# Is the late 1940s ignored in American pop-culture history? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 30, 2023, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283 "2023-10-30T01:57:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2023, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/61 "2023-11-03T17:23:15Z")
The first Godfather movie takes place during the late 1940s. ---
**Author:** ![sciurophobic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@sciurophobic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sciurophobic)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2023, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/62 "2023-11-03T18:01:27Z")
We don’t think of them as being examples of late 1940’s music, but many classic Christmas songs are from that era: “**The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)**” (1946) “ **Here Comes Santa Claus** ” (1947) “ **Sleigh Ride** ” (1948) “ **Baby, It’s Cold Outside** ” (1948) “ **Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer** ” (1949) ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/63 "2023-11-04T12:48:22Z")
> **[Tradition](https://xkcd.com/988/)** > > An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/64 "2023-11-04T13:00:59Z")
> [@sciurophobic](#): > > “**The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)**” (1946) > “ **Here Comes Santa Claus** ” (1947) > “ **Sleigh Ride** ” (1948) > “ **Baby, It’s Cold Outside** ” (1948) > “ **Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer** ” (1949) Well, I do. Christmas as an American holiday of cosy secular family consumerism was cemented in the public consciousness then. Although it took a little while before the whole greed machine was fully operable. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/65 "2023-11-04T13:28:34Z")
It’s certainly the most wonderful time of the year for the Gene Autry estate. ---
**Author:** ![gnarator](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gnarator/32/8266_2.png) [@gnarator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnarator)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/66 "2023-11-04T16:21:32Z")
> [@fedman1](#): > > but during 40’s you also had the Big Bands like Ellington, Basie, Miller Sure, but Glenn Miller died in 1944 when his plane disappeared. Basie had to temporarily disband in 1948, and shut the big band down in the early '50s. Big band music suffered during the war due to the recording ban of '42-'44 and because so many musicians were drafted. After the war they had a hard time getting resetablished. ---
**Author:** ![Briny\_Deep](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/briny_deep/32/17188_2.png) [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/67 "2023-11-04T16:34:34Z")
> [@martyg](#): > > Late 40’s to me means the Miles Davis Nonet. I was all set to come in here and post about the seminal album _Kind of Blue_ coming out in 1949 and sounding like something from at least 10 years later, then found out the album, while mostly recorded in 1949, wasn’t released till 1957. ---
**Author:** ![gnarator](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gnarator/32/8266_2.png) [@gnarator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnarator)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/68 "2023-11-04T16:46:13Z")
> [@Briny\_Deep](#): > > I was all set to come in here and post about the seminal album _Kind of Blue_ coming out in 1949 and sounding like something from at least 10 years later, then found out the album, while mostly recorded in 1949, wasn’t released till 1957. I do not think that is correct. _Kind of Blue_ was recorded in March and April **1959**. Are you thinking of _Birth of the Cool_? ---
**Author:** ![Briny\_Deep](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/briny_deep/32/17188_2.png) [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/69 "2023-11-04T16:58:15Z")
> [@gnarator](#): > > I do not think that is correct. _Kind of Blue_ was recorded in March and April **1959**. > Are you thinking of _Birth of the Cool_? Duh! Of course I am! Swear to God, this is not stone ignorance, just morning fuzziness. ---
**Author:** ![gnarator](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gnarator/32/8266_2.png) [@gnarator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnarator)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/70 "2023-11-04T17:01:33Z")
> [@gnarator](#): > > Sure, but Glenn Miller died in 1944 when his plane disappeared. Basie had to temporarily disband in 1948, and shut the big band down in the early '50s. > > Big band music suffered during the war due to the recording ban of '42-'44 and because so many musicians were drafted. After the war they had a hard time getting resetablished. I was interrupted, so I cut this post short. Ellington’s band, from its high-water mark in the early '40s, saw Jimmy Blanton die, Ben Webster and Rex Stewart depart, and the band struggle to break even. Supposedly dance halls had to pay a new tax, so smaller groups were more economical. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/71 "2023-11-05T02:38:14Z")
Randall plays fast and loose with the facts here. “Sleigh Ride” is indeed from 1948 as noted above, with lyrics added in 1950. “Winter Wonderland” was an instrumental hit in 1934, with lyrics added in the 1940s. The “Fifties” are mostly songs from 1950-1952. The whole notion of special music for Christmas was very much a post-WWII “bring us back to normal and romanticize the time when we were young and innocent” obsession. Yes, I’m sure boomers heard these songs incessantly when they were young. What else would be played? Nobody was writing hot new Christmas songs because that period of nostalgia was over. Brian Wilson did write a couple of Christmas songs that were, of course, terrific. Nobody plays them. So the blame for all those songs goes to the previous generations. They were the “us” who needed nostalgia. Boomers didn’t invent Columbus Day either; it was just drilled into our heads. Same thing. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/72 "2023-11-05T05:07:17Z")
My understanding from listening to Andrew Hickey (The History of Rock in 500 Songs) is that the tradition of hit Christmas songs every year persists in the UK. In the US it mostly ended by the mid-1960s. ---
**Author:** ![Digger11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@Digger11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digger11)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/73 "2023-11-05T15:53:37Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > I wouldn’t call Eisenhower “boring.” At the time, he was the most popular US general since Grant, and he got the job done. His only real rival for the presidency was MacArthur, and he torpedoed his chance of getting elected by giving one of the worst political speeches ever. The Democrats had a joke at the time– “Have you heard about the new Eisenhower doll? You wind it up, and it does nothing for 8 years.” ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/74 "2023-11-05T16:01:38Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > Well, it was a nice moment for teenagers Actually, the word “teenager” did not exist until about 1949. check out the google ngram > **[Google Books Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teenager&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)** > > Google Ngrams: teenager, 1800-2019 ---
**Author:** ![bibliophage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bibliophage/32/7615_2.png) [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/75 "2023-11-05T16:25:24Z")
The two movies that come to my mind that were made in and also set in the post-WWII period up to 1949 are _The Best Years of our Lives_ (1946), which has been mentioned above, and _The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer_ (1947), which hasn’t. The latter is the source of the classic “You remind me of a man” routine. [You remind me of a man.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfv1Jx3_PRs&t=110) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/76 "2023-11-05T16:36:02Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > Actually, the word “teenager” did not exist until about 1949. More specifically, the word was created by the market researcher Mark Abrams. Of course, it’s just an accident of English that the syllable “teen” is in the words for 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 and no other words (less than 100). This isn’t true in most languages. Abrams was trying to distinguish the ages of adolescents (13 - 25) from those younger and older. He thought this group began to be important as consumers starting in the early 1940s and continuing until the early 1950s. In some sense adolescents as a separate group for many purposes didn’t really come about until about that time. Before then, a large percentage of people didn’t graduate from or even attend high school. Mostly this was true of poorer people. For them, when you reached adolescence you got a job. It was only in the early 1940s to the early 1950s that a large enough percentage of them were considered no longer really children but not yet adults that they could have a separate culture. With increasing numbers of them being in high school and college during those years, it became possible to think of them separately: > **[Adolescence | Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolescence#Culture)** > > There are certain characteristics of adolescent development that are more rooted in culture than in human biology or cognitive structures. Culture has been defined as the "symbolic and behavioral inheritance received from the past that provides a community framework for what is valued". Culture is learned and socially shared, and it affects all aspects of an individual's life. Social responsibilities, sexual expression, and belief system development, for instance, are all things that In his sh... ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/77 "2023-11-05T16:48:05Z")
The teenage slang in _ **A Clockwork Orange** _ is called “Nadsat” because it’s the equivalent Russian suffix: _trinadsat’_ (13), _chetyrnadsat’_ (14), _pyatnadsat’_ (15), and so on. Children aged _odinnadsat’_ (11) and _dvenadsat’_ (12) aren’t considered teens, though. (So far as I know.) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/78 "2023-11-05T16:58:34Z")
So Russian isn’t quite the same because the two syllables “nadsat” are in 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19. And of course the slang in _A Clockwork Orange_ isn’t that of Russians but of British people imitating Russians. The word for teenager in Russian is actually pronounced “podrostok”. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/79 "2023-11-05T17:02:15Z")
Yes, it’s British slang derived from Russian. Just like “droogs” (friends), “horrorshow” (good), “groodies” (tits), and the other borrowings in the book. Oddly enough, I once asked one of my all-Russian EFL classes if they got the derivation of “Nadsat.” (We were discussing the novel.) They had no clue. Of course, a Russian would never refer to a teen(ager) as a _nadsat’_. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2023, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283/80 "2023-11-05T19:02:12Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > Actually, the word “teenager” did not exist until about 1949. > check out the google ngram Nitpick: the word was spelled teen-ager before that. [Ngrams](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teenager%2C+teen-ager&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) clearly shows it used earlier and more often until 1960. You’d occasionally also find teen age, with no hyphen. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > More specifically, the word was created by the market researcher Mark Abrams. Nitpick: what Abrams did was create a marketing class he called the Teenaged Consumer. That was in 1959. Very late in the game. Teens had been known and referred to as a class for decades earlier. WWII, when the lack of parental supervision caused by soldiers and working parents started creating serious problems, caused both serious study and programs to occupy their time. Here’s another [Ngram](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teen%2C+teenager%2Cteen-ager&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), putting teen into the mix. Teen starts rising almost vertically in the war years. Click on teen 1824-1954 below and graph and you get [this result](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22teen%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1824,cd_max:1954&lr=lang_en). You have to be careful with Google Book dates for magazines, but books are usually petty solid. 1936 Adolescence; a Study in the Teen Years 1938 Modern Pantomime Entertainments: For Teen Agers, Adults, and Grammar Grades 1944 Teen Age Centers: BIrd’s-eye VIew 1946 Teen-Age Companion [part of the The Teen-Age LIbrary 1947 Teen Canteens 1948 Teen-age Football Stories More tellingly, a comic named [Harold Teen](https://www.toonopedia.com/teen.htm) started in 1919, specifically to chronicle the teen experience, already being recognized as something new and separate. > Harold Teen was just like most of his generation. He used teenage slang — in fact, Harold originated quite a few then-popular expressions, such as “Yowsah”, “Fan mah brow” and “pitch a li’l woo”, as well as the occasional more enduring term, like “pantywaist”. He also helped popularize quite a few fashion statements of the time, such as bell-bottom pants and yellow raincoats (which became identified with Dick Tracy, another Tribune star, a generation later). He had a girlfriend, Lillums Lovewell; a pal called Shadow (no relation); and what we now call a “communication gap” with his parents. He hung out at a soda fountain called The Sugar Bowl, run by Pop Jenks, whose “Gedunk Sundaes” drew so much interest, Ed eventually had to make up a recipe for them. Long before Archie was ever heard of, Harold Teen was known to one and all as America’s Typical Teenager. The _Archie_ comic, BTW, started in 1941. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-late-1940s-ignored-in-american-pop-culture-history/992283.md?page=5)