1959

My book club met this evening to discuss 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan. 1959 was clearly a year in which everything changed for me as that was the year I graduated from UCLA and began grad school at UC Berkeley. The book was also one of the few in which I found people that I had met, history that I had lived, and organizations that I knew.

Although Kaplan does not stress the point, the 1950s were very different than the 1960s. The 50s were the years of the "silent generation", of considerable social conservatism. The 60s were years of social protest and change. Thus I regard 1959 as a hinge year when American (and indeed international culture) changed significantly.

Kaplan seems to focus on small groups of people who were seriously involved in innovation. In the arts, it was a year when beat writers were seeking to develop a new literature, when some influential jazz musicians were seeking new directions in modern jazz, when Motown records was found, when stand-up comedians were testing the limits of topical humor, and when the efforts of a school of artists seeking to move beyond abstract expressionism was beginning to be recognized. It was the year of the invention of the microchip, the introduction of the first computer aimed as a business market, the introduction of the oral contraceptive, and the beginning of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. John Kennedy was preparing his run for the presidency and the introduction of the New Frontier, and there was even an effort to normalize relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

All these innovators were successful. They differ in the magnitude of their success. Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, differentiated from normal science done within a scientific paradigm and revolutionary science which changes a scientific paradigm. He was focusing on scientific innovation, but differentiating between two kinds of innovation. By analogy, Kaplan has noted that 1959 seems to have been a year in which people in quite a large number of distinct fields were seeking to change the paradigms in their fields.

In the cases of the arts, new paradigms were later invented replacing those in which artists were working in the 1950s; these in turn have been displaced by still newer paradigms in literature, painting and music in the last half century. The microchip created a new electronics paradigm that is still with us, albeit in an evolved form that the 59 inventors would not recognize; the pill created a new paradigm in reproductive biology, a paradigm that has transformed both sexual behavior and the American family.

The book served as the basis for a stimulating discussion, and I enjoyed the read.