Shouldn’t the Dodgers’ owner have paid them?
Well, okay, let’s continue this baseball analogy.
In the 1950s and a few surrounding years in the 1940s and 1960s the Yankees were the best baseball team that had ever existed up to that time. From 1949 to 1953 they won the World Series every year, and then again in 1956, 1958, 1961 and 1962. In years they lost the World Series they usually missed by the skin of their teeth - they lost in Game Seven in 1955, 1957, 1960 and 1964. In the 18 seasons from 1947 to 1964 inclusive, they won the pennant fifteen times.
Then they collapsed and were terrible for years.
But the thing is, the Yankees DID regain their greatness. In fact, they’ve done it twice - they were the best team in the major from roughly 1977 to 1981, slowly slid and fell apart again, and then in the late 90s and 2000s were again dominant.
How’d they do that? Well, obviously, NOT by doing the same things they did in 1955. The reasons they won in 1955 were Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. By 1977, those guys were all old and could not play baseball anymore. They could not have reclaimed Yankee greatness by re-employing those men. And in 1996, they did not attain greatness again by re-employing Reggie Jackson and Ron Guidry; they had to find new players and adapt to the way baseball was played in 1996. They’re in a bit of a lull now, but if they do well again, it will not be with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera and those guys, because they’re washed up. It will be with new players and new coaches.
Hell, the Cubs won the frickin’ World Series and they hadn’t won a World Series in 100 years. But it wasn’t by adopting the practices of the 1908 Cubs. You don’t even play baseball the same way anymore, or run a pro sports franchise the same way. They won with the new methods of running a baseball team, methods current to 2016.
There is no particularly convincing reason why the United States cannot be an even greater country than it currently is. What is for sure is that it will not achieve greatness by trying to pretend it’s 1955 again. It will achieve greatness by taking the steps appropriate to the early 21st century.
Boy, every history textbook has the Civil Rights Act year wrong, then.
The USA was not a great country then, and hasn’t been since. It was and is a large and powerful one, but far from a great one. In 1955, I applied for admission to a state university and was accepted, but not one single black student was. A few years later, my classmates were sent across an ocean to kill several million people for no other reason than that they dared to defend their homeland.
Sorry, I have my own opinion about what makes a great country.
Something to consider is that “middle class prosperity” of the 1950s looks a lot like poverty today. Imagine a family who lives in a 900 square foot home, where the kids share a room and everybody shares a bathroom. They own one small black and white TV- no cable. The parents share 1 car. No video game system, no WiFi, and only one phone, which is tied to a wall and doesn’t make long distance calls. Probably no air conditioning either. And a much smaller choice of foods to eat.
Prosperous? Relatively speaking, not so much. “Nostalgia is the ability to remember yesterday’s prices while forgetting yesterday’s wages.”
This wasn’t in America, but when Grandpa would get to waxing poetic about how great things were back in his childhood/youth, we had several ways to shut him up quickly:
How old was Aunt Tere? (his sister who died of a childhood illness for which we now vaccinate. For those who are thinking “that’s cruel”, we refrained from asking about his daughter who died of an illness that’s now curable with antibiotics).
And the father was the Lord and Master of the household, right? (his only spanked occasionally. Most other fathers in the building used the belt regularly, and were considered mild if they grabbed it by the buckle)
Your mom could read and write, yes? (from childhood, having been a notary’s daughter and, after her father died, an innkeeper’s daughter. Grandpa’s MiL was taught to read in her teens, when she joined a household where the masters required that all their servants be literate)
That part is what’s considered standard housing for a family or 4 or 5 in many European countries. How much would it cost in Manhattan?
Another factor in the growth of the US economy back then: The ending of colonization. A lot of the European colonies were somewhat inaccessible to US businesses. With the colonizers leaving, the new governments were quite interested in letting US businesses come in and set up shop.
How are you going to recreate that effect today?
And polio. Polio was great wasn’t it? Gotta bring that back. From almost 60,000 cases a year to virtually none in a decade.
And the actual poverty of the 1950s looks a lot like something that would result in an emergency call to social services today.
And that means somewhere between nothing and less than nothing when we are talking about taxes as an incentive as opposed to a revenue stream.
With 90+% taxes, even if there are deductions and loopholes and such, you still can’t get around the fact that if you want to pull another marginal million dollars out of your company to buy a house or a painting or a really nice car, you will have to pay very high taxes on it. This encourages you to leave your wealth in your company, where it will grow, not only increasing the wealth that you control, but increasing the wealth of the community as well.
With a less than 15% tax rate that many wealthy people enjoy, there is not the same incentive. In fact, the incentive is to remove as much equity from a company, and shove it into your own pockets as possible. This gets played up even more with hedge funds and other vulture capitalists, where they buy up a company and gut it for its equity. Even though they have destroyed wealth and left the community poorer for their actions, they take a cut, and they take this cut at a very low tax rate. A higher tax rate would make removing equity from companies less attractive.
All of which could be afforded by one man working one job 40 hours a week at unskilled wages. My family was perfectly happy living like that. A lot happier than my current neighbors and acquaintances, who have so much much more. Go and live in the 1950s, and come back and tell us about it.
Within a fairly narrow window of the spectrum, yes. But as others have already pointed out, the ease with which a white male could get a family-supporting job (more or less for life) is because 50% of the potential workforce was barred by gender, with another 10% or so barred by race. Easy to get a cushy, union-protected and decently-paying job when the booming economy can’t get or hold enough “suitable” workers.
For all practical purposes, the options for women were very low-paid factory work, often seasonal; teaching, at peasant wages; and nursing, at not much more. Even those options make the choices available to most black men and women look lavish.
So yay '50s prosperity.
The point about having much less - no cable, cell phones, multiple cars, etc. - is on the mark as well.
Sounds a lot like any given person from the NYC area, they live in some very small things.
Any ways i think it’s about perception.
I dont think the family back then in general perceived that they had been doomed to existence in some tiny box, i think that it’s more an issue of today we can not perceive existing with out a 900 square foot open kitchen with 4 bathrooms.
Im not sure poverty has any corner on that, 5 and 6 bedroom houses are not exactly the norm now.
That’s actually a benefit, only one of them to clean.
And you can look at much larger homes built in or before that time, and they also have one bathroom.
I don’t think most people perceived that they needed 3 or 4 bathrooms.
When i was a child, even the rich kids had 1 bathroom for the most part, we never thought anything odd about it.
You only needed 1 TV, there were not that many channels or TV shows.
TV remained off for the majority of the day, family got together in the evening to watch what ever, choices were limited.
ALL TV’s were small back then, there was no 70" screen, and most things were only broadcast in B&W anyways.
TV was still a very expensive thing at the time, for the limited use you got from it.
15" color TV might run you $1300 bucks and $300 for a nice 20" B&W, more if you got a nice console with radio and record player in a nice hardwood cabinet
Radio was still big, and there were usually several of those in a household.
Still were lots of good radio shows then
Not quite seeing this as a terrible thing
Well, phones did make long distance calls, but yes tied to a wall.
And we didnt sit around poking a screen with our thumbs and call it talking, we walked over and talked face to face. We did not use the phone that much to be honest.
We did not need a phone glued to our butts.
We dont now, we have made ourselves need them.
Nope no video games, we did not miss them, they did not exist.
We played outside.
We ran and jumped and climbed and rode bicycles and swam etc and were probably a lot healthier overall.
We also used our imaginations and such. We made up games, we didnt control super heroes on a video screen, we ran around and played them ourselves.
We were not in anyway devoid of fun entertainment.
AC existed, in both houses and cars.
It’s my remembrance that it wasn’t something you used very much, kids went outside, we didn’t care if it was 110f, 99% humidity.
Back then of course, you could buy all metal window fans than yanked enough air through the house to slam all the doors shut if you didnt wedge them open, which is what i remember using most of the time.
I do not however remember ever feeling like it was terrible and we were suffering.
Fast forward to today, i only use the central air from late september to early october, rest of the year it does not come on.
And during those months it’s only set at 82, mostly just for de-humidification.
And a large part of that is because modern construction materials fair poorly in humidity like florida etc.
The modern marvel of central AC in every home kind of got wasted on me i guess.
I would have to ask, as compared to what?
I can not think of too many things you can eat today that you could not then.
It may not come prepackaged ready to serve, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Maybe you could do some examples?
Not exactly true, most remember both really.
The little house cost about $7,000
Pop made about $3500 per year
The house payment was about $22 per month
Today the same little house lists for $283,000
The guy doing the same job today makes $37,000 give or take a few dollars
Mortgage on that, from the online tools looks to be about $1000 per month
Price of house increased 40 times
Payment increased 45 times
Wage increased only 10 times
Neither are families with four or five children. Now, third children come with jokes about not understanding birth control.
Thenpasrt I take issue with is the idea that smaller towns with poorer populations can’t support the Main Street store. It’s nowhere as goodnas the “old days,” sure. But our square does still have it’s shops. What they’ve done is specialize heavily.
Yes, it still is a bit of a luxury, but nowhere near the levels the article would indicate. It’s more that you get your prom or wedding dresses or fresh baked goods or just other that ngs that aren’t viable to have a specialy franchise in such a small town.
I’ve also never been to any town without at least one local diner. And, often, they are cheaper. It’s why I still consider Applebee’s to be luxury food.
And the top salary in baseball increased about 300 times.
You can’t go back. Ever. The past is past. Nothing is ever completely comparable.
I was around in 1955. My father hurt his back in 1952 or 1953 and spent a year out of work. My parents had taking out a mortgage on their house in 1951 to pay for my grandmother’s hospitalization and nursing home costs. In 1954 we moved to a three-room apartment above a bakery. I assume - they never talked about it - that the bank foreclosed on the mortgage. My mother could only work part time in that bakery because of severe arthritis in her knees. I entered kindergarten in a school that was virtually all black. When we moved a mile down the street in 1958 I found I was two months behind in my new, working class but almost all white, school.
That was 1955 for half the country. No suburbs. No color televisions. Schools that were integrated but second-class for some. Doctors were distant. When I got knocked down on my way to that first school and discovered in class that blood was pooling into my sock, my mother was called. We then *walked *to a clinic for treatment.
And the food. The food was awful back then. The choices were ridiculously limited. I never had pizza or Chinese until I went to college. Supermarkets were smaller than drug stores are today. And you couldn’t get fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. How can anybody possibly argue the value of food in the 1950s?
Today’s *Times *has an article on the new London, a bastion of cosmopolitanism in a sea of Englishness, full of English who like many Americans today are quite willing to totally fuck up the future for everybody in the name of nostalgia for a past that never was.
I never miss that past 1955. Not for a minute. The world has gotten better in every way every minute of the time since. This isn’t some new revelation. I’ve known it every year of the past 62. Nothing is more obvious than how much more wonderful every aspect of life is.
I recommend the book:
The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap
I don’t want to go back to 2005 or 2007 either (no LTE! ;)). The point is an era is best compared with what came before not what came after. By that standards, the 1950’s were probably one of the best eras because life and the General standard of living vastly improved for most people.
More to the point, there was a general sense that things were going to get better and that things have gotten better. That is one point which the present day does lack.
That is simply not true at all. Every woman was perfectly free to get a job outside the home. My mother met my dad when they worked together in an industrial job in 1930, and Mom then stayed home to raise the family. My sister graduated from high school in 1950 and immediately joined the work force. That was not at all unusual.
Many women chose not to work outside the home, for the simple reason that being a housekeeper and mom was a full-time job that they already had. But there was nothing to obstruct a women from joining the labor force.
In 1955, an unskilled man could earn enough, by himself, to pay the rent on a home for his family, with the rent costing about a quarter of his income. Good luck doing that nowadays.
Absolutely not substantiated by the historical facts, and saying that they could get pink pink collar jobs does not demonstrate equality.
As an example, here is a link to the complete report from the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.
https://www.dol.gov/wb/American%20Women%20Report.pdf
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act did not ban discrimination in employment on the basis of sex until 1964.
Right - never mind that medical care was segregated giving black people less access and in some cases deliberately denied treatment for serious disease. Home appliances and food surpluses only help if you can get adequate wages and it was perfectly legal to pay black people and women less for doing the exact same work as a white man, thereby perpetuating not just affluence for white men but also continuing poverty for black people and women attempting to support themselves or their families. Full employment? Only for white men - non-white people and women had a much harder time finding work of any but the most menial sort.
Kind of blew chunks if you were a woman needing to support herself, or perhaps some kids, though - because you were paid less for the exact same work. My grandmother faced this, being paid 1/3 the wages of the men at the accounting firm she worked at, as a CPA, doing the exact same work the men did. And it was perfectly legal. One of the excuses was that the men had to support a family. Well, grandpa was absent and grandma was supporting two boys and her widowed sister but I guess that didn’t count as “family”.
Whoops, sorry - that was white collar work, wasn’t it? Guess it was OK to underpay white collar workers as long as they were female or not white or something.
Yes. And “free” to be paid significantly less for doing the exact same work.
Nevermind that women were explicitly excluded from certain types of work - airline pilots, for example, were exclusively male until the 1970’s. While women could get work, they were restricted largely to “pink collar” jobs and systematically paid less.
So yeah, a white man could work one job and support a family, but a woman (of any color) attempting the same was screwed because it was legal to pay her a lot less for the exact same work. Ditto for black people of any gender. Which point has to be hammered home again and again to white men idealizing the 1950’s - it was good only for white males, everyone else was at a disadvantage. Which is one reason things got ugly in the 1960’s - everyone who wasn’t in the privileged class got pissed off about the lopsided society.
Nothing other than systematic discrimination from lucrative professions (“that’s man’s work!”), artificially lower wages, and the like. Just go ahead and ignore how all that pressured women to be housewives and nothing else.
But it sucked if you were, say, a woman trying to support a family without a spouse (because, you know, men can die or run off or become disabled or whatever) trying to o the same with the exact same job but being paid 1/2 or 1/3 of men doing the exact same work. For her, with the same job and the same house the rent or mortgage was half her income, not a quarter. Same for black people, including black men, when it was legal to pay them less for the exact same work.