The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[HudsonHawk]

Does anyone here actually *remember* the 50's? If so, it'd be interesting to here their take.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

not at all; marketing simply exploits this tendency of the human brain.

I believe marketing is what made those images prominent. The brain is not inherently lazy. It's marketing that dumbs things down and because we've lived on a diet of nuggets fed to us by those who gain from it we seek such sound bites.

I just see it differently than you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

whats the 1940s all about ? guys with big shoulder pads and chalk stripe suits and black and white shoes.
what's the 1920s all about ? flappers in beaded dresses and headbands. guys in spats with tommy guns going rat a tat tat.

And yet, as corny as those images are, they haven't been *marketed* to the extent that "The Fifties" have. Everybody knows what a "Fifties Diner" is, even though the diner is actually native to the teens and twenties. Why "The Fifties" and not the equally reductive image of "The Forties?" That's what we're getting at here. What is it about "The Fifties" that allows that fiction to be used as both a weapon and a counterweapon in arguments about the direction of American society? And note how *marketing* has played both ends in the middle in that battle -- using "The Fifties" as both a positive and a negative image depending on who's selling what to whom. That's what we're getting at here.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I turned 7 in 1960, so I have a kid's-eye view of the decade. When I started first grade, Ike was the President, we kids played WWII in my neighborhood, and everyone's father had been in "the Service".

By the way, I still like Ike!

 

[herringbonekid]

What is it about "The Fifties" that allows that fiction to be used as both a weapon and a counterweapon in arguments about the direction of American society?

in times of change and economic uncertainty 'good old fashioned values' seem reassuring again; the 50s was the most recent decade for that... in the popular imagination.



(in the UK the 40s is by far the most rose-tinted of the decades).

 

[rjb1]

As a 1948-model Baby Boomer there is so much interesting stuff here that it's hard to know where to start concerning comments.
One area that I have a strong interest in is fifties-era-TV - the shows we early BB'ers watched in our formative years. By good fortune a local independent station shows many of those nightly, so I have had a chance to watch now the same shows that I watched (and liked) then.
What strikes me most vividly about them is that the most positive role models for women were in shows that the little girls and women (then and now) probably did not or do not watch. These were the action/adventure/Western/science-fiction series of the fifties.
Examples: The #1 example is "Annie Oakley": She could ride, shoot, and catch outlaws better than any man in the town. In fact, the deputy in the town was constantly being snuck up on or hit in the head and Annie always had to come to his rescue. (He was so incompetent compared to her that I felt sorry for him, even as a kid.)
Another was "The Adventures of Robin Hood": Maid Marian was effectively Robin's second in command and was always a pivotal part of the schemes to fight the Sheriff of Nottingham. In one episode, Robin was traveling and as the next-best archer she had to represent the Outlaws in an archery match. (She was a better shot than any other of the Merry Men.)
Another was "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger": Veena Ray was part of the crew (navigator and translator) of Rocky's spaceship, so she was right along with the rest of the Space Rangers in their fight against interstellar outlaws and space pirates. (Years ahead of Lt. Uhura on "Star Trek")
On "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet", which was about the adventures in outer space of a trio of Space Academy Cadets, their Physics Professor (Dr. Dale) was female. In one episode she was instructing the Cadets in the classroom about how the nuclear power plant in their spaceship worked.
Of course, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were a Western pair who worked together to fight rustlers and stagecoach robbers. She was 100% competent in that role.
There were others, but this gets the idea across that not all the fifties-TV women were like June Cleaver. The women in the adventure shows were probably closer to Alice Kramden, but were in kid-adventure shows, not comedy. The problem is that no one remembers the adventure shows as representative since they were made just for kids. (Although I still like them today.)

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Does anyone here actually *remember* the 50's? If so, it'd be interesting to here their take.

Sure. I was born before the '50s..but I'm staying out of this discussion. Some seem to have their own unbending perceptions(as always)...and that's all I have to say about that.
HD

 

[Nobert]

(in the UK the 40s is by far the most rose-tinted of the decades).

Ah, the blitz...good times.

 

[LizzieMaine]

in times of change and economic uncertainty 'good old fashioned values' seem reassuring again; the 50s was the most recent decade for that... in the popular imagination.

But just how did "The Fifties" become enmeshed in the image of "good old fashioned values" when in fact the actual 1950's were the flood tide for "progressive parenting" of the Dr. Spock variety, all sorts of trendy pop psychology ideas that were all over the popular magazines, and soft-pedaled Norman Vincent Peale-style power-of-positive-thinking progressive religion?

And there were plenty of other things we don't associate with "The Fifties." My mother had a classmate who got pregnant -- and when I asked her how the girl dealt with it, she told me in very blunt language, "She got rid of it. That's what people did then." And this was in a small town, supposedly the kind of place where such things didn't happen in "The Fifties."

That image of "old fashioned values" didn't really become attached to "The Fifties" until after "The Sixties" -- and it didn't become a dominant theme in the public discourse in the United States until the late 1970s-early 1980s, as a result of very careful and deliberate -- yes -- marketing. It's how the popular imagination has been manipulated that really makes the whole question of "The Fifties" an important one.

 

[herringbonekid]

But just how did "The Fifties" become enmeshed in the image of "good old fashioned values" when in fact the actual 1950's were the flood tide for "progressive parenting" of the Dr. Spock variety, all sorts of trendy pop psychology ideas that were all over the popular magazines, and soft-pedaled Norman Vincent Peale-style power-of-positive-thinking progressive religion?

i hate to say it, but it's because of how things looked; the hair, the aprons, the cars, the lawn mowers. young people who weren't there at the time and are looking back for an image of some retro idyll (an antidote to today's 'anything goes' approach) ; the 50s is the first port of call.

It's how the popular imagination has been manipulated that really makes the whole question of "The Fifties" an important one.

you see market manipulation. i see people believing in the rose-tinted parts they want to believe in.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Perhaps what we're talking about is a difference between the UK and the US. Here, "The Fifties" have been, and still are, very deliberately used by marketers on both sides of the issue of "social values" to drive opinion in one direction or another -- either as something to be embraced or as something to be resisted. That image of "retro idyll" is a very potent thing in the hands of people who want to sell you a product, or a point of view, and it's becoming much more so the further removed we get from any awareness of the actual 1950s.

I knew from a very early age that in my town in "The Fifties," the hair was worn in a headrag, the aprons were made from old flour sacks, the cars were rusty, and the lawn mowers were even rustier. We weren't allowed to have rose-tinted anything about anything.

 

[MikeKardec]

I do remember going to a Mid Century exhibit of some sort at the LA County Art Museum. Amongst furniture and clothes and an Avanti Studebaker there was a photograph of a very modern house in the Palm Springs area with huge plate glass windows opening onto a nearly infinite distance. I thought about how we are all living behind walls and gates and such now yet this was built at the height of the Cold War and it is a house that has absolutely no fear of the outside world ... it was designed almost like it was reaching out and beckoning the vista in.

I know if we were living under a similar threat today we wouldn't react that way. Not that I didn't play in plenty of bomb shelters as a kid ... but, in their way, they were symbols of hope too. By the 1980s if you considered surviving an atomic bomb you were sort of treated like a criminal.

 

[vitanola]

Perhaps what we're talking about is a difference between the UK and the US. Here, "The Fifties" have been, and still are, very deliberately used by marketers on both sides of the issue of "social values" to drive opinion in one direction or another -- either as something to be embraced or as something to be resisted. That image of "retro idyll" is a very potent thing in the hands of people who want to sell you a product, or a point of view, and it's becoming much more so the further removed we get from any awareness of the actual 1950s.

I knew from a very early age that in my town in "The Fifties," the hair was worn in a headrag, the aprons were made from old flour sacks, the cars were rusty, and the lawn mowers were even rustier. We weren't allowed to have rose-tinted anything about anything.

The same thing has happened to the Great Depression, but with the Depression the situation is a bit more one-sided. An entire cottage industry has grown up around "debunking the New Deal". Books and scholarly articles abound which are filled with outright falsehoods. I live in the heart of this industry, and am acquainted with some of its principals. When I have asked one in paticular about of a series of blatant whoppers in a best-selling book of his the response that I received was "Well my figures may not have been strictly accurate, and the Morganthau quote may be apocraphyl but they illustrate the higher and more important truth that government intrusion is never helpful and can never succeed."

Now we are getting into religion, it seems.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I do remember going to a Mid Century exhibit of some sort at the LA County Art Museum. Amongst furniture and clothes and an Avanti Studebaker there was a photograph of a very modern house in the Palm Springs area with huge plate glass windows opening onto a nearly infinite distance. I thought about how we are all living behind walls and gates and such now yet this was built at the height of the Cold War and it is a house that has absolutely no fear of the outside world ... it was designed almost like it was reaching out and beckoning the vista in.

I know if we were living under a similar threat today we wouldn't react that way. Not that I didn't play in plenty of bomb shelters as a kid ... but, in their way, they were symbols of hope too. By the 1980s if you considered surviving an atomic bomb you were sort of treated like a criminal.

In the fifties the Russians were a threat but your neighbors weren't. The Russians were 5000 miles away. It was a different world. Little children played outside all day, all over the neighborhood. "come home when the street lights come on". Have seen pics of a grocery store with a row of baby buggies outside, babies in them, while Mom went inside to do a little shopping. You wouldn't see that today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the fifties the Russians were a threat but your neighbors weren't. The Russians were 5000 miles away. It was a different world. Little children played outside all day, all over the neighborhood. "come home when the street lights come on". Have seen pics of a grocery store with a row of baby buggies outside, babies in them, while Mom went inside to do a little shopping. You wouldn't see that today.

Those things weren't unique to "The Fifties" though. You could see the same sorts of things in the teens, the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the sixties, the seventies, and even into the eighties depending on where you were. I was one of those kids left in a baby carriage when my mother went into the store, I walked to school alone when I was six years old -- and so did my little brother a decade later. It wasn't a "Fifties Thing" so much as it was a "No Helicopter Parenting Thing." Doctor Spock was permissive, but he also was fine with letting kids get banged up by life.

 

[sheeplady]

In the fifties the Russians were a threat but your neighbors weren't. The Russians were 5000 miles away. It was a different world. Little children played outside all day, all over the neighborhood. "come home when the street lights come on". Have seen pics of a grocery store with a row of baby buggies outside, babies in them, while Mom went inside to do a little shopping. You wouldn't see that today.

My husband and I were talking about this last night.

There was a time that it seemed that various parts of the U.K. were getting bombed by the IRA on a monthly if not weekly basis. They say there were nearly 10,000 bomb attacks during the "troubles."

Terrorism is not new, sadly. Neither is our fear. We just think it is.

 

[Stanley Doble]

When I first read about gated communities in the US I thought it was rather weird, like something out of the 3d world where the very rich live in fear of the very poor. I thought it was an anomaly that would soon be corrected as the rich pressured the government to do something about crime and poverty. I was wrong. Things seem to be getting worse instead of better. Or, maybe I am misinformed.

A roundabout way of saying that a rich man's house made of glass, with no walls or fence around it, would not have seemed unusual or risky to anybody in the fifties.

An odd thought just occurred to me. A millionaire's house with a wall or fence around it would have been normal in the late 19th century right up to the depression. From the late forties through the seventies such defensiveness was practically unknown. Since the Reagan years it has come back.

The odd part is that the rich felt safer and more secure in the New Deal era, than they did in the conservative eras before and after. Hmmmm.

 

[sheeplady]

Gated communities are less about crime and more about fear and paranoia.

There are very violent places in the United States. Unsurprisingly, few rich people live there.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Gated communities are less about crime and more about fear and paranoia.

There are very violent places in the United States. Unsurprisingly, few rich people live there.

If not crime, what are they fearful and paranoid about?

 

[Nobert]

My aunt and uncle live in a gated community in Florida. They are comfortable but hardly rich. Ditto their neighbors. They moved from West Palm when their neighborhood started to succumb to more and more urban ills. Partly, that's just Florida, truth be told. What struck me was the potential effect of the gate. If I were determined to do so, though in my forties and not in the best of shape, I'm pretty sure I could scale that fence without much trouble. Being white, I probably wouldn't even get shot.