselves. We were beside ourselves. And a year later, there were all of these, you know, beetle mania, I mean beetle mania was everywhere. So the beetles, I think one of the really interesting things about beetle mania is on the one hand, there was of course, it spawned everything, magazines, you know beetles, you know, the equivalent of baseball cards, you know, wigs, everything. And on the other hand, there was a whole beetle mania industry of pop psychologists and, you know, sociologists trying to figure out why had the young women of America all collectively lost their minds. And there was an enormous amount of anxiety actually about beetle mania. But did it mean that young women were willing to violate police barricades, ignore police

authority completely so they could try to touch Ringo's hair, you know, what did that mean? And I think without being able to articulate it, what adults were seeing, sexual energy, just being unleashed by thousands of thousands of girls, you know, this was the first really big social movement of the post-war period that was a pop movement that was about girls and was enacted by girls and it was a kind of a collective jailbreak. Yeah. And there was a license being given by the beetles, you know, because, I mean, when you, when we think about why were the beetles, why were the beetles, why were the beetles so, oh, okay, I'll start to go. All right, why was beetle mania such a phenomenon? First of all, you have to remember that they, their first hits come out about six weeks after Kennedy is killed and they arrive in the States about 11 weeks after the assassination.

So here was a president who was confident, who was cocky, who was witty, who had a sense of humor, who was youthful, who had fun going back and forth with the press gone, dead, and replaced by an older, not very attractive politician, who however great he was in the Senate and behind the scenes in front of the camera did not embody any of that youthful, forward-looking energy that Kennedy did. Here come these four guys, irreverent, cocky, confident, love to have fun with the press, self-deprecating, youthful, full of energy. They reignited that whole zeitgeist that Kennedy had embodied. And I think that when the beetles came here, they not only tapped into, but they reactivated a zeitgeist that the Kennedy administration had embodied.

And I think people don't make the connection enough between the utter blow of the Kennedy assassination and the way in which the beetles, even though they weren't politicians, they were entertainers, absolutely recaptured and reignited that. It's a great way to think about it, I hadn't made that connection, but I think it's totally that. And I don't think it's Jackie, so I don't expect that. Yes, she was. I mean, there had been cultural music phenomenons before, you mentioned Elvis, you mentioned, I mentioned it before, he knew Sinatra, how the beetles different, almost quantitatively, almost, they are a different level of scale, I think, to what we've encountered before.

The beetles are different because they write their own music. They write their own music and their own lyrics, so there's a sense of authenticity about these guys that you do not get with Frankie Avalon or Bobby Vinton. That was very important that they wrote their own songs. They drew very heavily from the blues and R&B tradition in the U.S., which they loved, and they were incredibly charismatic on stage, and they were good. You know, all these people writing about Butylmania, some of the initial reviews were like, these guys are terrible, what's the matter, the music is repetitive, why are these girls going crazy? The beetles were great, so they wrote their own stuff, and it was very good. It was danceable, it had major and minor chords in it, it talked a lot about different kinds of relationships between boys and girls. They were a different order than these manufactured boy idols that had been created to replace

Elvis. The other thing is how they looked. Nobody has seen haircuts like that, and here they were, I mean, the thing about the beetles is that they were completely conventional and completely rebellious at the same time. So they were handsome, their suits were very dapper, they were beautifully impeccably groomed, but they had long hair, and they were irreverent, and they sassed back to reporters. They walked a very fine line in a quite cagey way that tapped into that fine line where young people were, where they were still obeying their parents, but they were beginning to feel like they wanted to break free from that 50s and early 60s grave flannel suit, ethos. Right, right. That's the perfect way to put it, that they're right on the edge of rebellion all the time. Does the beetles kind of reach to every corner of the country in a way that's unprecedented?

I mean, I don't know what the statistical measurements would be, but Elvis is pretty popular, too. But the beetles do be everywhere with a cultural message, like everywhere. The difference is that Elvis, because he drew very, very heavily from African American music. And some people, when they heard him on the radio thought he was a black man, he injected a certain amount of danger, you know, to American music, as did the African American performers who were out there with him, because here you had black music constituting the identities of white kids, and for a lot of people that was pretty scary. The beetles, on the other hand, even though they drew from an R&B and soul tradition, these are white guys from England, you know, and so not only were they adorable and cute, but they had that kind of, you know, British accent, you know, exoticism to them as well.

Now the thing about the beetles, I believe 73 million people tuned in to that February at Sullivan Show to hear them. That's huge. And very quickly, all kinds of performers began covering their songs. So it wasn't just that kids like me were, you know, burning holes in their albums, but there were very established middle-aged and older stars who started covering their songs. So the beetles were everywhere, and then there were instrumental versions of their songs. I mean, probably, you know, Monovani and his orchestra probably didn't, you know, please please me. So the beetles reach was very, very broad as well as deep. So you were so obsessed with the beetles, what did you do? So one of the local New York radio stations was having a contest, and there were different

kinds of pictures that you could draw the beetles, there were different categories, and one was the biggest picture of the beetles. So my dad was an artist, and he had rolls and rolls of white paper. So we rolled out all this paper in our backyard and taped it all together and drew the four faces of the beetles, and I think they weren't that bad, actually. And so this thing covered our backyard, and we folded it all up and mailed it into the station, and we didn't win, because the winner was like two acres in size. So so much for seeing the beetles, but that was the sort of level of intensity that people had for the beetles, and of course every girl had her beetle. You know, every girl had, she was a John girl, or she was a Paul girl, or she was a Georgia girl. I was a John girl, yeah, I could only be a John girl, because he was the more intellectual. I think because he was the mouthiest.

What's TV telling about 64 and the changes going on in culture? So we have to remember that television is now a major fixture in people's homes that is delivering now a half an hour of news every night, as opposed to just 15 minutes of rip and read, as well as, you know, press conferences, public affairs programming, and entertainment. So it's all in there together in this television flow, centered in people's living room. So television is a very contradictory terrain at this point. And if you look at popular culture, if you look at entertainment programming, you see television in one way lagging behind what's going on in the culture. But you also see television representing what's going on in the culture in a very metaphorical fashion.

Ed Sullivan is picking up on some changes, right? He's not a ventriloquist, tell me that little story about the youth movement. So Ed Sullivan is getting it that he has to start having groups like the Beatles on because the young audience is a very important audience for marketers. You know, you have this growing, you know, goiter in the population of teenagers coming out of the baby boom who have disposable income, not much, but they buy records in Naxima. I'm not sure the word goiter will. I think of this as well. I think of another. All right. All right. Yeah, what's going on in that? All right. So Ed Sullivan does have to deal with the youth market because this is a huge bulge in the population every year, more and more baby boomers are coming of age. They are a very important market for everything from skin cream to records to clothing. And so Ed Sullivan has to include in between the ventriloquists and the jugglers increasing

numbers of youth groups and, you know, singers. And of course, eventually he brings on young African-American singers like the Supremes, which he does in December of 64. Interesting. So, how are these impulses in the culture getting picked up by these producers and why? Well, let's think about race in America in 1964. The country has just been through a very tumultuous year in 1963, in 1964. The Civil Rights Act is, you know, moving through Congress and being enacted. American public opinion about segregation and about civil rights has changed. But that doesn't mean that most white people want a black family moving in next to them. And so you have television dealing with difference in a very unusual, kitschy way, which you

start to have these kind of Google comedies. So you have the Adams family, which premieres in September of 64, and the Munsters, which premieres at the same time. Here are these families that look very different. They are very different. And when the Munsters, they think they're just like everybody else. Nobody else thinks they're like the rest of the neighbors, but they do. It's very interesting, actually. And so you have these gullish, monstrous, grotesque people moving in, bringing in difference to the neighborhood, but they're just monsters. They're just cartoon figures. You know, but it is this implicit metaphorical way to deal with white, bred neighborhoods dealing with a very different kind of family moving in with different morays and different habits and different clothing and different hair and having to deal with that.

Americans really aren't quite ready for it on a lot of levels. It's sort of like the line that the Beatles are walking, right? Americans are not quite ready for it yet, but when it's dealt with in a kitschy way, you know, it's, you know, people think this is just entertainment. And believe me, they were not six white guys sitting in LA saying, oh my God, this little rights movement is really taking a hold and, you know, segregation is about to be ended and we have to deal with race relations. So let's put a monster in a neighborhood, right? It doesn't work that way. But people in television are members of our culture and they imbibe, you know, the zeitgeist of the times as well and work through how to manage changing morays even if they're not thinking about it in a conscious way into stories that will entertain Americans and that won't offend advertisers. And that's a key thing.

It's not just that the white red America is conservative, but even more so, the people that sell to white red America are conservative. Well, let's think about the television networks. How do networks operate? They have affiliates, where are some of their affiliates there in the South? You know, there were shows in the late 50s, the Nat King Cole show that some Southern affiliates would not air. And so you have affiliates that you have to placate if you're going to have national programming and you have advertisers who want to deal with a broad mass audience, lowest common denominator, they don't want to offend anybody sensibilities either and so television is a relatively at this moment conservative, you know, force in the culture. Having said that, there are ways in which difference and rebellion does come in. And at the same time, as you mentioned, what's so ironic is that the news is beginning

to carry these almost shocking images of fire houses turned out to people in Birmingham. And in 64, the American television landscape has got to become obsessed with the disappearance of three civil rights workers in South. Yes. Why? Because they're not all black. Right. So TV, as you said, is this complicated place, this landscape right now? It is complicated because, you know, in 63, when Birmingham happens, and Americans see kids being attacked by German shepherds and hosed down with these giant fire hoses, that had a huge impact on people sensibilities. So in 1964, we are in the wake of that, and yet there's still, of course, a desire for consensus and safety and comfort.

What do you make of the way the network covered freedom summer? I don't have a good memory of how they covered it, so I can't remember that footage. The broadest strokes, though, it's just the point that we've had made to it so many times, it's just that all the attention on those three missing workers are because two of them are white, they're black, Mississippi, black people in the Mississippi being murdered every month, and they're on page 19 of the New York Times, if they get mentioned at all. Right. Right. Well, you know. You dominate the news. Right. You know, but you are beginning to have cracks in the racial topography, despite the fact that, you know, the focus was on, you know, Cheney at all, right. You have, sorry, you have Sydney Poitier winning the Oscar for lilies of the field, black

actor wins the Oscar. You're starting slowly, but surely here and there to see the token black person in an ad. You are beginning to see a little bit of difference, and you're beginning to see shows like at Sullivan have more black performers on, so slowly, but surely. And of course, on radio, you know, radio is the least segregated of all of the mass media, is what's on radio, Motown is on radio. And for young people like me, you know, we might look back and think about 1964 through the lens of television, but it would be a mistake not to think about 1964 in terms of radio. And all of us lying in our beds at night, not only listening to the Beatles, but listening to all of those Motown acts, and especially the Supremes, who became superstars in 1964.

So you were just saying about how not only it was in the Beatles, but it was in the Beatles. Okay. So when we were lying in our beds at night, listening to our transistor radios, often under the covers, we weren't only listening to the Beatles, we were listening of course to Motown. And you know, the four tops, the temptations, and of course, especially the Supremes, who became superstars in 1964. And you really had black music, constituting the identity of white kids in a very important way. Yeah. Great. Let's talk about more TV for a minute. Okay. Okay. Okay.