Posted on 12/08/2020 3:22:14 PM PST by Ennis85
As Kevin Williamson observes, the 1950s still play something of an outsized role in the American imagination:
Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They weren’t, and damned few of us would be happy with the political settlement that existed then: The Left may cheer the high statutory tax rates of the time, but actual tax collections in those years were almost exactly what they are today, and as much as 80 percent of that Eisenhower-era tax revenue was spent on the military and national security, with entitlement and welfare spending kept to a small share of outlays. There was some movement on civil rights — Eisenhower signed a civil-rights bill in 1957 and sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to keep the peace as the schools were integrated — but the country remained segregated by and large. In 1950, a third of U.S. households had no indoor plumbing. But this is the era that commands the sentimental attention of the American mind. The postwar years are our national definition of normal, even though they were anything but that.
Michael Barone adds more on the atypical nature of mid 20th-century politics. It is worth considering why, exactly, the Fifties retain this position, one that will undoubtedly fade over the next few decades as the population that remembers the decade dwindles, but has been embedded deeply in an entertainment culture that has produced huge quantities of Fifties nostalgia (the most enduring relic of which may end up being the legacy of the decade’s boom in building diners). As Kevin notes, there is an ideological cast, one that involves glossing over some uncomfortable realities. On the right, the Fifties are recalled as a time of family values — but the model of the nuclear family with a single, male breadwinner working outside the home, a female homemaker, and kids in school was actually not as much of a historical norm before that time. Farm families traditionally required everybody (wife, kids) to work on the farm with dad, and often lived in extended families. Poor and working-class families often compelled women to work, whether they wanted to or not. Child labor was once common. High mortality rates before the 1920s meant a lot more widows, widowers, and step-parents. The Left sees the Fifties as the high tide of unions and good wages for the median laborer, but the median American laborer was protected as never before or since from competition. Domestically, the labor market was tight because of barriers to black employment, restrictive immigration policies, and women at home raising kids. Internationally, competition was reduced by much of European and Japanese industry being flattened by war; it was still rebuilding for a decade after 1945. And, of course, among the rebels against the decade’s political consensus was a young man named William F. Buckley, who started a magazine in 1955 in order to challenge it.
On the other hand, there are two fairly glaring reasons why the Fifties looked so great to people who lived through the decade, and why they were and are so fondly remembered. The first is almost too obvious to mention: They were a vastly better time than the two decades that preceded them. Virtually everything that was wrong in America in the 1950s was also wrong in the Thirties and Forties, plus they had the Great Depression and then the Second World War. To any American over the age of ten in 1950, the decade must indeed have seemed like the promised land. The nation was at peace, however uneasy in the Cold War, after the end of the Korean War in 1953. The suburbs, home and car ownership, college education, television, medicine (the polio vaccine), the general standard of living — all of these things grew explosively between 1945 and 1960. Indeed, the visible prosperity, optimism, and comfort of the times, and the end of many of the sources of misery and strife within white America, played their role in encouraging black Americans to press for civil rights more vigorously than at any time since the 1870s.
On the other hand, the great flush of prosperity was an American, not a global phenomenon. While the war-torn countries of Europe had their own baby boom and their own years of economic growth, there was still a lot longer period of rationing and belt-tightening in Europe, much of which took a long time to get back to where it had been in 1939, let alone 1928. (If you want to truly understand why so many young Britons who became rock stars identified with the blues music of black Americans, go look at the living conditions of the British working class in the 1950s. It does not look much like Leave it to Beaver.)
The other big reason is generational: the Baby Boom. The Boomer generation has played an outsize role in American culture since it started arriving in 1946, by reason of its sheer numbers. And for the crest of the Boomer wave, born between 1946 and 1952–53, the Fifties are remembered as the years of childhood. It is a common enough tendency to remember with more rose-colored glasses the years of childhood, especially if you grew up surrounded by lots of other kids your age. A large generation experienced the Fifties as The Way It Has Always Been, and passed that sense on even to my own generation — even long after a lot of the Boomer generation had rebelled against that Way It Had Always Been. Moreover, the nostalgia of childhood is a shared thing: We have similar memories of our years as parents of little ones. The great social upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies sharpened this: two entire generations of Americans (the Boomers and their parents) not only experienced the Fifties as a time of family togetherness and unquestioned parental authority, but followed this up with years of family arguments about “women’s lib” and civil rights and long hair and drugs and loud music and protests and Vietnam. The generational turn from one decade to the next happens in every generation, but because of the unusual size of the Boomer cohort and its coming of age coincident with a time of particular controversy, the Fifties stood out all the more as a lost golden epoch. That is surely why my own childhood era, the 1970s and 1980s, was bombarded with Fifties nostalgia — Happy Days and American Graffiti and Sha Na Na and Back to the Future. It is perhaps culturally interesting that the last decade gave us Mad Men, the first TV show to really build itself around tracking the cultural turn from the world of 1960 to the very different world of 1970.
The Fifties should be remembered fondly for what they were: a time when a great many things in America got better, and far fewer things got worse. But our collective memory of the decade needs to grapple with the reasons why it was historically unusual, and why our memories of it are, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpDbnWh_-aQ
That just about describes my life 20 miles away in West Whittier.
My father turned old enough to join the Navy in 1945 and became the first in his family to go to college on the GI Bill. The economy was booming and he got a management job with a GM company.
We had one of those newfangled "ranch" style houses in a neighborhood full of boomer families. Us kids would head out to play and be gone for hours. Nobody worried for our safety - they had no reason to.
Life in the 50's sure beat years of depression and war. Then came the 60's when the Democrats tried driving the country to hell. The Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam War, race riots, campus riots, the sexual revolution, the Berlin Wall, Cubar Missile Crisis ... Libs like to think of the 60's as some kind of golden age because of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts, but that's about the only good thing that happened. And without Republican support even that wouldn't have happened.
Because the 50’s and first half of the 60’s were the last time this country was doing things pretty much right.
More communist-driven revisionist history...
Before this next year is over, traditional Constitutional America will no longer even remembered...
The onslaught, as it always has in newly minted communist Nations, now turns to the complete erasure of the past and replacement with superstition, propaganda, distortion, falsehoods, and vile lies all designed to wipe all memory of the Nation’s greatness from the serfs psyche...
The novel 1984 doesn’t even come close to the dark tyrannical nature of the future now guaranteed for future generations...
I do that just about every day.
I was born in ‘53. My memories of the ‘50s are sketchy. But, my father told me often as I got older that the 50s were the greatest in his lifetime. He was born in 1918. Full employment, a balanced federal budget of $150 billion, a nation brimming with confidence, where both parties were pro-American, and so forth. All of that changed irreversibly on Nov 22, 1963.
I was born in ‘53. My memories of the ‘50s are sketchy. But, my father told me often as I got older that the 50s were the greatest in his lifetime. He was born in 1918. Full employment, a balanced federal budget of $150 billion, a nation brimming with confidence, where both parties were pro-American, and so forth. All of that changed irreversibly on Nov 22, 1963.
If I were writing a history of the US, I would put the high point of our civilization at 1962, with it in steep decline ever since.
My younger brother was born within days of the Kennedy assassination (which I consider one of the first major cracks in the foundation of our nation). I call him “cliff baby”, born right at the edge of our great cliff of decline.
Being born in the early 1950s I’m thankful that my formative first dozen or so years fell in that earlier period, forever thankful I wasn’t born a day later.
Thanks to a Commie.
I would place it on Thursday, January 19, 1961.
At the same time, however, conservatives were given hope by the rise of a new leader, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) who was elected in 1952 and bucked the Democrat landslide to be re-elected in 1958.
I don’t like blonds....
“Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They weren’t”
The author is an IDIOT. I watched Happy Days for years, and it obviously was the BEST TIME this country ever had.
What a Dingbat.
After reading Thomas Sowell, I don’t think that I can ever look at the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ as it was constructed, as an improvement for black Americans. It looks more like a disaster, which stopped their progress dead in its tracks, and then set them back to a pre-industrial lifestyle.
later
Only reciprocal trade protectionism can return American prosperity.
A fundamental building block of a free market economy is contract law. The free exchange of goods and services hinges on mutually agreed contracts be they formal mortgage agreements or the informal exchange of a dollar bill for a candy bar over the counter at a convenience store.
Long before our Constitution was written and our nation was founded, it was widely understood and accepted that a basic principle of a contractual agreement was that it was non-coercive and entered into without duress. Some civil rights legislation turned this long accepted principle on its head.
Speaking for myself, if I owned a rental property, I would be happy to rent to anybody regardless of race, creed, etc. provided that I had a good faith belief they would take decent care of the property and pay their rent on time. I'm not blind to the fact that racism and other biases exist, and most assuredly, there are others who may not feel that way, and may not want to (for whatever reason) rent to somebody because they are Catholic, Irish, oriental, black etc.
The fact that under certain non-discrimination laws, that property owner must rent to somebody they would not otherwise rent to of their own free will, IMHO, makes that a coercive (and therefore invalid) contract.
I truly believe a free market would clean this up. A property owner who would refuse to rent to a clean, responsible black family loses a good customer to a competitor, and may end up renting to white trash that falls into arrears and destroys the property. Further, a black entrepreneur who saw this type of discrimination in action would be free to specialize in establishing rentals for those who were discriminated against and would likely find a previously unfilled market niche.
An employer who refused to hire a superbly well qualified candidate simply because they were Irish may very well find themselves losing out to a competitor who had no problem hiring the candidate.
As it stands, there have been doubtless millions upon millions of contracts signed in the US that have been entered into unwillingly under the threat of coercive state and federal laws. IMHO, none of these are valid contracts and as such they only foster ill will between the parties of each contract, and further they suppress free market innovations that would have otherwise taken place.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.