Deliberate Speed; The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s

Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv, [1], 286, [2] pages. Some graphics used. Endnotes. Works Cited. Index. Argues that the Civil Rights movement, counter cultures, and radical artistic experimentation began in the fifties, not the sixties. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., is Emeritus Professor of English at Florida State University and Lecturer in American Studies at Smith College. W. T. Lhamon 's Deliberate Speed is a cultural history of the 1950s in the United States that directly confronts the typical view of this decade as an arid wasteland. By surveying the artistic terrain of the period—examining works by figures as varied as Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Little Richard, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—Lhamon demonstrates how many of the distinctive elements that so many attribute to the revolutionary period of the 1960s had their roots in the fertile soil of the 1950s. Taking his title from Chief Justice Earl Warren's desegregation decree of 1955, Lhamon shows how this phrase, "deliberate speed," resonates throughout the culture of the entire decade. The 1950s was a period of transition—a time when the United States began its shift from an industrial society to a postindustrial society, and the era when the first barriers between African-American culture and white culture began to come down. Deliberate Speed is the story of a nation and a culture making the rapid transition to the increasingly complex world that we inhabit today. American culture did not really start swinging until the tumultuous 1960's. Throughout the sleepy Eisenhower years, the United States dozed under a mom-and-apple-pie sky, quietly embracing its traditional values, nurturing its families in the manner of Father Knows Best, and giving its naive allegiance to authority and the status quo. An accurate analysis? In Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950's, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., answers with a resounding "No." Far from being a sleepy decade, the 1950's, according to Lhamon, were poised atop a fault line of tremendous instability, rocking and rolling their way with deliberate speed toward seismic upheavals in politics, art, music, literature, and technology.