I recently learned to my surprise that there was a recession in 1958. I had always
had the impression that this was a period of low unemployment and rising prosperity.
Was it really a period of low crime, everyone knew their neighbors, and good
jobs were available to anyone who was willing to work hard?
While I am mainly interested what it was like here in the USA, please feel free
to add your stories about what it was like in your country if you are not an
American.
Was born in the 60s but much of so-called 50s culture seemed to linger up to the 70s. Start with cars. As one wrote in one Reader’s Digest issue, the explosion of various new car models, in various colors, was an experience un-matched by anything that came after. This, I suppose, following the pre-war car making standard of making cars in any color as long as it’s black.
There was also the mass migration from the rural areas to the cities, the rise in inner city culture, and the growth of suburbs.
Finally, the cold war. Fear of the Russians and even the US Government seemed to reach irrational levels, best demonstrated by fear of UFO’s and men in black (with matching black limos.) I suppose being governed by the one nuclear power, and having the biggest conventional arsenal, could inspire and awe people into fear.
Oh yeah, in terms of number of teenage pregnancies, they say the 60s hippie movement was a bunch of choir boys compared to the 50s.
I was pretty young during them, but they were a period of stability. For instance, lots of companies had life time employment, as did governments. My uncle was an engineer in the defense industry, and they got laid off between contracts, but that was an exception, not the norm. (He went into teaching after the third time.)
Prices were stable also. SF books and magazines pretty much stayed the same price throughout the decade. There was almost no mention of sex on TV and in most movies - at least the ones I got to see.
And of course being racist and sexist in private was just fine - though in some of the north it was improper to be racist in public.
I was in high school from 1957 to 1960, and I thought then “no-one will look back fondly on this decade!”
If you are surprised that there was a recession in 1958, you don’t understand how the American economy works. There have been twelve recessions since the end of World War II:
Recession of 1945 Feb–Oct 1945
Recession of 1949 Nov 1948 – Oct 1949
Recession of 1953 July 1953 – May 1954
Recession of 1958 Aug 1957 – April 1958
Recession of 1960–61 Apr 1960 – Feb 1961
Recession of 1969–70 Dec 1969 – Nov 1970
1973–75 recession Nov 1973 – Mar 1975
1980 recession Jan–July 1980
Early 1980s recession July 1981 – Nov 1982
Early 1990s recession July 1990 – Mar 1991
Early 2000s recession March 2001–Nov 2001
Great Recession Dec 2007 – June 2009
For whatever reason, recessions seem to be a pretty fixed part of our economy.
The 1950’s were a time of relatively low unemployment:
Crime rates (or at least reported crime rates) were low in the 1950’s. They apparently began slowly increasing from just after World War II. They peaked in the 1980’s and have been decreasing since the early 1990’s. The crime rates are now about what they were in the early 1960’s. So if your question is what the crime rate is now, in 2013, as compared to the 1950’s, the answer is that there is somewhat more crime now than then, but it’s not a huge difference.
The few short years of the 1950’s brought the greatest improvements to people’s daily life in all of human history. Times were good, because the physical side of life was good.
Compare the changes to the previous decade:
In the 1940’s, most Americans went to bed a bit hungry every night. Not because they were starving, but because they didn’t have a refrigerator. It was common to walk into your kitchen and find that the bread had gone stale, milk was sour, etc. No problem…you just lived with it, the way we today live with the weather–there was nothing you could do about it. So you just waited till the shops (not the supermarket–which did not yet exist) opened the next day and bought some more bread. But in the meantime, you were hungry.
In the 1940’s most people would have preferred not to use an outhouse, but they were not repulsed by the idea…it just seemed a bit old fashioned. In the cities, toilets were common, but if you went to visit grandma on the farm, you would take a dump in her outhouse and not make an issue of it.
In the 1940’s there were still horses in use , and so an occasional pile of horse shit in the street outside your house was not a surprise.
In the 1940’s very few people owned a car.
Then, within a short decade, modern life arrived, with all the latest technology.
And I’m not talking about a minor upgrade, like switching to the latest version of your smart phone. I’m talking about vast, profound changes in your quality of life.
By the mid 1950’s everybody* had a refrigerator in the home, everybody had a flush toilet, and everybody had a car. Television arrived. Supermarkets made food available easily; there were even new “TV dinners” (i.e frozen food, ready to eat, just warm it up in your new electric oven!).
Society changed in profound ways…suddenly life was easy: everybody felt good , with new physical comforts. And people felt optimistic that the good times would continue forever.
And that’s why the nostalgia for the 50’s remains so powerful, a half century later.
*(Well, of course, not everybody. There were those colored people on the other side of the tracks, for example; but they didn’t count, right? You might even hire one as your maid, but don’t let her drink from the same dishes you use—you might catch something. )
I was very young in the 50’s. However, I do remember the Civil Defense film “Duck and Cover”. It was shown in elementary schools and included instructions on how to protect yourself after an atomic bomb. It can be seen on YouTube. I remember the neighbor built an underground fallout shelter.
Lived in Southern Utah at the time. They would announce the above ground atomic tests in Nevada. They were always in the early morning before sunrise. And you could see the flash. It would light up the horizon. Later, when the dust came, you could write your name on the sidewalk.
Did you forget the poor whites/hispanics/AmerIndians??
I was born in 1950 and lived outside a small midwestern town. My dad had a good job with a coal company…coal and steel were the major industries there. He was an engineer, but worked as a union mechanic most of that decade. That’s how it was done then. My mom didn’t work outside the home.
Life was a lot more basic for us. We had enough to eat, but ice cream, candy, and soft drinks were treats we had a few times a year, not regular fare. Our house was heated by a coal furnace, we had no air conditioning. The family had one car, a 1950 Mercury with a three speed manual transmission, AM radio, no air, power steering or power brakes. Hand crank windows, no carpet on the floors.
Our mom used a wringer washer and hung the clothes on a line outside in the summer, in the basement in the winter. We had one black and white TV that got two channels. Mom listened to soap operas on the radio while she ironed clothes.
For most of the decade we were on a five-party phone line. Everyone on the line had their own ‘ring’…ours was one long, two short.
We didn’t go on vacations or to summer camp.
Boys could graduate high school and go to work in the mines or mills the next day. College was for the select few.
There were a few black families in our town (known as 'colored, or Negro if you wanted to be formal) and they seemed to be treated as ‘separate but equal’. We played together as kids, but sort of drifted into our own groups when we got older. Different ethnicities tended to stick together, too.
It was a good life, but incredibly basic by today’s standards.
Flying cars and trips to the moon were just around the corner, but nobody anticipated the Internet or a computer in every room.
In my town, there were still a lot of little corner “mom & pop” stores, sometimes not even on a major street. They had yet to be supplanted by the giant supermarket chains. I get a bit wistful when I see one of the old buildings, buried deep in an old neighborhood, usually flat-fronted , sometimes converted into a home, and often just abandoned.
Large shopping centers had yet to be developed, at least in my town. If you lived in the suburbs and wanted to shop for clothes, your choice was mail-order (Sears, Penneys, Monkey Ward) or driving downtown, an hour’s drive from our house (no freeways) or a 2 hour, smelly bus ride. The big department stores were all downtown, so were the first-run movie theaters, and parking was a problem.
Discount warehouse stores didn’t exist, neither did MacDonald’s or KFC (or they were few and far between).
I highly recommend The Way We Never Were, by Stephanie Coontz. It’s a one-volume antidote to the Happy Days/Ozzie and Harriet/Father Knows Best/Elvis and Ike image of the '50s.
Not recommended for conservatives longing for a return to those halcyon days, who are pretty much its specific target.
“Going downtown” was a Big Thing. A special occasion, and you had to dress up for it—My mother dressed me in a suit (maybe without a tie), and she wore a nice dress, often with white gloves. All this for a trip to a movie, or to buy nice clothes and new shoes at the start of the school year.
I was a young kid, too. I remember the long drives every summer from the US west coast to the midwest where my parents’ families lived.
As Musicat said, there were no freeways. We took 2-lane blacktop roads. There were no motels as we know them today, just “tourist cabins” and those were spread far apart in some sections of the country. We’d smuggle our cocker spaniel into the room once it got dark.
Sometimes, we just pulled off the road, rigged up a sort of pup-tent that attached to the car, and slept at a scenic overlook or behind an empty building.
We ate in regular restaurants or diners, since there was no fast food other than A&W with car hops. Often, we’d stop at small grocery stores and get sandwich makings and get the thermos filled with coffee.
For entertainment during these week-long drives, we’d sing or play car games (bingo or “I Spy”) and watch for the Burma Shave signs.
Damn.
There were fast food places other than A&W. They often consisted of little cube- like buildings where you would order the food at a walk-up window. No seating, no bathrooms. Similar to the old fashioned Dairy Queen cubes, which seem to be disappearing in favor of McD’s type buildings.
I was born in '53 in a small all-white town in Indiana. Most stores were closed on Sunday. Gas prices were next to nothing, we’d go for rides for the fun of it. Computers were new and the size of a room. Robots were big. The space program was incredibly important. TV dinners were new. When we got a TV, it had a very small screen, was black & white, took several minutes to warm up, and there were only 4 stations. The shows were frequently interrupted by Technical Difficulties, and if you didn’t get the rabbit ears on top just right, there was “snow” in the picture. Rock & roll was called an offense to the ears, probably obscene, and possibly anti-Christian. The first black person I ever saw was on TV, and it was probably Nat King Cole.
There were corner grocery stores and family shoe stores and smaller business aplenty. There were no fast food restaurants. There were department stores, but no strip malls, no giant department stores like K-Mart, Ayrway (now Target) or Wal-Mart. Sears & Roebucks did mainly catalogue sales. People watched their language in public, at least in our town.
Keep in mind that your experience may have varied widely based on your location and especially your ethnicity. For some, the 50’s were Howdy Doody, Hot Rods, and Lunch at Woolworths. For others - Jim Crow, avoiding certain neighborhoods, and bringing food for your entire road trip because there was no way in hell you were going to be served at any restaurants.
I’m sure there were. I just don’t remember them. Maybe because my family didn’t frequent them?
I promise to be more precise in future posts. (I forget about the pedants sometimes.)