Since the major race riots in Detroit were in 1943 and 1967, should we presume that you agree that the 1950’s were a nadir in the city’s race relations?
For real?? History tells me that there was a recession in 1953 and again in 1958. I’ve already mentioned how the stock market had a dramatic tank in 1955, losing $14 billion on an announcement that the President had a heart attack. If this cite is to believed, the poverty rate was 22%; it was especially bad in places like theAppalachian mountains. The Kohler strike of 1954 was the longest strike in U.S. history, with a settlement not coming until the mid 1960s. Steel workers were so patriotic during the Korean War that they walked off the job in 1952. They did it again in 1959.
I am willing to concede that the 1950’s were a time when the U.S. overall had a very strong economy, especially vis a vis the rest of the world. I am willing to concede that American lives improved over that decade. But a decade “lacking concern”…come on, man!
How did you feel about the tie in Korea? Lots of people at the time felt it was the continuation of WWII…the fact that we didn’t win was ominous.
Are you forgetting the Soviets? What was your perception of them?
I presume that you were a young man at the time…probably from late teens to late 20’s, no? Is it at all possible that you are remembering the nostalgia of your youth (oh, to be young, unattached, and free to make your way in the world once again!) and maybe glossing over some of the uncertainty during that time?’ Also, if I may, what was your wage when you bought a house for $100 out of pocket? (I once read that nostalgia is the ability to remember yesterday’s prices while forgetting yesterday’s wages).
Yeah, I don’t get why people miss this. The Civil Rights era WAS the 50s. I think that it’s Boomers taking credit for something they missed. The Civil Rights Act was 1964 and really the decade of Civil Rights was probably 1954 - 1963. The mop-up was in the 60s, but the real work was in the 50s. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was 55, Little Rock was 57, Brown v Board was 54, The sit-ins were 58 and 59. The big happenings in the early 60s were that wypipo were finally getting onboard and that allowed the movement to finally push change, but the real work had occurred in the 50s.
I repeat: when riots struck Detroit, the city was NOT run by a racist Republican, but by an idealistic liberal Democrat. There is no way you can paint Jerry Kavanagh as Bull Connor or Frank Rizzo.
If rioting is caused by brutal oppression, why did it happen when one of the “good guys” was running Detroit? And why didn’t it happen in Deep Southern cities where oppression and police brutality were far worse?
I disagree with much of this. You write that the newspapers (and the populous) was 'right-wing" as though somehow 1% of the population had gained control of the nation. The national mood in the 50s may have been conservative though our lens today because a great majority of the people were conservative though our lens. This doesn’t make it wrong or unacceptable. The people felt how they felt and acted accordingly.
10% of the US population in 1950 had served in uniform in WWII. They fought, so they felt, for freedom of themselves and others. Low and behold within months of the end of the war, there is a cold war with the Soviet Union. Less than three years after the end of the war, the Berlin airlift is going on. Two years later Korea is invaded. The country could rightly ask how could so much go so wrong five years after the war ended. Yes MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons. They weren’t used. Some didn’t want Mac Arthur (hysterics???) to be fired but he was. He wanted to be President, but didn’t come close. So I don’t see that Americans of the 50s became unglued as you portray them. The world as a whole was more conservative now than it is today. That doesn’t make them batshit crazy nuts.
Most of the major newspapers chain were conservative and fervently anti-Communist. The Hearst chain alone reached 25% of the population, IIRC. The Gannett chain was right-wing. The McCormick papers were more than right-wing. Many people say the Colonel was so anti-Roosevelt he actually committed treason (giving away security secrets in headlines), and went right from there.
People don’t understand today how right-wing most newspapers used to be. I believe it wasn’t until Johnson that a majority of papers ever endorsed a Democrat for president and they went right back to Nixon and Reagan when the Goldwater threat was over. Newspapers *were *the media until the 1960s. *Time *had some influence, but Luce kept going farther and farther right over time. Radio news was extremely limited. Newsreels were a joke. Some small leftist newspapers appeared occasionally, but they didn’t last. The Washington Post was conservative until well after Phil Graham purchased it, and the New York Times was stridently middle-of-the-road.
Leftists had been the newspapers’ arch enemy for the entire century. Palmer’s Red Raids, the union threats of the 30s, the Socialist party, and anything communist ever. Roosevelt was a traitor to many, many newspapers for doing things we today consider obvious and sensible.
Even with all that, the McCarthy era was one of the lowest of low points in our country’s most sordid history. It was national hysteria, and I don’t use the term lightly.
Sure there were recessions. But they were mild by today’s standards Cite with a relatively small increase in unemployment to still relatively low levels, and recovery was swift. Sure there were pockets of poverty, but those pockets were always poor and most people never thought about them. Strikes were the cost of good union jobs - it is not like employers even then just rolled over. We have relative labor peace today, at the cost of the wages of the masses.
People in most jobs weren’t waiting for the next round of layoffs, whether the company made a ton of money or not. When I was in high school and college - '60s and early '70s - no one really worried about getting a job. When my kids went everyone did. Today we all know that you don’t owe any loyalty to your employer because they aren’t going to watch out for you. That has not always been the case.
Look at children’s books. When the Ramona series started (with the pre-Ramona books also) she lived in a one wage earner secure environment. That was the '50s. By the '70s her father got laid off, her mother had to work, and they were living on the edge. Beverley Cleary was not at the forefront of the books about social problems movement.
Your concessions would seem to contradict your earlier statement that " One of the things about the '50s was the lack of concerns (for white males, of course.)" Does it not? People in the 50’s might have had less concerns than people in other decades (I’m not sure), but they certainly didn’t lack concerns. Or is this a case where every concern I could mention doesn’t count, in a no-true Scotsman kind of way?
Incidentally, I am not clear on how your cite substantiates the fact that the recessions in the 1950’s were mild by today’s standards. I see a chart with GPD and unemployment levels; both were better off in years outside the 1950’s.
I’ve argued that much of the nostalgia of the 1950’s comes from people who are recalling their childhood innocence, so please forgive me for finding your reference to Bevery Cleary as quaint. It is my impression that the literary zeitgeist of the era is more encapsulated by such titles as Fahrenheit 441, The Crucible, On The Road, Catcher In The Rye, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
It wasn’t great for women who were getting kicked out of their high paying union jobs, either.
However, the US was building the interstates, encouraging homeownership and college educations. generally believing in its people and the future. That’s what people remember, happily ignoring that it applied to only ~35%.
The country was conservative in the 1950s. So what? The country is more liberal now and surprise, surprise, so is the media.
Once again it seems as though you’re trying to portray that the mean old media was out of step with the vast majority of Americans and were just dragging them to the right. The west had an issue with communism in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The west had an issue with the Soviet Union in the 40s - 90s. Even if I agree with your supposition about the media, and I’m not sure I do, beginning with Roosevelt, there have been more years of democrats in the White House than republicans, so the county seems to figure it all out.
The right makes the same argument now. The media is dragging the county to the left, but we have a republican President, and a majority of elected officials throughout the country are republicans. Imagine that.
My main issue with your post is that you make it seem as if “THE MEDIA” or others pulled the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting Americans and forced them to the right where they wouldn’t have been on their own.
Maybe the media responded to how the country felt, not the other way around? Maybe they just didn’t like communism and what was happening in the cold war? Maybe our grandparents in the 50s weren’t as dumb and naïve as you think they were and they were actually just conservative because they were?
The newspapers were anti-Communist because until 1953 one of the greatest mass murderers in history was dictator of the Soviet Union. Anyone who was paying attention was anti-Communist. The Cold War was a real thing - it wasn’t just a misunderstanding.
The anti-socialist movement predates that by quite a bit of time. The Finnish Miners who were striking for the right to Unionize in 1907 is a good example.
The federal government actually lost a court case where they tried to deny Finns citizenship under the Chinese exclusion act due to these concerns.
The main difference is that in the 1950’s Johnson and others decided to include Catholics and Jews into the “American Culture” in what was the new “judeo christian” culture claim.
This was a large shift compared to the pre-war era when Catholics were common targets for the KKK and other groups like the American Legion who were pro-fascism and anti-catholic.
Remember that the American Legion worshiped Mussolini and asked him to come and speak dozens of time. This pro-fascist anti-communist and anti-catholic sentiment is part of the reason that the American legion and others pushed the pledge of allegiance and other attempts to induce nationalism.
The 50’s were an era of ugly xenophobia and un-American atrocities. Although I can see how someone who idealizes fascism could view it as a golden era.
The history books do seem to paint it in such a lens for those of us who don’t happen onto the ugly truth hiding below the propaganda.
In 1951 at Curly’s Chesterfield Club in Waterloo, Iowa, you could get an all-you-can-eat Sunday dinner for $1.50.
That got you “Fried Chicken served family style, with Tomato Juice, Shrimp or Fruit Cocktail, Relish Dish, Salad Bowl, Hot Biscuit, Mashed Potatoes, Cream Gravy, String Beans, Pie or Ice Cream, choice of drink (i.e., non-alcoholic beverage).”
The 1950s were a great time for eating lots of non-heart friendly food at low prices in Iowa.
My home town was the location of our “State Hospital” where in the 1950’s when homosexuality and female promiscuity were defined as a mental illnesses.
It was a booming “industry” when these individuals were involuntarily committed to the mental hospital.
These people were subject to electro-shock therapy, insulin injections aimed at causing “curative” seizures, and other cruel punishments. While I grew up in the 1970/80’s and missed the 50’s era. I did my Eagle Scout project at the facility’s geriatric ward where there were still individuals who to advanced in years to re-enter the world after the Supreme Court limited the ability of the government to arbitrarily leverage involuntarily commitment to hide individuals that didn’t adhere to the acceptable social norms.
I don’t think one even has to mention the pain and suffering that was inflicted on those individuals who had the gaul to be born non-white.
As the fetishism with the era dies with the boomer generation I expect this era to be remembered as some of the darkest days of our country.
Believing that Democrats were always left and Republicans always right is one of the great flaws of these discussions. The Solid South of racist Democrats were about as conservative a group as one could find in this country, while the Republicans had sizable liberal and moderate wings. The Democrats were so conservative they broke off into Strom Thurmond’s racist Dixiecrat party in 1948.
The persecution of American Communists because Stalin was evil doesn’t stand up to inspection for a moment, any more than modern-day persecution of American Muslims is warranted because of 9/11. For one thing, there weren’t many Stalinists left in America by the time McCarthy got started. And some people were persecuted solely because they aided an active ally who won the war for us. A big clue is to look at the government persecution of fascists and the American Bund in the 1930s. There wasn’t any. There wasn’t the same level of persecution of fascists during the war as there was persecution of communists after. (Did the Dixiecrats, the worst major third party in American history, get persecuted? No, they got seniority and took over Congress.)
Instead, the U.S. government at many levels used its resources to persecute American citizens solely because they had perfectly legal but different beliefs: they were the thought police, quite literally. There was no excuse for it then. We now know that although some people were Communists in fact that no reason existed in hindsight for persecuting them.
In a great show of contrition, we’ve stopped demanding loyalty oaths. And … And that’s about it. Many people in and out of government want to continue to persecute people for their thoughts. Many people in and out of government refuse to condemn McCarthy and all his ilk as some of the rankest shit ever scraped off the bottom of American shoes. To the contrary, a neo-McCarthy movement is forming all around us. How is this possible?
My answer is that people whitewash the 50s. My advice is to step into the reek, push aside the blinders, get good and sick, and when you stop retching vow that you will do everything you can to ensure that it will never happen again.
More pointedly, the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in 1949, a scant 4 years after the U.S. had used two to bring Japan to surrender. Then, they tested a hydrogen bomb in 1952.
It wasn’t so much that the Soviets were brutal murderers. It was that they were brutal murderers with the firepower to blow up cities. The U.S. wasn’t the only one with that capacity.
You can imagine why, then, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 would have had Americans shitting bricks: Soviet nukes from space sounded imminent.