The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Tomasso]

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

Jehovah's Witnesses.

 

[Tomasso]

Being white, I probably wouldn't even get shot.

I wouldn't count on that. With the 'stand your ground' law in Florida everyone's so trigger happy even the white man ain't safe.

 

[Stearmen]

I just thought of some thing very funny. In the late 50s early 60s, there was a great nostalgia craze going on also. Every where you turned, TV, adds, movies, stores, you could not escape the 70s! That the 1870s to you Pilgrim. I am sure other men will back me up, all us little boys had our cowboy hats and Six Shooters. Of course, any good stick made a darn good Winchester partner. Just like the rose colored 50s glasses, the same was true of the 1870s portrayal, where the bad guy drew first, but the good guy shot straight, and women knew their place. Although, watching , Have Gun Will Travel, some of that started to come apart in the late 50s, early 60s, Richard Boone's character was a little less clear, the good guy, but not always righteous!

 

[Tomasso]

I had a pair of Fanner 50s!

 

[Nobert]

Sure, or the "Dixieland" revival of the fifties, with bands like the Firehouse Five playing a hokier version of New Orleans jazz. I want to say there was a vogue for the Gay Nineties as well. I expect people have always looked back at some period or another to create a Land That Never Was. "You Neolithic kids not know nothing. Back in Paleolithic, things so much better! What kind values we lost?"

 

[HudsonHawk]

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

Actually, I was thinking more about people who "came of age" in the 50's and remember the decade from a (young) adult social perspective. Basically having been born no later than about 1943. That would mean anyone under 70 is too young!

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Gay 90s fad happened in 1933-34, as a side effect of the repeal of Prohibition -- "Gay 90s Beer Garden" imagery was all over the place briefly. But the Gay 90s didn't become a cultural paradigm -- people weren't saying "We need to get back to the ways of the '90s, when Cleveland was president and all was right with the world" or "Remember the '90s, you should be happy things aren't like that any more." The same can be said of the "Roaring Twenties" fad of the late 1950s-early 1960s. That's the big, big difference between all these nostalgia fads and the Cult of "The Fifties."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Actually, I was thinking more about people who "came of age" in the 50's and remember the decade from a (young) adult social perspective. Basically having been born no later than about 1943. That would mean anyone under 70 is too young!

I could get my mother to register here, but if people think I'm mouthy, they'd lie down on the floor and cry after meeting her.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There was a Gay Nineties revival in the early fifties too but it didn't last long.

For our younger members, Gay Nineties doesn't mean what you think it means.

 

[emigran]

I had a pair of Fanner 50s!

STOP you're killing me... BTW how cool were they...

 

[vitanola]

There was a Gay Nineties revival in the early fifties too but it didn't last long.
.

Well, not really. Billy Rose was one of the big promoters of the whole "Gay Nineties" fad. Of course the "Gay Nineties" comprised the period between about 1895 and the Great War. His New York night club, "Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe" was the epicenter of the revival. Rose pulled old retired vaudevillians out of retirement, folks like Joe Howard, and created new stars such as Beatrice Kay. In the early days of television he was very successful at getting his artists booked on the various variety shows, creating his own mini "Gay Nineties" boom.

The Samuel French company had discovered in the early part of the "Gay Nineties" fad that it could successfully market long forgotten melodramas, vaudeville sketches and minstrel shows out of its catalog to amature theater groups, and did so very successfully. These shows were generally performed ironically, in the modern manner, and in that context were pretty funny. Then too we have the antique automobile hobby, which really began to reach the public consiousness with the Golden Jubilee of 1946. The machines which were collected in those days where of course of the Brass Era, dating before the Great War, from the period which was roughly considered to be the "Gay Nineties". The iconography of the early automobile contributed to the nostalgia fad.

The whole "Gay Nineties" phenomenon really began in white heat with Repeal, as Miss Maine suggested, but continued on for about fifteen or twenty years in fits and starts. There were periods when the fad was more in the forefront, usually around the time of the release of a Hollywood picture set in the period. Rose 's activity as a booking agent slowed down in the 'Fifties. Th "Diamond Horseshoe" closed in 1960 or 1961, and the ghosts of those dear dead days beyond recall were laid to rest. If only Elvis and The Beatles could be similarly consigned to the mists!

 

[LizzieMaine]

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.)

The definitive woman of this type has to be Lois Lane in "The Adventures of Superman," who, especially in the first two years of the series, was portrayed as a tough, hardboiled reporter in the 1940s manner -- a characterization lifted intact from the long-running radio series of the previous decade. Her characterization was softened somewhat during the mid-fifties, but she never became the simpering lovesick pushover of the contemporaneous "Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane" comic books.

This series reran for years and years, and I knew many girls who enjoyed it as late as the seventies -- specifically because Lois was such an intrepid, no-nonsense, career-oriented character. And yet -- when TV characters of "The Fifties" come up, Lois Lane is hardly ever mentioned. She's a character of the 1940's extended into the 1950's, and not someone who fits into the well-packaged image of "The Fifties."

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

In the 1970s there was something of a 1930s nostalgia fad which was popularised by movies such as The Sting and Paper Moon which no doubt had a far more lasting influence on many of us here.

 

[sheeplady]

I could get my mother to register here, but if people think I'm mouthy, they'd lie down on the floor and cry after meeting her.

lol

 

[sheeplady]

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.

But yet all those strong women aren't portrayed in modern interpretations of the 1950s. Which is really quite sad.

 

[MikeKardec]

She's a character of the 1940's extended into the 1950's, and not someone who fits into the well-packaged image of "The Fifties."

Around 2003 I interviewed an actress who became a famously sexy starlet in the mid 1950s (She will remain anonymous for our purposes). It was really remarkable to watch her tie herself in knots trying to both live up to her sex pot image and, at the same time, show how innocent a little 1950s girl she was. It was definitely an afternoon of dueling pretensions. At times I thought she was going to start crying, "my sister, my daughter." There were just so many conflicting expectations to live up to.

A year or two earlier I had done similar interviews with a few women who came into their own in depression era Oklahoma. Talk about clear and objective! We were going through a photo album where one of them identified members of the family, friends, then, "This is my illegitimate son. These are my cousins ..." She didn't even break stride. The others were like that too. Life was nothing to be ashamed of or to create myths about.

It's often seemed to me that in the great flattening of society after WWII many pretty average Americans took on what had been affectations of the rich. Before the war a huge number of women were direct partners with their husbands, growing "kitchen crops" while the husband raise the cash crop, working in the family store, that sort of thing. After the war the sort of decorative (at best domestically managerial) "house wife" became more common but I suspect that a lot of them took on baggage that had mostly belonged to the pre war wealthy. "How does it look? What will we say? What will people think?"

I think my favorite line from Lizzie's true Lois Lane era was one of Bacall's, in To Have and Have Not as the hotel lobby is being blasted to bits in the Free French version of a drive by shooting, she squirms around behind the meager cover she shares with Bogart and, looking totally pissed, says, "I think I'm sitting on someone's cigarette."

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's often seemed to me that in the great flattening of society after WWII many pretty average Americans took on what had been affectations of the rich. Before the war a huge number of women were direct partners with their husbands, growing "kitchen crops" while the husband raise the cash crop, working in the family store, that sort of thing. After the war the sort of decorative (at best domestically managerial) "house wife" became more common but I suspect that a lot of them took on baggage that had mostly belonged to the pre war wealthy. "How does it look? What will we say? What will people think?"

It was always common for small businesses to use the family for help -- this was the only way a lot of shoestring working-class businesses could survive, and most of the people who ran such businesses didn't end up in the postwar suburbs. Most of them stayed in town, near their businesses or even lived in apartments over those businesses.

Class insecurity was very common among the first generation of suburbanites. In most cases they were the children of working-class families -- the working class, meaning people from blue-collar backgrounds, was the majority in the United States until about 1956 -- and they really didn't know how they were expected to act in such an environment, hence the soaring popularity of various self-help, social-development, and etiquette manuals in the immediate postwar years. The Boys From Marketing took full advantage of this by selling a huge range of products thru an appeal to class insecurity -- sit down with a year's worth of any popular magazine from the 1950s and it'll leap out of the page at you. They weren't selling to the pre-war middle class -- which was defined as families employing at least one servant -- they were selling to Joe and Suzie Dinnerpail from Flatbush, who'd moved out to Levittown and were determined to Fit In.

That's why so much advertising from "The Fifties" is full of chipper smiling housewives and pipe-clenching husbands with crew cuts -- exactly the types of images that form the focus of all those Time Warp Wives With Beehives sorts of shows and articles. The Boys knew very well that Joe and Suzie weren't really like that, but if they could convince them that's how they *should* be, well, they could sell them just about any damn thing out there. Modern people who assume this is what "The Fifties" were definitively like are like people who think a picture postcard is equivalent to visiting the real place.

 

[herringbonekid]

Class insecurity was very common among the first generation of suburbanites. In most cases they were the children of working-class families -- the working class, meaning people from blue-collar backgrounds, was the majority in the United States until about 1956 -- and they really didn't know how they were expected to act in such an environment, hence the soaring popularity of various self-help, social-development, and etiquette manuals in the immediate postwar years. The Boys From Marketing took full advantage of this by selling a huge range of products thru an appeal to class insecurity -- sit down with a year's worth of any popular magazine from the 1950s and it'll leap out of the page at you. They weren't selling to the pre-war middle class -- which was defined as families employing at least one servant -- they were selling to Joe and Suzie Dinnerpail from Flatbush, who'd moved out to Levittown and were determined to Fit In.

sounds exactly like England in the 30s, before the suburban housing boom was curtailed by the war.
loads of etiquette guides existed in magazines for middle class aspirants then too.

 

[Nobert]

\

That's why so much advertising from "The Fifties" is full of chipper smiling housewives and pipe-clenching husbands with crew cuts -- exactly the types of images that form the focus of all those Time Warp Wives With Beehives sorts of shows and articles. The Boys knew very well that Joe and Suzie weren't really like that, but if they could convince them that's how they *should* be, well, they could sell them just about any damn thing out there. Modern people who assume this is what "The Fifties" were definitively like are like people who think a picture postcard is equivalent to visiting the real place.

I've been thinking about this, and I know the point you're getting at, though there seems to be some contention about whether there's an at to get, in this case.

I feel the waters are getting muddied. You started off talking about "The Fifties" along the lines of the boys with DAs taking their girls out in yacht-sized Cadillacs with tail fins to get malteds at a joint where a waitress on roller skates waits on them car-side and they punch up Bill Haley and the Comets on a huge, bulbous, neon-lit juke box. Now you're talking about the Ward & June Cleaver, 2.5 smiling clean-cut kids, smiling Mom greets hard-working Dad at the door with a martini sort of ideal. If you're talking about an image that is used to proselytize a halcyon era for whatever purpose, what are you or aren't you including?

 

[herringbonekid]

That's why so much advertising from "The Fifties" is full of chipper smiling housewives and pipe-clenching husbands with crew cuts -- exactly the types of images that form the focus of all those Time Warp Wives With Beehives sorts of shows and articles.

advertising has always created unrealistic images that represent some sort of just-about-believable-but-always-out-of-reach ideal.
that's not unique to the 50s. look at Leyendecker's advertising imagery from the teens and 20s, or virtually any fashion illustration from the 30s.