Those Conformist Fifties

One of my pet peeves—and if you don't air a pet peeve now and then, you're not really blogging—is when people say the Fifties were conformist. Just like that, they say it. Everyone conformed and was bored and Ike's face smiled like a full moon over the decade and nothing of interest happened. My guess is that the people who say this derive their knowledge of history and the arts from Nick at Nite. So as a public service, I'm going to start a series of examples of not-entirely-conformism from that much- and wrongly maligned decade. Example the first: