Matthew Ides, "Cruising for Community: Youth, Agency and Culture in Cold War Los Angeles"

"Cruising for Community" is an examination of youth culture and politics in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1975. In this period, both politicians and marketers recognized youth as central to the culture of postwar American domesticity. Policies and products designed with youth in mind were seen as a key to the votes and dollars of baby boom families. Within the mass culture of postwar liberalism, young people found new ways to define community and practice a cultural politic. My dissertation seeks to unearth a better understanding of the relationship between mass culture and youth culture which has been for the most part overlooked in American history. In examining this dialectic, the project will elucidate a primary way in which politics and culture evolved in the postwar period. The disciplinary goal of my dissertation is to offer a metropolitan history of cultural politic of youth to the field of American History. Youth as a subject crosses categories of historical analysis, allowing scholars to explore issues dealing with ethnicity, race, class, and gender. I aim to provide a model in which to better evaluate youth as an agent of historical change. While the investigation is historical in nature and will be of primary interest to historians, its conclusions will be valuable to other disciplines that take modern youth and its cultures as an integral subject: sociology, public policy, education, anthropology and communications, etc.

In the postwar period, a culture politic became the primary vehicle of agency because youth—defined as a period from teen to mid-twenties–were barred from most other types of political participation. Until the 26^th Amendment was signed into law on July 1^st 1971, electoral participation was extremely limited for those under 21 years of age. Outside of electoral politics, young people were excluded from fraternal organizations that acted as nodes in the mesh of political networks and commitments. In this environment, young people looked to create alternative worlds that privileged cultural expertise and experience over the authority of age. From the Zoot Suits of the 1940s to punk rockers of the 1970s, youth subcultures arose that distinctly challenged notions of American middle class domesticity and standard political participation.

In response to changing notions of youth, local and state governments did not take a passive approach. They created policies that both encouraged and limited youth cultural adaptation. For example in the 1950s, Los Angeles delinquency professionals promoted the growth of youth clubs to curb crime. Many of these clubs turned to working on cars and contributed to the growth of custom car culture, hot rods, and lowriders. By the mid1960s, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, a supporter of youth clubs in the 1950s, was looking to shut down the East Los Angeles car clubs because constant cruising created too much traffic on Whittier Boulevard, and local area merchants complained of lost revenues and surly teenage customers. A secondary goal of my dissertation is to look at the relationship between the state and the cultural politic of youth. I will demonstrate that both the state and youth had active roles in shaping policy and opportunities for youth.

Theoretically, I am also oriented to view these changes on a spatial level. I have chosen Los Angeles as the site of my research not only for its dynamic economic changes in the postwar period, multi-racial and ethnic makeup, and shifting political coalitions, but also because the city has served as a model from which to understand the decentralized late 20^th century American metropolis. While urban theorists have speculated on the ways in which alternative communities view space, not much analysis has been grounded in social historical methods. An integral part of my project is to understand how young people thought of their city.

While historians of the counterculture and New Left have well chronicled developments in the 1960s, the history of 1950s youth culture and politics, and in Los Angeles, is much less developed. This dissertation will link these two decades and show how young Angelenos of the 1950s actively created cultural and political opportunities for 1960s youth.