The 50s were a time of prosperity, consumerism, growing economy, family and community. But no time was perfect. This might have been the perspective of one group of people, but certainly not all.

This blog won’t get into the civil rights movement but you might find it in a later blog coming soon. Also if you’d like to skip to just the Winter Exhibition it is at the bottom.

The Cold War and Red Scare 

A big part of the 50s was the “Red Scare”, that all started because of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.  From my understanding the Cold War was a state of political hostility between the two countries that had no physical warfare but included, propaganda and threats. Early on in this unit we did a package and watched videos on the Cold War to fully connect our last topic, the Manhattan Project ending WWII, to this one.

The Cold War damaged the relationship between the two countries so greatly that they didn’t trust eachother. This led the United States to believe that there were hidden communist spies threatening the country. They were so frightened that they actually started turning on there own people calling them out for being a communist and part of the red scare.

The Crucible 

At the start of this unit we read a play called The Crucible written by Arthur Miller. This play grasps the concept of how a society can throw all logic away when dealing with a pressing threat. In the Crucible this threat was witches, and for the 1950s it was the communists. In both examples the community started blaming each other for the smallest and sometimes completely unlogical evidence.

I’ll come back to this in just a moment but let’s talk a little about something great about the 1950.

Baby Boomers and Life in the 1950s

Because there was no massive war going on anymore and soldiers were finally coming home to their wife’s, this made a lot of fast changes in the society and the economy.. kind of like a “boom”.

This video should some up the baby boomer generation and how they made such a huge impact on society. During the whole unit we learned about the baby boomer generation by watching videos such as this one Leave it to Beaver, and Happy Days. We also watched The Century, Americas Time: Best Years where we took a lot of notes on the baby boomers aswell as the red scare.

Now lets back to The Crucible and Red Scare. In the novels once someone was accused of witchcraft they would go on trails where they were forced to confess or be killed. Sadly, this is not far from what happened if you were accused of communist influence in Hollywood. If you were accused of being a communist you would be fired from your job most likely but if you worked in Hollywood your would go though a senate hearing probably get blacklist and never work in the industry again or even be sent to jail.

These types of hearings weren’t just for people who worked in Hollywood though the senator at the time, McCarthy famously accused multiple people and groups of having communists such as the US navy. Something great about the 1950s was that television was common in most households so people could now see more of what’s going on for themselves, such as the senate hearings. Because these hearings were televised people realized there senator was making false accusations with no proof. This made people believe the red scare was a hoax and helped end it.

Winter Exhibition 

Now I think you are well caught up in the crazy world of the 1950s and The Crucible, so let’s recreate and demonstrate what we learned in one amazing exhibition. It sounds like a lot of work, and yes it was, but for this exhibition we worked as a whole class and were all pretty proud of what we did.

Getting Started

For awhile we had been thinking about what the Exhibition would look like. We knew it had to be a interactive experience, we would walk through about 6 stations, we would have guides that go through all the stations, and it had to connect to the 1959s The Crucible and today. That, and what we learned through the whole unit, was pretty much all we had to work from when the teachers left us in the classroom (just like the LOTF debate) to figure out our exhibition.

Having to organize the project, and actually the whole exhibition in general, showed how much we have grown up into more productive critical thinkers since last year. We had barely any trouble deciding realistic ways we were going to connect all of our themes, what big ideas to use to separate the stations and how many people needed for each, and who should charge in script writing, editing, costumes, and set design. Throughout the hole process we were able to use our teachers to help us stay on the right track but we mostly just used eachother and our resources.

Everything Coming Together

We all put our strengths together and I can happily say we did a good job. There were definetly a couple fall backs and struggles, such as coming up with a impactful conclusion, the wall that seperates the gym not working, needing to fill the gym more, and parts of the Hollywood scene falling apart during our presentation. We dealt with all of this and did the best we could to give a spectacular 1950s experience that you can see here.

Reflection

Even though I was very proud of how we came together and what we produced, there’s is definetly more I could’ve done as a individual. This project had a lot of aspects to it such as script writing, art, acting, building, and presenting so everyone had something they were good at. I mainly stuck to what I was comfortable and confident doing, which I would classify as the more behind the scenes stuff. Now that I’ve reflected, I wish I had taken the opportunities that I had to try new roles such as being a guide or even a DRI.

This winter exhibition I definitely found more challenging then last years, but I also think I learned a lot more about history and literature. As I mentioned before we covered the American history of the glorious 1950s. Most of what I learned about the baby boomers, suburbs, Red Scare, blacklisting, Cold War, and McCarthy I kept in a pages document.

Reading the Crucible was definetly different then what we normally read for English because it had a lot of interesting text that we deciphered during our in class readings.

In this unit one of my biggest takeaways was how history can repeat itself. That is how we decided to conclude our presentation, so I thought that would also be a good way to conclude this blog.