I got a chuckle out of this. Compared to the 10’s (WW 1 and Influenza), 20’s (Wall Street Crash), 30’s (Great Depression), and 40’s (WW 2), the 50’s were the first decade for most people living back then that there was no great cataclysm. If you were 50 years old in 1960, the 50’s would have been the only decade of your life to that point that things were normal.
Compared to the 60’s (Vietnam and Culture Wars), and 70’s (Oil Crisis and Stagflation), they look pretty good as well.
“horrible” is relative, romanigypsyeyes. Judged only by today’s standards, perhaps. Adults in the 50s had memories of the mass starvation of the Depression, the horrors of world war and the Holocaust. Compared to their recent past, the 50s were a substantial improvement, even for the poorest and most maligned members of society. Certainly no worse, and likely at least somewhat better, than they had experienced in 1930, so things were improving.
The 50s were neither the best nor the worst of times. Respectfully @romanigypsyeyes , you’re going too far in the opposite direction.
The 1950s, except for the Korean War, were a time of peace. The importance of that can’t be overemphasized.
It was a time of relative prosperity.
The GI bill gave World War II vets the right to attend college and other training programs. By the 1950s, these new college grads, many the first in their families to attend college, were established in the lower rungs of corporate America and were better off economically than the parents had been. My college roommate’s dad left school after 8th grade to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. He ended up in the navy during World War II. He used his Gi benefits to become a plumber—which enabled him to put 2 kids through private colleges without financial aid.
The GI bill was not only important for those who benefited from it and their families, it enforced the idea that if you made college affordable, people would go. (When the GI bill was created, the number of people who would take advantage of it was seriously underestimated.)
You can laugh at Stuyvesant/Peter Cooper and Levitown, but the former cleared a lot of slums and both provided housing for many working class families. Yes, they were segregated, but the political war about this lead to the creation of the Riverton in Harlem. In other words, the 1950s were a time when the idea of “affordable housing,” especially for vets, became a political issue.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided in the 1950s.
In 1948, by executive order, President Harry S. Truman integrated the US armed forces. Military leaders were appalled and fought back, but by 1950, the order was being enforced. In the 1950s, due in part to the horror of the Korean War, the armed forces were thoroughly integrated. African-Americans soon discovered that the military gave them an upward path of mobility free from the racial restraints of civilian society at the time. (I’m a military brat who didn’t learn that segregation existed until we had to live “off base” for the first time in my childhood when I was almost 10. )
Moreover, in that era, when males were drafted into the armed forces, some white people discovered during their service that the world wouldn’t end if African-Americans ate in the same restaurants, worked in the same work places as whites, etc. And, any African-Americans who served were unwilling to return to a civilian life where segregation was the norm. IMO, without the integration of the armed forces during the 1950s, the Civil Rights Acts would probably never have passed.
Hawaii became a state in 1959. It was a huge deal–in large part because whites were only a minority there. It was only admitted in a “package deal” with Alaska, but the fact that it was admitted at all was a sign that Americans’ ideas about race were changing.
So, the 1950s weren’t all “horrible.”
Heavens no the fifties weren’t “horrible.” In the fifties my H and my mom were college educated, working , driving cars finding spouses, buying stArter homes and having babies like H and I. WWII was over and young men who wanted military had those careers. I don’t care what culture you come from but the nature of all human beings is to find a mate and procreate. And there were plenty of fifties women who ended up divorced by choice. Honestly young people these days fed a steady diet of Disney really think life is more complicated than it really is. Sure the fifties parents were depression era but if anything that taught them more resilience and appreciation for college educations, homes, cars and all the fifties brought. And fifties moms that didn’t work were not all that different than SAHMs today although today’s SAHMs might have college degrees they aren’t really using them so I see little difference.
You are making too many assumptions here. What I was actually referring to was that the bigots would be the ones reacting to such a hypothetical opinion piece. Such bigots would not necessarily be devout religious people, though they sometimes try to use religious and other socially conservative arguments.
However, the threat of a cataclysm (nuclear war) was widely known and feared at the time.
As mentioned by another poster, the 1950s did see the beginnings of questioning the old racist segregated social order. But there was still considerable resistance against eliminating various forms of segregation and having equal civil rights for all, which was part of the culture wars in the 1960s.
@cobrat, my friend was definitely a would be radical lefty. I think I may have said something like I wasn’t too worried about how expensive the Goethe Institute was since my parents had footed the bill. It was honest. I don’t know about that summer, but later when I was paying for it on my own dime, I know there were a lot of people in the class who were being paid by companies that they worked for.
In any event I just thought it was funny that bourgeois was such a bad word!
I assume you say Wax’s article over the weekend? https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-cant-be-debated-on-campus-1518792717 (won’t be readable without a subscription)
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.
“Had the article’s author been Rev. ML King”
Not possible, as he was assassinated during the time being celebrated.
Oh my goodness. We can always look at each decade from rose colored classes or from our negative view glasses. All decades have their good history and their bad history.
I choose to think we learn from our history, good and bad. We try to make the next decade better by what we have learned. However, to think we will have a perfect decade is naive. We have good things now and we will in the future. We also have bad things now and we will in our future. We learn from ALL experiences and try to improve.
The writer here doesn’t even consider the rise of women in the workforce as the primary driver of reducing the need for two parents (or making divorce possible for women)? Seems like a pretty big omission, considering a very small percentage of families are on welfare and a very large percentage of women work outside the home, for money.
Mostly white men got those benefits. Both the college education and the gov’t backed loans for housing. It was race-neutral in principle but not in execution.
I suggest you consult Wikipedia. MLK was assassinated on April 4, 1968. NOT in the period being celebrated. The counter-culture that the article deplores was in just about full swing.
Not to mention that the reference is to the contemporary article…
When people suggest that the 50’s tended to be good and that certain values played a part of that, they AREN’T claiming the 50’s were perfect or that the vast majority of people held these values.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard discussions on TV where the topic was unwed motherhood, and somebody pointed out that in the decades leading up to the 1960’s, an educated, ambitious, and successful African American middle class was developing in many urban areas…and that 2-parent households were a big part of that.
“I suggest you consult Wikipedia. MLK was assassinated on April 4, 1968. NOT in the period being celebrated. The counter-culture that the article deplores was in just about full swing.”
Sigh… “These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s”. So we can argue whether April 68 was close enough to qualify as mid 1960s, or I can simply ask if you got the point I was making.
The article in the op IS claiming that, however.
Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.
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Oh and +++3 to the Stephanie Coontz book rec. Amazing how we have whitewashed our memory of previous decades, even ones many people living now lived through.
I read the article and some of the responses. The first thing I disagree with is that “bourgeois” culture is racist. People maybe racist and some people within that culture may be racist but all races can have bourgeois values. The question becomes are these values superior to other cultural values. It’s a valid question and one that won’t be answered by silencing Drs. Wax and Alexander. Discussing the pros and cons of the bourgeois culture and how it compares to others cultures should be the reaction to the article. Wanting the authors fired for their opinions and writings is just plain scary.