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Whenever I would read comments online people would always say how today is crap compared to living in the 1950s. But I was wondering, where the 1950s as great as everyone says they were like they showed on those TV shows? If you remember the 50s well what do you think? How was your life then?
I suppose there were good and bad things. I think my mom was greatly influenced by a 1950s sort of mentality. My impression is that things that were unpleasant were swept under the rug. A teenager who became pregnant simply vanished until after she had her baby, things like that.
I wasn't alive in the 50s so I can only speculate. The answer for me would be no, for many reasons. The racial and human rights issues, the wars, the disease, less-advanced technology to name a few. Did people live under these conditions? Of course. But the 1950s indeed were not perfect.
The Fifties were my Jr. H.S./H.S./college decade. If the standard of "great" is based on the squeaky clean, totally unreal TV shows like The Nelsons or Father Knows Best, my answer would have to be a resounding, NO! But you could send your kids out to play and just tell them to be home in time for dinner without a qualm in many parts of the U.S., or leave your house unlocked while you went shopping, and ditto for your car.
But a lot more was going on.
1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., Wisc.) gave a six hour speech on the Senate floor claiming to have evidence of 81 Communists working in the State Department. Undersecretary of State John Peurifory declared to a Senate investigation hearing that a "homosexual underground" in Washington is participating in the "Communist conspiracy" against America. McCarthy and others whip up a furor over the "pervert peril." The Commie Pinko f*g label is born. More people will be fired from government service based on accusations of homosexuality than for Communist associations.
The Korean War began. In response to the invasion of South Korea by North Korea President Truman ordered U.S. troops there to repel the invasion. The US and UN forces succeeded against the North Koreans at first, but the entry of Communist China into the war caused heavy casualties and the fortunes of war reversed.
Lucky Strikes' popular radio show Your Hit Parade debuted on TV in this year. It stared clean-cut looking, very adult, white performers only, and it featureed the type of music (and performing styles) that white teenagers would very soon abandon wholesale -- light melodies, sweet lyrics and wholesome singers, innocent and inoffensive "feel-good" tunes that reflected the mood of white middle class, suburban and small town America. Mona Lisa and The Tennessee Waltz were big hits this year, they were typical of white pop music. And they were Snoozeville to many teens, Daddy-o! Neither the producers nor the performers of the show were able to cope with the spirit and energy of rock 'n' roll when it went national; it became painful to watch and the show was put to sleep at the end of the 1959 season.
The McCarran Internal Security Act was vetoed by President Truman, but was passed again - overriding the president's veto. The act contained draconian security measures aimed at the perceived domestic Communist threat, including a provision for the creation of detention camps "for emergency situations."
In 1951 HUAC (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) began a second wave of hearings in the lower chamber of Congress, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy led the charge in the Senate. The already overheated political climate degenerated into a three-year era of grossly exaggerated charges and unfounded and unsubstantiated denunciations that spread paranoia and hysteria throughout the nation. The word "McCarthyism" found its place in the American language as a result. Roy Cohn, a thoroughly unprincipled lawyer, is McCarthy's right-hand man and young Bobby Kennedy did his brief bit for the Senator too.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. The judge declared they are responsible for 40,000 dead Americans in the Korean War. The evidence against Mrs. Rosenberg is flimsy at best.
Production costs and ticket prices had yet to soar through the roof, and the Fifties saw a string of colorful Broadway musicals with great songs. The King and I, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, opened on March 13th 1951. Set in the royal court in Bangkok in the 1860's, it had dazzling sets and costumes, and ran for 1,246 performances. The exotic looking, shaved-headed Brynner became a major star. In addition to many, many enduring musicals, Broadway saw many new non-musical dramas and comedies opening every year, and vying for theatre space.
One of these was I Am a Camera, a stage adaptation of gay English author Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, which opened on November 28th. It was written and directed by another well-known English writer, John Van Druten, and stared Julie Harris. Isherwood's stories, set at the dawning of the Nazi era, would be reborn decades later as the Broadway musical Cabaret, later a Hollywood film.
One of Alfred Hitchcock's most esteemed films, the film noir classic Strangers on a Train, came out in 1951, starring Robert Walker and Farley Granger. Based on the first novel of author, Patricia Highsmith, it brought her fame, especially in Europe. Her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was made into a movie in France, and released in the U.S. in 1960 as Purple Noon. Highsmith said that its intense and handsome star, Alain Delon, was ideal as the sociopathic Ripley, and he went on to become a talented international star. A 1999 remake starred Matt Damon, playing Ripley as a more confused and even likeable character.
In his West 20th St. apartment in Manhattan the unknown Jack Kerouac banged out the manuscript of a novel on one long roll of paper in three weeks. On the Road was the thinly disguised adventures of his idol Neal Cassady (as the fictional Dean Moriarty) and himself, and when the book was finally published in 1957 it signaled the emergence of the Beat movement on the American scene. The general public assumed Kerouac himself to be the model for Dean Moriarty, but it was a role he was not suited for and a pose he could not sustain. The real-life Cassady outlasted the heyday of the Beats, and lived just long enough to streak across the Hippy firmament as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, where he may be found in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Kerouac, however, suffered an inglorious fate: he slid into moroseness and heavy drinking, becoming a recluse -- and finally the willing prisoner of his rigidly conventional mother. Now there is the other side of the Fifties!
In 1952 war hero, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was elected President of the United States and served for two terms. He was a modest man, and one who found the business of campaigning and politicking distasteful. "I like Ike" was his campaign slogan - and it was hard not to like Ike. Earnest, oftentimes worried-looking, clearly much happier on the golf course than at a press conference - his genial, unassuming fatherly image became a tranquilizer for Americans exhausted by the war and terrified of the Red Menace.
For me the event of the decade occurred this year: "Jungle music" showed up. Hot damn! Across the country white teenagers within the broadcasting range of radio stations playing what had been called "race music" until only a few years before, embraced Rhythm and Blues as their own. The proprietor of the Dolphin Record Store, one of the biggest black-owned record stores in Los Angeles, famously reported that in one year his customers had gone from zero whites to 40 percent white. Cleveland DJ Alan Freed used the term "Rock and Roll" for the new (to whites) music, and his audience had gone from being all black to heavily white. (Though Freed later claimed to have coined the term, "rock and roll" was a black slang term for screwing, dating back to the early 1920's.) "Race music"was entering most white American homes for the first time.
It didn't matter what your skin color was: no one's parents were ready for Little Richard. One of the biggest shifts in American popular music was underway - and it was one hell of a great time to be a teenager!
But popular yellow journalism writers, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer informed Americans in their latest book, U.S.A. Confidential, that juvenile delinquency was linked "with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background. Many music shops purvey dope; assignations are made in them. White girls are recruited for colored lovers....We know that many platter-spinners [DJ's] are hopheads. Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention....[teenagers] frequent places the radio oracles plug, which is done with design...to hook juves [teenagers] and guarantee a new generation subservient to the Mafia.” I'm not sure how I missed that side of the music scene, but I did.
A former U.S. soldier George Jorgensen, now called Christine, achieved notoriety for her sex change done in Denmark in 1952. For many years her name was used by comedians as an acceptable public allusion to anything referring to homosexuality. Instant laughs. Hyuk hyuk. Jorgenson took most of the dubious humor in stride and was quite tolerant of intrusive questioning...up to a point. However, years later when she was a guest of the The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett offended her by asking about the status of her private life with her "wife." She walked off the show and as she was the only guest scheduled, Cavett had to fumble through the rest of the show talking about how he had not meant to offend her.
In 1953 the Korean War ended. The U.S. accepted a truce as the solution to the war - the first major war in its history that the U.S. had not won. It quickly became the "forgotten war." This was really scary - just a step away from outright losing to Communists! And under the Fifties rug it went.
The Rosenbergs were electrocuted at Sing Sing prison this year. Protests against the executions had been held in many places in the U.S. and around the world, and leading figures pleaded for mercy, including the Pope. The first 57-second jolt fails to kill Ethel, she is strapped back into the chair to receive two more jolts. After the Cold War ends it is discovered from Russian agents that she was not in their employ. Whoooooops.
Arthur Miller's great play The Crucible, an indictment of America's witch hunting past, opened at the Martin Beck Theater in New York City. It took aim squarely at Sen. McCarthy's tactics of witch hunt hysteria.
1954 saw Brown v. Board of Education. In this watershed case the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation is unconstitutional. While the decision did not contain a timetable for the desegregation of schools, nor did it ban other forms of segregation, there was no doubt in any quarter that finally the obligation for "Negro" equality had to be taken by the Federal government.
The 45 rpm record player came along this year, it was a small special unit which you attached to your radio in order to play the new size records has become the made-for-teenagers monster it was intended to be. It was now the industry standard - the old brittle 78 rpms rapidly became history - and the player's small size, low price and new portable models meant that teenagers could take their music with them. In the era when the musical tastes of adults and teenagers were rapidly and radically diverging, this little machine might lay claim to being the rocket which propelled the development of a youth market in music - with soft drinks, clothing and other products rapidly jumping on for the profitable ride. The Fifties were definitely the time when adolescents became firmly identified as a separate entity apart from adults - popularly portrayed and worried about as being in fierce opposition to family life and parental control. Well, yeah, right.
That ol' Red hunter, Sen. Joe McCarthy began hearings to prove that the U.S. army had been infiltrated by Communists. With the help of President Eisenhower and unedited footage of the hearings taken by newsman Ed Murrow the army was exonerated and "McCarthyism" in all its squalid dishonesty was laid bare to the public. McCarthy was censured by the Senate - only the third time in its history that it had taken such a measure. Red-baiting dies down, and the Senator dies in 1957 of the effects of years of alcoholism.
This was the year I saw my first Broadway show when the national company of Kismet played in a nearby city. The musical was bound to bowl me over - a bubbling, humorous tale set in long-ago Baghdad, sumptuous sets from an Arabian Nights fantasy and a talented cast singing songs derived from the most romantic works of Alexander Borodin. Wow!
In 1954 George "Hound Dog" Lorenz, a DJ who'd been playing R&B on a small daylight station, WHLD (or was it WJJL?), in Niagara Falls, NY moved to 50,000 watt WKBW in Buffalo, and premiered live with Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown from the racially mixed Zanzibar Lounge in the black ghetto of Buffalo. Lorenz was one of the first white DJ's to play what had until recently been called "race music" full time on his shows. At night this station could sometimes be heard as far as Tennessee. I had been a religiously dedicated listener since his Niagara Falls days on a daylight station. Alan Freed moved to WINS in New York City. R&B and rock and roll weretwisting the tail of the pop music industry. It is difficult today to imagine the intensity with which teenagers responded to these first rock 'n' roll DJ's. Soon parents, schools, clergymen, politicians and the legion of self-appointed social commentators would be blaming these DJ's and the music for every problem associated with young people.
This year Swanson marketed the first "TV Dinner." Americans bought 10,000,000 the first year! Just as the simple little flea brought the Black Death which wiped out millions in Europe's Middle Ages, this little frozen pie led to the eventual annihilation of real home cooking in the United States.
In 1955 James Dean, a talented actor with stage and live TV drama credits (I'd seen him on TV), was brought to Hollywood after starring in a stage adaptation of Gide's novel, The Immoralist, a story with a homosexual theme. <gasp!> He exploded into stardom with Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. The former created the image that millions of American teenagers identified with. His famous red jacket becomes a teenage trade mark. I want it, I want it, I want it.......but I never got one of those d*amned jackets!
Blackboard Jungle, a film about juvenile delinquency, based on Evan Hunter's shockingly vivid novel, featured the theme song Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets. The song became a teenage anthem, and national Rock n Roll is a reality. Those Bobbie Soxers had faded away and in their place were were Us: the secretive, clannish and sometimes sullen and disrespectful teenager. That word acquired such bad associations that there were even attempts by school authorities in Buffalo and other places to force the use of various imbecilic labels in its place - dudes and dudettes, is one pair I recall.
This year on July 3rd Buffalo's WWOL DJ Guy King climbs out a studio window with a mike to broadcast his show from the top of a billboard overlooking Shelton Square. He exhorted his audience of teenagers in the square below to honk their horns if they wanted to hear a repeat of the song he was playing. The song was - of course - Bill Haley and the Comets' Rock Around the Clock. Teenagers pile into their cars and descended into the area - the honking didn't stop, Rock Around the Clock didn't stop and the result was holiday eve traffic chaos. After two hours King was dragged off to jail for the stunt. Several thousand teenagers had brought the downtown of America's fifteenth largest city crunching to a halt. Teenagers did what! And forty miles away we listened in awe and envy.
Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus; Emmett Till, a black teenager, was kidnapped and bludgeoned to death after making a fresh remark or whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. When it came to the question of race, the Fifties were not better.
In '56 Black singer Nat King Cole was attacked onstage while performing in Birmingham, Alabama by four white men. Nat Cole was the star of a national, prime time television show in 56 - 57. but it failed to attract major advertisers, and though NBC supported it without significant advertising revenue and top-rated stars appear at nominal union fees to bolster it, the show folded after one season. Advertisers were convinced that they would suffer a significant loss of sales in the South by sponsoring the show.
Elvis Presley, had begun his career in 1954 with "That's All Right, a cover version of a song by black, Delta blues singer, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. (He honored Crudup with covers of another two of his songs.) But in this year the white crossover singer, released Heartbreak Hotel. His undulating hips - not to mention his unmentionably obvious dangling weenie and bouncing balls - worried the nation. Really!His career heralded a wave of "rockabilly" music.
But his rapid domestication and conversion into a pop ballad singer paralleled the development of the far safer, saccharine genre of white-teen-idol schlock rock. For a few years attempts to "whiten" pop music and put a racial cordon sanitaire around the record industry would ride this wave.
Rock and Roll was denounced as "a plot to mongrelize America." A White Citizens' Council spokesman in Alabama says, "We have set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, n****r rock and roll bop." Even outside of the South its racially mixed teenage audiences upset parents and officials used to codes of customary, if not legislated, segregation. And R&R unabashedly celebrated the physical and hinted at the sexual; and ridiculed deferred gratification and the work obsession of the world of gray flannel suits. Congressmen rumbled against it, parents hated it. And I was a slave to it. "Hail, hail Rock and Roll!"
1956 year-end music industry statistics showed that 68% of the music played by radio DJ's was rock 'n' roll recordings, two-thirds more than in the previous year. At the end of the following year every song on Billboard magazine's Top Ten would be a R&R one.
In 1956, I was eighteen. While having failed to attain the heights of disaster reached by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, my adolescent psyche, nevertheless, had ulcers. Most kids in this era had very little real independence or privacy, however my parents were way more controlling than most. "Talking things over" was never in their picture (even between themselves); shouting and threats are the language of "discipline," though to be fair, many working class parents were like this. They both had very set expectations of their only surviving child -- unfortunately, often conflicting ones
In any case, Yours Truly, was a "nice kid" - an intelligent, polite, hard-working student in the world of adults - but like others I became something else in my own world. Painfully self-conscious about being too good a student and miserably second-rate at anything athletic I competed in other ways: smoking and drinking since junior high school, regularly sneaking to bars that served minors for three years, and probably having more sex in the past six years than many adults. (Yes, Virginia, we invented promiscuity.) In the process I became such a smooth liar and habitual pretender that the punishments I received were almost always for petty infractions of my curfew. In any case, I had won two scholarships and would be heading off to a university more than a hundred miles away.
The first five years of the decade had seen live TV dramas, such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Westinghouse Studio One and Kraft TV Theatre among others, and had featured original works by the likes of Paddy Chayevsky and Gore Vidal (quietly making a living doing TV scripts after being skunked over The City and the Pillar), and the acting talents of Rod Steiger, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Susan Strassberg, etc. At the mid-Fifties taping and the move to Hollywood brought an end to this era of creativity. The sugar-coated sit-com would reign unchallenged, a reassuring world in which Communists, blacks and sex are hardly acknowledged. The film Man in the Gray Flannel Suit tried to explore the new world of materialism, conformity and the furious competitiveness of the white collar world. By the midpoint of the decade Marty, The Rose Tattoo, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, The Country Girl, The African Queen and Streetcar Named Desire have been filmed. Despite the post-war deluge of war memoirs and a never-ending series of books by Winston Churchill, as well as sentimental popular fiction, novels with probing themes sold well too - Catcher in the Rye, Too Late the Phalarope, The Caine Mutiny, The Adventures of Augie March, Man with the Golden Arm, The Invisible Man
By the mid-Fifties the winds of change were picking up force throughout U.S. society. The proliferation of new products for home and personal use was making consumerism the new American Way of life, automation was changing manufacturing and threatening the blue collar worker's job, and for white collar workers there was now the "Rat Race." But being a working class family in a town where everyone worked in a local factory or on a farm, I had to find out about this part of the Fifties when I went to college.
Where I lived people were worried about the fact that somebody said they're finding used "rubbers" in the bushes around the football field! Uh-oh, I wonder who left those there.
And this was only the first half of the Fifties. Without a doubt, as cited in the OP, I would agree that today is "crap" when compared with the Fifties, though probably for different reasons than a great many people. Not living in the same world as the fantasy of those famous family sit-coms, my Fifties were a time when lots of folks were bustin' the cojones of all those fearful - mainly white - types who were trying to sweep the tidal wave of post-WW II changes under the rug, while a lot of powerful people were trying to squelch many of those changes by labeling them "Communist," even when the label was blatantly silly.
Swings and Roundabouts,but I would say on balance it was a better time. People nowdays might say ''how did you live like that then'. Of course it may depend too on where you lived.
The 1960s changed all that. For better or for worse?... swings and roundabouts
Like living in America (where it all started) in the 1950s would be different from the UK. I think the world (western) was heavily influenced by America.
Most of the people on this forum weren't even alive in the 1950s, or if they were they were too young to really understand what life was "like" and besides they had nothing else to compare it to.
People who didn't live through that era believe it was some kind of primordial period when there was no birth control, women weren't "allowed" to work, and a plethora of other inane and incorrect concepts. The fact of the matter is that the 1950s had everything we needed to be comfortable and thrive. Yes, I believe they were pretty darn perfect.
If you were a minority - particularly an African-American - or woman who had high career aspirations or otherwise sought out legal equality, life in the 50's probably was not great at all. Just watch classic TV and movies from that time to see who was (not) featured and what type of roles they were (not) given. Or perhaps catch a few episodes of Mad Men which, albeit set in the early 60's, shows a glimpse of how the winds of change were starting to turn.
On another note, many non-smokers may not have enjoyed having to breathe cigarette smoke at their workplace, in restaurants and most any public venue. (Sorry to any smokers that may be offended by my opinion.)
I was born in 1944, so I have personal memories of the 50's. Although I believe it was a much better time to raise children than subsequent decades, the word "perfect" is an exaggeration. No human society ever was, or ever will be, "perfect". It was great, provided one was not black or homosexual, but since I was neither it was good for me. I'm glad I grew up knowing that I needed to be respectful and courteous to adults. I'm glad I grew up before drug use became common, that is, other than alcohol and nicotine. It was an era where college costs were low enough that students could work their way through college with part-time jobs and emerge debt-free. That was a great character builder.
In the aggregate, I'd take the good points of the 1950's (despite the admitted bad points) over what we have now (despite many good points of the present day).
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