I know that popular entertainment is not exactly the best record of actual American culture, but … Listening to radio shows and watching movies from the 1930s I can’t help but be struck by how RUDE everyone is to eachother. Compare that with stuff from the 1940s and 1950s, and you see how POLITE they are. Now I know you need conflict to create drama, so maybe that’s just what happened (The characters are certainly rude on All In The Family and Married With Children).
But I have long had this theory that we Americans were short, nasty, and brutish (The Great Depression can do that), and then the unity of purpose of WWII made us more polite. In short, beating the “Japs” became more important than having a snappy come-back if someone asked you the time.
I think it would be hard to have a factual answer to this General Question. I am unaware of what one could use as a valid sort of rudeness indicator to compare/contrast the 1930’s with the 1940’s or 1950’s.
That having been said, your speculation on the Depression and the “common bond” formed by WW2 is most likely the best guess, IMO.
One example of what you are talking about might help. I can remember the 40’s and 50’s, but not the 30’s. I can tell you without a doubt, people are ruder today than back then. My parents, grandparents and other adults I knew as a kid were all polite, in ways no one can dream of today. I doubt that they changed just because of the war. A better guess, if there is anything to your theory, is that radio and movies were new mediums. The technology was not as good and neither were the techniques of the performers.
Examples then vs. now. People did not use four letter words in mixed company and very few women used them at all. Everyone could quote you on what Emily Post had to say about the correct way to do this and do that. Today everyone cusses, everywhere and almost any time. It would be rare to find anyone (under 30) today that had any clue to what ettiquite is and certainly there is no one with a household name like Emily Post.
You may be right, but many people do know what etiquette is.
I get a little suspicious of this type of nostalgia for the halcyon days of yore, when everyone was supposedly more polite, more respectful, and no-one swore. This is especially the case when talking about the 1940s and 1950s.
Anyone seen tapes of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and other hearings desined to flush out communists and fellow-travellers? McCarthy and his ilk were about the least polite people around.
And ask an African-American living in Alabama or Mississippi (or even in the north, for that matter) during this time about how polite and friendly everyone was. All those considerate people who helped blacks to light up their front lawns in the days before halogen lamps.
Or maybe you could ask a woman who, having been told that she had to work in a factory or an office to help the war effort, was then told just as unceremoniously that she had to piss off back to the kitchen so returning GIs could have jobs.
Just because the surface courtesies and pleasantries were more closely observed during this period (and even that is not true for all people) does not mean that the sort of human feeling and empathy that i associate with real politeness and friendliness was more common.
And as for the 1930s, if you’re going to use pop-culture references, then maybe you could look at some of the writers etc. who examined the working classes and the southern agrarian classes and you might find more politeness there than you have seen up intil now. John Steinbeck shows in Grapes of Wrath the way that the “okies” travelling to California had a sense of shared suffering and trouble, and were often willing to help each other out. And historians like Lisabeth Cohen and Michael Denning demonstrate the strong ties between many working-class people and communities in the face of Depression-era poverty and unemployment.
mhendo, you have a point about it being on the surface and in fact it was referred to as “appearances”. However, that has to be what KXL is referring to when s/he talks about the way they acted on radio and in the movies. I was answering the OP as presented, not looking for deeper issues.
I don’t know that you can tell all that much about a time from its movies , except that those were the movies people wanted to see .I haven’t seen many old movies, so I can’t use them as an example. I’ll have to use the world of '50s and early '60s sitcoms. In that world, virtually everyone lived in a nuclear family, in a fairly large house, in either a suburb or a small town, married women didn’t work, and there were no big problems. That may have been the ideal (and to a certain extent, I think it still is) ,but it wasn’t the reality
I don’t know that this is a particularly good example to give of current rudeness. While it’s true that more people use four letter words now, it’s also true that fewer people are offended by them now . That said, I agree that people are ruder today than they were when I grew up in the '60s and '70s. I wonder how much has to do with the people themselves and how much has to do with the costs of rudeness? When I was a kid, I had at least a passing acquaintance with most of the neighbors within a few blocks, even if it was nothing more than seeing them sitting on the front stoop while I was going to a friends house.From my earliest memory until I moved out at 24, only 3 families moved off my block. People shopped locally instead of going to malls. If I was rude to someone there was a very good chance that it would get back to my parents or that it was someone I’d encounter again.Today, it’s easier to be anonymously rude.People move more frequently, and there’s less stoop sitting. If I’m rude to a salesperson at Home Depot, there’s a good chance that either I’ll never encounter that person again or that I won’t be remembered.If my son is rude to a neighbor, the neighbor probably won’t know where he lives.
It’s about as accurate as using recent and current popular televison shows and movies as an accurate reflection of how people treat each other in day to day real life. ie Married with Children - Malcom in the Middle - Drew Carey - Pulp Fiction - etc etc etc. Accuracy meter is way off in how popular media reflects day to day real life behavior. In addition sitcoms then and now both use extremes of behavior for comic effect.
What real world, circa 2002 adult would allow their children to talk them in the contemptous, disrespectful tone that sitcom kids often use in talking to their sitcom parents? I know of very few. Mine certainly don’t.
From what know from older people that were around in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s and from different things I have read about that time period, people in general were alot more polite and mannerly back then, trusted each other more, and cared about each other more. Just the other day, I had an emergency, I had a family member in hospital and my phone was cut off. I knocked on my neighbor’s door, asked to use her phone and tried to explain the situation, and she shut the door in my face saying how she just did not care and refused to let me use her phone. And she heard me loud and clear about my phone being cut and my family member in hospital because she didn’t shut the door until after I finished saying that. Neighbors just did not treat each other like that in the 1930s-1950s. And don’t say that she was having an emergency herself or whatever, because I get treated that way all the time and people can’t always be having a huge problem or emergency or violently ill every time I see them. No, it’s that the times have changed. People have changed alot. We are in a whole new heartless, impatient, rude, and unfriendly age. I have many other very similar examples besides my neighbor, but you get the point. People stopped caring about anyone but themselves and are only nice to someone just to get something from them, or they’re only nice to someone they find good looking when they are in the mood. It just wasn’t like that once before. Kindness and empathy from people was actually often genuine, they trusted and cared, and they felt alot more comfortable and safe around people in general. It was a time before so many people in the world acted and did things to eventually rob most people of that comfort and safety. People were also much less superficial back then and cared more about qualities in people besides how they looked. And it is completely impossible now to ever make the world back to the way it was then. Too many people now for too long have molded humanity into a much more hostile, unsafe, cynical, skeptical, impatient, unfeeling, and heartless picture.
Paul Fussell in his book Wartime argued the opposite, his observation was that war has a coarsening effect on cultural manners, morals and standards of conduct. However bad it was in the 1930s, WWII made things worse. Swearing became routine, his example with regard to language was how the F bomb became an all purpose exclamation, adjective, noun, verb etc. He overheard a group of mechanics working on something when a bolt stripped or something broke. “Fuck! The Fucking Fucker’s Fucking Fucked!” and this made grammatical sense.
Almichael’s comment comes across to me as a combination of nostalgia, confirmation bias, and a bit of “kids these days” ranting (which by the way has been going on since Aristotle). Maybe moving between a small town and suburb, or the coast and inland, or changing macroeconomic, political, or racial factors are in play besides just time.
Sometimes it does seem to me that people in the 1930s were as rude as hell, if the infallibly accurate portrayals of period films is any guide. Take for example It Happened One Night when Clark Gable’s character boards the bus. “Are these seats reserved?” he asks the driver who replies “Maybe they are and maybe they ain’t” with a nasty sneer in his voice. You get the distinct impression this driver hates the world and everything in it, or maybe he just hates Gable. Why couldn’t he just answer the question.
That’s the key I think. It becomes extreme when people can say rude, disgusting and hateful things on the internet, to and about complete strangers, reasonably confident that they will not be identified.
They’d think we’re all rogue police/spies of some sort or else costumed superheros. Both groups tend to be very impolite to whoever they’re dealing with.
Heck, I’d like to compare current films to the films of the OP’s ancient 2002.
You know, before that fresh wall-o-barely-coherent-text revived this zombie.
I don’t think there was a big change in American culture from the 1930’s to 50’s, maybe people feel better in good time (the '50’s, for many or most) than bad (the '30’s for many or most). 30’s is too far back for direct real living memory anyway, even people in their 90’s weren’t adults.
My theory of difference between say 30’s-50’s and now would be that US culture is less homogeneous overall than now. An oversimplification to some degree because there were more local area cultural differences then and minority groups (though smaller) more isolated from the mainstream than now. But movies presented the mainstream. And in the mainstream there was more of a shared set of values by which subtle humor (a lot of ‘impoliteness’ in '30’s movies is that, ‘typical irascible but lovable X’) . Nowadays it’s much easier to offend people overall because of less in the way of shared values. Curse words are an example. In some spheres of our (US speaking of) more Balkanized culture it’s now standard to use foul language in ‘mixed company’. In others it’s still considered very offensive. A few generations ago there was a more homogeneous culture where it was more uniformly considered out of bounds. Or, lots of thread all the time here are about ‘is this racist?’, ‘is that racist?’ which wasn’t a concern decades ago. And nowadays some people find that intense focus on ‘racism’ annoying, or even a kind of power game being played against them to ‘put them in their place’ or mete out collective punishment based on their background. We don’t have to value judge which is a better society now or past to say ‘the past is a different country’.
Again though 1930’s v 40’s or 50’s difference I don’t see a lot of basis for. Then v now, more of a basis.
