The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Nobert]

Indeed so -- McCarthy himself was personally such an odious man, surrounded by even more odious men, that he makes a perfect villian for the period. That kind of reductive, caricature thinking is exactly what we're talking about here.

Censorship and blacklisting were inarguably part of the period -- to the point where kindergarten teachers in many school districts in the early 1950s were required to take loyalty oaths -- but it wasn't McCarthy himself who was to blame. He merely exploited the national mood of the early postwar period, which was there well before "The Fifties" began. As Mr. Murrow pointed out, "the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

My favorite quote is from James Thurber, writing about his WWI experiences during the height of the Red Scare: "In those days, we naively feared the enemy more than each other."

You could argue, I suppose, that McCarthy actually ended the height of Red baiting by revealing himself to be a power-crazed buffoon. Even Margaret Chase Smith said that he could have done the country a service if he had been sincere.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My favorite quote is from James Thurber, writing about his WWI experiences during the height of the Red Scare: "In those days, we naively feared the enemy more than each other."

You could argue, I suppose, that McCarthy actually ended the height of Red baiting by revealing himself to be a power-crazed buffoon. Even Margaret Chase Smith said that he could have done the country a service if he had been sincere.

That's the thing that modern-day rehabilitators of McCarthy miss -- he was a fraud. He was *always* a fraud, who had known nothing about Communism before his re-election campaign in 1950. He merely jumped on the bandwagon and proceeded to push off the driver and run it off the nearest cliff.

There were sincere people in the anti-Communist movement of that period. The radio actor Bud Collyer, best known as the voice of Superman and later as the host of "To Tell The Truth" led an effort to purge "radicals" from the New York local of the American Federation of Radio Artists. He deeply regretted the human cost of this campaign -- some of the people who got purged had been his friends -- but he sincerely believed that "something had to be done." In later years he tried to atone for the damage done to innocent people -- among other things he went out of his way to get John Henry Faulk a job on "To Tell The Truth" in 1962, one of the steps that actually helped to break the blacklist in New York. It's possible to respect the man himself, even if you don't agree with his tactics -- and I say that as someone who probably would have been blacklisted myself. But no thinking person can respect McCarthy -- because there was, in the end, nothing there to respect. I think, in the way that people in the years since have made him the indelible symbol of the period, that there's more than a little "Had we but lived in the days of our fathers we would not have shared with them in shedding the blood of the prophets" in their attitude.

 

[Seraph1227]

It's interesting how a decade can shift in retrospect. At one time I eulogised the latter Seventies as a period when truly great music was everywhere. Yeah- the Clash, the Damned, The SexPistols, The Ramones, Blondie, an interesting period of Dylan, Slade... the first revival of rockabilly and rock and roll... Then the Beeb started rebroadcasting old episodes of Top of the Pops from that decade. A heavy reminder of just how much diabolical rubbish has been forgotten, and how far off the mainstream much of the truly great stuff was. All decades are the same. Nostalgia has a way of making us forget that the 99% rule applied to the past too!

in my locker in High School I had a sticker that read " The Clash, the only band that matters" It was true then, its true now. R.I.P. Joe Strummer

 

[PeterB]

This thread, like most threads on FL, raises more questions and thoughts than it answers.

To address Lizzie's opening point: may I suggest that we tend to see the past as it is presented to us, rather than as it actually was? With reference to the 50s, I believe, though I am open to correction, that Perry Como sold more top hits than Elvis, who was until the 60s more of a counter-cultural figure than someone like Como. The leather jacket and brilliantine image that we have of the 50s comes largely from Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and Lords of Flatbush, which was a now obscure film that took place in Brooklyn in the late 50s. That image seems to have come from urban areas, mostly in the north and mid west, not from rural areas across the country.

It might also be said that the 50s, from a cultural and political point of view, did not begin in 1950, but in 1953, with the end of the Korean war and the onset of a period of relative peace and prosperity, and did not end in 1959 or 1960, but probably in about 1964, when the Vietnam war more or less started, Johnson's great society program was beginning, and the Civil Rights Act was, if not passed, at least getting started in that year as well. Some might argue that the 50s began in 1945 with the end of WW2, and continued until the election of JFK. It depends on how you measure or picture a period of history.

Lizzie is right in stating that the image fed to us about the 50s is almost certainly selectively prepared, and for most people's experience of that decade, inaccurate. One problem that we have is that because of the effects of television and constantly being barraged with images and sounds, we are not able, or not allowed to form our own impressions.

Here is my two cents worth: given that the average person does not wake up in a year that ends in zero and decide to act differently, it is possible that for some people the 50s, meaning a way of living and thinking common in that era, did not end until the 80s, if ever. I recall as a boy in the 70s that most of my friends' houses still had old hi-fi sets, televisions may have been replaced, but were very similar to the old big boxy cabinet style sets, washing machines were at least 20 years old, and most mothers did not work.

Lizzie is also right in stating that for many people, the television image of the 50s, even then, had more to do with propaganda than with reality. I doubt, for example, that many families really resembled that of Ozzie and Harriet, though in terms of furnishings, chinaware and decoration, homes shown on television had not changed much by the 80s, at least in my experience. In my home town, Victoria BC, in Canada, hippies were few and far between in the 60s and we were more or less separate from what we read about in Time magazine. Even attitudes, particularly among the middle aged, had probably not changed that much since the end of the war. Visually, the 50s seem different in photographs, but I doubt they were that different. Because we are inundated with popular culture, we tend to see differences in cars, hair styles, furniture and clothes as being significant in some way, which they really are not.

So why do people look back at the 50s with such faulty vision? As some posters have stated, the 50s represents a "before" period, implying that the 60s onwards were the "after" period (for better or worse). This further implies that somehow the world was different from the 60s onwards, which I would argue it was / is not. Every decade, every year for that matter, brings changes, but in many ways, is the same as what went before. For example, how was listening to a tune different in the 50s from how it is now? You can pick up a record pressed in the 40s and hear the same words, melody, harmony and instruments as did someone in the 50s: is there really any difference? Perhaps the 50s are now, fellow Loungers, just as "the 50s" never were.

 

[emigran]

PeterB: well said... I'd agree that just because a decade begins with a zero is not the mark of something that's changing...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Lizzie is also right in stating that for many people, the television image of the 50s, even then, had more to do with propaganda than with reality.

And some of that was even driven by the exigencies of television production. Barbara Billingsley wore high heels as June Cleaver to make her appear taller in comparision to Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who even early in the run of "Leave It To Beaver," were growing faster than the producers liked. That was the only reason for that wardrobe choice -- actual housewives would have worn low, serviceable shoes for housework, but sustaining the illusion of Beaver and Wally as younger than they actually were required the actress playing their mom to look taller. Thus, June Cleaver vacuuming the floor in three-inch spike-heeled pumps.

And yet, *that image* is perhaps the defining trope in the myth of the "Fifties Housewife." You will find thousands of references to it on line, both positive and negative, and whenever any young woman decides to try "living the life of a fifties housewife" you'll without exception find her blogging about "getting used to do doing housework in heels," as though high-fashion uncomfortable footwear was a real, tangible part of what it meant to be a housewife in the actual 1950s America. Or you'll find that same image used to ridicule oppressive suburban domesticity -- "the days of vacuuming in heels is over, thank God!" Of such fragile grasps on reality are "The Fifties" made.

(I loved this thread the first time around. Glad to see it resurface.)

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I'm another of those early Boomers - born in '47. My memories of the '50s are pretty clear from '53 on. For one thing, almost all of our parents were born in the early '20s and grew up in the '30s. Their shaping experiences were the Depression and WWII. That means we heard almost zero nostalgic reminiscinses about the past. They were just glad it was past. We had no sense that things might have been better before our own times. Except for "The Untouchables" there were hardly any tv shows about that period. There were lots of Westerns, about a time only the very oldest people could remember.

We all watched "Leave It To Beaver," "Özzie and Harriet"and all the other family sitcoms. We weren't exactly cynics but even we thought they were hilariously unrealistic. There was none of the dirt and chaos we revelled in. We had no interest in politics or other grownup stuff, and the idea of nuclear war started to look attractive around report card time. Gahan Wilson's "Nuts"comics caught some of this atmosphere perfectly - the incomprehensible doings of parents, the sticky-floored third-run theaters, the really stupid things we did and should have got us killed. The poodle-skirted, leather-jacketed ones were our older brothers and sisters. They were as remote to us as grownups. Our teenage and young adult years were the '60s. Those years were exhilarating but we were forced to deal with reality.

 

[Fading Fast]

I grew up in the '60s and '70s and we knew very well that real life and TV were far, far apart. My house, parents, values and day-to-day were far, far away from "The Brady Bunch." I can't image kids and families in the '50s didn't also get that. Even watching all the reruns of '50s sitcoms in the '60s and '70s, we never thought that is how life was - we alway knew that those shows were "just TV." The thing I always liked about those shows was seeing the older cars, clothes, buildings, etc.

The somewhat closest to the reality of my upbringing in the '60s was the '80s TV show "The Wonder Years." Still far from reality, but it did hit on a lot of stylistic points and attitudes that more approximately my upbringing than any contemporaneous sitcom did.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's not really a question of whether kids in the real fifties got it or not -- leaving aside the aspirational impact of such images on a generation of working-class people who were trying very hard to "fit in" with the middle class in suburbia. It's a question of how and why images which were always marketing-and-show-business-driven caricatures have since taken on a life that has created an easily-manipulated mythology in the minds of the generations that followed. As an example, the June Cleaver-Betty Anderson "fifties housewife" trope is still very vivid in the minds of a generation that *has very likely never watched an actual 1950's television show.* They had to pick up that image from somewhere else.

That's what this thread is really about. Why have such images transcended their own fiction and soaked into our culture to the degree that they have? Who is using these images? And for what purpose are they being used?

 

[Fading Fast]

I see the distinction but ask do people really see the '50s as presented by June Cleaver? I don't and most people I know realize that is a "romanticized" or "sterilized" version of the '50s. Is there some marketing effort to present it that way - with Elvis, and saddle shoes, et.al., - yup, seems to me there is. Probably because fake nostalgia sells and memes are easier than gritty nuanced reality if you just want to sell something emotionally. But I still question how many people believe the marketing image is how the decade really was.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the problem is that "most people" don't think of the 1950s -- the *actual* 1950s -- at all. Few can tell you what a rolling readjustment was, or why "I will go to Korea" is a significant phrase, or why the word "faubus" was proposed as a new verb meaning "to make a bad situtation infinitely worse." They don't know who Robert Welch was or why his influence endures to the present day, and they can't tell you the signficiance of Sherman Adams's vicuna coat.

And yet, say the words "fifties housewife" or "fifties diner" or "fifties family" to any adult in the United States, and a very specific image will come to mind. That sort of image *is* "The Fifties" to the vast majority of Americans -- which up to a point is to be expected. Nobody talks about Teapot Dome or Oscar W. Underwood when the "roaring Twenties" are mentioned, and most people's vision of "The Forties" boils down to not sitting under the apple tree with anyone else but he.

But you don't have pundits and politicians and marketers using a blurry image of "The Twenties" or "The Forties" to sell a product or a point of view. "The Fifties," however, have been repeatedly used in that way. And when people in the public discourse say things like "we need to get back to the ways of The Fifties" or "we mustn't go back to the ways of The Fifties" I submit that they aren't talking about the actual 1950s at all, but rather this fictional construct of "The Fifties."

 

[Doctor Strange]

Young people - the ones who won't even watch old b/w TV shows - also think the fifties were actually like Grease and Happy Days. It's a vastly misunderstood time that was far more complex than the perfect-suburbs or greaser-culture (etc.) stereotypes that have been common for so long now.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I think there's a sense that the 50s were the true Golden Age. Everyone understands how crappy the Depression and WWII were, and that there was a rough period of readjustment right after the war, then things settled down and the incredible postwar prosperity began. Mom and Pop had a house in the 'burbs with 2.4 kids and a dog. The working stiff had a well-paying job. Teachers were respected and scholars were scholarly. Almost everybody was white. For the first and only time, America was unassailably on top of the world, the sole superpower. There was a youth culture separate from that of the adult world. That wasn't what it was really like but that's the image being sold and what people think they can get back to.In the 60s we thought the 50s stuff was old-fashioned and stodgy, but now we're able to appreciate the style of the times and we can look around us and see how trashy what we have is by comparison. And it's recent enough that the older people remember at least a version of that time. That makes it seem re-attainable, unlike the fairytale Edwardian era, which is lost forever.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's certainly the *image* of "The Fifties." But, as you note, that really wasn't what it was like. The reality of the actual 1950s was that there were two significant economic recessions during the decade, in 1953 and in 1958, that the Eisenhower Administration tried to soft-pedal. We were the world's greatest superpower, except that while we were messing around building Edsels and similar chrome-festooned consumer junk, the Soviet Union was putting satellites in orbit. We were at peace, except for the whole paranoid global-missle-race thing. Everybody was white and middle classs -- except for those who weren't, and who were getting increasingly frustrated with their invisibility. Kids were polite, well-behaved, and knew their place, and teachers were universally respected, except for the increasing and highly-publicized problem of juvenile delinquency. Teenage girls never got pregnant -- because the family doctor helped them "get rid of it" when they did. Women stayed home and raised the kids -- except for those who made up nearly 40 percent of the workforce. Everybody was religious -- except for those who weren't. Baseball players played for the love of the game -- except for those who made big headlines every spring for holding out. Everybody wore nice clothes, except for those who wore dirty overalls and home-made housedresses and so on.

I think you're exactly right with your comparison to the Edwardian Era -- everybody wants it to be lovely gowns and stately houses, not plutocracy, child labor, filth and soot. "The Fifties" are the same way -- they've bceome a myth manufactured out of carefully-filtered childhood memories, poilitical demagoguery, and manipulative marketing. But I submit those "Fifties" are no more attainable in any actual reality than the Downtown Abbey image of the 1910s -- because neither of them ever really existed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A lot of things depended on where you were. For example, television was overwhelmingly centered around a few major cities prior to 1953 because of the FCC's freeze on the issuance of new television licences. The majority of Americans had no access to television at all until this freeze was lifted, and as late as 1954, only 54 percent of homes had television. It wasn't until 1958 that TV approached full saturation in the US, and by that time the era of "live television emanating from New York. " had been largely supplanted by filmed shows produced in Hollywood. Even before then many stations not part of the main network lines got "live" shows only via kinescope film on a two-week delay basis. The "Fifties" image people have of everyone in the country gathering to watch Milton Berle on Tuesday nights on the "Texaco Star Theatre" didn't happen the way they remember it -- Berle's audience was overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast, and during his peak of popularity between 1949 and 1951, great swaths of the country never saw him at all. Likewise, most people who "remember" watching Lucille Ball's pregnancy unfold on "I Love Lucy" remember it only from subsequent reruns, not from first-run viewing.

This kind of thing is important in understanding the difference between "The Fifties" and the actual, historical 1950s. One's personal experience is rarely representative of the whole, especially in a country as fragmented as the US actually was in the real, historical 1950s. If the differences between the North and South, for example, are powerful and pronounced today, they were vastly, vastly more so in the actual 1950s. The North and South might as well have been entirely separate countries for all their vast social, cultural, philosophical and economic differences during those years, especially after Brown Vs. Board of Education. But those differences are rubbed away in the warm, flourescent glow of "The Fifties."

 

[2jakes]

^^^^
Too young to understand or ask why was there different entrances to theaters & the “happy days” soda fountains had signs that read
“Colored section Only”.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And that, too, is a good point. The further we get from the actual 1950s, the more the image of that period is shaped by the memories of those who knew the period only as children. There are people alive still who have childhood memories of the 1920s, and even the late 1910s -- but those memories can't really give us any kind of a real sense of what that period was actually *like* beyond the level of a child's understanding.

Simply by force of its size, the generation of Americans who were children in the 1950s have had an outsize influence on how that period is perceived. It's commonly argued that theirs was the first distinctive "youth culture," and that therefore it's of great significiance -- but in fact, manufactured youth culture goes all the way back to the late 19th century. Such youth culture was at a high level of development and influence in the 1910s and 1920s -- and reached a peak of sorts in the 1930s, when kids had Mickey Mouse, The Lone Ranger, bubble-gum cards, Big Little Books, Buck Rogers, Roy Rogers, and Junior G-Man Clubs among all the other manufactured kiddie products competing for their attention. Most of these things still existed in the actual 1950s, but none of them were *products* of the period. And yet, the image of "The Fifties" suggests that they were the first period in which kids had their own manufactured play world -- and that's largely because so many fifties kids didn't realize they were actually just getting shined-up hand-me-downs from their parents' childhood. Little boomers who laughed at Pinky Lee had no idea that Pinky stole most of his schtick from their parents' radio favorite, Joe Penner.

Of course, none of this explains why the legend of "The Fifties" was largely created by people who experienced the period as adults, at a time when most Americans had experienced the period first hand. They *knew* the difference between "The Fifties" and the actual, historical 1950s -- and they made deliberate, specific choices in what to market and what to "forget." That's what I find most interesting in looking at what their vision of "The Fifties" has given us.

 

[Dirk Wainscotting]

This thread mainly concerns 'the fifties' as an American phenomenon, but I'd like to chip in about the fifties as reality and how it always was seen in the UK and what 'the fifties' has strangely become in the UK now.

Since post-war England took a long time to recover the fifties in England was really a time of austerity and because fuller employment (and no-doubt post-war exhaustion) dampened down political tensions, it was also pretty conformist. I'd say family life was patchy with some families spending time together because there was not much else to do and others with a father in the pub all day and not much food because of rationing. However, I don't believe it was reflected as an ideal time in media; many films and a lot of television was socially challenging. I think of films like It Always Rains on Sunday, The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning as films that showed post-war class tensions, youth culture, working-class culture, alongside Ealing comedies with their more middle-class tone. Telly aside British people have always looked back to the fifties with a mixture of fond regard for a simpler life, some positive changes in class perceptions and economic hard times for more people than is commonly thought. This persists on the whole.

However, the popular conception of the fifties in Britain is beginning to get a little smudged. A lot of people who now claim to follow alleged 'fifties lifestyles' seem to mimic American media stereotypes of the fifties or a rockabilly culture (which had a resurgence in Britain in the early 80s). Trad jazz was hugely popular in fifties Britain, but you hear very little about that. So many vintage enthusiasts nowadays recreate an utter cartoon of the 1950s. My brother is a long-time rockabilly-lifestyle enthusiast and my father who actually grew up in the fifties scoffs at it.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

Just an amusing little anecdote. When a friend of mine's son was little, he thought there wasn't any color in the world and everything was black and white because the only TV shows he'd ever seen that his parents had watched as kids were in black and white.

 

[Stearmen]

I do not remember any one talking about how great the 50s were in the 60s and even into the 70s! It was not until well into Happy Days that the nostalgia hit. I do remember in the 60s, a longing for the good old days, the 19th century, cowboys and farmers! Add in a little Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone for good measure. Also driven by rose colored glasses in the movies and television!