As part of our celebration of the Michigan Bar Journal’s 100th year, each month we highlight important events and legal news in a decade-by-decade special report.
Often remembered as a safe, bland, and colorless era — almost an episode of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” — the 1950s were anything but. Communism, civil rights, and scientific endeavor shaped the decade. Aided by the People’s Republic of China, North Korea waged war against the United States and South Korea. Joseph Stalin died and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, told the West, “We will bury you.” Sen. Joseph McCarthy continued the 1940s witch hunts for communists. The U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated public education unconstitutional. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, leading to a citywide bus boycott. Arkansas’s governor blocked nine black children from attending Little Rock schools until federal troops arrived.
Integration did not proceed with the deliberate speed the Supreme Court ordered. Jim Crow laws persisted and hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan grew stronger. Women forced out of their jobs after World War II faced even greater pressure to stay in the home. The U.S. detonated the first hydrogen bomb, accelerating the Cold War nuclear arms race, and launched the first nuclear-powered submarine. An International Geophysical Year promoted scientific exploration and cooperation. And when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the U.S. found itself running behind in the space race to the moon.
Television supplanted radio as the source of most Americans’ home entertainment. Audiences loved Lucy, agreed that “Father Knows Best,” were content to “Leave It to Beaver,” and chuckled along with the laugh track of “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Garry Moore, and radio stars from the 1940s hosted variety shows, and dramas included “Gunsmoke,” “Peter Gunn,” and “Dragnet.” Girls and boys helped “Mr. Wizard” do science experiments and watched “Captain Kangaroo.” TV offered late-night movies, while theaters showed “Cinderella” (1950), “High Noon” (1952), “The Caine Mutiny” (1954), “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957), and “North by Northwest” (1959). “Guys and Dolls,” “The Music Man,” and “Oklahoma!” opened on Broadway. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was published. Elvis Presley sang “Love Me Tender” and “Hound Dog” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” though contrary to the popular and oft-repeated legend, his hips were visible onscreen. Rock and roll was here to stay, but it shared the airwaves with doo-wop, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, and Loretta Lynn.
Like the decade before, the 1950s begin with a war. North and South Korea have been separate countries since shortly after World War II. In June 1950, North Korean forces cross the 38th parallel, which divides the countries. The United Nations authorizes military force to defend South Korea and the United States becomes the primary U.N. combatant. Red China — the People’s Republic of China, formed after Mao Tse-tung’s 1949 revolution — begins assisting North Korea in October. World War II hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur leads the American forces with great success initially, but losses multiply and President Harry S. Truman soon relieves MacArthur of his command for not respecting Truman’s authority. Almost 37,000 Americans die in Korea; 4,700 become prisoners of war. The war never actually ends but fighting ceases after a July 1953 armistice. The border between the Koreas is back where it started: the 38th parallel.
While World War II figured prominently in the Michigan State Bar Journal’s pages, the Korean War does not. We find lists of lawyers in the military and notices about those recalled to service. Recognizing that “lawyers are being taken into active military life again,” one article examines the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act, while another reviews soldiers’ reemployment rights.
Erle Stanley Gardner — an attorney and the creator of the character Perry Mason — presents a serious talk at the 1950 SBM Annual Meeting about the use and misuse of circumstantial evidence in homicide cases. Television overtakes radio as the primary source of Americans’ home entertainment; nearly 80% of households purchase a TV in the 1950s. Americans watch “I Love Lucy,” “Playhouse 90,” and “The Twilight Zone.” Elvis Presley appears on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” giving rock and roll respectability. Because the “meteoric growth” of TV “has brought with it a host of problems,” the Bar Journal publishes “Television and the Law.” The SBM inaugurates a feature on Detroit TV station WXYZ called “Your Day in Court.” Nestled in an issue devoted entirely to public relations is the article “Television and Bar PR.” “Listen, Girls!” — a 1952 column by anonymous Stella the Steno — offers tongue-in-cheek advice to “law office secretaries” who “know that the boss’s practice would collapse” if they weren’t there every day “banging away at the old Remington.”
“Honest” voting “errors” are discovered during Gov. G. Mennen Williams’s 1950 reelection bid. His lead plummets to a razor-thin 1,154-vote margin. The Bar Journal tells us how “a ‘blue ribbon’ panel of 120 of the State’s ablest attorneys” — working without pay — recounted a “record 1,900,000 votes,” discovering that “the human errors, inexcusable though they may be, were negligible” and that Williams won. It describes the estimated $150,000 public expenditure as “a tidy sum, but cheap if the measure of value be restoration of confidence in election honesty.” A similar lawyer-led recount occurs in 1952, with Williams again winning. He is reelected three more times and serves for the entire decade.
During the late 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conducted hearings into perceived communist influences over the movie industry. Many actors, writers, and directors were convicted of contempt for lying at the hearings. Studios blacklisted others. HUAC also heard testimony about communists in federal government. Former spy Whittaker Chambers testified against Alger Hiss. Hiss denied the charges but some HUAC members, particularly Richard M. Nixon, had doubts and Hiss was convicted of perjury. Similar hearings in various committees continue in the 1950s. While speaking to the West Virginia Republican Women’s Club in February 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) claims to have a list of Communist Party members in the State Department. Espionage involving the Soviets and others is a serious threat, but McCarthy’s list is spurious. It nonetheless leads to numerous hearings with baseless accusations, becoming a witch hunt. McCarthyism inflames the ongoing Red Scare. In response, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team changes its name to the Cincinnati Redlegs. McCarthy is eventually censured and dies soon after, but the Cold War grinds on.
The Red Scare engulfs lawyers. The ABA forms the Committee to Study Communist Tactics, Strategy, and Objectives; by resolution, it approves of “the manner in which” various congressional bodies are investigating Communist Party activities. In “ABA — Bulwark Against Communism,” the Bar Journal details the ABA committee’s proceedings. It also reprints the ABA resolution to “expel from its membership any and every individual who is a member of the Communist Party” or “advocates Marxism-Leninism.” The SBM forms the Special Committee on Disbarment of Subversive Members of the Bar, which exists until 1955.
Women — including those forced to leave their jobs after World War II ended — are under even greater pressure to remain at home and women’s rights stagnate. In May 1954, Brown v Topeka Board of Education holds that racial segregation of public education violates equal protection. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s unanimous opinion concludes that separate-but-equal facilities, approved by Plessy v Ferguson in 1896, are inappropriate in education. A year later, Brown II requires school desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” It does not.
While Brown has effectively sounded the death knell for “separate but equal,” civil rights advances come slowly. On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks rides a Montgomery, Alabama, bus home from work. The driver orders four passengers to leave their row in the “colored section” to make room for a white passenger. Three comply, but Parks refuses and is arrested, eventually paying a $10 fine and $4 in court costs. Though Parks is not the first to defy the Montgomery ordinance, her arrest prompts a 381-day bus boycott by Black riders despite the hardships it creates for the city’s poorer residents. Martin Luther King Jr., a young Montgomery minister, leads the boycott. The city repeals the ordinance.
Three years after Brown, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus deploys the National Guard to assist protestors blocking nine Black students from entering a Little Rock high school under a desegregation plan. President Eisenhower federalizes the Arkansas Guard, eliminating Faubus’s control, and sends in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division so the Little Rock Nine can safely go to school.
After Germany’s successful use of the supersonic V-2 rocket in World War II and the Manhattan Project’s development of the atomic bomb, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations devote tremendous resources to nuclear weapons and rocketry. The U.S. in 1952 explodes a hydrogen bomb — a thermonuclear device far more powerful than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki — but the Soviets detonate their own H-bomb soon after, and other nations follow. The nuclear arms race accelerates at a breakneck pace. Crick and Watson describe DNA’s helical structure in 1953 without acknowledging their use of critical data from another researcher, Rosalind Franklin. In late 1957, during the International Geophysical Year, the Soviet Union launches Earth’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik is an unimposing 23-inch, 184-pound metal sphere with four radio antennas, but its appearance in the October skies shocks the American public and galvanizes the space race between the two countries. NASA is created in 1959.
Not long after the H-bomb explodes, the Bar Journal publishes “Law in the Atomic Age,” which discusses nuclear war capabilities, and another article on peaceful uses of atomic energy. By 1957, SBM forms the Committee on Atomic Energy Law. Shortly after Sputnik, the State Bar turns its thoughts to space, leading to the article “Law for the Space Age” and formation of the Special Committee on Space Law in 1959. The colorful November 1958 cover depicts flying cars to accompany “Aviation Law and Flying Automobiles,” an article about military research projects such as Chrysler’s flying Jeep.
The Cold War has escalated steadily since the Korean War’s end. Joseph Stalin — the Soviet Union’s leader since 1924 and Hitler’s rival in atrocities — dies in 1953; his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounces Stalin’s crimes. But Khrushchev himself declares to Western ambassadors at a 1956 Moscow reception, “We will bury you.” France’s disastrous 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu during its war in Indochina leads to the creation of North and South Vietnam, and the United States assists South Vietnam during Eisenhower’s presidency. Justifying its actions by the domino theory — that one nation falling to communism leads others to topple — the CIA aids a coup in Guatemala. The Soviet Union invades Hungary, its satellite country, to end a 1956 uprising against Soviet rule. In 1959, Khrushchev and Nixon debate capitalism vs. communism while standing in a model kitchen at an American exhibit in Moscow. Fittingly, it is called the Kitchen Debate and later shown on U.S. and Soviet television. The Eastern Bloc’s threats to the safety of West Berlin grow. Fidel Castro overthrows the Batista government in Cuba in late 1959 as another domino falls to communism.
The stage is now set for massive protests and greater civil rights victories in the coming decade. Nuclear proliferation will soon lead to brinksmanship and a nuclear crisis. The 1950s Beat Generation will fade and a new counterculture will emerge. And the legacy of America’s aid to South Vietnam during the 1950s will include some of the most divisive events of the tumultuous 1960s.