I’m a fan of nostalgic classic old TV series, as some may have noted from my comments in the “TV series” thread. I’ve recently been re-watching some episodes of Father Knows Best and some of the indicators of mainstream 1950s culture are very revealing and really quite astonishing. I’ve mentioned some before but here are the ones that most amazed me:
Just for starters, there are no people of colour in any episode. None. It’s not that the lovely Andersons would be prejudiced against them, it’s just that – fortunately for the Andersons – they just don’t exist.
In the (in)famous episode “Betty the Engineer”, Betty embarks on an internship as a civil engineer doing surveying. The parents are shocked, the men all treat her with hostility. This is simply not done by young women. Fortunately, all turns out well in the end – Betty gives up, her mother buys her a nice dress, and one of the engineers on the crew asks her out on a date. Thus is Betty properly launched on a career as a housewife, groomed to please her future husband.
Betty figures in another episode where Bud does something useful for the Air Force and gets a ride on a fighter jet. Betty immediately falls in love with the pilot because of his manly manhood, or something. They go out on dates, but he informs her that he may be transferred to Alaska. When the tranfer happens, he flies over her house, dipping his wings in a manly sort of way to say goodbye. Betty is distraught at first, but soon learns that duty to country is everyone’s #1 priority, and besides, there are other men all over the place!
Betty is thrilled that she got top grades and other honours at junior college, but then a pretty young new student walks by and all the boys whistle at her. It dawns on Betty that no one has ever whistled at her and she goes home in a funky gloom. She practices in front of the mirror to try to be more alluring. It totally astonished me that boys were proud of what has come to be called the “wolf whistle” and even more astonishing that women would be flattered or even aspire to be so victimized. Today of course it would be totally unacceptable and considered a form of harassment. In the 1950s, apparently, “Hey, I can barely control my raging hormones!” was considered a fine message to send to a random young woman anywhere you saw her.
To their credit, though no Black ever appeared in the show, a Hispanic is involved in one episode – they’ll go that far. He’s called “Frank”, but that’s not his real name. According to Frank, that’s his “USA name”. “Frank” has dropped his real name and abandoned his worthless Hispanic heritage because he wants to be part of the greatness that is the (white Anglo-Saxon) USA.
Still wanna live in the “Great 1950s”? Then watch Far From Heaven (2002), which was beautifully filmed in rich colours symbolic of an idyllic environment that was largely a facade.
I can’t speak to all the issues with Betty, but I can say with certainty that there were absolutely no people of color anywhere near me in Walnut Creek and Lafayette, CA, when I was a kid there in the 50s. The trash collectors were black, but they came so early that I rarely saw them. My father worked in Oakland, which certainly had a more diverse population, but I rarely went anywhere near that city. If my family had been in a TV show, it definitely would have looked like Father Knows Best.
And then…in 1964 my family moved to a fairly-large town in VA which was segregated. As far as I know, there were no black families living there. There were certainly no black students in the school system (and we only had one elementary school, one junior high, and one high school). We did have an Asian student and one or two Hispanic students. Nearby Petersburg still had two distinctly segregated high schools, Petersburg HS for white students and Peabody HS for black students.
In essence, I never attended school with a black person until I went to college.
Well the lack of diversity is more an indictment of society at the time, not the producers of the show. White flight was in full effect, redlining had kept neighborhoods racially homogeneous, etc. So yeah, it’s realistic not to have black people in a show set in the suburbs in the 50s, but it’s telling.
Critics often derisively point to “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” as the epitome of 1950s sitcom blandness and conformity. I disagree. “O&A” was a situation comedy, literally a show about nothing, that was played for laughs. There was no heavy-handed morality involved. I can sit down and watch any episode of “O&A” and leave with a nostalgic smile on my face. I’ve often watched it if I’ve woken up at 3am and need to put my mind in a pleasant state to go back to sleep.
“Father Knows Best,” however, is just the opposite. It’s supposedly a sitcom, yet it’s never the least bit funny, and there’s always some important lesson involved. It’s preachy and bland. (Now Bud-Betty-Kathy what have you learned from this?) I’ve always though it was one of the most subversive shows ever produced in that era. Almost as bad: “The Donna Reed Show.” Yecch!
Excellent OP! I just know in my heart that all the things you mentioned are the “wet dream” of many MAGA proponents and part of the REAL meaning of, “Make America Great Again”. The pre Civil Rights era was heaven for white people in general but very much so for white males in particular.
O&H? Or was there another show called O&A. [NB: I’m caffeine-deficient at the moment.] I’ve never watched O&H or FKB. I did watch reruns of Leave It To Beaver.
I wasn’t around in the 50s, but even in the 60s it would have been realistic for a show set in NYC to have only white characters. The only non-white people in my neighborhood were the people who ran the Chinese restaurant - and they probably lived somewhere else. Were there non-white people around - sure, I would see them on buses and trains. But fellow bus and train passengers aren’t normally seen on sitcoms.
I see a lot of reruns of Leave it to Beaver on MeTV and am surprised by how often the show is about Father Screws Up His Parenting and Apologes to His Sons. And he’s always talking about wanting to be a better father than his father, who was apparently quick to beat him.
It’s funny how the standard-issue 2026 white MAGA man (shaved head, beard, t-shirt, baseball cap, jeans or shorts) would look like a countercultural freak if you transported him back to the 50s.
I’m always interested in the real-life backgrounds of the cast of popular old TV series. My dim recollection is that Billy Gray was later the most critical of the show’s cloying moralizing. Elinor Donahue was (or became) something of a religious nutter. Google tells me that her own son quit show business to become an Episcopal priest. Donahue went on to many albeit mostly minor roles after Father Knows Best. Lauren Chapin (“Kathy”) later spoke openly about being sexually abused by her father when she was a toddler, and suffered from alcoholism and drug abuse. She lived to the age of 80 and died just last February.
The elegant Jane Wyatt came from a privileged background of Upper East side Manhattan. It always bugged me that she had a normal accent just like the rest of the family but for the life her could never pronounce her "r"s when it came at the end or the middle of a word. There was never such a thing as “dinner” at her house – it was “dinn-ah”. I’m sure it was ingrained from childhood but it always sounds pretentious to my ears, like the person had been raised by British royalty.
Robert Young, of course, went on to great fame playing Marcus Welby,MD, the supremely competent and compassionate physician. Contrary to what I thought and popular myth, he never uttered the line “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” (that was Chris Robinson, who played Dr Rick Webber on General Hospital). What the ad industry did with Young was arguably worse when he was hired to shill for Sanka decaff – he didn’t disclaim anything, but just went on about how great the stuff was using his established persona from Marcus Welby, MD to lend credibility to his claims.
Apologies for digressing my own thread, but these things interest me.
One book that made a huge impression on me was James Loewen’s Sundown Towns. (He’s the guy who wrote the now-classic Lies my Teacher Told me and the also excellent but overlooked Lies Across America. I highly recommend both.) It was a real eye-opener about how social engineering had functioned to produce Only White enclaves across the country, not only in the South and Midwest states. Towns without blacks weren’t that way because blacks chose not to live there, or hadn’t historically migrated there. This was made evident by towns that had substantial black populations, but then lost them completely in the 1920s or thereabouts.
A website has been set up to provide a database about such towns. You can find it at
I looked up Walnut Creek, CA, but it has no entry. Lafayette does, though.
Comments
“In the early 80’s several of [my brother’s] friends
were in the Police Cadet program in Lafayette. On their
ride alongs they would occasionally here the term ‘NIL’
for Nigger in Lafayette used over the radio… racism
would never be openly tolerated, however it existed
under the wire in these subtle ways.”
Father Knows Best started out along the same lines, which leads me to believe that the title was intended to be ironic. But even before Season 2 had begun, it had already become less of a comedy and more the vehicle for preachy moralizing that it’s known for.
Most of it, TBH, was harmless, except for the unrealistic idealization of the perfect suburban family. Sure, they had problems once in a while, but they were all minor problems which Father was able to solve or else they just solved themselves. It’s the moralizing that was so much at odds with today’s more enlightened values that so fascinated me.
Speaking of which, there’s another bit that I should have included in the OP. In one episode, Kathy writes a nasty letter to the mayor repeating some of her father’s criticisms. Father is of course upset and resolves to apologize to the mayor. Bud says, “gee, dad, if you go to prison I guess that makes me the head of the household”. It was supposed to be a funny line uttered by a 15-year-old kid, but the culturally ingrained idea that Mom had no role in this seems obvious.
Don’t forget the tattoos. In the 50s only sailors and circus freaks had tattoos. And sailors had one or two. Today’s fully sleeved, chest, legs, and back (and neck! and face!) tattooed person would be a “freak” and would be run out of town on a rail in the 50s. But at least they could find good work at the traveling carney.
OP, I’m not disagreeing with anything you have written. But, I guess I’m a little confused as to your point. You’re shocked that a 1950’s tv show depicts an idealized 1950’s white person’s life? You say you are a fan of classic old tv series, so I’m surprised that this surprises you. Is the point of your post to just call attention to all of the “indicators of mainstream 1950s culture”? If so, the fact that they are present in a popular show from that time is probably the least surprising thing I have heard today.
I did want to comment on your point regarding the boys whistling. I’m not sure boys were “proud” of the whistling, or that girls enjoyed it. Rather, boys did it because, while still frowned upon in polite society, there were likely less or zero repercussions for doing it. And I doubt many girls back then “liked” it, but as crude as it was, it showed sexual interest from guys. And I’m sure at least some teenage girls back then, as now, appreciate when boys find them attractive. I think it’s as simple as that.
From 1940 to the present, the proportion of engineers in the U.S. who are women has slowly and steadily risen from less than 1% to 16%. During World War II, there were some training programs for women to take certain jobs that made them sort of engineers, but mostly they moved back into other fields afterwards. This was true of many sorts of jobs during World War II where women took jobs that men had before because the men were drafted, but then after the war they moved on to other jobs. It was not the case that women had no jobs like engineering in the 1950s but then the proportion suddenly exploded in the 1960s. It just slowly moved upwards till the present. Also, women didn’t just become housewives who never worked outside the home. They mostly took jobs after their children were old enough. However, note that 16% being engineers now means that they still haven’t reached being an equivalent proportion to men.
Bear in mind that the culture exerted tremendous pressure to find a partner and get married.
Wolf-whistling was crude, but it presented heterosexuality.
Your expriences in NYC were different from mine, because the segregation there wasn’t city-wide. I grew up in The Bronx ('50s and '60s), and had Black classmates as early as elementary school. But no denying that there was still segregation.
My “point”? Do I need to justify why I posted the OP? Like most OPs, the “point” is just to spark an interesting and perhaps informative discussion.
Yes, I watch a lot of old TV series from the 50s, 60s, and other decades, both American and British. Inevitably these programs offer some reflection of the cultural realities of their times, but it’s often subtle. I’m currently going through the old Perry Mason series (1957-1966), for example, and aside from the cars and some of the interior decor (and the rather unbelievably idealized major characters) in most major respects it could pass for a modern series.
But Father Knows Best is different and indeed rather unique. Ever since the producers made the pivot early in its production from silly comedy to a series of morality plays, the series not only reflected mainstream 1950s culture but it preached it, and it shoved it in your face. This makes it a great historical archive of the values that mainstream cultural leaders of the time – the producers, networks, and sponsors – believed in and sought to promote. Many of those values – honesty, integrity, civic duty – are the same ones we have today. It’s the ones that have changed so much that are fascinating.
You need to watch the episode. To the boys, it was recreational. And Betty was genuinely upset and in a funk for days when she realized she never got whistled at. It’s such a stunning anachronism relative to today’s society.
The “engineer” occupation in the story was just a minor part of it, probably chosen because it was such a male-dominated profession. The real objection the parents had was that Betty wanted a career. After all, her mother Margaret was perfectly content to be a housewife and so should Betty. The happy ending was when Betty realized the error of her ways, put on a pretty dress, accepted flowers from the real engineer and potential future husband, and went off on a date, all career aspirations forgotten in a swirl of dresses and flowers and dreams of future housewife-ing.