Yes, lots of U.S. rockets blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not all of these were NASA projects (they were military projects to develop ICBMs to carry nukes). The reason Saturn/Apollo was so successful was the project management/quality assurance/testing processes that NASA instituted starting with the manned programs. I think SpaceX uses a looser process, which results in more test failures. Sure, they get there in the end, but the development process seems more chaotic and out of control.
I worked as a work-study at NASA Wallops Island in 1972 in the 2-way radio and CCTV section. They had a "blooper reel" of video of stuff blowing up that just went On and ON! There were also war stories. One I remember was they launched a rocket and then zoomed the camera in on some object left on the pad. Somebody who knew the rocket yelled "That's the steering drive" as the rocket started to sway and then zoomed and looped all over the island. Some brave soul got up on the otpcal tracker and tried to guide the radars on the rocket visually so the command destruct antennas had a chance to point at it. It was just looping all over so fast that the antennas couldn't slew that fast. Finally, tne thing plunged into a sand dune and exploded.
Another story was a rocket that was supposed to arc over into an orbital path, but the timer that was to start the course change failed, and it just kept going up and up. Nobody knew exactly where it was going to come down. Due to Coriolus effects, they were pretty sure it would end up somewhere in the Atlantic, but not sure how far off the coast. They had to sit there with the radar until well after midnight before they could be sure it would be safe.
So, LOTS of stuff went boom back then.
Then, there were range safety oopses. Due to ocean swells, it was possble for small fishing boats to be missed when they swept the area. Some guys were out there in a 16 foot boat and had a Nike first stage drop out of the sky at a couple thousand miles per hour a few hundred feet from their boat. I think they were tossed dozens of feet in the air.
Jon