Time Frame – 1930 – 1965
From the Great Depression through World War II and the postwar era, society underwent dramatic political, economic, and cultural change. Mass media expanded, American influence grew worldwide, and everyday manners increasingly reflected the values of a modern industrial society. Understanding this period helps actors capture the assumptions and behaviors of the mid-twentieth century.
Politics/Economics – Rise of Fascism, Communism, Socialism. The rapid decline of colonialism.
The Great Depression did what Prohibition couldn’t – sober up America. Interestingly, it also made entertainment more powerful. With the wide availability of radio and film, people were willing to spend a few of their hard-earned pennies on escapist entertainment. And yet the realities of the world were never far away. The 1930’s gave birth to modern jazz (with its darker tonalities always bubbling underneath even the happiest tunes), screwball comedies (where normal can become surreal in a second) and superheroes (because a normal guy is no match for the brave new world). Counterpoised to that is the underlying presumption, especially in the United States, that any problem can be overcome so long as we put our collective minds and muscle to it. Not just engineering challenges, but social ills, natural disasters, environmental concerns, finally even reaching the moon – all are bendable to the will of science and technology.
The two greatest effects of WWII were the catapulting of the US as the bonafide world power, and the decline of the European countries, even the victors. Strict colonialism could no longer survive, and most colonies of the old European Empires quickly gained independent nation status.
The United States largely won the Second World War on the strength of its industrial power. It was able to produce the tanks, planes, bullets, guns, and ships to outfit itself and its allies, as well as provide the petroleum to power them. American society took two lessons from this. First, that if industrial bureaucracy could crush fascism, it could be used to handle any task. Companies large and small copied military protocols and organization. In short order hospitals, schools, department stores, public housing, suburban residential developments – all became industrialized. Large works better than small.
The second lesson was that the war was won by the average Joe, not by the snooty aristocrats. America turned away from looking to France and England for its art and culture. So begins the era of the common man, and with it the dominance of American culture worldwide. Even as early as the 1920’s, but certainly by the end of the 30’s, upper class entertainments are viewed with ever more suspicion. Opera, ballet, symphonic music, poetry; these have little place in the new culture of the common man. Film is the main art form, the only one that reflects popular sentiment and is actually seen by most of the population. There is less production of what had fed aristocratic desires, supplanted by a flood of lower luxuries fulfilling the American Dream.
Warning: big digression coming up: Here is where I begin to part company with many books on theatre history and period style. Too often they take their cues from art criticism and academic art history, which at this point in the twentieth century tend to focus heavily on modernism and postmodernism. But when attempting to understand period style, concentrating on the “art for art’s sake” movements is often of little practical value. These schools, brilliant though many of their artists undoubtedly were, spoke primarily to relatively small artistic and intellectual circles rather than to the population at large.
When trying to understand how a society saw itself — how ordinary people imagined beauty, authority, romance, violence, patriotism, masculinity, femininity, or modern life — it is usually more useful to examine the popular visual language of the period than the avant-garde fringe. In this sense, much of twentieth-century “serious art” functions almost as an artistic aristocracy, often admired more for intellectual interpretation than for broad cultural participation. It is therefore not usually to the artistic fringe that one must look when attempting to identify the dominant style of an age.
Fashion/Manners –
Instead of proscribed manners, it becomes more important to act directly in a personal way to whatever is happening in the moment. A man was expected to stand straight and have a firm handshake in the business world, but was expected to relax and “loosen-up” when at home or with friends. The body begins to slouch into a comfortable chair, and the legs can cross in any way that is comfortable for the sitter. Formal introductions are completely gone, and most people feel completely at ease in simply introducing themselves to a stranger in any situation.
Civilian Conflict –
Continuing unchanged from the prior period, most men are unarmed. At most, a hidden gun or knife might be worn, as most countries pass laws prohibiting the wearing of weapons.
Warfare –
Armies replace bolt-action rifles for the infantry with semiautomatics, and then finally fully automatic rifles. Aviation and tanks redefine the infantry/cavalry dynamic. The foot soldier can become both the heavy and light infantry, but now tanks can barrel past trenches, filling the role of heavy cavalry. Helicopters and airplanes become the light cavalry. Because the expense of war rises exponentially with each technological improvement in weapons, smaller armies or poorer ones use irregular fighting strategies, now called “guerrilla” warfare. The concept is ancient, and resorted to when facing a force superior in numbers and weaponry. In short, it involves attacking when the enemy is in retreat, disappearing when the enemy wants to attack, and disrupting the enemy when it is not prepared for engagement.