People under 30 most likely don’t even know that the United States was not always like it is today. That we were once a strong, moral people with safe cities & towns. Low disease rates, excellent public education, and a happy & content population. Look at those movies & TV shows the 1950s....that was the greatest nation in the history of the world. Look at us today.
FWIW. Let’s talk numbers instead of perceptions.
The murder rate in the USA hit its lowest point ever in 1963, at 4.6 per 100k. It climbed through the 80s and peaked around 11 in 1987.
It’s has trended down since and we’re very nearly back where we were in 1963.
Late 19th century we were about where we were in the 1980s, and prior to that murder rates had been MUCH higher.
“People under 30 most likely don’t even know that the United States was not always like it is today. That we were once a strong, moral people with safe cities & towns. Low disease rates, excellent public education, and a happy & content population. Look at those movies & TV shows the 1950s....that was the greatest nation in the history of the world. Look at us today.”
Don’t be overly nostalgic. There has always been awful problems, though they change over time, and today seems like paradise compared to many of these.
In context, the late 1940’s and 1950s were marked by the collapse of the existing social order, which was typified by racial segregation in most of the US, sectarian religious clique control of most towns, college educated housewives going mad with boredom, tremendous xenophobic paranoia and a deep seated fear of nuclear war, and worsening air and water pollution.
Despite its technological advantages, the US came very close to losing the Korean War, and likely pulled off a stalemate only because of an epidemic of pulmonary hemorrhagic hantavirus that decimated the Chinese army.
As far as morality went, it was so twisted and corrupt that the establishment of the Kinsey Institute in 1947, on the campus of Indiana University, in the heart of the Bible belt, was greeted with glee in much of the country, as a slap in the face of the existing order. Socially it was seen as a cultural “Scopes trial” between authoritarian prudes and sexual liberty, if not license.
It did not happen spontaneously, but only as a reaction to intense sexual and social repression; most of which the returning veterans refused to tolerate.
Their goals were not lewd, they wanted to marry, have a good job, have and raise children, buy a home, and “live happily ever after”. And they did not tolerate annoying and intrusive people interfering with that for whatever reasons.
(I’d like to add as a note, that the low disease rate of the time can to a great extent can be credited to an intense US government propaganda effort during and after the war, to teach the public hygiene; and the development of antibiotics.)
Finally, an awful lot of the illusion that it was good times in America can be traced to censorship on the part of the news media. Many problems they wouldn’t report; many criticisms they wouldn’t make; and free speech pretty much only applied to *some* political speech.
Because of socialist Eugene V. Debs winning millions of votes, even mentioning third political parties was carefully scrutinized to insure that it did not offend the powers that be.