Your timeline is misleading. The great migration of Blacks from the south to the north began around WWI. It was ongoing in the 50’s, but it’s erroneous to suggest that it was a product of the 50’s. Case in point: The Detroit Race riots of 1943, sparked by the huge migration of Southerners that had come looking for work during the Depression. Well into the 1950’s, and beyond, Black people faced unyielding harassment when they tried to get into white neighborhoods in the North.
The same era saw the popularity of the “Negro Motorists Green Book”, an essential guide to navigating while Black, as it let you know where you’d be served in this great land of ours, and where you’d be killed. In 1957 there was even a bit of a diplomatic incident when the finance minister from Ghana was denied service at a HoJo’s in Delaware.
Hell, I couldn’t even give up being able to call from pretty much anywhere without having to go to someone’s house or use a telephone booth, let alone having more than 5 channels that are on more than a few hours a day.
I wouldn’t give up our world today for any past era. Maybe to be able to jump a hundred years or so into the future though…
The facts don’t support such a sunny supposition. 1950s Detroit simmered with racial tensions. A decade earlier, one of the worst race riots in the post-war era broke out in Detroit. A decade later, Detroit suffered the third-worst riot in US history.
The entire police force was white, and according to Thomas Sugrue, an NYU historian:
White flight to suburbs like all-white Dearborn with its segregationist mayor, began in earnest, and redlining and restrictive covenants kept Blacks in deteriorating neighborhoods. A three-block-long, 6’ wall was built to separate a Black neighborhood from a white one so the developer of the latter could get financing.
It’s safe to say few in those circumstances would think life was good and about to get better. A hellish past doesn’t erase awareness of or anger about a current nightmare. The riots of '43 and '67 sure weren’t bookends of an era of optimism and contentment.
They were the best of times, they were the worst of times. Great times for some were not so great for others. For many the 1950s was a wonderful decade, for a minority it was shitty. You won’t persuade those who have fond memories of the 50s that they shouldn’t no matter how hard you try. And what does it matter? Soon there won’t be anyone left who was alive then. So then we can move to the 60s.
I was born in 1959, so I have no direct memories of the '50s. My memories are of growing up in the '60s. And yet I still developed subjective impressions of the '50s during my childhood based on the things I knew to be continuous through both decades.
So whenever I thought of the '50s, my impressions were mostly olfactory: the smell of hot cooking grease at hamburger joints, the cigarette smoke that was literally everywhere, the smell of leaded gasoline and the exhaust fumes from dirty-burning car engines. Culturally, it seemed like a time of dumb-ass guys in high school letter jackets and stupid hairstyles, and rock-‘n’-roll that wasn’t very interesting compared to '60s music, recorded and played back through crappy low-fi systems while the ubiquitous cigarette smoke swirled in one’s face. TV shows that were all stupid. None of this held any appeal for me; I felt it to be repulsive and was glad I’d missed it.
In retrospect, the one redeeming virtue the '50s held for me was jazz, especially bebop and hard bop. Bird, Dizzy, and Miles. To me the crowning cultural achievement of the '50s. But impossible in my imagination to separate from the overpowering reek of cigarette smoke that I knew pervaded all the jazz clubs.
In 1972, when I was 12, Time magazine reviewed the new musical play Grease and commented: “That dreary decade, the '50s, is being dusted off for a revival.” When I read that, it resonated, because “that dreary decade” is exactly how I’d always perceived it. Black and white and reeking of burger grease.
Not only was marital rape not a crime, but police could only arrest a husband for assaulting a wife if they saw him do it! And those laws only changed after a few wives killed their abusive husbands.
Rape victims were seen as “asking for it” by walking alone after dark, wearing tight clothing, etc. etc. etc. After all, rape was about sex, not an act of violence. I remember a newspaper writing that “although the victim was assaulted, she was not physically injured.” (“Assaulted” was ued because “rape” was considered a bad word).
It was a good time for the straight, white, Christian man. Every one else could just live under their domination.
As I said above, I lived in the ghetto and went to the local elementary school. Over Christmas vacation of second grade, my family moved a mile down the street, putting us over the border to the next school. At the first school, the officials wanted me to skip a grade every year. At the new school, I was about two months behind in the work. The first school was about 99% black; the second was about 99% white. Still the wrong side of the tracks, still working class, highly ethnic and immigrant, but white. Both schools fed into the same high school. Nobody from that first school was ever in one of my classes.
That’s just a personal anecdote. Studies have shown that it was replicated throughout the country, though. Systemic discrimination we’d call it today. It took an exceptional individual to overcome that and few individuals were exceptional.
I’m sure many of the fathers of those kids worked at the same factory my father worked. Having decent jobs was a wonderful thing, but it’s only one aspect of life. My family worshiped education, which was perfect for me. Other families didn’t. And parents often had little help to offer. My father did piece work. At the end of every week, he had to multiply out the various components to turn in a work completed card. I started doing those at a very young age. And he brought home cards from others he worked with because they found it tough to do the math. He and my mother and I sat around the kitchen table (because it was the only table in our apartment) and went over these stacks of numbers until we were sure about them.
Do you know that it wasn’t until the 1960s when even half of white Americans graduated high school? And it wasn’t until the 1980s when that was true for blacks? Figure 3
It’s true that the 1950s were better than the 1940s and 1930s. So what? The important statement that is buried in that cherry-picked obfuscation is that the 60s were better than the 50s and the 70s were better than the 60s and on and on. The 50s were only “great” for a segment of the population which was better able to lord it over other segments in the 50s than at most other times. That’s an unholy definition of “great” that everybody should be ashamed of using.
I think the reason that we have so many divergent opinions in this thread is that we aren’t in agreement with what we are debating. Is the question:
Comparing the 1950s to all other decades past and including the subsequent decades, were the 1950s objectively the best?
or
Imagine that you were a person living in the 1950s with no knowledge of the subsequent decades, did you believe that the 1950s were a pretty great time?
If we are talking about #1, then I think it in nearly indisputable that the 1950s were better than the previous decades, if we are talking about life in the United States. Yes, we had labor problems, minorities were treated like shit, etc. but the labor problems were nothing compared to say, the United States government bombing striking miners on Blair Mountain as had been done in decades previously. Blacks were treated terribly by modern standards, but no worse than the previous 90 years and things were looking up (e.g. The Brown decision, the feds enforcing civil rights decrees, you could move to a city up north and be treated a bit better)
If we are talking about #2, then we are going to get a host of subjective things that each poster values more than another and adjusts his or her opinion accordingly. I know that many women value their careers, however many women would love to stay at home and care for the household. It solves child care problems, family and medical leave, latchkey kids getting into dad’s dirty magazines, etc. A man could come home to a clean house with a home cooked meal on the table (again, if the woman wanted to do that, which many do).
On the flip side, as others have mentioned, middle class living was one TV, one family car, and vacations consistent of going camping at the lake the next county over, or if you really splurged, you went to the beach. I’ve travelled all over the world; something absolutely unthinkable for a family like mine in the 1950s. I can sit at this laptop and gain the latest knowledge about any subject from anywhere in the world with a google search. I can turn my house lights on or off, adjust the temperature, or close the garage door from anywhere in the world on my smartphone. Further, if I was a homosexual or a minority then I could marry the person I loved or not be treated like shit respectively.
With #2 there will be tradeoffs and a tremendous amount of differing opinions as to which was subjectively better.
ETA: I reversed #2 and #1. I renumbered them at the top.
True, and yet it does NOT prove what you think it does.
History proves something counter-intuitive again and again. We ASSUME that riots and revolutions happen where things are worst, where people are suffering the worst abuses.
That’s logical. It’s also completely wrong. Riots and rebellions tend to happen PRECISELY in places where things are improving.
People who are afraid do not rise up in protest. People who are NOT afraid do. That’s why nobody in Russia dared say a word against the cruel Nicholas I, but terrorism was rampant under his liberal son Alexander II (who was himself murdered by terrorists).
Riots didn’t happen in cities of the Deep South because black Southerners were (rightly) terrified of the police. Riots happened in cities like Detroit, which was run by idealist liberal mayor Jerome Kavanagh!
A riot doesn’t prove things are horrible. It usually proves that things aren’t improving fast enough to suit the rioters.
With the caveat that it should be expressed as “places where things are improving but not nearly as fast as the oppressed population expected and was told,” this is known as the J curve of rising expectations. Compared to a flat baseline of actual gains, the increasing expectations about how things ought to be rises steeply in a small time period. It’s essentially equivalent in shape to the hockey stock of rising CO2 emissions. Conversely, it can be expressed as a constant slope of increasing expectations but with a fall of actual conditions. Either way, a sudden widening of the gap is the cause of revolutions, not the absolute value of the gap.
This is probably the one thing I remember best of my social science education. It was an eye-opener at the time, and can be applied in an astounding number and variety of situations.
Yup. One came up to me in about 1957, when I was in second grade. I was smart enough to ignore him. But this was something no one talked about back then, and the schools were not about to send a letter home alerting everyone.
I pretty much agree with this. One of the things about the '50s was the lack of concerns (for white males, of course.) My uncle was an engineer working in the defense industry, and he got laid off regularly as contracts were completed. This was viewed as different from the norm, not the norm as it is today. Lots of companies had lifetime employment. AT&T had a club called the telephone pioneers for those who had worked there for 20 or 25 years (I worked 15 and never made it in) and there were lots of people in this club.
Ironically a lot of the things that made for this good environment are things the conservatives who say how great the '50s were would have a fit about today. High incremental tax rates that kept CEO salaries relatively low and helped reduce income inequality. Strong unions. Very few people were driven to work 60 hours a week to catch up.
And my father, who never could go to college thanks to his family being poor, had a good white collar job and a house. Money was tight, but not that tight.
Oh, and lots of people had pensions back then, and so were not worried about how to live when they retired.
This is all within the context of the time.
Someone living 50 years from now is going to wonder how you could get along without a really intelligent assistant to help you run your life, without all that damn typing we primitives in the early 21st century have to do.
Look back 20 or 30 years from any vantage point, and it is the same.
I never missed not having cable in the '50s - we had 7 channels in New York, more than I could watch, and I didn’t conceive of a DVR. Still beat the radio.
Just as today where despite a falling crime rate some politicians want to make it sound like we’re at risk of being killed any second, there was a lot of fear in the '50s also. Look up juvenile delinquents. Movies and the newspapers made it sound like they were all over the place. My friends and I, who were a bit young to qualify, never saw one but were convinced they were around the next corner. And we lived in a good neighborhood.
One advantage back then was primitive telecommunications, so that the local news in San Francisco couldn’t show the one flagrant crime in Georgia or someplace far away every night.
And I never felt once under siege. The Manson case was a tad after the '50s, and I no more feared that than I feared that OJ would be coming after me.
The 50s were an attitude. It was ‘post war’ - No rationing, no 35 mph national speed limit, companies made consumer products instead of war machines, the ‘Super Market’ was created. The US had won THE war and we enjoyed the benefits of being the only viable economy in the world. We believed our government was by and for the people. We felt great.
Some recollections:
1950 - I had a union job at the Thornton CA cannery - convinced me to get an education
1951-1952 - Attended San Francisco City college for $1 a semester
1953- Was drafted - made me realize that male citizens are the property of the state
1953-1957- Joined the USAF before my draft date- got a free education in analog computers
1957- Upon discharge I got a job at IBM and went to their electronic computer school
1959-Transfered to IBM San Jose lab - By then I had a wife and 3 children - bought a house for $10 down and $90 closing.
Yes, it was largely a white male society and the low salaries made things difficult. But there was opportunity. I could not do the same thing today.
