| Media Studies |
| United States |
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| State & Local |
| History |
| Social Science |
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Resumen
Seen as a land of sunshine and opportunity, the Golden State was a mecca for the post-World War II generation, and dreams of the California good life came to dominate the imagination of many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowhere was this more evident than in the explosion of California youth images in popular culture. Disneyland, television shows such as The Mickey Mouse Club , Gidget and other beach movies, the music of the Beach Boys--all these broadcast nationwide a lifestyle of carefree, wholesome fun supposedly enjoyed by white, middle-class, suburban young people in California.
Tracing the rise of the California teen as a national icon, Kirse May shows how idealized images of a suburban youth culture soothed the nation's postwar nerves while denying racial and urban realities. Unsettling challenges to this mass-mediated picture began to arise in the mid-1960s, however, with the Free Speech Movement's campus revolt in Berkeley and race riots in Watts. In his 1966 campaign for the governorship of California, Ronald Reagan transformed the backlash against the "dangerous" youths who fueled these actions into political triumph. As May notes, Reagan's victory presaged a rising conservatism across the nation.
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May, a freelance historian who lives in Boston, has turned her dissertation into a first-rate examination of the popular cultural images of California young people from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. In many ways, this is "old-fashioned" image history, in which the author mercifully eschews fashionable theoretical models and postmodernist jargon. She uses sources traditionally favored by historians of popular culture: popular magazines, pop music, motion pictures, television shows, advertisements, and promotional literature. Simply stated, May argues that from 1955 to 1964, most Americans saw young people from California (as represented by popular media) as a kind of middle-class ideal--wholesome, healthy, attractive, essentially good kids whose main sin was spending a bit too much time on the beach. This image altered significantly in 1964-66 with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Watts Riot. Nonetheless, this image of "nice California young people" continues to resonate. The use of Disneyland as an early and continuing symbol of this image is especially effective, as is the caveat that African Americans, immigrants, and the poor seldom appear as part of this happy, contented image. An important and finely crafted study that is fun to read. Highly recommended to all libraries. A. O. Edmonds Ball State University
