Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (71 page)

Until this time, young people had not even existed as a distinct group of consumers. Indeed, ‘young people’ had not existed at all. In traditional families and communities, children remained children until they left school and went to work, at which point they were young adults. The new, intermediate category of ‘teenager’, in which a generation was defined not by its status but by its age—neither child nor adult—had no precedent. And the notion that such persons—teenagers—might represent a distinct group of consumers would have been quite unthinkable a few years before. For most people the family had always been a unit of production, not consumption. To the extent that any young person within the family had independent cash earnings, these were part of the family income and used to help defray collective expenses.

But with real wages rising rapidly, most families could subsist—and better—on the income of the primary wage-earner; all the more so if both parents were employed. A son or daughter who had left school at fourteen (the typical school-leaving age for most young west Europeans in these years), who was living at home, and who had a steady or just a part-time job, was no longer automatically expected to hand over all his or her earnings every Friday. In France, by 1965, 62 percent of all 16- to 24-year-olds still living with their parents were retaining all their own earnings to spend as they wished.

The most immediately obvious symptom of this new adolescent spending power was sartorial. Well before the baby-boom generation itself discovered miniskirts and long hair, its immediate predecessor—the generation born during the war rather than just after it—asserted its presence and its appearance in the gang cults of the late Fifties. Dressed in dark, skin-hugging outfits—sometimes leather, sometimes suede, always sharply cut and vaguely threatening—the
blouson noirs
(France),
Halbstarker
(Germany and Austria) or
skinknuttar
(Sweden), like the teddy boys of London, affected a cynical, indifferent demeanour, something between Marlon Brando (in
The Wild One
) and James Dean (
Rebel Without a Cause
). But despite occasional bursts of violence—most seriously in Britain, where gangs of leather-clad youths attacked Caribbean immigrants—the chief threat that these young people and their clothes posed was to their elders’ sense of propriety. They
looked
different.

Age-specific clothing was important, as a statement of independence and even revolt. It was also new—in the past, young adults had had little option but to wear the same clothes as their fathers and mothers. But it was not, economically speaking, the most important change wrought by teenage spending habits: young people were spending a lot of money on clothes, but even more—far more—on music. The association of ‘teenager’ and ‘pop music’ that became so automatic by the early Sixties had a commercial as well as a cultural basis. In Europe as in America, when the family budget could dispense with a teenager’s contribution, the first thing the liberated adolescent did was to go out and buy a gramophone record.

The long-playing record was invented in 1948. The first 45rpm ‘single’, with one song on each side, was marketed by RCA the following year. Sales in Europe did not take off as fast as in America—where turnover from record sales rose from $277 million in 1955 to $600 million four years later. But they rose nonetheless. In Britain, where young people were initially more exposed to American popular music than their continental contemporaries, observers dated the pop music explosion from the showing of the 1956 film
Rock Around the Clock
, starring Bill Haley and the Comets and the Platters. The film itself was mediocre even by the undemanding standards of rock music movie vehicles; but its eponymous title song (performed by Haley) galvanized a generation of British teenagers.

Working-class teenagers for whom jazz had never held much appeal were immediately attracted to the American (and in its wake, British) revolution in popular music: driving, tuneful, accessible, sexy and, above all, their own.
¹³⁴
But there was nothing very angry about it, much less violent, and even the sex was kept firmly under wraps by record company producers, marketing managers and radio broadcasting executives. This is because the initial pop music revolution was a Fifties phenomenon: it did not accompany the cultural transformation of the Sixties but preceded it. As a consequence it was frequently the object of official criticism. Disapproving local council watch committees banned
Rock Around the Clock
—as they did Elvis Presley’s decidedly superior rock musical,
Jailhouse Rock
.

The city fathers of Swansea in Wales thought the British skiffle player Lonnie Donegan ‘unsuitable’. Tommy Steele, a moderately energetic British rock singer of the late Fifties, was not allowed to perform in Portsmouth on the Sabbath. Johnny Hallyday, a half-successful French attempt to clone US rockers of the Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran mould, inspired outrage among a generation of French conservative intellectuals when his first record appeared in 1960. In retrospect, the horrified response of parents, teachers, clerics, pundits and politicians across Western Europe appears quaintly disproportionate. Within less than a decade Haley, Donegan, Steele, Hallyday and their like would seem hopelessly outdated, relics of an innocent prehistory.

European teenagers of the late fifties and early sixties did not aspire to change the world. They had grown up in security and a modest affluence. Most of them just wanted to look different, travel more, play pop music and buy stuff. In this they reflected the behavior and tastes of their favorite singers, and the disc-jockeys whose radio programs they listened to on their transistors. But all the same they were the thin end of a revolutionary wedge. More even than their parents, they were the target of the advertising industry that followed, accompanied and prophesied the consumer boom. More and more goods were being made and purchased, and they came in unprecedented variety. Cars, clothes, baby carriages, packaged foods and washing powder all now came to market in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes and colors.

Advertising had a long history in Europe. Newspapers, especially the popular newspapers that flourished from the 1890s, had always carried advertisements. Roadside hoardings and placards were a longstanding blight in Italy well before the nineteen fifties, and any traveler in mid-century France would have been familiar with the exhortations painted high up on the side of rural farmhouses and urban terraces to drink
St Raphael
or
Dubonnet
. Commercial jingles as well as still photographs had long accompanied newsreels and the second feature in cinemas across Europe. But such traditional advertising took little account of targeted product placement, or markets segmented by age or taste. From the mid-1950s, by contrast, consumer choice became a major marketing consideration; and advertising, still a relatively small business expense in pre-war Europe, took on a prominent role.

Moreover, whereas the cleaning products and breakfast cereals advertised on early commercial television in Britain were directed towards housewives and children, commercial breaks on Radio Monte Carlo and elsewhere were aimed above all at the ‘young adult’ market. Teenage discretionary spending—on tobacco, alcohol, mopeds and motor bikes, modestly-priced fashion clothing, footwear, make-up, hair care, jewelry, magazines, records, record-players, radios—was a huge, and hitherto untapped, pool of cash: advertising agencies flocked to take advantage of it. Expenditure on retail advertising in Great Britain rose from £102 million a year in 1951 to £2.5 billion in 1978.

In France, spending on magazine adverts aimed at adolescents rose by 400 percent in the crucial years 1959-1962. For many people, the world as depicted in advertisements was still beyond their reach: in 1957 a majority of young people polled in France complained that they lacked access to entertainment of their choice, the vacation of their imaginings, a means of transport of their own. But it is symptomatic that those polled already regarded these goods and services as rights of which they were deprived, rather than fantasies to which they could never aspire. Across the English Channel, in that same year, a group of middle-class activists, perturbed at the unmediated impact of commercial advertising and the efflorescence of commodities it was selling, published the first-ever consumer guide in Europe. Significantly, they named it not ‘What’ but
Which
?

This was the brave new world that the British novelist J. B. Priestley described in 1955 as ‘admass’. For many other contemporary observers it was, very simply, ‘Americanization’: the adoption in Europe of all the practices and aspirations of modern America. A radical departure though it seemed to many, this was not in fact a new experience. Europeans had been ‘Americanizing’—and dreading the thought—for at least thirty years.
¹³⁵
The vogue for US-style production lines and ‘Taylorized’ work rates, like the fascination with American films and fashions, was an old story even before World War Two. European intellectuals between the wars had bemoaned the ‘soulless’ world of American modernity that lay ahead for everyone; and Nazis and Communists both made great play with their role as the preservers of culture and values in the face of unrestricted American capitalism and a ‘mongrelized’ rootless cosmopolitanism symbolized by New York and its spreading example.

And yet, for all its presence in the European imagination—and the very physical reality of American soldiers based all over western Europe—the United States was still a great unknown for most Europeans. Americans spoke English—not a language with which most continental Europeans had any acquaintance in these years. The history and geography of the USA were not studied in European schools; its writers were unknown even to an educated minority; its political system was a mystery to all but a privileged few. Hardly anyone had made the long and expensive journey to the US: only the wealthy (and not many of them); hand-picked trade unionists and others paid from Marshall funds; a few thousand exchange students—and a number of Greek and Italian men who had emigrated to America after 1900 and returned to Sicily or the Greek islands in old age. East Europeans often had more links to the US than westerners, since many Poles or Hungarians knew a friend or relative who had gone to America, and many more would have gone if they could.

To be sure, the US government and various private agencies—notably the Ford Foundation—were doing their best to overcome the gulf separating Europe from America: the 1950s and early 1960s were the great age of overseas cultural investment,from America Houses to Fulbright Scholars. In some places—notably the Federal Republic of Germany—the consequences were profound: between 1948 and 1955, 12,000 Germans were brought to America for extended stays of one month or more. A whole generation of West Germans grew up in the military, economic and cultural shadow of the United States; Ludwig Erhard once described himself as ‘an American invention.’

But it is important to emphasize that this sort of American influence and example depended curiously little on direct American economic involvement. America in 1950 had three fifths of the capital stock of the West and about the same share of output, but very little of the proceeds flowed across the Atlantic. Post-1945 investment came above all from the US government. In 1956, US private investment in Europe amounted to just $4.15 billion. It then began to rise sharply, taking off in the 1960s (notably in Britain) and reaching $24.52 billion in 1970—by which time it had provoked a flurry of anxious publications warning of the rise of American economic power, notably J-J Servan-Schreiber’s 1967 essay,
Le Défi Américain
(The American Challenge).

The American economic presence in Europe was felt less in direct economic investment or leverage than in the consumer revolution that was affecting America and Europe alike. Europeans were now gaining access to the unprecedented range of products with which American consumers were familiar: phones, white goods, televisions, cameras, cleaning products, packaged foods, cheap colorful clothing, cars and their accessories, etc. This was prosperity and consumption as a way of life—the ‘American way of life’. For young people the appeal of ‘America’ was its aggressive contemporaneity. As an abstraction, it stood for the opposite of the past; it was large, open, prosperous—and youthful.

One aspect of ‘Americanization’, already noted, was popular music—though even this was not in itself a new pattern: ‘ragtime’ was first performed in Vienna in 1903 and American dance bands and jazz groups were widely circulating before and after World War Two. Nor was it a uniquely one-way process: most modern popular music was a hybridization of imported and local genres. ‘American’ music in Britain was subtly different from ‘American’ music in France or Germany. French taste in particular was influenced by black performing artists who made their way to Paris to escape prejudice at home—one reason why the idea of ‘America’ in French culture was markedly infused with the image of racism.

By the 1950s, the impact of American example on a European audience came overwhelmingly through the medium of film. European audiences had near-unrestricted access to anything Hollywood could export: by the later 1950s, the US was marketing about 500 films a year, to Europe’s collective output of about 450. American films suffered the disadvantage of language, of course (though in many places, notably Italy, they were simply dubbed en masse into the local tongue). And partly for this reason audiences above a certain age continued to prefer the domestic product. But their children felt otherwise. Younger audiences increasingly appreciated American feature films—often made by European directors who had fled Hitler or Stalin.

Contemporary critics worried that the smug conformism of American popular culture, combined with the manifest or subliminal political messages conveyed in films aimed at mass audiences, would corrupt or tranquilize the sensibilities of European youth. If anything, the effect seems rather to have been the opposite. Young European audiences filtered out the propaganda content of mainstream American movies—envying the ‘good life’ as depicted on screen, much as their parents had done twenty years before, but laughing out loud at the bathos and naiveté of American romance and domestic routine. Meanwhile, however, they paid very close attention to the often-subversive
style
of the performers.