So hold the door for ladies while wearing nothing but a hat! All cultural sides are satisfied! 
Has zero to do with the decline-in-manners Starving always complains about. Has zero to do even with the loss of stigma of divorce you mention – that was entirely because of the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution and the general decline of the “Christian consensus,” none of which were rooted in government action or activism, and all of which we ought to be grateful for now.
Not just the wealth gap, but the awareness of the wealth gap. Before television entered virtually every home who knew about the lifestyles of the rich and famous? All of a sudden people knew how the wealthy were living. There’s a factor of wealth inflation as well. In the 1950’s Ralph Kramden lived a lifestyle appropriate to that of a bus driver, but in the sixties and seventies sitcom families lived lifestyles that would have required incomes far exceeding their occupations. You had waitresses living in $2,500/month apartments and wearing thousands of dollars in designer clothing.
Didn’t Americans have a lot more respect for the government in the Good Old Days?
Vas you dere, Charlie? FDR was not activist? Truman was not activist? Ike wasn’t very activist true, but he did start one of the biggest public works projects in history, the interstate highway system, and he did send troops to Little Rock. LBJ’s Great Society was seen as an extension of the New Deal, not something radically new.
We’re talking the 1950s here, not the 1850s, right? Retirement planning? We had Social Security then, and many people had good pensions. My grandfather was able to lead a comfortable life on these, having been a union plumber all his life and far from rich. Low inflation and relatively low medical bills reduced concern a lot.
Marriage a key protection from unemployment? You must be kidding. Since very few women worked, a laid off wage earner was the entire family salary. The thing that was actually different was that most companies did not have a policy of dumping staff at the slightest downturn. People working for defense contractors were the exception. My uncle went through several companies until he got fed up and decided to become a school teacher. Lots of companies actually did offer lifetime employment. When I joined the Bell System in 1980 there was a club called Telephone Pioneers for people who had been there at least a decade, I think, possibly more. There were lots of members, and it was supported by the company. Back then, being laid off was something to be ashamed of, and thought of us as a blemish on one’s record. Not today.
For normal people, yes, not for the rich or for Hollywood stars. But I suspect this was a problem of sexual equality more than what you say. After all, a woman not in the workplace was going to feel the impact of a divorce far more than one today, and if a woman was supposed to fulfill the role of a wife, resigning would be looked down upon. And there was also the problem of more adherence to the majority religion. I was unaware of any of the aspects you mention. Two of my best friends did not have fathers living at home, and there was absolutely no issue from anyone at home or in school. None. One uncle married in the army and got divorced soon afterward. He was seen as foolish for being enticed by this woman, but there was no shame about the divorce and he did get remarried.
Maybe everyone knew everyone in small towns. In 61 or 62 Dylan wrote about New York “when someone disappears, you never even know.” When I lived in a small town in NJ in the '80s and '90s there was far more the sense of everyone knowing everyone else than Queens in the '50s.
You think there was no home relief back then? You think there were no con artists? Hah! Not to mention that some guy in a car tried to get me to climb in with him in the mid '50s. The news didn’t report it, but it happened. And CBS discovered many people going hungry in this paradise of yours. That they were faceless and ignored didn’t mean that they didn’t exist.
So, 1929 - 1933 was just dandy? None of this unemployment insurance or retirement nonsense then right? People were helping each other, and Hoover was reelected in a landslide.
Budgets are always limited, but people aren’t turned against each other when they all care about the good of the country, which most people from both parties did in the '50s. When one party tries to make anything that might help anyone else sound like robbery, then we do get people turning against each other.
Back then, 1% of the very rich weren’t sucking up enormous amounts of wealth. CEOs made big money, but not tens of millions. There was still money for a decent wage for most, and for pensions, and for taxes high enough to have a surplus to pay of the WW II debts. People like my father, with only a high school education and a reasonably low level job at the UN could afford to buy a house, and when I was born shortly afterward my mother could afford to stop working and take care of me. Things were tight, but they managed pretty well.
Have any examples of government reducing the value of reputation? I do agree that for most companies reputation was more important than the current price of their stock, and things like Enron and the banks were much rarer.
Ah yes. The mugger conks you on the head and steals your wallet, and then yells at you for blaming him.
Remember, many problems were the fault of government back then. In New York it was almost impossible to get a divorce without proof of infidelity. (Might still be.) Government prevented access to birth control. Government assisted in censorship. Government forced prayer in the schools and blue laws.
The zero sum game is largely artificial. When you ratchet down taxes, and refuse to raise them in times that government must do more, that if forcing a zero sum game on government, not recognizing one. Colbert is now asking radical right wingers if they would raise taxes even a little to save a whole city of grandmothers from terrorists. He asked that scumbag Grover Norquist this last night. The answer is always no.
We had Birchers in the '50s - they have taken over the Republican party today.
So I emailed my uncle asking him for examples of data fitting the curve I described in the OP. Here was his response:
I’m honestly not certain what he means about foreign-born as fraction of US population. The rest of those are all things where it’s clear which direction is “good”. I’m guessing that there wasn’t much immigration during the war itself, so that foreign-born-as-fraction must have been at its lowest in the early 60s, which clearly isn’t either good or bad in and of itself, but I guess is just another example of a trend which follows the same basic curve. But you can see here that there are plenty of things that were measurably different then other than just “white middle class people think everyone is polite”.
He then went on to email me this:
I’m not sure that is true about the foreign born. Remember, there was massive immigration from the late 19th century until the various laws shut it down during the ;20s, and many people from this wave were still alive in the early’60s. My grandfather was born in Russia, as was Isaac Asimov, and his parents. Today those immigrants seem true Americans, while the ones coming today seem more different to our eyes. I’m not sure that was true back then.
Also along these lines, TV exposes people to ads for products the average person hasn’t a hope of ever affording (like luxury automobiles). A good advertisement stimulates desire for the product; that in turn can create frustration and unhappiness when the person viewing the ad knows the wanted item will remain forever out of his reach. Prior to TV, the average person saw fewer ads for unaffordable luxury products, because those ads were more likely to be placed in print publications wealthy people (but not many working class folks) read.
But again this is a rosy glassed view of the past. Voluntary charity was enough - for the problems of middle class white people who belonged to a community of people like them. But there were plenty of Americans who fell outside of this system.
The traditional solution to the problems of these people was to ignore them - they didn’t live in your neighbourhood afterall.
So the government stepped in because voluntary charity wasn’t enough. If people really had been taking care of the problem, there wouldn’t have been a need. But all people were doing was taking care of the problem that was in their immediate line of sight.
Give me one example of a waitress on tv in the 60s-70s living in a $2500/month apartment.
Very interesting OP. I am always surprised that these discussions don’t mention TV as one of, or the single largest, reason for both the changes in the 60’s and 70’s and also our perceptions of what is good and bad in society. Gald to see it come up in this thread.
Perhaps the decline of civility is due the increase in the speed of the world. People are more likely to extend a more involved set of civil protocols in a small town as opposed to a big city. As ones daily routine becomes more hectic store clerks engaging in conversation with the customer in front of you is more likely to annoy.
Technology must also play a part, there is no need to be polite to a machine and as we spend more of our day interacting with one politeness becomes less important.
It seems to me that how well you know and trust your neighbors is inversely correlated with economic mobility.
The poorer you are, the more likely you are to know your neighbors. They’re the people you grew up with, and your immediate family, and everyone else who’s always lived there because most people don’t have the resources to move away.
Marriage rates are (somewhat) inversely correlated as well. Young women with more money are much less likely to get married now. At least some of that seems to be that in the past, a single woman had few and difficult prospects. Now, they have the economic power to be more choosy.
I have no doubt that my social and family support networks are weaker than they would have been in a previous generation, and that that’s a demographic change brought about greatly by economic changes. For one, my family is smaller. I’m an only child, as many more children are these days, so I don’t have siblings to rely on (smaller families correlate with increased wealth). I live a day’s drive away from my parents, and further still from grandparents and aunts and uncles. I have close friends, but they’re (mostly) not people I’ve known forever. I generally can and do take care of myself. I have moved house every few years, and I don’t know my neighbors well at all.
There’s something of a paradox there. Will I experience a sudden jolt when and if I am not able to handle everything by myself? Would I be happier and better off if I were not so independent, because I’d have people to rely on, and who relied on me?
UberBoomer Stephen King makes the point repeatedly in Hearts in Atlantis that America before, say, 1965 is now a lost country, foreign and incomprehensible to anyone too young to remember it.
I guess that’s what Starving is mourning for. Atlantis.
Um, Alice, maybe? How nice was her apartment – it’s been YEARS since I watched that show. So I could be wrong.
I remember my parents talking about that show…
Ghostbusters, when Sigourney Weaver is first seen entering her apartment, I thought, “What, cello players make $350,000 a year in New York?”
OK this was a receptionist, and the very late 70’s, but Loni Anderson’s character in WKRP In Cincinnati lived in a humorously expensive, luxurious apartment loaded with luxury items and high-end artwork, etc. (presumably paid for by sugar daddy type relationships) and this was the subject of several jokes / situations during the series.
We allowed priests to abuse kids while most of the parrishers knew it. We did not speak aloud about such things.
We knew molesters were active but we did not run it on the front pages.
We knew some girls were having “troubles” at home with their dads, but we didn’t discuss it. We did not prosecute it.
There were people who knew about politicians sex lives, but they did not put it in the papers.
We knew some women with black eyes had problems"running into doorknobs". We let it end there.
Gays were away from the people in their own places with no outsiders. We pretended they did not exist.
There were kids that got beaten by their dads, it was none of our business.
I don’t think it was a better time.
If you want to understand the 60’s youth IMHO there are a couple of factors:
[ol]
[li]Demographics - men returning from WWII getting married and having kids AKA the Baby Boom.[/li][li]Wealth - specifically wealth in the hands of the young. For really the first time kids had disposable income. That gave them a sense of autonomy that was not present in earlier generations.[/li][li]TV - the world was visible to them, in a much bigger way than the movies or radio in the past.[/li][/ol]
These three combined to create a very independent minded generation. An outgrowth of that was a strong anti-establishment ethos.
Now - as to the “good old days” argument - I would submit that the polite civil society that is being remembered was only really present in polite civil society. (Much like the people in the south remember how wonderful the antebellum south was before the Civil War. Or the French courtiers remember how great is was before the revolution. Or {insert mannered society} during {insert historical period}.) If you were part of it, sure, it was great!
Argument for the “good old days” always seem to contain a component of the “other” that has ruined (is ruining) it for the chosen ones. The OP is full of that (full of it?). I submit that history is always turning turning turning, the “haves” are always bemoaning the ruination of their precious world by the “other”.
Just as the OP blames the fall of society on the “hippies”, the following generation (those who thought they were changing the world) blames the fall of society on the Reaganites.
Turning turning turning…
I’ve been staying out of this thread because it’s become painfully obvious that despite the considerable verbiage I’ve devoted to the subject no one has understood what I’ve been saying or the points I’ve been trying to make. However, in light of gonzomax’s post, I do feel compelled now to enter the thread in order to point out that in America today:
Children still get abused, molested and raped.
Drug related prostitution flourishes, to the detriment of the women involved.
Girls still get pregnant (sometimes at the rate of one in every eight female students) and have a 25% STD rate.
Politicians still have illicit sex.
Women (and children) still get beaten, abused and killed.
Gays still get ridiculed and bullied.
Plus:
We can no longer educate our children.
Government social programs are bankrupting the country.
Large segments of the population literally hate each other.
We have a revolving door prison system; people in their twenties and thirties with mulitple felony convictions walk the streets preying on society.
In most towns, no area is safe from criminal gang and drug activity.
Drug abuse is rampant; millions of lives have been and are being ruined and lost. Virtually every middle school and high school is rife with drugs.
Millions of kids are growing up in single parent homes with virtually no supervision or discipline.
Gang activity has exploded.
Elementary school children have begun engaging in sex play, sometimes even in class.
Society as a whole has become crass, aggressive, ill-mannered and vulgar.
In comparing these days with the 50’s and 60’s, it doesn’t look to me like the bad things have gotten much better, while the good things have gotten whole orders of magnitude worse.
Good job, guys.