The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Fading Fast]

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!

My mom was born in '32 and her family struggled financially. When I talk to her today, she doesn't see the '50s as a happy era of sock hops and early rock and roll, but as a struggle to pay bills. So she has no romanticized notions of the '50s, but she does say that the world, to her, seemed less complicated then, than it did after the late '60s.

She is not very political and supported the changes of the 60s in social justice (like my Dad, she comes at it very pragmatically in that she believes everyone - of every religion, gender, race, etc. - deserves a fair shot to earn a living and pay their bills - the fancier social justice theories don't hit her radar, but she believes everyone should be able to try to work and pay bills - that comes from growing up in the Depression), but said that all the sexual freedom and "everything goes" standards that also came out of the '60s has made the world more complicated and, to her, a bit scary.

When I drill in on this with her, I get a jumbled answer of "everyone knew how they were suppose to dress, how women and men were suppose to behave toward each other, how one conducted oneself in public and now it is all kinda chaotic and confusing." One thing I take from my conversation with her was that it was the late '60s when "it all changed," in her view. When all the things, values, social customs, standards that seemed established started to break down. So, she's not nostalgic for the '50s, but she does see it as a period of "before" to the late '60s and beyond "after."

Final thought: It would be interesting to see, regarding Lizzie's interesting and thought provoking theme of how the '50s is marketed to us today, if this effort has been successful with the generations - like my Mom's - that actually lived through it. All the Boys in Marketing efforts have not done a thing to change her view.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the era most worth examining in that respect would be the 1980s -- there were still plenty of people alive at the time who remembered the actual 1950s from an adult perspective, and yet this was also the peak of using "The Fifties" as a cudgel to beat "The Sixties," as well as that of using "The Sixties" to beat "The Fifties."

In part you could probably trace that all the way back to Nixon's "law and order" campaigns of 1968 and 1972 -- Nixon himself being a definitive figure of both the historical 1950s and "The Fifties." While he never actually said, as far as I can track down, "let's go back to the ways of 'The Fifties," it was implicit in pretty much every "law and order" speech he ever gave. You can make a good case that Mr. Reagan, in the 1980s, continued that theme by making a blurry nostalgia for a lost bygone age the theme of his entire presidency. Reagan himself was also a figure who bridged the actual 1950s and "The Fifties" -- as a highly-visible spokesman for General Electric in the latter years of that decade, he was selling "Progress Is Our Most Important Product," which according to GE meant, not social progress, but the acquisition of shiny consumer goods -- a theme which is a hallmark of the modern conception of "The Fifties."

Both of these perceptions, of course, blot out the fact that the historical 1950s had plenty of strife, crime, violence, sex, and social unrest to go around -- but those looking to accomplish what I've been talking about needed only to hold up "The Sixties" and say OMG LOOK A HIPPIE in order to prove that "The Fifties" *didn't.* A lot of that kind of reasoning went on during the 1980s and it still affects the way those periods are viewed today.

 

[Edward]

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.

It's certainly the case the the 50s thing in the UK is very much Americanised - much moreso, I think, than the 30s/40s, or, indeed, the Sixties and Seventies nostalgia. You zone in on exactly the reason: so many of us have an interest in the fifties borne of the music, which is primarily American, that it's really inevitable. I've never seen it as anything to find objectionable, but certainly it's very noticeable.

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.

Ha - I did that too. Despiteseeing books and things in museums from that period, which were, of course, in colour...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Thinking a bit about Fading's comment on how his mom talks about the roles of men and women and how they changed in the late sixties -- it's interesting that it was just about that time, say 1967-70, when there was a very strong anti-feminist backlash in the popular culture of the period. You also had some of the most egregiously sexist advertising ever put forth. "I'm Doris. Fly Me!" and things of that nature -- and even in advertising campaigns that, on the surface, seemed to acknowledge the changing roles of women, you had an effort to co-opt and distort what those changes meant. "You've come a long way baby -- you've got your own cigarette now, baby!" There was an edge, not just of condescension, but of actual hostility toward women in many of these campaigns, and it conicided with the rise of "women's libber" as a slur against any woman who spoke her mind. But the backlash itself drew a backlash from women -- and it failed.

I submit that when this direct pushback failed, The Boys moved on to a more indirect method. It was just about the time that these types of ads faded out in the early seventies that they were replaced by general "nostalgia" themed campaigns that subtly suggested what a "woman's place" ought to be -- and these types of campaigns, in turn, ln combination with other cultural trends of the moment, all led inevitably to the crystallization by the end of the 1970s of "The Fifties."

 

[Fading Fast]

To Lizzie's comments above, I very well remember the aggressive sexual innuendos of those adds and, agree (at least now looking back) that there was an ugly agenda at work by at least some in the industry. That said, never underestimate the "sex sells" axiom - sometimes, that's all it is: the use of sexual innuendo to sell.

I've asked my mother her thoughts about women's changing roles and since she worked in the 50s and my grandmother worked in the 50s, she was all for more fair treatment of women in work (see my comment above, her view is very real-world, people need to earn money to live and everyone should have a fair chance to work regardless of race, gender, etc. - it's that simple to her, no further high-ideals).

That said, she also feels (and this might not be popular) that women and men are different - and the differences aren't just social conventions - and that there need to be social conventions or norms that direct sexual interaction in ways that protect women and create a construct for healthy relationships. She doesn't think most women want to sleep around, that young girls in their early teens should be having sex and that casual sex is the same for men and women. I am trying to reflect her views fairly, but to be honest, she says this stuff a bit more directly.

And it is not that she thinks women should save themselves for marriage, that they should exist to take care of their man or any of that nonsense, but she does believe that most women want relationships not casual sex and that, at some point, most women want to marry and have kids. If a woman sincerely doesn't, my mom would stand arm an arm defending her choice, but she still says that most want marriage and kids and that approaching men and women as if there was no difference is crazy. And, she thinks that today's gratuitous displays of sexuality everywhere is obnoxious and harmful to young girls. Maybe her views are dated, but I've done my best to reflect them fairly. And one last clarifying one - she thinks it is great that women can have pre-marital sex without a stigma attached (she's said this), she just doesn't think all the bed hopping, hooking up, etc., is healthy for young women.

 

[LizzieMaine]

She and I would agree on much of the sex stuff, actually -- I believe that modern "raunch culture" is at its roots hostile to women. But in the big picture of "The Fifties," the fact that "The Fifties" are perceived as a time much more straight laced than the historical 1950s actually were demonstrates my point. We superimpose the synthetic image of "The Fifties" over the far-less-sanitized reality of the 1950s.

My mother, a 1950s teenager, did "save herself" for marriage but she was the only one in her circle of friends who did so, and was made to feel very much the odd one out. And this was in a very unsophisticated small town, very much the sort of place that would be stereotyped as a "Pleasantville" thru the lens of "The Fifties." When she was seventeen, she broke up with a boyfriend she genuinely loved over this issue, and today it's one of her greatest regrets.

 

[Dirk Wainscotting]

The fifties - like most decades in the 20th century really - has two or more versions. People can look back at the rosy stereotype because there really was some of that, but there's also the seedy, downtrodden world of many an inner city like in Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, or perhaps the growing student unrest that finally emerged in the 60s, and the 'alternatives' with people reading C.Wright Mills and the beat poets and not conforming.
It's also only fairly recently that 'black history' has begun to be told alongside the official history of the 1950s and it has a permanently separate tone reflecting that history. Or even the history of the true extent of poverty among many people in the decade that many countries saw as having improved the lot of everybody.

That 50s backlash against growing feminism Lizzie talked about went on well into the 70s in many countries. I recall that a Dutch film, which came out in 1979 (A Woman Like Eva), was really a breakthrough feminist film in a country that was still quite sexist, but in a more unwitting way. The backlash against feminism now, because of course it hasn't stopped, is now far more insidious.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's also only fairly recently that 'black history' has begun to be told alongside the official history of the 1950s and it has a permanently separate tone reflecting that history. Or even the history of the true extent of poverty among many people in the decade that many countries saw as having improved the lot of everybody.

It brings to mind a line I remember from "All In The Family," in which Archie Bunker articulated a point of view that was very very common among middle-aged white Americans in the 1970s: "We didn't *know* we had a race problem!"

A lot of people in the real world believed that at the time -- that America's "race problem" sprung out of the activism of the Civil Rights era, and that before Those People got too uppity, things were coming along just fine. These were largely people who had lived thru the historical 1950s, but by the 1970s, they were already becoming so deeply invested in the myth of "The Fifties" that they completely blotted out of their memories the fact that there was at least one major race riot somewhere in the US every year between 1952 and 1960. These were the years in which the "Black Muslims" were growing at a remarkable rate, with a militant influence in the inner cities that far outweighed their enrolled membership, and this was the era that led to Mike Wallace's famous 1959 TV documentary "The Hate That Hate Produced," which basically warned White America that it was about to reap the whirlwind.

And yet within twenty years, the saponaceous myth of "The Fifties" completely erased the memory of all of that. And it continues to do so today.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ "Saponaceous" Google to the rescue. Nice word.

 

[Stearmen]

"The Sixties" and say OMG LOOK A HIPPIE in order to prove that "The Fifties" *didn't.* A lot of that kind of reasoning went on during the 1980s and it still affects the way those periods are viewed today.

But, the 50s did have Beatnik's, and no parent wanted their kid to grow up and become one!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I loved that show -- brilliantly written and acted, and it never misses a chance to thumb its nose at every single convention of the "Fifties Sitcom." Herbert T. Gillis most definitely did not Know Best, Winnie coped by being willfully oblivious to just about everything, Dobie was pretty much a hormone-crazed buffoon, Zelda was in deep, deep denial, and Maynard was a cartoon character trapped in a world he never made.

It was a wonderful, subversive bit of television -- and likely because of that it got very little syndicated rerun action after it went off the network. I saw it on a cable channel in the early eighties and was astounded -- everybody knew that TV wasn't supposed to have been like this in the picture-postcard pasteurized-process world of "The Fifties."

 

[HudsonHawk]

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.

I remember a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks his dad why old photographs were all black and white, and didn't they have color film back in the day. His dad tells him that everything used to be black and white and the world didn't turn color until the mid 30s. Calvin is trying to process this, and asks why the old photographs didn't turn to color like everything else. His dad explains that they *were* color photographs, but of a black and white world. The look on Calvin's face is almost as bemused as when his dad explained angular velocity on a record.

 

[PeterB]

I keep returning to this thread, because it speaks wonders about how we remember things and the power of media to influence the way we remember. As I wrote a few weeks ago, people in the 50s did not know that they were in the 50s, in the sense that it was just another decade. Lizzie's point about "The Life of Riley" is useful, in that it was probably more realistic, or just as realistic as anything else on TV, but there is the problem. Why do we take our understanding of a decade from TV? I would submit that if we did not have TV we would have much more accurate memories of a decade, without marketers able to say "This is what that decade was like. Do not trust your own memories." I cannot recall the 50s, but I can recall the 60s, and apart from Apollo 11, I recall nothing of Woodstock and the Summer of Love, etc. For me, the 60s were just time passing. The Internet gives us the opportunity to look back and say "Is that what we did?" or "Is that what we thought?"

Having seen the posts on this thread, I am not sure if we remember things as they were, or if we remember what people tell us about how things were. Keep in mind as well that one man's memory will necessarily be limited to what he did, saw and thought (or one woman's). I can remember the 80s, but my memories will not be what someone else's will be, and they will not be what I can see on TV of Miami Vice and Dallas. I was never in Miami or Dallas, and so was never there in the 80s.

My point, finally: we need to stop watching TV or allowing the media to invade our lives. Books are a type of media, of course, but they are less invasive than TV or even radio. They require thought and consideration to digest, and thus allow us to be more discerning. If all we had were books, we would not be convinced by the media that what we remember is not really what happened.

However, it is interesting to see old TV shows because they tell you more about what TV producers thought than about the period they represent. Thus, the oft mentioned I Love Lucy is an example of what TV producers thought people wanted to see, and obviously people watched it. The fact that they laughed tells us what they thought was funny. The same with Dragnet. People must have thought that was quite something (I am a fan), which tells us about the viewers. But I would not imagine Dragnet is necessarily a social history of the 50s by itself.

Just another of my two cents.

 

[2jakes]

HoosierDaddy got it right & that was Feb. 13, 2014.
"All this talk about the “fifties” is very amusing!"


There was good & bad things happening, just like today.
I didn’t wear long sideburns (Elvis) or join gangs (Rebel Without a Cause}.
And my mom did not wear high heels or fancy dress in the kitchen like
June, Lucy or Donna.
And TV commercials than as now, either you liked the jingle or hated it.
I was influenced by my grandmother, teachers in school & friends.
These were my sources & memories.

Watching television (mostly black & white) was just part of things we
did in what everyone who wasn’t there refers to as the “fabulous fifties”.

I would say, watch television, but remember,
what ever the media, or ‘Boys” have you believe,
take it for what it is.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie and others, what do you think of "The Honeymooners -" hardly a '50s is a wonderful time in America TV show? While far from real life, there was something more real in that show - for me and what I saw growing up in the '60s / '70s - than in "Father Knows Best" and shows like it (even if I enjoyed them).

Money was a regular concerns, as was keeping your job, as was your boss being a jerk, as was buying-on-credit still being looked at with skepticism by some (not all, the Nortons loved debt). Also, loud neighbors, dicey landlords, swindles, strikes and very old appliances still being in use - all stuff I saw directly, albeit, in a later decade, and heard about from my parents and grandparents talking about that period ('30s on, not specifically the '50s, but inclusive of the '50s).

 

[2jakes]

^^^
Not a favorite watching this “live" on TV because of the way Ralph treated Alice .
I had a crush on that character & the way she handled herself.
A beautiful lady.

I watch it now in reruns on occasions just to catch a glimpse of her.

Just realized, she reminds me of someone from Maine in some ways!

 

[LizzieMaine]

"The Honeymooners" was very much a part of the context of the pre-"Fifties" 1950s -- a relic of a time when television was much more comfortable with an East Coast working class orientation.

Most television sets in the early fifties were concentrated in and around Greater New York, and the type of characterizations featured in "The Honeymooners," when they began as a segment on Gleason's variety show, were very relatable to a working-class New York audience. Gleason had several other characters in the same vein -- Charlie Bratton, The Loudmouth, was another New York working class archetype whose usual domain was a cheap lunch counter of the sort that working-class New Yorkers would immediately recognize; Fenwick Babbitt, a sort of well-meaning boob who constantly bungled various working-class jobs; Rudy the Repairman, another loud, rough-tempered character similar to Charlie The Loudmouth; and of course Joe The Bartender, who was instantly recognizable to anyone who ever stepped into a cheap neighborhood bar. The only major Gleason character who *wasn't* obviously working class was Reggie Van Gleason III, who was very much a caricature of what the working class perceived the ruling class to be like. Gleason, of course, was an authentic working-class man from Brooklyn, and he drew his characterizations from a life he'd actually known.

By the time "The Honeymooners" became a half-hour weekly show of its own in 1955, the demographics of television had completely changed -- and working-class comedy was disappearing fast. The programs that most people remember as characteristic of "The Fifties" came along after this demographic change, when sponsors and networks were specifically targeting the suburban bourgeoisie. They were produced in Hollywood, by Hollywood writers and performers, and were very much ground out studio products rather than the products of a singular creative vision in the way that Gleason's programs were. I don't think it's a coincidence that Gleason's work lost nearly all of its bite when he moved from New York to Miami in the mid-sixties.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie and others, what do you think of "The Honeymooners -" hardly a '50s is a wonderful time in America TV show? While far from real life, there was something more real in that show - for me and what I saw growing up in the '60s / '70s - than in "Father Knows Best" and shows like it (even if I enjoyed them).

Money was a regular concerns, as was keeping your job, as was your boss being a jerk, as was buying-on-credit still being looked at with skepticism by some (not all, the Nortons loved debt). Also, loud neighbors, dicey landlords, swindles, strikes and very old appliances still being in use - all stuff I saw directly, albeit, in a later decade, and heard about from my parents and grandparents talking about that period ('30s on, not specifically the '50s, but inclusive of the '50s).

^^^
Not a favorite watching this “live" on TV because of the way Ralph treated Alice .
I had a crush on that character, such beautiful lady.

I used to cringe at how he treated her - not how my parents (or relatives) acted toward each other nor how we were taught to treat others. That said, and it is hard for us today to even see this as a mitigating factor, but I think the intent of Ralph's threats to Alice were supposed to be seen as hollow - him just blowing off steam. Most shows ended with him professing his love for her and acknowledging her better nature and smarts (sometimes).

 

[LizzieMaine]

Ralph was a parody of misogyny, not an actual misogynist -- the entire essence of his character was that of a frustrated, impotent man (and I choose that term advisedly, the Kramdens seemed incapable of having children) who lashed out blindly in his helplessness. He was incapable of accomplishing anything he ever set out to do, which was the tragic bleakness at the heart of the character -- and deep down he himself *knew* this.

The idea of the man as "king of his castle" had been treated as a comedy joke for decades by the 1950's, as ideas of "companionate marriage" gained currency, especially from the 1920's forward, and the audience always knew Ralph was just a sputtering blowhard when he made these remarks. They were never taken seriously by Alice, nor were they in any way ever taken seriously by those watching the program.

The opposite sort of violence, where the wife threatens to physically assault the husband, was another comic trope that was exceedingly common in the comedy of the Era. The long-running comic strip "Bringing Up Father" had as its foundation the idea that the larger, more powerful Maggie was physically dominant over her smaller, more passive husband Jiggs, and would frequently attack him with rolling pins, vases, and crockery. Mamie Mullins, the muscular and tattooed cook-washerwoman in "Moon Mullins," had the same sort of relationship with her no-account husband Uncle Willie. A bit of projection, perhaps, on the part of cartoonists and comedy writers feeling a bit threatened by the increasing independence of women thru the Era.

I did, by the way, grow up in a home where both my father and stepfather were physically abusive to my mother. That didn't stop me from laughing at Ralph Kramden -- if anything, it may have caused me to laugh louder.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Aaaah, the reminiscence to "The Honeymooners" in King-of-Queens!!!!!!!