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Social Critics of the 1950’s
Primary Source Documents
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Our Right to Require Belief
Billy Graham (1956)
In 1956, “In God We Trust” became the official national motto, reflecting both a Cold War culture
where Americans contrasted the United States with the atheistic Soviet Union and the
widespread appeal of traditional moral values embodied in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Evangelist Billy Graham emerged within this context, becoming the most significant evangelical
preacher of the postwar era. His message of salvation through Christ spoke to middle-class
Americans in search of some meaning in their lives.
There is a movement gathering momentum in America to take the traditional concept of God out
of our national life. If this movement succeeds, IN GOD WE TRUST will be taken from our
coins, the Bible will be removed from our courtrooms, future Presidents will be sworn into office
with their hand on a copy of the Constitution instead of the Bible, and chaplains will be removed
from the Armed Forces.
The issue of prayers in public schools is now before the Supreme Court and, if the Court
decrees negatively, another victory will be gained by those forces which conspire to remove
faith in God from the public conscience.
With each passing Christmas season the observing of Christmas in the school becomes a
sharper issue. Many public schools, from California to New Jersey, have already ruled out the
singing of carols in the classroom.
Those who are trying to remove God from our culture are rewriting history and distorting the
truth. But those who advocate drastic changes in our traditional faith are only a tiny minority.
Most Americans not only believe in God themselves but want their leaders to have faith in God.
The Associated Press recently reported the findings of Dr. Paul Bussard, editor of the Catholic
Digest, who learned that 99 percent of the American people believe in God; that 77 percent
believe in the hereafter, and that 75 percent believe that religion is important.…
It is true that our forefathers meant this nation to be free from religious domination. The men
who built America were primarily victims of oppression. They felt that the terrors of the
wilderness were as nothing to that of government oppression of religious faith. But the founding
fathers in their determination to have freedom “of” religion never meant to have freedom “from”
religion. Separation of church and state in no way implies separation of religion and state affairs.
They are spiritually inseparable.…
Early American history was hallowed with a purpose greater than material wealth and a
cause greater than democracy. It was forged in the fire of a burning faith in God. Many early
settlers came to America with one goal in mind — namely, to advance the Kingdom of the Lord
Jesus Christ.
The tremendous prosperity, power and blessing which America has enjoyed through the
years came because we as a nation have honored God. It is, I believe, a direct fulfillment of the
promise, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency:
Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary (1955)
The 1950s postwar affluence affirmed conventional values of middle-class morality and
idealized the nuclear family with a working father and stay-at-home mother. At the same time,
the economic comforts provided opportunities for consumer indulgence and a relaxation of
social and moral constraints. Concerns about immorality haunted the middle class as reformers
began defining a problem of juvenile delinquency that they attributed to the sexual and violent
themes appearing in comic books, according to Democratic senator Estes Kefauver of
Tennessee. The Senate investigated the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency in
1955 and determined that the mass media was a “significant factor” in the crisis of America’s
youth.
It has been pointed out that the so-called crime and horror comic books of concern to the
subcommittee offer short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage,
necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy,
bestiality, and horror. These depraved acts are presented and explained in illustrated detail in
an array of comic books being bought and read daily by thousands of children. These books
evidence a common penchant for violent death in every form imaginable. Many of the books
dwell in detail on various forms of insanity and stress sadistic degeneracy. Others are devoted
to cannibalism with monsters in human form feasting on human bodies, usually the bodies of
scantily clad women. …
A Communist magazine, printed in East Germany and devoted to bitter criticism of the
United States, appeared under the name, “USA im Wort und Bild” (USA in Word and Pictures).
The publication ridicules comic books and similar American attempts to present the classics in
simple form. Some of the phrases read:
Shakespeare in Yankee dialect is the latest “cultural triumph” *** The “cultural” achievement
of the publishers is expressed on the jacket of the pamphlet: “You can quote the best
quotations of Shakespeare and impress your friends, without reading the play.”
… Soviet propaganda cites the comic book in support of its favorite anti-American theme — the
degeneracy of American culture. However, comic books are but one of a number of instruments
used in Soviet propaganda to illustrate this theme. The attacks are usually supported with
examples drawn from the less-desirable American motion pictures, television programs,
literature, drama, and art.
It is represented in the Soviet propaganda that the United States crime rate, particularly the
incidence of juvenile delinquency, is largely incited by the murders, robberies, and other crimes
portrayed in “trash literature.” The reason such reading matter is distributed, according to that
propaganda, is that the “imperialists” use it to condition a generation of young automatons who
will be ready to march and kill in the future wars of aggression planned by the capitalists.…
While not attempting to review the several findings included in this report, the subcommittee
wishes to reiterate its belief that this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding
its children, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime, horror, and violence. There was
substantial, although not unanimous, agreement among the experts that there may be
detrimental and delinquency-producing effects upon both the emotionally disturbed child and the
emotionally normal delinquent. Children of either type may gain suggestion, support, and
sanction from reading crime and horror comics.
John Kenneth Galbraith Criticizes the Affluent Society (1958):
“The final problem of the productive society is what it produces. This manifests itself in an implacable
tendency to provide an opulent supply of some things and a niggardly yield of others. This disparity
carries to the point where it is a cause of social discomfort and social unhealth. The line which divides
our areas of wealth from our area of poverty is roughly that which divides privately produced and
marketed goods and services from publicly rendered services. Our wealth in the first is not only in
startling contrast with the meagerness of the latter, but our wealth in privately produced goods is, to a
marked degree, the cause of crisis in the supply of public services. For we have failed to see the
importance, indeed the urgent need, of maintaining a balance between the two.
This disparity between our flow of private and public goods and services is no matter of subjective
judgment. On the contrary, it is the source of the most extensive comment which only stops short of
the direct contrast being made here. In the years following World War II, the papers of any major citythose of New York were an excellent example- told daily of the shortages and shortcomings in the
elementary municipal and metropolitan services. The schools were old and overcrowded. The police
force was under strength and underpaid. The parks and playgrounds were insufficient. Streets and
empty lots were filthy, and the sanitation staff was underequipped and in need of men. Access to the
city by those who work there was uncertain and painful and becoming more so. Internal transportation
was overcrowded, unhealthful and dirty. So was the air. Parking on the streets should have been
prohibited, but there was no space elsewhere. These deficiencies were not in new and novel services
but in old and established ones. Cities have long swept their streets, helped their people move around,
educated them, kept order, and provided horse rails for equipages which sought to pause. That their
residents should have a nontoxic supply of air suggests no revolutionary dalliance with socialism.
The discussion of this public poverty competed, on the whole successfully, with the stories of everincreasing opulence in privately produced goods. The Gross National Product was rising. So were retail
sales. So was personal income. Labor productivity had advanced. The automobiles that could not be
parked were being produced at an expanded rate. The children, though without schools, subject in the
playgrounds to the affectionate interest of adults with odd tastes, and disposed to increasingly
imaginative forms of delinquency, were admirably equipped with television sets. We had difficulty
finding storage space for the great surpluses of food despite a national disposition to obesity. Food was
grown and packaged under private auspices. The care and refreshment of the mind, in contrast with the
stomach, was principally in the public domain. Our colleges and universities were often severely
overcrowded and underprovided, and the same was even more often true of mental hospitals.”
Michael Harrington Describes the Other America (1962):