Well, I’d imagine that like most social problems it was more prevalent in larger cities.
I mean, I don’t see a lot of youth crime around HERE, either, but this is a nice neighborhood. Crime definitely went up in the 1960s and 1970s, and then started declining in the late 1980s, but people’s impression of the level of youth crime generally does not seem to track reality; I am sure most people would say youth crime is still as bad or worse than it used to be.
The issue isn’t so much that craftsmanship has died, it’s that pen companies realized that they could make more money by making a somewhat less durable pen (or even disposable ones) so they could sell you several pens over that lifetime instead of one pen and maybe some ink, if you even liked their brand of ink.
Same thing with most consumer goods like toasters; people wouldn’t pay the amount for a lifetime toaster vs. buying 3-4 over a lifetime.
By that, I mean today, would you pay $160 for a toaster that was guaranteed to last 40 years, or would you spend $20 and use one for 5-10 years, and replace it for $20 when it breaks? Same amount of money, more or less, but people like cheap.
Could we get one thing straight? There was not much less crime then than now. If one goes by the amount of reported crime, there was only a little less crime in the 1950’s. I suspect, in fact, that the amount of actual crime was either about the same as now or perhaps somewhat more. (I will be talking about crime rates, not absolute numbers, here. The population has increased since then. I will also be talking about crime just in the U.S., although what I say may apply to other places.)
There are pretty good reported collections of crime statistics since that period. They say that the reported crime rate rose slowly and steadily at least from the end of World War II to 1992 or 1993. Since then the reported crime rate has dropped faster than it increased during those earlier years. The reported crime rate is now what it was in the early 1960’s. So if we’re comparing, say, the reported crime rate in 2013 with the reported crime rate in 1958, the reported crime rate now is only a little higher than then.
I personally suspect that the actual crime rate back then was considerably underreported. In general, crimes by more powerful groups against less powerful groups tended to be greatly underreported. (In fact, at any period, crimes by the powerful against the powerless are underreported. There are just different power groups today.) Domestic violence was greatly underreported. There was a much greater tendency to treat a husband beating a wife as just a family argument that no one should interfere in. There was a much greater tendency for child abuse to be ignored. There were much more cases where crimes against blacks or Hispanics or homosexuals (or even just poor people) were ignored.
You’re going to say, “But, I just read a story about child abuse going on today.” Exactly. You read or heard the story in the news. That’s because it’s not ignored today. The same is true of wife abuse or crimes against homosexuals or Hispanics or blacks or poor people. Crimes that didn’t even get reported then are now all over the news.
In the case of pens, it was a confluence of a number of factors, but the invention of the ballpoint pen, against which the fountain pen competed poorly, was the death knell. Ball points lend themselves to shortcuts in manufacture in ways fountain pens don’t (cheaply made FPs leak and skip and write poorly). Fountain pens are delicately balanced finicky tools which need care and maintenance. Ball points aren’t. Plus all that planned obsolescence stuff.
The ballpoint pen reminds me that left-handers always had a terrible time with fountain pens. Of course, in the 1950s teachers were going to try and make lefthanders write with their right hand.
I used a fountain pen all through school in the 1970s, but I was one of the few left who did, carrying a bottle of blue ink around in my briefcase rather than risk running out of cartridges and forgetting to buy any more in time. If you dropped it and ruined the nib, it was wait until you could get a new nib, and then break it in, before you were writing comfortably again. Lefties could get left-handed nibs, but risked leaving a series of smudges on the paper.
Other vignettes of the Fifties.
Everybody worried about the Bomb, which never happened as it turned out. Many joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which faded away in the 1960s before making a comeback in the '80s. The draft, known as National Service here, was still on but was coming to an end by the time the decade ended. It was uncontroversial and scarcely anybody refused to go. The Suez Crisis punctured Britain’s delusions that it could still act as it saw fit in foreign policy and not care what anybody thought; also that the Americans were not always going to be on our side. Atomic power, we were told, was going to be so cheap it wouldn’t even have to be metered. The Clean Air Acts began to do something about inner city pollution, then mostly from coal fires and steam locomotives. Television began to make inroads into the radio audience, but radio was still big and some shows got huge audience share but most comics would kill for now. Credit cards were unknown, bank loans and mortgages were hard to get. Most people bought big things on hire-purchase, of which the government continually varied the terms in an effort to work the economic levers, or did without and saved up. The Conservative Party dominated politics for most of the decade. Winston Churchill clung to active politics long after he should have retired to write his memoirs. Despite his serious health/ageing problems, which were common knowledge to those ‘in the loop’, the Press said nothing.
“I did not become the Queen’s Prime Minister to oversee the dissolution of the British Empire.”
My mother was born in 1950s Hungary. I get conflicting accounts of how the '56 uprising was the most horrible thing ever (from my faintly blue blooded grandmother), to my grandpa telling me how, as a teenager, the smell of diesel, and the sound of the Russian tanks rolling through his hamlet were the coolest thing ever; the same way a teenager from the sticks might get excited about a monster truck show today. 
We didn’t lock our house in upstate New York in the 80’s, or our house in the St. Louis burbs in the 90’s or our house in southern Il in the 2000’s. Our car keys were always on the floorboards or a hook inside the house next to the unlocked door.
Back when I was growing up (60s and 70s), if a husband hit a wife, and she called the cops, the cops would come in pairs. One would take the husband for a walk around the block, to give him time to cool down. The other one would stay with the wife, and tell her not to provoke her husband. I don’t know what happened if a wife hit her husband. As for child abuse, it happened, but it was generally considered to be harsh discipline and nobody else’s business, even if the kid had broken bones. And you never heard of pedophilia in the news…just whispered anecdotes and gossip. My mother would not allow my little brother to go into a men’s room alone until he was nearly a teen, and I never understood why until I heard about chicken hawks as an adult.
If a black or Hispanic or poor person got assaulted by a white person, there was really no point in going to the cops, especially if the white was middle class or higher. The cops wouldn’t believe it, or they wouldn’t seriously investigate it even if they did believe it. Same with rape, if someone was raped, unless she was a “good girl” of a good family, she was asking for it. I don’t think that male rape was even considered a possibility.
A big part of the nostalgia was the simple fact that Dad could have limited skills, be only a high school graduate, but get a decent enough job to support a family of four or five with a car, a house in the suburbs, and a yearly vacation.
Mom was able to stay home, keep a clean house, have good meals on the table, and rub your boo-boos when they hurt.
Just those facts were huge. Have to juggle child care? What is that? Stay with Mom. Struggling with credit card debt? What are credit cards? Hard to make that car payment? What is that? We only have one car and it is paid off. Mortgage? We had a 5 year one when we bought the house 10 years ago. Student Loans??? *phew
People didn’t have nearly the creature comforts we have today, but the middle class had a solid life that many people today would easily trade for.
Credit cards might not have been big, but charge accounts were quite well known. A family member went into Tudbury’s (borrowing from Blondie here), picked out merchandise, said “Charge it!”, and Dad got the bill the next month. The thing about charge cards was that the clerk didn’t have to know each customer personally, to be sure that the bill got charged correctly. Credit cards existed back then, but usually either each chain or store had its own card, the “use everywhere” cards weren’t as popular back then. So yes, there WAS something that was the equivalent of credit card debt.
Now, the average wage of a high school graduate was relatively higher, I’ll grant you that. But a lot of the things that we take for granted today were simply not available. Yeah, medical bills are higher, but we’ve got more treatments available. I really don’t think that most people would trade our current standard of living now for what we had back then…because it’s possible to get along with one car, a blue collar job, etc. even today. Most people don’t want to give up what we’ve got now, though.
I was born in 1953, the youngest of five children. My father died a little over a year later leaving my mom to raise us. She had a small pension from my father’s employer, but this seemed to pretty much cover house payments and utilities. Mom did “day work” which meant she went to a different house every day and either cleaned or did the laundry. Much later, I realized that was likely off the books for cash.
We did not own a car until I was eight or nine. We shopped for groceries at the small grocery store less than two blocks away. This was closed from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday due to the Sabbath.
I went to a Catholic elementary school three blocks away. Our neighborhood was just on the edge of downtown and was (and still is) a neighborhood that people who did not live there avoided after dark. We had an old coal furnace that had been converted to gas, no air conditioning, one bathroom, and one wall phone in the kitchen.
At the time, we were happy. The neighborhood was always a great place to grow up, and we did not really realize at the time that life was really that much different in other places. There was vey little extra money for life’s little luxuries, so at a young age I was cutting grass (with a rotary push mower) during the summer and shoveling snow in the winter for spending money.
I got my first job at age 14 in a local Italian restaurant bussing tables for a dollar an hour. I was rich!
Despite the neighborhood, the doors were not locked, and I had a lot of freedom to play where I pleased as long as I checked in when the streetlights came on. This is not to say that we were without issues. It was a pretty rough area and casual violence was not unknown. I still have the (faux) mother of pearl handled Italian switchblade that I kept after the previous owner tried unsuccessfully to use it to settle an argument we had. (I was a little quicker than he was with a half brick I picked up after he pulled the knife) It is on the desk next to my keyboard and I use it as a letter opener.
All in all, it was kind of a combination of Sandlot and West Side Story (with out the music and dancing)
It has been fun reading these posts and remembering…
From 1966 and onwards -
In the town that my family was the main employment source until 1972 and we had a summer house in until 1985 the main grocery store [IGA] was owned and operated by my uncles Father-in-Law and family so my brother and I could wander in and charge anything. The ‘convenience store’ was a smaller store that did newspapers, deli stuff and light notions also had a charge account that we could wander into and buy stuff. It was on a corner near the main offices and mill buildings. There was also a J. J. Newberrys that we could go into that was not locally owned. I would assume that one or more of the town gas stations also had an account opened for my mother, but not driving at the time I wouldn’t really know.
Later, in the late 80s [not sure the date range as I was not living in the town, just visiting periodically] my parents had some sort of account with a local petroleum company where they had a key to a gas pump and it somehow tracked their use and they got billed for gas. Knowing my Dad, it was definitely cheaper than going to a gas station. They stopped using it sometime in the 90s.
I don’t remember if mom charged groceries, but maybe she did. I do remember that when we went to the store, the clerk (Mrs. Terwilliger) wrote down what we bought on a small pad with a carbon copy. That could have been for inventory purposes, but maybe it was a charge account.
What’s weird is that I don’t remember standing in line. You’d think there’d be some waiting, if a clerk had to write down everything you bought.
Mom did do lay-away for Christmas, and of course we collected Green Stamps, pasted them into books, got crap stuff in exchange. Which was another thing that would have made for a long wait in a line. 
I wasn’t alive in the 50s, but from hearing stories from my grandparents, those charge accounts were very common. But there were several differences. First, all of the stores were neighborhood stores that personally knew you. They didn’t let you go crazy and run up massive debt. Usually they wanted the balance paid at the end of the month. Second, they were for convenience more than anything. A lot of families didn’t allow Mom access to the checkbook. That and the lack of ATMs and credit cards made it easier for Mom to go to the grocery store, put it on the charge account and send the bill to Dad. Third, at least among the people my grandparents’ age, and there are few left, debt was an absolute moral sin. This was shared universally. You did not buy things you couldn’t afford and pay for right then.
I would disagree with your assertion that a family could simply go back to one blue collar wage earner, one car, and such if the family just chose to do so. The main reason is, as you alluded to, health care. We simply can’t say to ourselves and definitely not our children that we will only accept 1955 level health care. The police would put you in jail for endangering their welfare. Even with Obamacare, we have to pay 10% of our income for our own health care. The spouse and child have no such caps. Further, there are so many more products that people feel that they can’t do without: cell phones, cable HDTV, high speed internet, and thousands of consumer products that you don’t need to be able to afford because a swipe of the credit card will allow you to take it home.
Now, I agree that the second part is a choice but to stick with that choice requires the participation of you, the wife, and the kids, and all of your will see what your neighbors have and be made fun of for living in the 1950s. There’s a strong social pressure to conform instead of that simply being the norm.
Your comments about domestic violence were spot on. If a husband beat the hell out of his wife, well that was a family matter, and not a police matter. It was only a police matter when the fight was disturbing the neighborhood, so they might show up to get them to keep the noise down, but that was about it. If a wife slapped her husband, and he reported it to the police, the boys at the station would probably have a good hearty laugh over it.
Not to hijack the thread, but between now and then, we corrected the problem and then overcorrected. A push, a shove, or yelling is now a police matter which gets a man a conviction which hurts his job chances. Women who honestly say that it was an argument that just got out of hand and want to leave it alone are persuaded by “counselors” who do everything in their power to get her to cooperate with a police investigation that only hurts her and her family. Once that first call to the police is made, you have set in motion events that you cannot undo. I think all jurisdictions in the country will prosecute DV cases even without the victim testifying or wishing to pursue charges. That creates hurt and animosity in the family.
So, the 1950s weren’t perfect, but I know that my two grandfathers, neither one of them went to college, were able to own their homes without a mortgage, had no debt, owned a good reliable used car, took a decent yearly vacation, and each family put two children through college. I think if we looked at things in totality, we would take that lifestyle over are current one, even with our new creature comforts.
Male WASPs might like it. Jews might object to the blood libel that went on. People of color would probably object to the open discrimination that was common and legal. Any woman who didn’t want to be stuck in a mommy/wifey role would object, too.
Hell, I objected when I was forced to take Home Ec for a year in high school, rather than a second year of science. And I objected when I wasn’t allowed to take wood or metal shop. I know that my grandmother would have preferred to become a doctor, but while it was POSSIBLE for women to become doctors back then, they had a real problem getting into med school, and then finding a place to do their training, and if they did manage to become MDs, they had problems getting patients. Instead, Grandma became a nurse.
That lifestyle and those privileges were only for male white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Even John Kennedy experienced an awful lot of prejudice because he was Catholic.
In Arkansas, it was legal for Dad to beat Mom with a stick so long as it was smaller in diameter than his thumb.
Lynn, didn’t someone explain to you back then that if a woman was admitted to medical school she would probably get married and have kids shortly after she graduated–and so would naturally stay home to raise them–so all this medical training would be wasted? (I am sure I read that this was the view of medical school faculty at the time.)
The racial situation was terrible. I agree. But that could have changed without blowing up the middle class lifestyle. Neither of my grandmothers ever had a desire to work. They were content with raising a family. Before she died, my grandmother said that she never understood how modern women could juggle a career and a family. She said that one or both would have to suffer, and I agree.
But for those women that wanted to work, the laws should have changed to allow that. Your treatment in medical school is abysmal and I support the laws that changed that.
It’s not an all or nothing choice: either hate blacks and jews with a good middle-class lifestyle, or else do what we do today.
If you don’t mind, I would like a link to the text of the AR law in question. I’ve heard this so many times that I believe it is simply an urban legend. As far as I know, no jurisdiction in the U.S. ever allowed physical violence against a spouse. But back in the day, society just never enforced those laws absent severe aggravating circumstances.