Why are the 50s and 60s a unique target of nostalgia, and is it justified?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The era of which I speak could be any time between the end of WWII and the Kennedy assassination or the point at which America’s involvement in Vietnam became a social issue. In general, though, people term it “the 50s and early 60s.”

I just watched the movie Peggy Sue Got Married yesterday (pretty good flick), in which the main character travels back from 1985 to her life in high school in 1960 (the movie itself came out in 1986).

When I was growing up in the 70s, it was pretty clear my parents considered the 50s a better time, and there was a big resurgence of 50s music that I got into as well, even as a little kid.

In the 1980s, that nostalgia was as strong as ever, as evidenced by the popularity of Back to the Future and less popular movie I mentioned above. The nostalgia, it seems, has never really abated: look at the popularity of the series Mad Men.

No other time period, it seems to me, garners this type of strong nostalgia, in which people not only like the music, TV shows, clothing styles, and other surface aspects of the era but really are amenable to going back and living then.
Nostalgia for the 70s and 80s also exists, but do you ever get the impression that people want to go back and live there? People have fun with the kitchy pop culture of that time, but few people really seem to think that those were fundamentally “better days.” I’m sure there are exceptions, but it isn’t a “thing.”

There is also some nostalgia for the Victorian period, but I think that is mostly style-based (Steampunk, etc.).

So, two questions: Why do the 50s and early 60s trigger such nostalgia? And is it justified?

Here are what I think are the reasons:

1. It’s within the living memory of many people alive, yet it also seems like a long time ago.

I sometimes think it’s funny that the 50s were just 12 years before I was born, but it really seems like 100 years ago now. Vast societal changes occurred even in just the years 1963-1970.

2. It was a positive time in which everything seemed to be getting better.

People will point out the problems of the era: racism, the Korean War, the Cold War, and so on. And those are real. But the thing is, I think the relative changes in a situation are more important to mood than the absolute situation. Which is to say, a world that is improving will make people feel better than a world that stays the same or is declining–even if the latter world is at level that is higher than the former.

Racism was bad, but the racial equality movement was making huge strides. The Korean War was bad–but we had just won the big one, WWII. Meanwhile, there was this fun new music called rock ‘n’ roll, the economy was growing, technology was moving forward in ways that made life genuinely better and more interesting, and so on.

3. We hit the sweet spot of capitalism.

Let’s face it, a lot of people today feel that, no matter what they do in this economy, they’ll never get ahead. There is a definite feeling of futility. The opposite seems to have been true in the era in question. If you had a basic work ethic, you could get a job and have a family, usually with only one breadwinner.

4. Life was slower-paced and easier.

A standard thing one hears about the era is, “It was a simpler time.” Today’s technology is great, and I would not want to live without it, but many burdens go with it. This is true in both personal life and business.

Imagine your office in the year 1960. Even if you were a pretty low-level manager, you had access to a secretary pool. Your office had a phone and some basic office supplies. An inbox for memos and mail. No computer with its infinite demands coming at you. You probably did a fraction of the work that someone does today, but you could still make a living doing it. Somehow it worked.

The bills you would pay at home were much more limited. There were no credit cards, though might have had credit accounts at specific stores. And so on.

So is the nostalgia justified? I think the trend among smart people like Dopers, as evidenced in some threads I’ve read on here about the “good old days,” etc., has been to pooh-pooh the nostalgia, emphasize what was bad about the period, and generally affirm that we’re better off now. I’m going to partially buck that trend.

I think we live in a particularly negative and burdensome time, but even in 1985 the nostalgia for the 50s and early 60s was already great, and I don’t think that happened without a reason. I think the average person today, if s/he could go back, would truly find a world that offered a more positive attitude and an easier way of life. I think that less dense mode of living allowed people to live in a more naturally human way.

If given the choice, I would rather live in 2014 than 1960. But it would be great to be able to take a break from this world now and then and spend a couple months in a world that offered a slower pace. What would be really nice is if we could find a way to get the best of both worlds.

Thanks for your thoughts!

2

Mostly, the 50s were a high point for straight white Christian men; the people you most hear express fondness for the 50s. I’ve heard blacks and women on this forum comment that they’d rather die than live back then; there certainly aren’t fond of the period.

The 60s have the virtue of being the last period that there was widespread hope for a better future. If there’s a single characteristic that later decades share, it’s ever increasing pessimism and hopelessness.

3

The baby boomers. World War II ended and a lot of young people started families at the same time. Their children grew up in the fifties and sixties. So normal childhood nostalgia became associated with those particular eras.

4

in this older thread about technological changes since the 1950’s I pointed out that the great thing about the 50’s was the sense of improvement in daily life. There were vast improvements in everybody’s standard of living.This made you feel optimistic, knowing that the future would be even better. And it’s that feeling of optimism that people are nostalgic about.

5

My uncle, who was a parent in his 30s in the 1950s, was already nostalgic for the '50s, as a better era, in the 1970s. (He was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, but, of course, a British Conservative in the 1970s was a very different sort of animal from the American conservative of today.)

6

This was my first thought. I was born in '54 and I have pretty vivid memories of the early 60s, including the Kennedy assassination. For me, those years were a great time because I didn’t know any better! Mom and Dad took care of everything, all of my grandparents were still alive, I started school, and that was fun! I had no worries about bills or my future or politics or the war - it was probably the last time I was truly worry-free. That’s as good a reason as any to get all nostalgic!

7

1950s nostalgia was already going strong in the 1970s (think American Graffiti, Animal House, ‘oldies’ stations that played pre-British Invasion rock/pop). In a way, this reason was already true: it was within practically everyone’s living memory, but it was also on the other side of the great cultural divide of the 1960s. (One measure of how fast things were changing: the Beatles went from “Love Me Do” to “A Day in the Life” in what, four years?) A lot of people missed the relative tranquility of the 1950s.

8

Maybe, but '50s nostalgia and '60s nostalgia could hardly be more different. '50s nostalgia is for conservatives, for stability and hierarchy, '60s nostalgia is for radicals, for change, excitement, struggle, and political and sexual idealism.

As I already mentioned, parents of boomers were already nostalgic for the stability and old fashioned vales of the '50s (i.e., when they were parents of young children) by the early '70s. They hated the '60s, of course. On the other hand, kids (i.e., teens and twentysomethings) in the '70s wished it was still the '60s (I know, I was one), and hated what the '50s symbolized. Punk (some of its rhetoric notwithstanding) was the ultimate expression of '60s nostalgia, trying (fruitlessly, really) to get back that feeling of open ended struggle and possibility.

Of course, one must always remember, in these discussions, that “the '60s” actually occurred from about 1963 to 1972. Also, that “generations” with clearly defined characteristics, let alone definite start and end points, don’t really exist.

9

There’s a book called Decadeology that is exactly about what you are talking about. It theorizes that the “decades” as we know them didn’t start and end exactly the same as on the calendar but rather were often a couple years off. It also argues the 1950s actually spanned from 1947 to 1962!

10

Mostly because the people who make the decisions of what movies and TV shows get aired are nostalgic for those eras.

Similarly, the web site Buzzfeed is nostalgic for the 90s because the people who decide what gets posted are nostalgic for that era.

11

Certainly for white people, and white males in particular. After the Great Depression and WWII, the 1950s were normalcy and relative affluence for the first time in 30 years.

Tru dat. Of course, I feel obligated to point out that we achieved this “sweet spot of capitalism” via powerful unions to make sure the working man shared in the affluence, graduated tax rates to make sure that nobody got overmuch economic power, and real antitrust regulation to make sure that competition stayed real.

Of course, it was harder to do a lot of the same work. As a veteran of the cut-and-paste era, I remember what a pain in the neck rewriting was, before computers got to the point of putting one on every desk. And yet you had to do it. It was hard fucking work. I HATED writing back then. I love it now.

How people managed to write anything worth reading before computers is a mystery to me.

OTOH, pretty much every business had its slack periods. And because the people doing the grunt work got paid reasonably well and got time and a half after 40 hours, overtime work for the salaried workers was relatively infrequent, and when things were slack, people could actually knock off early. Now that the people doing the grunt work are in Cambodia, overtime for the salaried workers is just another free resource for management.

And getting back to the broader picture, things were good for white males. Women were relegated to the kitchen, and assumed to just not have the brains to compete with men. (And those that clearly did were regarded as freaks.) I rather like working with lots of intelligent, capable women. I have zero interest in going back to a world where they were second-class citizens.

And knowing what I do now, I’d find the way people of color were treated to be intolerable - in the North as well as the South. Kept out of the labor unions, only allowed to live in a limited number of neighborhoods, which were red-lined so they couldn’t get FHA loans for those 30-year mortgages that everyone else got…life for northern blacks was better than for their southern cousins, but they were still, as a matter of policy, excluded from the opportunities that white people had.

No, I wouldn’t want to go back, even for a vacation. But I’d love to bring some of those racists and misogynists forward in time for a visit to my office, so they could see women, blacks, and other people of color working together, and clearly knowing their stuff with respect to some pretty complex work. Then send them back to 1956 or whenever, after their heads had exploded and been stitched back together.

12

The 50s were idyllic compared to the 30s and 40s. In the 60s people began to throw off the chains of repression. In the 70s everything went downhill, so the 50s and 60s were something to look back on fondly. By the 90s things got so bad there was some nostalgia for the 70s. The 80s will always be a joke. As pointed out in another thread we’re still in the 90s.

13

I tend to agree that the current nostalgia relates to the baby boomers . Many are nostalgic for the period of innocence in their lives, when you believed the fairy tales and dreamed your dreams unencumbered by reality. I expect that in time the “new” nostalgia will creep up to later and later decades, as the general population ages and many reflect back on the idealistic period of their youth.

I say many because there will always be children in any generation who sadly have horrid or unpleasant memories of their childhood years.

Another reason could be related to a “tipping point” (“The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell). A well-written television show or movie of that period becomes popular; mid-century modern architecture becomes desirable; fashion trends cycle around…at some point these converge, and it becomes fashionable and cool <grin> to be into 50s-60s Nostalgia, even for those not growing up in that era.

14

Yes but look at the ages of the baby boomer generation in comparison to the feelings you’re describing. They were children in the fifties - the period you describe as the era of stability and hierarchy. They were in their late teens and early twenties in the late sixties - the era for radical change, excitement, struggle, and political and sexual idealism. The seventies were when they became adults and had to assume the responsibility of jobs and marriages - and the “feeling” of the seventies was nostalgia for the better times of the fifties and sixties. And look at how the entertainment of the seventies became aimed at adults after being aimed at children in the fifties and teenagers in the sixties.

15

If you look at historical crime rates the late 1950s had the lowest crime rates in us history. From 1961 to 1971 the crime rate in this country more than doubled. It then went up by over 50% from 1971 to 1981. So in reality the 1950s was a much safer time to be alive, and the 1970s was a much more dangerous time with lots of fear and violence.

16

Those decades get referenced often, but its part of a bigger phenomenon. I was talking with my wife how the very concept of nostalgia is your brain cherry-picking memories and experiences. People dont like to consciously recall bad stuff, so whats left is this very sanitized, sugar coated image of what things were like. It happened to my wife-

She grew up in this village in Mexico in the 80s as a kid and had fond memories of it. A few years ago she went back for the first time in like 15 years, and according to her it sucked. No cars so you had to walk all the damn place. The roads were bad and your shoes wore out very fast. Not much to do for fun. Small-town mentality with all the rumor mongering and shit talking that comes with it. I pointed out that her memory of it was when she was 5, and really didnt know anything else. But her teens and adulthood were spent in Silicon Valley, exposed to college, media, and technology. Going back to the Town she grew up in showed that contrast.

17

Cite?

18

Depends on the age of boomer we’re talking about. Anyone born between 1946 and 1964 is regarded by demographers as a boomer. Only those born on the early side of that range really remember the 1950s very well. I was born in 1954, and while I remember bits and pieces of pre-British Invasion culture, I’m culturally a child of the 1960s. Peace, love, Woodstock, tie-dye. My wife, born in 1964, is OTOH a child of the 1970s who remembers disco fondly, and remembers the 1960s not at all.

19

The baby boomer demographic creates the nostalgia for the 1950s and 50s, it was when the baby boomers were growing up. Which decade you are nostalgic for depends on which side of the cultural divide you belong to: conservatives love the 1950s, sane people love the 1960s.

I do however love the native American architecture and design (beanpole and woggle, Populuxe) of the 1950s before those idiot European minimalists took over. But that is perhaps more an informed choice on my part than simple nostalgia, except that my basic attraction to the look is emotional. I just understand why I am attracted to it.

The other point is, optimism about American died out in the 1970s and was replaced with pessimism, which was richly rewarded when we elected Ronald Reagan president and started the long slide toward the current Guilded Age of the One Percent. So, relatively little nostalgia.

20

Well, yes, which is why I did not take issue with your claim that it is about the “boomer” generation. As boomers are usually defined, however, many were not born until the very late '50s or even early '60s, so they were children through the '60s (essentially missing participating in what was going on - I, born in '52, only caught a bit of the tail end of it myself), and were teens and twentysomethings through the '70s, already nostalgic for what they had missed. It was only the very oldest sub-generation of boomers and pre-boomers - born in the '40s - who actually got the chance (if they took it, which many probably didn’t) to participate fully in what was going on in the '60s, and even most of them were too young through the '50s to remember much about it. Those boomers who have picked up on '50s nostalgia must be largely getting it from identification with their parents, the people who had lived through the depression as kids, and the war as young adults, and for whom the '50s were a welcome respite, and the first truly prosperous times they had known.