How did people in the 1950s perceive the times they were living in (bomb, generals)

[harry chickpea]

Originally Posted by markg91359

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.



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 Education of 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 worked in one in the late 1960s. The involuntary commitment ruling had effect on patient population, but the real reason for the demise was money. The state run hospitals were products of earlier times and were surprisingly self-sufficient, with their own farms and infrastructure that supplied food and in some cases even heat and electricity. Rehab activities included fabric arts and making furniture, which also added a little income. Staff generally lived in dorms on campus and were paid minimal wages.

The involuntary commitment ruling and a concurrent ruling that minimum wage had to be paid to patients who were working depleted the farms of the free labor that kept them solvent, and made other areas into money drains - laundry and food service immediately come to mind.

Concurrently, funding from the states and any Federal funding were trimmed, with the great lie that most patients could be mainstreamed or housed in private nursing homes less expensively.

In the 1970s, patient's rights began to have influence on laws and regulatory agencies, and the feasibility of the large institutions vanished in a mass of red tape and BS.

The padded rooms were used into the early 1970s at least. There were times that medication was ineffective and other patients were at risk. The padded rooms protected. Then there is the issue of the "criminally insane" who were taken from prisons and put in violent wards, largely because of attorneys who pleaded decreased capacity in individuals who were by no means mentally ill, other that being evil S O B.s

Towards the end, working in such places was crazy, with people quitting, short staffed shifts, and zero support from legislative flab bottomed chair warmers, more interested in pet projects and "favors" than honest government.

[Hermit12]

Originally Posted by steiconi

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.

You must be watching a different TV than the rest of us.

[BigCityDreamer]

I wasn't around in the 1950s. But my feeling is that we still live in a kind of de facto 1950s even today.

When someone says, "I am looking to buy a house that is in a safe neighborhood with good schools," everybody knows exactly what that person is talking about. But nobody mentions it out loud.

I'll leave it to people who actually lived in the 1950s to say how accurate this observation is.

[SunGrins]

Originally Posted by BigCityDreamer

When someone says, "I am looking to buy a house that is in a safe neighborhood with good schools," everybody knows exactly what that person is talking about. But nobody mentions it out loud.

I'll leave it to people who actually lived in the 1950s to say how accurate this observation is.

It was generally unsaid in the 1950s. No real need to say it if you were white and middle class. Blacks, of course, wanted the same thing but were prevented by various means to do it.


Times have changed. Now one has to wonder who would announce that they are looking to buy a house in an unsafe neighborhood and bad schools. Everyone values the same thing -- safety and good schools -- regardless of social status or any other label. In most instances now it boils down to location, preference, and affordability.

[in_newengland]

Poster "webster" has it right when it came to the rights and circumstances of different groups in the 50s.

Allow me to ramble on a bit about what it was like here in New England in the 50s. I lived in a house in a city until I was seven years old. We had poor families and we had average families. My family was average. They had just bought the house and my dad was fixing it up. I had a nice yard and I could walk to school. My best friend lived down the street in a tenement with no backyard.

In kindergarten we went to school half days and we had all kinds of kids. We even had some black kids. In fact, in grade one, my best school friend was black. I don't know where she lived but she would wait for me on the playground and when she saw me coming her face would light up. She'd clap her hands and I'd start running to her and then we'd hug. I don't know what we saw in each other but while the other kids were playing organized games like tag this girl and I ran loose. We'd race and chase and we were different from the rest. I can still see her standing there with her pigtails with ribbons in them and a pretty dress. At the end of the school day everyone dispersed in different directions to walk home. I don't know if black kids lived in certain neighborhoods in the city; I didn't know where any of my school friends lived, but I still remember some of their names and there were Italian kids--a group that was often looked down upon. I had such a crush on a boy who had an Italian name but my actual first grade boyfriend was not Italian or any other ethic group.

Unfortunately the next year my dad got a great new job. We lived with my grandparents out in the country for most of that year and I went to another school. In third grade I started in the snobby suburban town so my dad could be close to his new job.

It was in this town that I learned about discrimination and hatred. There were no black people at all. I remember only two Italian kids in my grade and they were somewhat "poor" and were looked down upon. I was looked down upon as were the people in my neighborhood of middle class people. We consisted of teachers, retirees, a school principal, a retired school superintendent, a couple of factory workers--my neighborhood was "poor" in that town.

Divisions were severe. The town was divided by religion though, not by race. In my neighborhood my best friend was Irish Catholic and she would tell me (Protestant) that I would go to Hell because I wasn't Catholic. She would ofen duck into her church on the way home from school and tell me that I wasn't allowed. But Catholics and Protestants co-mingled at the expensive, exclusive town country club which neither of our parents could afford.

The third group was Jewish. Those kids got out of school for the afternoon every so often to attend Hebrew School. It left the rest of us with nothing to do but busy work with so many missing. I didn't know it at the time but their parents weren't allowed to join the ritzy country club. I got to be good friends with a Jewish girl and she invited me to the Jewish Community Center where there was an indoor pool! I was really excited and then her mom told her to un-invite me because I was not Jewish. Not too far after that she told her daughter not to be friends with me! We had been such good friends that I could walk right into her house without even knocking. We used to do our homework together. They had a maid (black or white? I don't remember.)

Moving on with the divisions within this snobby, wealthy town, most of us went to a ballroom dancing class once a week right after school. I suffered through one year of it and then my dad learned that Jewish kids did not get invitations to the dancing school. He pulled me right out of there. I was just glad to be out!

We did see a few black people but they didn't live in town. We'd see them sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. They were people's maids. I didn't look down on them. I just thought it seemed weird and as a kid, I didn't understand it.

Around the time I was in 6th grade, there was a feeling of unrest in our middle class neighborhood. A wonderful family (boys were Eagle Scouts, the little girl was adorable, the parents were really nice) were going to move away.
Those two boys used to look out for the younger kids in the neighborhood, even organizing games for big groups of kids after supper until it was time to go in. But there was something else going on too.

When I asked my mother what all the "hush hush" whispering among the neighbors was about, she told me that a family of black people might move into that house. At my age I was puzzled as to what was wrong with that. She told me that it could bring property values down.

People in those days were trying to better themselves, it was a time of opportunity, and if they'd invested in a house, they didn't want to lose out. Ours was an affordable neighborhood of older homes--most were in nice condition--but it wasn't like the rest of the town with its staid old mansions, or picturesque antique homes which had been built hundreds of years ago or planned areas that were designed by famous landscape architects back in the 1920s as refuges for wealthy city dwellers to relax in peace and quiet.

But no worries--no black family ever moved into the neighborhood. As I said, certain ethnic groups were looked down upon and it was said that if an Italian family lived in this town they would have to be in the Mafia to afford it.

I don't think I ever hung out with a Mafia kid but my younger sister did! Her friend lived in a nice house and she took my sister to the city to see the pizza shop where she said her dad and uncle held secret meetings in a back room. (Turned out to be all too true. ) The Italian kids that I knew in town were not well off--no beautiful house, no new car, no cashmere sweaters, no annually redecorated house--I got along well with those kids but they were definitely not on the A List.

Meanwhile in the neighboring town, which had been separated from my town as it was looked down up because it was "the other side of the tracks" there were kids of all kinds. That town even had a few factories and farms. That town would have been the average all American town back in the 50s in my part of the country. I don't know if they had black people, I don't know if ethinic groups were looked down upon. When my parents moved there after we kids had graduated high school in the snobby town, I found that the people were nice and really down to earth. We probably had moved to that snobby town for its outstanding school system.

[SkyLark2019]

They really thought that "this is as good as it gets."

[VeniVidiVelcro]

McCarthyism was much nastier and a bigger deal than what a lot of people know.

Only for communists or their useful idiots like the Rosenbergs who stole our nuclear tech and gave it it to the Soviet Union (and were executed for it)

McCarthy was right. If you want to know the truth about politics in that era, search and read the Venona Papers

Also read “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers.

[CalWorth]

The ones I knew of were family members. They did not speak much about the past but it appeared that for them the 1950's
were a break from the trauma of the Great Depression & WW2. None of them returned to the family farms. Most moved far away and looked for steady work in industry or civil service. Some prospered more than others. The ones who struggled most were the older children in these large farm families, because they didn't have the educational opportunities that the younger ones did.

[Manigault]

Originally Posted by VeniVidiVelcro

Only for communists or their useful idiots like the Rosenbergs who stole our nuclear tech and gave it it to the Soviet Union (and were executed for it)

McCarthy was right. If you want to know the truth about politics in that era, search and read the Venona Papers

Also read “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers.

It was communists (or 'fellow travelers') who with Bella Abzug represented Willie McGee in the fifties (before he was executed) and the Scotsboro Boys in the thirties. In the fifties under McCarthyism, the FBI was known for approaching the workplace of leftists (particularly those who fought in the Lincoln brigade) and exerting pressure to have leftists fired.

You should read "All God's Dangers" about the fifties, communists and leftists.

[Coney]

WWII vets were still having difficulty finding steady work, even in the 50s.

Even in liberal NY, Jews and Catholics were not welcome in certain neighborhoods and many faced occupational limitations. Certain law firms would not hire Italian or Jewish lawyers. I think the series Mad Men portrayed the era of the late 50s fairly accurately. An Italian art director was an anomaly in that field and subjected to bigotry.