On the bright side, intrafamilial sexual abuse was pretty much unheard of–it was as rare as homosexuality is in Iran. And marital rape was nonexistent!
That’s because they slept in different beds. Reference the historical documents of the time.
Its all relative, in the 1960s the riots and crime made the union thuggery seem less bad in comparison. The Beatniks were nowhere near as numerous as the hippies. The 1960s also saw the formation of an antiwar movement where thousands of young people seemed to be routing for the communists to win in Vietnam, that was more unsettling than some spies in the pentagon.
It is indeed all relative. Did the riots in the 1960s make the Klan seem less bad in comparison, for black people? Did the antiwar movement seem more unsettling than Pentagon spies, if you lived in Cambodia or Vietnam?
Remember that the civil rights movement of the late 50s and 60s came about because of the state of terror that was the Jim Crow South, and that the antiwar movement came about because the US military used napalm liberally on civilian populations. Affluent white Americans may have seen a modest diminishment in their fortunes in the sixties, but plenty of folks came out of the trauma better off.
How did Jim Crow and mass terrorism against black people fit into this? Who was on the same team as black people who wanted to fairly compete for a shot at success? Or folks who wanted to marry interracially? Or LGBT Americans?
If you were born in 1950 you could expect to live about eight years less than someone born in 2000, depending on your race and gender.
Interestingly, black women have made the greatest gains.
I notice you keep trying to compare the 50s to the 60s, while the rest of us are trying to give the perspective of people *in *the 50s with no knowledge of what was to come.
The 50s had the Korean War.
How the fresh Hell was that peace.
Also, look up the history of the “mopping up” operations in the Pacific.
We were invading islands that held Japanese garrisons, that had never surrendered.
Yes, into the 1950s.
A couple of weeks ago my 79 year old Fox News watching mother, completely out of the blue, started to say something about how the 50’s were a better time.
I cut her off. No, sorry, you’re looking back through your experience and ignoring all of the bad things that happened. The 50’s were not paradise for everyone.
Compare that to WWII though…or even WWI, which would have been in the memories of a fairly large fraction of the working population during the 50’s, or if not would have been fresh enough in their minds to still recall. You have to make a valid comparison, and Korea, while it would be horrific today (which always struck me as ironic when people today complain about how violent the world is now) was a drop in the bucket compared to WWII. So was mopping up the Japanese garrisons. That WAS peace to the folks back then. Consider the previous 4 decades…1910-1920, 1920-1930 (which was pretty peaceful, though hard to notice with a world wide depression going on), 1930-1940, 1940-1950. Then compare that to the decade of 1950-1960, especially from an American perspective (which seems to be where most of the nostalgia about the golden 50’s comes from). The only more peaceful decade was also the one where the US Great Depression was raging.
Here’s the counter-perspective:
Unlike WWI or WWII, the Korean War was a stalemate, not a win. No ticker tape parades. No declaration of surrender. And that was a huge controversy: The President had to fire the General over a very public disagreement about whether the U.S. should finish the job, and (as is common whenever there is a political disagreement), not everybody was happy with the decision to call it a tie.
But that’s where we were in the 1950’s. The entire planet was divided up into Soviet and American factions, as the two superpowers were each individually capable of blowing up entire cities with a single bomb. There was no longer going to be conventional wins on the battlefield; we’ll either have to give ground to the communists, or we will have to blow up the world.
This was a very real perspective at the time. People legitimately feared the coming nuclear bombs. Kids practiced hiding under their desks. Bomb shelters were a thing. And when you consider the Soviets got into space first, the confidence that we were going to win wasn’t necessarily there. By the time that the commies had overthrown Cuba in 1959, just 90 miles to the south of the U.S., there was a sense that we weren’t just fighting the Cold War - we were losing it (as I already noted upthread, Kennedy ran in 1960 telling the people that the Republicans had spent the last 8 years neglecting their duty to keep the country safe from the coming threat).
I don’t know how enthusiastic the general (American) public was for Korea, however, so I don’t know how the outcome of Korea really affected public opinion. Certainly you are correct that this was a time of great nervousness about Communism and nuclear war (ironically, the US was by far dominant in this period wrt nuclear capabilities) as well as the space race. Those are all good points that are glossed over with the application of rose colored glasses and a softening through history of the realities of the time.
The press was dominated by right-wing newspaper syndicates and many major magazines, like Time, were extremely conservative. The media therefore covered a war against the Commies exactly the way Fox News would do so today. The public was encouraged to be gung-ho; Gen. McArthur’s stunning drive at Inchon was the only acceptable template. He suggested nuking North Korea and got cheered. That’s why they went into hysterics when McArthur was relieved by Truman. Stalemate was a total defeat; a Commie victory that set the stage for the decade’s paranoia. And allowed the other McCarthy - Joseph - to extend the McCarthy era until 1954. That’s half the fifties.
What if that 80 year old black man tells you how limited job opportunities were due to his skin colour, and how much disrespect he had to endure from whites and how one of his brothers was lynched because he was falsely accused of raping a white woman? Sure, some black people did indeed prosper economically (and some would even tell you there was a stronger sense of unity within the black community) but overall I highly, highly doubt they would you tell the 50s were overall better than the modern era considering how severely constrained black people were from moving upwards socially.
That, and we’re the most supportive generation of sexual abuse victims, so kids feel more empowered about reporting abuse, not to mention we’re doing a vastly better job of spotting signs of sexual abuse. For the first time ever, we’ve reached the general consensus that spanking is an abusive and ineffective approach to parenting. We’ve become the least tolerant of abuse towards children. Unfortunately, this acute awareness that an adult can hurt a child in any situation has spilled over into hypervigilance. So few kids under the age of 14 have the privilege of being trusted enough by their parents to wander out and explore their world without constant adult supervision.
I know quite a few that have been one-income families at some point, and the biggest reason for the one who’d been SAHM/D to go back to work was personal satisfaction. Not covering basic needs, not more bling, but wanting to be able to put in play those skills they’d started learning in their youth and developed through years of professional development. Another big one is the dis-satisfaction which comes from the internal power imbalance when the earning partner starts forgetting how much work “keeping house” is. I’m sure there’s people who need that second income, but most of the people I know are from middle-class on up.
The 1950s were the time of the Great Migration of blacks from the south to the north, away from Jim Crow in its worst incarnations.
Cite. Perfect? No. Better? Obviously.
Regards,
Shodan
This kind of reinforces my point - that things were so horrible for black people that they were displaced en masse. And with sundown towns so endemic, in the North as well as the South, entire communications infrastructure, like the Green Book, were needed, just so black families could safely travel around the country.
The 50s were the time of Sheriff Bull Connor and his ilk, redlining, segregation, sundown towns, constant terrorist violence against black people who “stepped out of line”, etc.
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They weren’t displaced; they moved voluntarily.
It is, IMO, far more true to say that the 50s were the time when huge numbers of black people moved up out of poverty into the working or middle class. As well as advanced on most other measures of social well-being.
‘The 50s were great because things got a lot better for a lot of people, including and especially black people’.
‘The 50s weren’t great because every problem didn’t get fixed for everyone.’
The first seems closer to the truth to me.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not voluntary when staying home means very little chance at success and high chance of brutality and terrorism.
Things improved, from almost all of America being a brutal nightmare for black prior, to merely most of America being a brutal nightmare for black people, with the rest being a shitty and unequal place for black people, with improved but still shitty chances at a decent life.
I never said the Fifties were better (let alone a Paradise) for black Americans. Merely that nostalgia is a funny thing. Not all black Americans look at the world their kids inhabit and think everything is a hundred times better.
A black man who lived in Detroit in 1956 probably thought, “Things are good, better than they’ve ever been before, and they seem to be getting better.” If he still lives in Detroit now, I’m not at all sure he’d say any of those things.