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Worked at the state mental facility in the 1990s. Was able to access the archives at that time. In the 1990s we had about 350 people on the campus. About 100 of them lived there and the other 250 rotated out (and back in of course). What was stunning is that in the 1950s the place had about 3K living there and had had up to 7K living there during it's history since it's founding.
We had empty/abandoned living quarters throughout the large campus. We got to see the old "Rubber Rooms" covered in acoustic tile replete with dents from pounding fists. We even found abandoned records of some of our older patients who had been young then. Still demonstrating some of the same behaviors as they did as elderly folks.
We had an abandoned farm and dairy on the property. A graveyard. It was its own self contained city at one point.
In the olden days it was fairly easy to commit someone to a mental hospital. If your spouse and a doctor agreed you needed the treatment you could be involuntarily committed. Electro shock therapy was fairly common than as a treatment for depression and the hospitals frequently used it on their patients. In reality, there were thousands of people in mental institutions whose problems could be managed on the outside.
In the seventies, a US Supreme Court decision called O'Conner v. Donaldson made it clear that involuntary commitment to such a hospital was only allowable if it could be shown that the "patient was a danger to themselves or others". Most mentally ill people are not dangerous and so the decision resulted in the release of a huge percentage of the population of mental hospitals. This was not all good. We have thousands of homeless mentally ill people on the streets today because they have no where to go. However, many others who shouldn't have been there were released and have been successfully treated as outpatients.
There is an excellent movie with Jack Nicholson in it called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that details abuses in mental hospitals during this period.
Quote:
Originally Posted by spencer114
The 50’s were trash and anyone who longs for the “good old days” is a racist POS. Period.
They weren't all bad (and very few would call me a racist POS). Even if you were a minority this was the decade that gave rise to Brown v. The Board of Educationof Topeka and the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. Martin Luther King would begin his successful protests against segregation during this decade. Plenty of young sharp World War II vets came to realize during this era that things needed to be changed. This was the group that really gave rise to the changes that occurred in this country during the 1960's.
The 1950's are overhyped, but there was still plenty of good (as well as bad) that happened during this decade.
I invited some older friends to a '50s-themed party (put together by people born in the '60s). They said, "No thanks, we lived through the '50s, have no interest in celebrating them."
They weren't all bad (and very few would call me a racist POS). Even if you were a minority this was the decade that gave rise to Brown v. The Board of Educationof Topeka and the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. Martin Luther King would begin his successful protests against segregation during this decade. Plenty of young sharp World War II vets came to realize during this era that things needed to be changed. This was the group that really gave rise to the changes that occurred in this country during the 1960's.
There was the soft, de facto racism in much of the country in the fifties. There was about zero minorities seen on TV or in advertisements. Minorities were essentially expected to 'stay in their place', a disheartening edict. "Ebony' magazine each month touted 'Speaking of People' which showed blacks in management positions. Each spring the magazine would print which major league baseball team had black players. The Yankees, America's elitist team in NYC, was backward in this area with only Elston Howard in 1955. I remember the big to-do about Willie Mays in the fifties when Leo Durocher's wife had her arm on his shoulder and on Mays. This made the cover of Sports Illustrated and, I later learned, the public just about had a fit. Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes did not have a black dancer until the eighties and Mercedes Ellington (the Duke's granddaughter) joined the June Taylor dancers in '63; their first black dancer. It was fun to try to pick her out among the others on the Jackie Gleason show.
I lived in a factory town in the fifties and it was easy to see where minorities were not hired, even at the locales close to minority neighborhoods. These were the days when the daily newspapers would feature pictures of a check passing, a meeting of a veterans group or a church association. Black or brown faces were almost never shown in the pictures.
It wasn't just blacks who were unrepresented, either. Ethnic minorities in the fifties sort of huddled together for group safety. In addition to the black press, there was a daily newspaper in Hebrew, Italian and in Spanish in NYC. People wanted to be able to walk to church and for their kids to be able to walk to school. Where I lived, this made de facto housing segregation real: There were two Italian parishes, two Irish, one Polish, one Slovak and one Portuguese! Each had their own school. This came back to haunt the diocese in the eighties with parishes having to be combined after flight to outer suburbs.
One of the biggest differences between now and then is while today very small families (less than 2 children, if any at all) and helicopter parents predominate, it was a free-for-all of large fertile families that lasted into the early 1970s when this country was overwhelmed with children. Nearly every household had 3,4 or more children, streets were always full of mobs of children at all hours, teenagers in large groups roamed and hung out on city street corners, schools were ridiculously overcrowded, homes and bedrooms were overcrowded. Children were free-range nearly as soon as they could walk, no hovering parents. Even though most households had 2 parents, parent involvement in children's activities was minimal, if there was any involvement at all. There was a lot of violence taken for granted, fights at school with bruising and black eyes, physical abuse and bullying, gang violence by teenagers, beating of children by parents, beatings by school staff of students (beyond paddling), and these things happened nearly every day.
This is quite a significant difference. It's interesting how in such a supposedly conservative time, parents weren't near as involved in their children's lives as they are today. It's as if parents have gone from one extreme to the other, from letting their kids do whatever to controlling their every move and thought and infantilizing them even after adulthood. I wonder what caused such a dramatic shift in parenting styles. I'm sure the parents of the '50s believed they were doing what was best for their children just like the helicopter parents that emerged during the "self esteem" era believe their parenting style is best.
Having those "free range" experiences during your formative years, in my opinion, is very beneficial in teaching children life skills to excel in adulthood. I think the helicopter parenting since the self-esteem movement has caused a lot of the problems people typically attribute to Millennials.
There was the soft, de facto racism in much of the country in the fifties. There was about zero minorities seen on TV or in advertisements. Minorities were essentially expected to 'stay in their place', a disheartening edict. "Ebony' magazine each month touted 'Speaking of People' which showed blacks in management positions. Each spring the magazine would print which major league baseball team had black players. The Yankees, America's elitist team in NYC, was backward in this area with only Elston Howard in 1955. I remember the big to-do about Willie Mays in the fifties when Leo Durocher's wife had her arm on his shoulder and on Mays. This made the cover of Sports Illustrated and, I later learned, the public just about had a fit. Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes did not have a black dancer until the eighties and Mercedes Ellington (the Duke's granddaughter) joined the June Taylor dancers in '63; their first black dancer. It was fun to try to pick her out among the others on the Jackie Gleason show.
I lived in a factory town in the fifties and it was easy to see where minorities were not hired, even at the locales close to minority neighborhoods. These were the days when the daily newspapers would feature pictures of a check passing, a meeting of a veterans group or a church association. Black or brown faces were almost never shown in the pictures.
It wasn't just blacks who were unrepresented, either. Ethnic minorities in the fifties sort of huddled together for group safety. In addition to the black press, there was a daily newspaper in Hebrew, Italian and in Spanish in NYC. People wanted to be able to walk to church and for their kids to be able to walk to school. Where I lived, this made de facto housing segregation real: There were two Italian parishes, two Irish, one Polish, one Slovak and one Portuguese! Each had their own school. This came back to haunt the diocese in the eighties with parishes having to be combined after flight to outer suburbs.
I recently heard Heather McGhee talk about her book The Sum of Us, and she brought up the statistic that the rise of individual home swimming pools is directly correlated with desegregation of public pools. And post-WWII, most Americans favored the idea of universal health care and guaranteed employment, but once the Civil Rights movement picked up, those fell out of favor under the idea that "those people" would be getting things for free.
The USA came out of WW2 economically smelling of roses, especially compared to pre WW2. The 1950s USA was a great time for middle class Americans for sure.
There was optimism in the 1950s as new technologies were being introduced into homes: TVs, laundry appliances, etc.
There was the soft, de facto racism in much of the country in the fifties. There was about zero minorities seen on TV or in advertisements. Minorities were essentially expected to 'stay in their place', a disheartening edict. "
And when there was a "minority" character in a movie or tv show, they were often (absurdly) portrayed by a white person.
The Puerto Ricans in "West Side Story" were mostly played by Italians.
Yul Brenner played the king of Siam.
Marlo Thomas played a Chinese girl on Bonanza. (That was in the early '60s, I think)
Most Native Americans on westerns were played by Hispanic or Italian actors.
It's only pretty recently--like, the last 20 years or so--that we see mixed race couples on TV ads. Many commercials still show only single-race groups.
Things are changing very slowly.
A tale of two experiences in the south: As a white kid, I saw it as safe as did our parents. I could ride my bike where I wanted. My mother would get arrested today, but back then, when we got on her nerves - a house full of boys and our friends - we would get locked out of the house; we could play in the street, at the swamp at the end of the road, ride our bikes to the pool - the one of course that let in Jews and Catholics but no African Americans - the country clubs would not let us join - and if we needed water, well there always the garden hose and the swamp for other bodily business. Later, as an adult, my African American friends shared their experiences as kids: they had to be careful not to go alone off their street, ever alert; they were frequently chased.
When we would go away for the evening, the doors would be locked, but the garage window would be left open so in the odd event - that never happened - we should loose our keys, one of us could climb in and unlock the door. It never occurred that a burglar might do the same.
Traveling before the interstates was slow and again we could go where we wanted. African Americans needed the The Negro Motorist Green Book - yes, that is what it was called. It listed where they could safely get gas, get lodging and get car repairs done.
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