The 1950's weren't great

Great Debates
1

Now, let me preface this with a statement: I am not arguing that the 1950’s were a bad time in American life. Far from it.

However, I am railing against the myth in this country that the 1950’s were an especially idyllic time which this country should aspire to return to. It’s simply not true. The 1950’s were a time of labor strife, uncertain economic times, international fears, and other maladies just as surely as any other era.

In my estimation, the people who delight in talking about the 1950’s as a time of American greatness are doing so for two primary reasons: One, they are recalling their childhood, when their own skewed perspective led them to miss all of the real problems of the times and leaves them with an impression of simple goodness; it’s not actually an accurate reflection of the era, but rather of the innocence of youth. Secondly, the culture of the 1950’s was too cloistered for there to remain a popularly accurate recollection of the times. What we are reviewing is the sanitized mementos from a period that was actually much more morally ambiguous.

Consider:
A labor market of prosperous blue collar workers: That’s the memory; Americans put on their hard hats and went to work at decent jobs that let them raise their families, own their homes, and comfortably retire. If that is so true, why then was the President of the U.S. forced to nationalize the steel industry in 1952, due to a massive walkout of labor demanding higher wages? Workers were so placated by its conclusion that they struck again in 1959, forcing the country to rely on imports.

Unfettered Economic growth: The era was a time of great prosperity; never has the economy been so relatively prosperous, right? Tell that to investors in 1955, when the stock market lost 6% of its value due to an announcement that the President had a heart attack.

Strong, stable leadership: The 1955 heart attack wasn’t the only time that Ike’s health led people to worry about the future of the country’s leader. In 1957, he had a stroke. No need to worry, right? Dick Nixon was the VP, and Ike surely trusted him with the reigns of power. Well, when asked about the ideas that Nixon contributed to the administration, Ike once famously said, ““If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

A nation at peace: The 1950’s were a period of unique hegemony, with the U.S. clearly atop a world recovering from WWII. Right? Well, if you asked an American adult back then, they might have not been so sure. For much of the 1950’s, the Soviets appeared to be the more advanced country; they got a satellite in space first, and people were concerned enough about their technology that JFK was able to credibly campaign on the “missile gap”; people were ready to believe that the US was not #1, and a typical American adult of that era had a palpable fear of imminent nuclear war. There’s also (like any other time in history) the threat of terrorism, such as when the capitol was shot up in 1954.

Wholesome culture: But if outside forces threatened America, at least the society was reassured by the knowledge that their own society was righteous and good. Right? Tell that to Congress in 1953, which formed a subcommittee to address juvenile delinquency. The cause - comic books, of course. See, in the 1950s the youth were out of control, and the lurid stories they were exposed to in these tawdry books was to blame. Fortunately, drug problems were unheard of back them (except when the papers reported on the problem; heroin was a particular issue worth noting). School shootings, fortunately, were not as bad (high capacity rifles not being available for sale), but they did exist, too.

This is just a sampling. I, of course, haven’t gotten into the low hanging fruit that can be associated with 1950’s America: the racism, the sexism, the punishment of homosexuality and gender nonconformity. Or the smaller houses, the less technology, the shorter lives, the increased risk of disease, the more boring cuisine…

Point being, the constant drumbeat of “make America great again”, with its plain reference to “that time” when the country was “right,” is a fiction. Many people just use it as shorthand for fewer immigrants and less freedoms, but for those whom mean it sincerely, you are operating under a delusional misunderstanding about America’s past - and that’s true even if you lived through it.

2

Weird…I posted a reply to this, but now I don’t see it. Oh well. Long story short, I think that the 50’s were ‘great’ for a certain segment of the population. You have to put the 50’s into context. You had the 30’s, marked by pretty much a continuous Great Depression filled with privation and deflation for the majority, punctuated by things like Prohibition and the fear of another war looming on the horizon (obviously this is a US perspective). Then you had the 40’s, where we were attacked and drawn into a war we were still collectively uncertain we wanted to have anything to do with, shortages and rationing while building the materials for us and our allies to fight that war, and then helping out the many countries destroyed by said war.

It was a time when US goods and services had an almost total monopoly as the largest manufacturing economy not devastated by the war, when cheap loans made owning a house something just about everyone could do, when work was available seemingly to all (white males), and when an explosion of goods and services were available to all. You can’t look at the 50’s in today’s context wrt jobs, salary and buying power, but you need to look at it as those who lived it would have seen it. I think that’s the disconnect you are having. Also, you need to consider that this was for a segment of the population…and if you weren’t a white male you might have had a different view of the 50’s than the popular rose colored glasses version of that segment and their kids and grandkids.

3

The '50s were also a time when advancements in science and technology made it “the future.” Stuff that’s absolutely taken for granted today – television, computers, antibiotics, heart surgery, interstate highways, rocket ships, you name it – was just coming on line. Nuclear power was going to make electricity “too cheap to meter.” Automation was going to make work so easy that we’d only have to show up for a few hours a week (and still get paid generously, of course) and appliances would free housewives from a lifetime of back-breaking drudgery.

4

One good thing about the 50’s was the great infrastructure projects, highlighted by the interstate highway system, and easily financed because the top tax bracket was over 90%. I don’t see the TEA party calling for a return to that.

5

Moraiarty, you have no argument.

This is not to say that your argument is true or false per se. But specifically, you haven’t brought up anything except to point to cherry-picked examples. That doesn’t make a useful argument at all. Further, it’s easy to pick out problems and then ignore the bigger picture about society.

People have a weird habit of picking out what they like or dislike and then asserting that, whatever it was, the 1950’s was full of it. In actuality, the decade was a remarkable transition, with considerable cultural, social, economic, and technological change (and often for the better).

6

In addition, I would suggest a third possibility: that the 1950’s benefit by contrast with the surrounding decades. After the 30’s (Great Depression) and 40’s (WWII), the 50’s were an optimistic time. Then the 60’s (assassinations, riots, Vietnam) and 70’s (more Vietnam, stagflation, pollution) came along and people weren’t so optimistic any more.

7

I though that was the thrust of my post: from the perspective of people living in the 1950’s, it wasn’t a special time when everything was great. Rather, we (well, some of us) only adopt that nostalgia because of a distorted look back. People at the time would have said: sure, we are better off than we were in the 30s (during the Depression) and the 40s (WWII), but we still have labor problems (striking workers), we still have law and order problems (delinquent kids; terrorism), we aren’t even sure that we are the #1 country in the world (lots of possibilities of the Soviets taking over, or devastating the US with its communist ruthlessness). And that’s without ever even discussing the disenfranchised or the downtrodden.

Yeah, but it’s not unique in its technological development. That’s my point; the 50’s were a time of advancement and innovation. So, too, were the 1920s and the 1990s. The 1950’s were not some uniquely special time in our history.

I tried to preface my OP by noting that the 1950’s were not a bad time. But it wasn’t a uniquely great time, either. Decades with considerable cultural, social, economic and technological change are not limited to the middle of the 20th century. THAT is my argument.

8

Ask that of a person living in, say, 1958 (after Sputnik was launched), who thought it likely the U.S. would end up in a nuclear war. (Example)

9

Well, then we are saying exactly the opposite thing. I think it WAS a special time for those people who lived (and worked) in the 50’s because of how bad things had been in the decades leading up to it. In addition, it was a time when the US finally moved out of the shadow of Europe and took center stage on world events, became the dominant economic power as well as the military leader of the western world (something we certainly weren’t known for before). It was an extraordinary, even unprecedented time for the people living and working (and the right color) in the US, which is why it’s seen as a golden age. From there on you had the European and other world powers getting back on their feet and starting to compete with the US again for market share, you had the rise of automation that further eroded the blue collar, high wage and low skill worker in the US and you had, finally, the whole Civil Rights thing that had been brewing in the US for so long but came right after this supposed golden age (you also had the rise of things like the hippy movement, the black eye of Vietnam and the fall of Nixon, to name a few more blows). I’m not saying the US was in decline…far from it…but from the perspective of the core of white working class America, the 50’s were a golden age, especially after the privation and sacrifice of the decades before.

No. You are looking back and making comparisons between then and now, but the people who lived during that time were making comparisons between then and the decades that preceded them. Compared to today, the 50’s weren’t all that special except as a historical anomaly, at time when the US had a near monopoly on international trade, when our manufacturing went from a flat out war footing to a consumer products orientation. Compared to the wealth of the average citizen today, and the wages and benefits of workers today, the availability of goods and services, the sheer wealth of today, the 50’s sucks. Compared to the 40’s and especially the 30’s, however, it was a magical time for blue collar workers who could have a car of their own (maybe even 2 cars!), and a house with electricity and the appliances to use it. It’s hard to even explain to someone today what that actually meant.

Some might have said those things but still felt that it was a magical time. And in the 50’s few thought that the US wasn’t the number 1 country or that the Soviets were better than us…more brutal and maybe on par with us militarily (ironically, they would have been wrong about that) but certainly not better. Hell, much of the US casual, almost unconscious arrogance stemmed from this period in our history.

10

There was nothing magical about the 50’s for women or minorities. At all.

11

Well, aside from the incredible magic trick that maintained old white men in all positions of power in the US, in every place and without any truly notable exception, and with few or none even daring to ask questions in public about it, let alone do something immediate to change it.

Not all magic is good.

12

It’s all a matter of the questions you ask.

  1. How many incomes does it take to support a family? In the 1950s the answer was one. Nowadays it is two.

  2. Is it safe for children to play outside unsupervised? In the 1950s very definitely. Nowadays no; the world is filled with perverts who abuse children–thus we need helicopter parenting.

13

No, but I strongly suspect if you talked to a 80 year old black man in Detroit, he’d tell you things were pretty good in the Fifties, better than they’d ever been before, and that he wished his grandsons could look forward to the kind of high paying factory job he had back then.

14

I’ve heard the same thing from millennials about the 1980s. Having been their age during that decade, I tell them to be EXTREMELY grateful they missed it - AIDS, Reagan, Chernobyl, etc.

Enjoy the music and snicker at the fashions, and leave all that in the past.

15

The reasons we remember the 50’s so idyllically are emotional, not factual.

The humor author Bill Bryson has written an autobiography* of his childhood in the 1950’s in white America.
He describes the wonders of those times:

Bryson also describes how in the 50’s the future looked good. Science was making great strides: Anything was possible.
Diseases were being eradicated (polio). Mosquitos were being killed with DDT, and the new miracle substance called asbestos was making buildings fire-proof --they even wove it into children’s pyjamas for safety. You could afford to buy a new house on valuable property in Nevada—within sight of the open-air nuclear testing grounds.
Life was good, and getting better!!!
What could possibly go wrong?
*The book is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid". A good read.

16

Heck, flying cars and automated homes were right around the corner - we’d probably have them by the 1970’s ;).

17

But that wasn’t unique to the 50’s, was it?

18

chappachula, the OP reminded me of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and tempted me to try to find and dig out my copy. It is indeed a good read.

19

…as a small minority of those who lived it…

That’s the thing: for millions of Americans, work wasn’t available. Affordable housing wasn’t available.

and to not being able to get a house loan except from sharks who’d do their best to have them evicted and get the property. Dude is black, not stupid, but the American predatory version of rent-to-own hasn’t gone away. Then again, a lot of things about your credit system are just fucked up and were even more so in the 50s.

20

In the 1950s, it was still possible to find the kinds of extreme poverty that we don’t really even imagine as being possible in the USA today. The poverty rate was a good deal higher, and poverty often meant not having electricity or even a flush toilet (something like 10% of households didn’t have flush toilets in 1960).