I think people who hark back fondly to the 50’s are confusing the rosy pink glow of TV portrayals of 50’s life with the real thing.
Started IMHO thread to address this.
People remember the 50’s fondly because it was a decade of calm, after the stress the 40’s ( WW II) , and before the stress of the 60’s.
Think about the presidents–The 40’s had FDR and Truman, the 60’s had JKF and Nixon; all 4 of those names mean something today, and raise strong emotions. But the 50’s was Eisenhower–and does anybody have any emotional reaction when you hear his name? It’s easy to feel nostalgic for a calm time when everybody seemed calm and happy.
As for the OP–it wasnt just the Vietnam war that destroyed the 50’s. It was the general rise in standard of living and technology. Insterstate highways, 2 car families, telephones in every home and of course television. These were rare (or non-existant) in 1952, but by 1962 they were almost universal. This made the country far more aware of its problems, and ready for social change.
C’mon, man. Think about it a little.
- 1950s. Stylized and (theoretically) unified. We were the good guys fighting for peace and justice and freedom.
- 1960s. Cynicism and dashed ideals reveal that maybe we’re not all about freedom and justice and such.
- 1970s. Lacking unified direction and lacking faith in the goodness of society…we elect to focus on ourselves and get laid a lot. Woot!
Although most people associate it with the 1960’s, the civil rights movement started during the 50’s. We also had the Cold War chapters on Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, the Korean war, a nuclear arms race with the nagging threat of mutually assured destruction, including classroom films like the classic *Duck & Cover[\i], The Iranian coup, revolutions in Hungary & Cuba, thalidomide prescribed to pregnant women. Overall, the 50’s don’t seem to be any better a time to have lived than really any other time.
I think that the portrayal of the 50’s as being a golden age stems from The US economy doing great because we basically won WWII and it didn’t happen here-- unlike industrialized Europe, we didn’t get our cities bombed. Since our industrial infrastructure was intact, we had plenty of work helping rebuild Europe. Also the age of people remembering that decade: anybody left alive from that time was very young and there’s a strong tendency to romanticize our childhoods.
And on preview I see that chappachula has already addressed this.
And, going forward from the 70’s, the 80’s were the Gimme Decade.
For white Christian males, probably. I’m curious if everyone else felt the same way.
Probably. Calm and contentment are not the same thing.
Other than the increased prospeity, the only good thing about the 50s was the Populuxe school of archictecture and design. It was fricking cool! And the worst thing about the 70s was the way it got snowplowed under by that fricking European shit design.
That whiny-ass James Lileks and I aren’t in agreement about many things, but this is definitely one of them.
Amend that to white Christian conservative straight males of no particular cultural or intellectual bent, and you’ll pretty much have it.
-BoD, son of a son of the '50s and proud of it
What, this? I dunno, I got mixed feelings about that style . . . it’s like everything was a bowling alley . . .
Examples?
I think a lot of “50’s culture” was created by virtue of television being a censored medium.
When things like putting married couples in the same bed could cost you your license, you started only showing goody-goody families.
Thank you Jonathan Chance. I realize the 50’s weren’t perfect but had its problems that were slowly simmering and exploded onto the scene in the 50’s. The values I was referring to were things that we take for granted today, such as a family consisting of a mother, father and their children, a family sitting down together to eat dinner and doing other social activities together (board games, trips, etc), people growing up looking forward to having families and being good fathers and mothers (compared to girls and boys just wanna have fun, the free love movement, etc), consumer products being built with pride and being built to last, and people taking steps to be able to do things on their own and in their home insteaf of resorting to spending money they don’t have at the mall for every kind of imagineable service, whereas those things used to be done at home (curling hair, ironing and washing clothes, mending things, etc).
The reason why I brought up the Vietnam War was because I do see that as a flashpoint, where the kids coming of age started to see some of the hippocracy of their elders and of their government, and combined with the racism those values lost their meaning and things turned into a rebellion against the system.
And BTW, I don’t believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen and that the man is always right and she should be a slave to the breadwinner. I’m not afraid of a strong woman who can speak her mind. In fact, I welcome it!
How about things like family values, a sense of humility and self restraint, the idea that love is something beautiful and sweet and innocent compared to the drug and booze-laden goth teens that grind their butts off at the local dance clubs of today and end up with a lovely concoction of diseases and side effects because their yuppie parents are too busy checking their e-mails on their Blackberries? Not to mention the notion that turning 18 actually meant something and along with the priviledges came a level of responsibility and taking responsibility for your actions that it seems to me people were better at handling back then than people are today?
If it wasn’t for 'Nam then, would the 50’s have had a softer landing compared to the violent social upheavels that we got instead?
Shoutout to the OP’er from a former Ames resident, BTW. Go Clones!
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Amen to that 
Hahaha, but it’s a great design for drive-ins 
The latter is better. What’s your point?
I didn’t say the 60’s were hypocritical. What I do think is that the 50’s had certain values that were destroyed in the 60’s and have become problems which are still prevalent to this day, namely the destruction of the family and society making an effort to promote positive values to its younger members. And I feel that the way the Vietnam War was played out, seen by the population, and the scandals that its coverage exposed helped to bring down what was left of the 50’s, including many of its positive aspects.
EDIT: the “and the hypocritical part” Wasn’t supposed to be there. That statement was meant to be deleted when I put together my post but snuck in there before I could stop it. Hope that clears things up.
If that’s how you view the fifties, I can only asume you weren’t there.
I’m the son of people who were there, and I also have grandparents who were there, and I’m inclined to believe them that some of the things a typical teenager is able to get away with today that would make for an interesting episode of Jerry Springer would not have been tolerated in the house back then. If that means that parents took a more active part in raising their kids and to get them to turn into responsible adults than I consider that to be a good and universal theme that should be timeless and not locked down to a particular decade. For all the affordable college education people were given access to, it seems they have gotten low marks in subjects such as… well… parenting, and it’s been a downhill ride since then.