I am probably closer to @romanigypsyeyes 's position on the 50s than most of you. My take:
For the American middle class, the 50s was a period of affluence and increasing prosperity, but it was on an unsustainable basis. The rest of the developed world had had its manufacturing capacity bombed to smithereens, and its working age population decimated and traumatized, so there was no effective competition and vast global demand for American projects. There was no effective environmental regulation, and massive environmental and health costs went unrecognized in practically every industry – a massive borrowing from the future we are still paying off.
The 50s were great if you were white, straight, and middle class (and if, being a woman, you didn’t care too much about getting paid for the work you did). There were still enormous areas of poverty so abject we don’t even associate it with the United States anymore – children with no shoes, children with no access to schools, people without plumbing or electricity. Native Americans were being forced to give up tribal lands. Sure, Brown v. Board of Education was decided, but so was Brown v. Board of Education II (“all deliberate speed”), so that as a practical matter the amount of school integration in the 50s was none. The 50s ended with federal troops being required to get nine Black teenagers in the door of one high school outside the Deep South.
The 50s was the period that essentially privileged cars and trucks over other forms of transportation, and that gutted urban neighborhoods in favor of sprawling suburbs. It’s also when we institutionalized our crazy practice of tying health insurance to employment.
My main point is – It’s fine to be nostalgic for the 50s, but there’s nothing there worth returning to. The affluence of the 50s, far from being some natural state for America, was founded very significantly on the lack of global competition and on externalized costs. For that reason, it was completely ephemeral, and can’t return.