Yes. YES, goddammit. All that flag waving and insistence on conformity was the basis for the general discontent. We’ve made a little progress but it’s been a long slow haul for someone my age (64).
Except that Voyager was not talking about literary zeitgeist. Cleary’s early books were published and set in the 1950s, and the families portrayed in them had one wage earner. Then in the '70s, she gave an equally realistic view of what was happening by portraying layoffs and working wives/mothers. That’s not someone’s memories being distorted; it’s right there in print.
Upthread, ElderSign linked to a list of ten reasons life was better in the '50s, one of them being “Access to Education”. They’ve gotta be kidding. I’m in the midst of reading a book about the Little Rock Nine, and it’s giving me nightmares, no exaggeration. I’m amazed that those kids physically survived their experience at Central High. Sure, access to education, if you had the right complexion. Of course, this didn’t happen to the majority of black people. Because the majority of black people “knew their place”.
Don’t delude yourself. The youth of America is not oh-so-much less racist, sexist, and generally xenophobic than their grandparents.
Did you see the marchers in North Carolina? The police assaulting and killing young black men? The Starbucks manager? The school shooters and church bombers? These people were not over 50.
Now, I am not saying that Boomers are the apex and epitome of tolerance, but they certainly don’t suffer in comparison to people half their age.
The Soviet Union stopped being “Communist” about the time that Trotsky was murdered. Too many people in Europe and North America confused Soviet-led “communism” with actual Marxist ideas and we spent a lot of money and blood trying to stamp out something that would have died on its own if we had not been so paranoid about an issue that too few people understood (and many continue to misunderstand).
And Stalin was hardly the source of “anti-communism.” American papers were attacking it from the end of the nineteenth century–not as an unworkable politico-economic theory, but as a serious threat to our culture.
Opposing Stalin and Mao and their smaller imitators was a legitimate activity. Confusing Soviet or Chinese totalitarianism with “communism” and opposing every effort to improve the conditions of the poor or to rein in plutocratic excesses simply demonstrated a tribalism that preferred slogans to thought.
I should have said middle class white people. The ones who are scared today. Not that the 50s were worse for the poor than previous decades.
Take a look at my cite. The economy recovered in a year in both cases, and unemployment rose by only about a percent. Quite mild when compared to recent recessions.
If you reread my post, I was referring to this as a specific way in which the 50s were better. Especially since those who find the 50s wonderful would be strongly against the economics of high taxes. All in all I don’t think they were better.
The books you mention were against McCarthyism, the fascism we just beat, racism, and conformity to some extent. Cleary, who wrote from the 50s into the 80s, was reflecting on the stuff kids could expect to see and be worried about.
Not all kids books were like this - I read my kids a book about kids in a housing project in the 50s (written then) in which things were not all suburban peachy keen. But Cleary always reflected the zeitgeist more than edgier writers for kids.
I think there is an attempt here to define conservatism in the '50s in light of modern ideas. Conservative anti-Communism? Truman is the guy who resisted Russian expansion and who fought back in Korea. Are you calling him conservative?
Taft was the major conservative Republican. Eisenhower, the guy who won, was president during the era of relatively high taxes and federal initiatives like the Interstate system. Maybe he was a liberal.
And very few back then from any party wanted to retreat from the New Deal. The parties were much closer together back then.
Cite?
Regards,
Shodan
Absolutely. In our world the Taft-Hartley Act never happened. Uh-uh. Shot down and buried. :smack:
Moriarty,
You bring up interesting points. I may have lapsed into nostalgia.
In 1953 I made 35 cents an hour at the California Academy of Sciences and the same as delivery driver for a florist in Oakland. It cost me about $5 to fill the 35 gallon gas tank in my 1932 Cadillac roadster. Using 35 cents an hour, and the current ~$10 an hour for similar work, as indices gives a multiplier of about 30:1. The student body fees at City College today are $29 v $1 in 1953. So, that’s a wash. However, today, if you are not a resident of the City of San Francisco the fee for my load of 11 credit hours is over a thousand dollars. I lived in Alameda. Using the 30:1 multiplier that would have been ~$33 in 1953 money. That was about the cost of my books for the semester. It would have been difficult.
In 1959 I made about $150 a week at the IBM R&D facility. It took $3.75 to fill the tank on my 53 Chevy. So, ten bucks was about the price of three tanks of gas - something like $150 today. I did not have the 10 in my pocket so I wrote a check. The $90 closing was tougher, but still far under what it would take today.
After Christmas of 1953 I was on a bus from San Francisco back to my base in Texas. The bus stopped in Anthony New Mexico and the driver told a black soldier in uniform that he would have to move to the back of the bus. Four of us, also in uniform, told the driver what he could do with that idea. The black soldier was a US citizen in uniform and he could take any seat available. The soldier thanked us but moved to the back of the bus.
It wasn’t all good.
Crane
Shodan,
The Communist period only lasted about 18 months. It definitely ended with the New Economic Policy of 1921.
Crane
Who said so at the time?
Regards,
Shodan
There’s a weird right-wing meme going around that the U.S. isn’t a democracy, it’s really a republic. My response is that the U.S. is now the dictionary definition of a democracy because that’s how democracy has been defined as for 200 years.
To be consistent, I also believe that communist is defined as the way the U.S.S.R. acted from 1917-1989. Just as fascist is defined by the way Italy, Spain, and Germany acted between WWI and WWII.
No country ever functions in reality as a platonic ideal of a philosophical theory. I’m comfortable pointing at America and calling it a democracy even though it does a half dozen undemocratic things before breakfast every day. If the U.S.S.R. wasn’t communist, then the term has no meaning and shouldn’t be used. If you want to talk about Marxism as a philosophy, use that instead. But the U.S.S.R. wasn’t Marxist in any day-to-day terms.
And no, I’m not getting into a point-by-point analysis of what those terms mean. I’ll go all Potter Stewart on your head.
While Murder rates were lower during the 1950’s than they were for a long time after that, it can be argued that the increase in murders beginning in the early 1960’s and peaking in the 1980’s was due to the drug war, cultural upheaval and resistance to civil rights initiatives.
Murder rates in the USA right now are dropping and are very close to the low period at the end of the 1950’s and early 60’s.
Moriarty,
In the 50s there was generally a positive attitude toward the use of executive power by FDR and Truman. We were out of the depression and we won the war. That was enough.
The Korean war was disruptive. Our government had heavily propagandized the US population about Russia and China as allies and Japan and Germany as the evil axis. As the Korean war developed the propaganda began to shift. The Germans and Japanese were good and China and Russia were bad - new deal! US paranoia returned with anti-communist propaganda and the McCarthy hearings. The hearings discredited themselves and Harry Bridges made fools out of the anti-communists.
We all loved McArthur, but agreed with Truman recalling him. The Korean War was not a war. It was a police action. The most powerful nation on earth was losing it. In 53 it was largely over and I still got drafted. Very confusing.
Crane
Funny - I live, work alongside, and talk to black people who were alive back then. Not a one of them is nostalgic for the 1950’s in the way you assume. Why would they want their grandsons to look forward to factory jobs when said grandsons are in college to become doctors and lawyers and accountants or running their own businesses?
Maybe you could actually try talking to a real black man who lived in Detroit in the 1950’s…?
No, it wasn’t better for them in the 1950’s because in the 1940’s they could either get ample work in the factories producing war goods, or they could be in the military and perhaps working their way up the ranks to being an officer.
After WWII it was “thanks, but the returning white men need work” and “Tuskegee Airman who?”
Sorry, the much-lauded prosperity of the 1950’s was for WASP’s, for everyone else it was the back of the bus (if they were allowed on the bus at all).
Hey, if someone has great memories of the 1950’s more power to them. No one wants to rain on their parade. The problem is when those with great memories insist it had to be that wonderful for everyone when it wasn’t. The problem is when people who weren’t alive back then don’t get the full history.
I’m sure life was wonderful for the sons of a plantation owner in 1850, too, but that doesn’t mean the antebellum south is something we should aspire to return to.
You mean “MALE WASPS.” Lots of the women who got jobs during WWII were told that the returning men needed work, so good-bye. Go home, get married, have babies.
A significant number of the people who survived after being shot nowadays would have died in the 1950s and early 60s because of the advances of modern medicine. For example people in 1950s and early 1960s era didn’t even have paramedics:
http://www.jems.com/articles/print/volume-38/issue-10/features/birth-ems-history-paramedic.html?c=1
Oh, so the very same Taft I said was a conservative and who lost to Eisenhower?
When I think of the New Deal, I think of bank regulation, unemployment, and social security. Plus that was the '40s, not the '50s.