To everyone who wants to glorify the fifties as some sort of paradise, please don't kid yourself. Every generation seems to think that their time was the best, and the whole world is going to pot. I'm sure the GenXer's will be saying the same thing a few years from now. But let's look at reality, and not some rose colored image of the past. I was born in 1957 so I'm too young to remember the fifties, but I get a good idea from my older brothers. My father and my mother, who just died two weeks ago, were both born in 1915 and my late grandmother something like 1881 so I do have a pretty good historical frame of reference.
Yes, a lot of things were better for everyone, including kids, back in the day. But no one wants to remember the bad things. Like the premature babies who routinely survive today that wouldn't have a chance in 1955. Or smallpox and polio. I had a relative who walked hunched over with a withered leg, because he had it in the fifties. What about malaria, or the thousands who would die from untreatable cancers we can battle today?
Would you like to be a middle class black today, or in 1958? Yes, you're going to scream about how the welfare state has destroyed the black family but was it really better to have separate drinking fountains mandated by the state?
My point is not to denigrate those times. No one gets angrier at movies like Pleasantville that try to make the time seem uptight and boring than I do. I just don't think it helps to promote a return to a time before MTV as the panacea for today's problems. Didn't you learn anything from your parents who thought Elvis was going to destroy your youth?
Thanks for an excellent post. You conveyed in nicer words what I have been trying to get across. I wanted to bring up the issue with blacks but decided not to. But since it has been raised, let me comment upon it. During the 1950s in the South, blacks were by and large not allowed to shop or eat with whites or even use the same bathrooms and water fountains. They were treated like garbage. And while things were better up north, it was still no picnic being a black person. So while I am not black myself, if I were, I would be very insulted to have people try to tell me that the 1950s was a paradise on Earth.