Highpoint of 20th Century American Culture?

[Ideologue]

And anyway, you chose a different path on the love-fear spectrum.

[CountDeMoney]

There's a spectrum?  Nobody told me that.

[Ideologue]

You don't get the reference because you were born in 1970.

[CountDeMoney]

It should've been on Betamax then, dammit.

[The Larch]

I'm torn between the 20s (Lost Generation, early pulp, Harlem Renaissance, big bands), 40s (classic Hollywood, Hopper), 50s (Beat generation, classic r&r, r&b) and late 60s-early 70s (Pop art, counter culture, New Hollywood). Anyway it's hard as hell to pinpoint some of these movements to a particular era.

[jimmy olsen]

Anyway, I voted 80s.  Both MTV and Reagan's 300-ship Navy defeated the Soviet Union in between commercial breaks before The Day After and The Cosby Show.  It was the high point of Pax Americana.

It was a 600 ship navy!

[Josquius]

Probably the 50s/60s out of momentum but the 20s was the true point after which the rot set in.
Thank you very much Henry Ford.

[grumbler]

Sixties.  Motown.  Hitchcock at his finest.  The Real James Bond(TM).  Motown. The Space Race, counter-culture, 2001, Vonnegut hitting his stride, ditto Dr Seuss.  Motown.  The scariest movie ever made (The Haunting), the best movie ever made (The Lion in Winter), the funniest movie ever made (either Dr Strangelove, or The Producers, depending on your taste in humor, but both from the 60s). And Motown.

Edited:  Dr Strangelove was a high point of British culture.  Still, one of the two contenders for funniest movie ever made.

[Queequeg]

60s is Hitchcock at his highest?   

[grumbler]

60s is Hitchcock at his highest?   

Psycho was his best flick.  It came out in 1960.

[Queequeg]

60s is Hitchcock at his highest?   

Psycho was his best flick.  It came out in 1960.

Vertigo and Rear Window are both better, and beyond that there's so much Hitchcock goodness in the 50s that it overwhelms whatever superiority you give to Psycho. 

[Savonarola]

I went with the 1920s due to the literary output (Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance Writers and the best of Pound and Eliot) as well as the architecture (art deco at its most exuberant.)

It's a tough call though; while the 20s was the era of some of Gershwin's finest work as well as Ive's mature period; jazz, the great American musical form, developed much more in the 1930s and onward with the advancement in recording techniques.  Visual Arts came into their own more after the Second World War and the New York School (prior to that Paris was the worldwide art market.)  The cartoons of the 20s were expanded Sunday Funnies (Felix the Cat being an exception); they became a distinct art form in the 1930s.

[grumbler]

Vertigo and Rear Window are both better, and beyond that there's so much Hitchcock goodness in the 50s that it overwhelms whatever superiority you give to Psycho.

You can argue about which is his best film, and thus represents his finest work, but you can't argue that his finest work isn't his finest work because there are a bunch of inferior works that, taken together, represent "goodness."  It's like the difference between arguing what name we should use for Mount Everest, and arguing that Everest isn't the highest mountain because, if you add the heights of K-2, the Matterhorn, and Mount Kenya, they are higher.

[Sheilbh]

For me I'd take Hitchcock in the 50s over the rest of his work: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief (Grace Kelly ), North by Northwest, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Similarly I think 1959 is to jazz what 1922 is to literature, that year Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, the Shape of Jazz to Come and Time Out were all recorded

[MadImmortalMan]

1920s. For Charlie Chaplain, Walt Disney, Al Capone, the birth of radio and TV, transition from silent movies to talkies. The OP does ask about culture. Hollywood and Mickey Mouse.