The '50s prompt some nostalgia here, but not as much. The music was mostly still American, people worried about The Bomb, wartime austerity (cultural and economic) was beginning to fade, employment was (in retrospect) almost full, though politicians worried about the (now very modest) levels of it. Mass immigration of black people from the Caribbean was beginning and felt in some quarters to be storing up trouble for the future, but few politicians felt they could say so openly (Enoch Powell would come later). Britain’s economic problems were partly masked by returning prosperity but there were too many sunset industries propped up, for a time, by domestic demand, and industry preferred to service the undemanding British consumer who was taught from his earliest years to take what he was given and be grateful. The shortage of housing was a perennial problem and one which successive governments only partly managed to tackle. Wartime bombing damage was still being patched up, and some of the new housing projects were storing up trouble for the future.
I absolutely think this is the main reason. I’m reading Bill Bryson’s autobiography and he talks about this quite a bit. In the 1950’s, a toaster was a wonderful thing. I mean it toasts bread! In about five minutes!! How cool is that!?!
The only thing cooler than a toaster was a dishwasher. Or maybe a refrigerator.
Refrigerators are undoubtedly the coolest of appliances. 
Nah. We were naive.
Naive hope is still hope.
The 1950s seem to have been a great time if you were a straight non-ethnic White male who was in excellent health and whose family was economically middle class or above. For everybody else…meh.
The 1960s is idolized as a time when a few people protested and yet now most people who are alive can claim that they supported those protests when it’s likely that they either did not or they were at best lukewarm about them.
It seems that it’s a all a matter of perspective.
Few people if they are seriously introspective about those time periods will have much positive to say about them as they represented either a repressive period in American society (the 1950s) or a turbulent one (the 1960s)
How can you have nostalgia for a period in which you never lived? That’s not really nostalgia–it’s just re-narration for present-day agendas, and it says very little about the past (though a lot about the present).
I find most so-called “nostalgia” to be highly suspect, (when not simply just plain annoying.) Though I’m barely old enough to remember the 70s, it’s enough to sense something wrong about these recent movies taking place in the 70s. I get much more out of seeing a movie that was actually made in the 70s, like something by Altman.
In a similar way, tawdry costume dramas like Dowton Abbey–or those complacent film versions of Austen novels–in fact represent little more than a persistent vanity of the present.
I think modern tolerance relative to the past is somewhat overestimated. There were plenty of non-bigoted people in the 50s and 60s, and plenty of ignorant people today. Plus at least black people had jobs, and 1/3 of them weren’t in jail, in 1960.
:dubious:
Do you think gays don’t get sick? Antibiotics made survival of infections a routine thing. Earlier even a small infection could be potentially fatal. After antibiotics? “Here, take these for three weeks”.
Do you think women hated all the labour saving appliances, like. fridges, dishwashers, blenders, toasters, vacuum cleaners, automatic ovens etc? Not to mention freely available food. Before the 1950’s, “staying in the kitchen” was not an option. It was a necessity, if you did not want to see your children starve…I don’t think you quite appreciate how long it took to perform those tasks manually. Hell, that is one of the reasons that women began to venture out of the house into the market, they could actually afford to. Speaking of kids
Do you think women hated the pill, because they could now actually have sex with their partners , without fearing the visit of the stork a 9 months hence?
Do you think that that the non white ethnics were upset about polio vaccines? These days, the WHO has had a freak out over less than a 100 cases. Polio used to afflict thousands in every country every summer. Do you think, the era when global widespread smallpox vaccinations began and when DDT decimated malaria carrying mosquitos was “meh” for non whites?
:rolleyes:
It’s pretty straightforward really. World War II was over. The social upheaval and conflicts of the 60s hadn’t started yet. If you were a white, male, conservative, things probably seemed pretty great. There was a sense that American was awesome and right and just. In fact, it probably didn’t occur to many people that there was any way to be other than white, male and conservative.
The 60s are more of a source of nostalgia for the left. A period where people rose up to challenge the status quo and demand equality for women, minorities, and such.
In retrospect, shows like Mad Men or films like Revolutionary Road portray the 50s as less of a white conservative utopia and more of a time of crushing conformity.
I wish I could believe that, Der Trihs.
Pax
It’s easier - look at SCA. They can be nostalgic for the costumes, feasts, and bloodless combat and ignore death in childbirth, plague and lack of sanitation.
You seem to be the only other person bringing this up. I remember '20s dances or dress-up days in school in the late '60s. When I was even younger there was nostalgia for the 1890s (barbershop quartets, ice cream parlors, Victorian design).
Mad Men is popular because it’s a good, well-written, well acted show. Some people are probably watching it out of nostalgia, but I think a significant portion of the audience is watching it and seeing that the time was bad in many ways for many people. I’m a woman who loves Mad Men, and I have lots of female friends who watch it and love it and we all admire Peggy and Joan, but we wouldn’t for one instance want to trade places with them. At most we’d want to borrow some of Joan’s outfits.
I usually read the recaps on Tom and Lorenzo’s blog for Mad Men. Tom and Lorenzo are gay men, and there’s many women and gay people who post in the comments. I’ll see some nostalgia for some of the clothes or maybe the cars or items in the house or office, but very little nostalgia for the actual times.
It blows my mind that the '20s in the '60s were as recent as the '70s are today. There were people in their 30s who could remember the 1920s well into the 60s!
No nostalgia for the 30s, and I think we all know why.
I doubt there will be any nostalgia for the 2000s, and as things are shaping up, for the 2010s either.
Speak for yourself. I am a 1930’s fiend!
all those years reading Doc Savage.
Interestingly, I got into 1920s music by way of 1950s records in the 1970s.
I wonder if nostalgia for the 20s in the 50s/60s was similar to nostalgia for the 70s/80s today: more of a celebration of styles and pop culture than a real desire to go back. Whereas I think nostalgia for the 50s and early 60s has been more along the lines of, “It was a better world, I’d like to go back and live there.”
I think that Leave It To Beaver 50s nostalgia is very much a western thing - it’s certainly not a huge thing here (Amongst White and Coloured South Africans, I’d say it’s mostly 70s-80s nostalgia that predominates. Possibly because we only got TV in '76?) The biggest bit of 50s/60s nostalgia there is, is for certain old areas and their cultures, that were emptied of their non-White residents under Apartheid. So there’s a strong nostalgia for Sophiatown and District 6
This isn’t to say US 50s nostalgia doesn’t do good business here, because it does. Sha-na-na! was huge when I was growing up…
Wasn’t there a tv show called the Waltons? I hear it was pretty big and largely set in the 1930s.