The cynicism of the '60s & '70s v. the naiveté of the '50 - real or imagined, a new turn or reversion to baseline

In My Humble Opinion
1

This started with me rather recently reading an article about being a (rural midwestern) college student during the Vietnam war and not believing the President would lie to the people, and other (urban, northeastern) college students thinking him naive. And then the Pentagon Papers, and of course Watergate are often used as the turn to not trusting government. The author posited that back when he said that, a lot more Americans thought like him than like his peers. Watergate is often treated as the deathknell to general faith in government/politicians.

But I sometimes wonder how true that is. Or if it was only true for young people. Because I’ve listened to 1930s Green Hornet episodes, and I’ve read old comic books. Even for the superhero ones, corrupt politicians are common. The idea that the government is full of people only acting towards their own best interest is not at all uncommon. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is another example of media that presents corruption taken as a given. WWII obviously brought a much bigger “do what the government says” in propaganda, but newspapers don’t show people going along nearly as biddably as some would like. Afterwards, there was more of the same. Comic Codes Authority enacted by publishers after various outcries. And certainly the Hays Code is older that that, by far. Batman gets deputized or some such and so forth. Certainly I think a lot that does reflect the general mores of the (white, middle-class) population.

But did adults actually gain more faith in politicians and belief a less corrupt government? Or did they (at least a certain socioeconomic set) just teach their children that, even if they didn’t believe it themselves.

For that matter, do we have any measures to see how corruption did change?

I see significant unrest in the late '40s newspapers (after the war). Of course, even more in those papers serving African Americans. I can understand if its less than the 1930s (haven’t read those papers), but some certainly seem as big as the '60s outcries to me. The '50s had several in the era I was reading, too, though I was mostly looking at late '40s stuff.

Is there anyone here old enough to have not been a child in the 1950s and that lived in the US that wants to chime in? Or even anyone that had these conversations with older people where this was discussed?

2

I think you’re skipping the great countereffects.

Politicians have always been corrupt and been seen as corrupt, although that often worked to peoples’ benefit. The big city bosses provided jobs and food and opportunities to their supporters when no one else did. Even the Southern bigoted autocrats were overwhelmingly supported by the small white farmers who were helped by black suppression.

The 1929 stock crash was a far huger cultural shock than Watergate. The country rallied around Roosevelt and saw the federal government as a savoir. The politicians who didn’t support him became the enemy. The evil Senators in Mr. Smith weren’t New Dealers.

That was followed by WWII. Massive omnipresent unending propaganda told the public to back the war effort, which meant the government. Most of the anti-Roosevelt attacks switched to accusations that he wasn’t doing enough the right way but that they could.

The postwar period did not see the usual immediate shrinkage of the federal government because of the Cold War. People needed to stay patriotic, and publicly patriotic. It greatly helped that the US was the only major country undevastated by the war and so its economy owned the world. The President was the leading war hero and the most trusted man.

Such a period couldn’t last without yet another gigantic national crisis to force acceptance. The national mood reverted to the norm when Eisenhower left office. Vietnam and Watergate were piled on civil rights, the youth movement, the women’s movement, and other major cultural shifts, plus Kennedy’s assassination. The baby boomer flood after repressed birth rates would have changed the culture no matter what else happened, but these coinciding changes were boosted by their economic independence - the first time such a young cohort experienced it. (Child labor was never economic independence except in extreme cases.)

This backlash was fleeting. The hippies got crushed, remember. Nixon won 1972 in a gigantic landslide. Joe Sixpack took over. Reagan told people that the government was the enemy while using the government to crush all his cultural enemies for the benefit of his white base. It was as brilliant a maneuver as any fictional dictator’s. The right has followed his line every moment since.

History and memory seldom coincides with the feelings of people who lived through times day by day. And two things can be true at once. Today a large percentage of Americans are loudly insistent that the government needs to be slashed from top to bottom while belonging to a cult of personality that wants to overturn the constitution to run the government themselves. Nobody will believe that in a century. Certainly nobody will understand it.

The American people have always been cynical and complain loudly, except when they are seeing the benefits personally. Then they are fierce and unyielding defenders. Whose ox is gored explains everything in politics.

3

It’s always dangerous to generalize about generations and the periods in which they lived.

The '50s featured a strong background of war and feared nuclear confrontation (which extended to the '60s). Demagogues had considerable influence, there was considerable infighting and even Eisenhower wasn’t immune to charges of being soft on Communism and complicit in betrayal. It wasn’t all milk and cookies and “Leave It To Beaver”.

Even during WWII there were corruption scandals, resentment over people ducking military service and a conviction among many that the war would be prolonged in the late 1940s and be followed by a depression due to a mass influx of ex-servicement into the labor supply.

*when it comes to reading the mood of the times, I’d take “Green Hornet” over “Leave It To Beaver”.

4

There was a lot of cynicism about the U.S. by Americans in the 1950s. There were the beatniks. There was Mad magazine. There was much of the early civil rights movement, causing many Blacks to be cynical of the U.S. There was a desperate attempt by the cultural leaders of the U.S. to persuade the American public that World War II was a temporary period in American women’s culture. They tried to persuade women who had worked in jobs traditionally held by men that they could now quit those jobs and go back to being just homemakers. Not surprisingly, many women rebelled and insisted on keeping those jobs. The 1960s were just the point when the barely suppressed rebellions of the 1950s finally broke free.

5

It’s not just Leave It To Beaver, it’s Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show. Father Knows Best, almost forgotten today, hugely popular at the time. The 1950s was the first decade of suburbanization or so it seemed. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California. Baby Boom going on, so entertainment targeting or featuring kids and families was popular. It was a real thing, a way the decade was trying to represent itself.

Families like those on the above shows had been featured before, but pre-WWII they would have been seen as upper class, not middle class. It was something that was portrayed, but not without the lower classes, servants, in the same society. Plus those eras had bigger rural and urban ethnic populations, and those were sometimes portrayed in media of the time.

Urban ethnic and rural were shrinking in the 1950s and took a back seat to the portrayals of suburbanization. There was an attempt to move forward on social issues, Sidney Poitier first became popular during the decade. But I think the trend at the time was to present those issues in a quieter, nobler fashion. The rural and urban ethnic elements would come back in subsequent decades, but the perception of how the 1950s portrayed itself isn’t inaccurate.

6

What precisely does this mean? What is “nobler” and does “louder” inherently mean less noble to you?

7

My impression (which may or may not be accurate—I was quite young at the time, and not around at all earlier) is that Watergate was the “deathknell” to faith in the Presidency in particular. Americans have long believed that there was significant corruption in politics, but many felt that the POTUS was above all that.

8

Even Peanuts subverted the view that children (aka young people) were clueless innocents.

9

There had been twelve million comic strips with worldly children before Peanuts. Comics essentially started with the Katzenjammer Kids and the Yellow Kid (Hogan’s Alley). People believe what they want to believe. That never changes.

Besides, Peanuts is a terrible example. The characters spent all their time saying things that most adults couldn’t articulate. Children that mouth elderly wisdom seem cute but have nothing to do with undermining peoples’ perception of childhood innocence.

10

“To you?” My impression is that referred to how people at the time saw it, not Jay_Z.

11

My impression is that it was how Jay_Z saw it. Guess we’ll have to wait for clarification.

12

I was reporting, not endorsing. My opinion of what the era was trying to put forward with Poitier et al. Yes, louder later was better.

13

One thing to remember is that most of what we now see as representations of the 1950s was actually propaganda, advertising, and escapist entertainment, and not even trying to be an honest representation of the actually existing conditions.

14

Anyone old enough to be in college should know that no one is that absolutely trustable. The lesson of Watergate was that we always have to carefully evaluate the claims of any politician or any other public figure. If we find that they are guilty of a crime, they should receive appropriate punishment. They shouldn’t hold office again. I was a college student during the Watergate affair. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest. Nixon had never struck everyone as any more trustable than anyone else. There were always some suspicions about him. The lesson of Watergate was that you couldn’t decide that all politicians were corrupt just because one was. You had to actually listen to and evaluate what each one said and kick the ones who lied out of office and then move on. We don’t live in a perfect world. The cynicism that was at a lower level in the 1950s and greatly expanded in the 1960s wasn’t about learning that everybody except yourself was no good and that you shouldn’t trust anyone about anything. It was about the fact that you had to think about and evaluate everything you heard. Which is what we do on the SDMb.

15

One of my eternal frustrations is the way in which modern Americans have been led to believe that the 1950s was an idyllic time in our history.

In actuality, it was a time of great volatility in society, but that’s true of any era. And so people of that time would be used to scandal and “palace intrigue”, even if their notions of what constituted scandal was perhaps different than what came later.

In the 1950s, for example, the Teapot Dome scandal was only about 30 years old - President Harding’s administration was on the take. He also had a mistress - Nan Britton came forward with a book in the late ‘20s with claims that he was the secret father of her daughter.

Recall, too, that by the 50’s there were rumblings of scandal with Nixon, Eisenhower’s pick for Vice President. His famous “checkers speech” (where he deflected accusations that he was taking bribes by saying that he had only been gifted a dog, named Checkers), saved his place on the ticket. But it’s not as if it was beyond consideration that a politician was corrupt.

There were other “scandalous” things back then which we don’t even consider today. Things like secret black ancestry, or a devotion to Catholicism, stoked racist or bigoted reactions in voters.

I disdain the notion that the 1950s was a time of naïveté about our political leaders.

16

He was known as Tricky Dick as far back as 1950, when he smeared his opponent in their Senate race. Watergate was not out of character for him.

17

The move to the suburbs was representative of actually existing conditions, though. People with money were having kids, moving to the suburbs, buying TV sets… why wouldn’t they want shows that featured their life path?

There was controversial stuff, Peyton Place. Arguably some things in the 1950s were sexier than the 1950s. I think Elvis was sexier than the Beatles, who were far more safe. The whole folk/beat group period, which took up a lot of the 1960s, was tamer than some 1950s stuff.

The demographics have something to do with it. There were simply more people who were teens in th 1960s than in the 1950s due to the Baby Boom. So that influenced what was in media and what was remembered.

18

As someone who has done a little study of history, this is absolutely how I perceive it, I have to admit. I’ve been reading a lot of old thread on different eras and have almost had it up to my eyeballs with the Back to the Future references and how little anyone would see change if they went back 30 years from whatever-date-the-post was. I like the movie, but it was a work of fiction and a comedy at that, with Marty going back to a stereotypical-non-reality 1950s and having a degree of ignorance most 1985 teens would not have (him trying to twist the top off a soda bottle being one of the more overt ones for me).

I’ve read about the upheaval of the 1960s and how much a time of change it was, but the more I read about history, the more I see so much of this was already happening in the 1950s, but people just have a selective amnesia about it. On the flipside, the percentage of population of the hippie movement and drugs and such is vastly overestimated in pop history. I really do sort of wonder how that happened and how it happened so soon after the events in question. You can’t even say it’s older Boomers making history all about themselves because most of them simply were not part of all those outrageous parts of the 1960s.

19

It was representing something about suburban life, certainly, but not honestly.

20

Which is hard work when you’re living your life. I would imagine this board is heavier with political wonks than the general public but the political threads are 95%+ the same fifty people – out of how many thousand?