The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Inkstainedwretch]

I'm more an Internationale kind of gal myself.

Gee, Lizzie, I never woulda guessed it. I had you figured for a Horst Wessel type.

 

[HudsonHawk]

In the post-9/11 climate you take your life into your own hands if you don't sing along when you're requested to. There were incidents of fans being beaten in the stands at Yankee Stadium for failing to sing "God Bless America" when they were requested to do so.

This irritates me to no end. Here is an exhaustive list of songs for which I am obligated to stand and remove my hat in respect:

The Star Spangled Banner

That's it. The complete list.

Now here is a partial list of songs for which I'm not obligated to stand an salute:

America The Beautiful
The Battle Hymn of The Republic
God Bless the USA
Amazing Grace
Dixie
Sweet Home Alabama
God Bless America
Any other show tune you may find suitably stirring

 

[LizzieMaine]

I spend an awful lot of time below stands buying hot dogs at games in recent years.

I can also do without the meatheads who think women are supposed to remove their headgear and salute. I wear a headrag most of the time, and I don't take it off for anybody, because the Flag Code states that I don't have to. These ten-cent patriots ought to know that.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I get a huge kick out of all the creeps complaining about Obama not saluting his Marine guards when they salute. This is because the President is a civilian, and civilians don't salute. Look at old films of President Eisenhower. He was, one would think, a guy who knew a thing or two about military protocol. Yet he didn't salute his Marine guards, either. This was because he was no longer in the Army and was in civilian clothing. And when the national anthem was played he held his hand (or hat) over his heart while the generals flanking him saluted. Ike knew about these things. But Reagan, as president, saluted his guards. This was because he was an actor and apparently didn't learn a thing while he was briefly in uniform during WWII. He always went for the theatrical gesture, even though it was inappropriate. But the righties adore Reagan and think everyone should imitate him. Sorry to get political, but I did my time in uniform and get exasperated when people misunderstand these things.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I learned that in the Girl Scouts. There are few things in America so poorly understood as flag protocol.

To get this thread back on topic, it's a trope of "The Fifties" that all school children were required to salute the flag every day. Well, it's true that kindergarten teachers and lunch ladies in many jurisdictions were required to swear loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in a public school, but the Supreme Court had ruled in 1943 that compulsory school flag salutes were an illegal abridgement of the First Amendment. In the actual 1950s school districts were allowed to hold flag salute ceremonies -- but they were not permitted, under Federal law, to require all students to participate. Chldren of Jehovah's Witnesses and some other religious groups that consider flag saluting to be idol worship were routinely exempted from participation in these ceremonies.

It's also a trope of "The Fifties" that there was universal support for school prayer, right up until the Supreme Court ruled against it in 1963. But in the actual 1950s, the National Council of Churches, representing most mainline Protestant denominations, along with the ecumenical National Council of Christians and Jews, and many individual Catholic leaders were on record as *opposing* compulsory classroom prayer. It was largely fundamentalist denominations outside the mainstream of 1950s religious thought which rose up in opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling.

 

[BlueTrain]

Some of us aren't that wild about flags, any flag. You might notice that soldiers everywhere wear little flags on their sleeves. We don't have crowns in the country, so I guess we need something to worship.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

When I was in grammar school ('53-'59) we started every day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the flag salute. But this was in Catholic parochial schools. If anything the RC schools were even more patriotic that the public schools. I think this was because Catholics' patriotism and loyalty were suspect for so long that the Church authorities went overboard the other way and insisted on a huge display of patriotism. For the record, we had no idea what the words meant, we just repeated them phonetically. When I started junior high at public school in Michigan in fall of '59, there was no more flag saluting except on special occasions, usually for some kind of outdoor ceremony.

 

[2jakes]

When I was in grammar school ('53-'59) we started every day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the flag salute. But this was in Catholic parochial schools. If anything the RC schools were even more patriotic that the public schools. I think this was because Catholics' patriotism and loyalty were suspect for so long that the Church authorities went overboard the other way and insisted on a huge display of patriotism. For the record, we had no idea what the words meant, we just repeated them phonetically. When I started junior high at public school in Michigan in fall of '59, there was no more flag saluting except on special occasions, usually for some kind of outdoor ceremony.

I was in that classroom too.
I literally had no idea what I was regurgitating in class but the penguins
made sure I memorized it otherwise I'd get my hands whipped with a ruler.

And it’s true ---soap was used on kids as a punishment.

 

[ChiTownScion]

It's also a trope of "The Fifties" that there was universal support for school prayer, right up until the Supreme Court ruled against it in 1963. But in the actual 1950s, the National Council of Churches, representing most mainline Protestant denominations, along with the ecumenical National Council of Christians and Jews, and many individual Catholic leaders were on record as *opposing* compulsory classroom prayer. It was largely fundamentalist denominations outside the mainstream of 1950s religious thought which rose up in opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling.

My pre-law advisor and professor was a primary school teacher before obtaining his Ph.D. and taught in a small rural Pennsylvania school in the 1950's. His experience was that the end of prayer in the schools took place once the Soviets launched Sputnik: the technology and space race was on, and every available minute in the schools was to be utilized for math and science- not prayer. He- a Marxist and an agnostic- admitted to employing classroom prayer time as a way of controlling the behavior of the more rambunctious kiddies as they were less likely to poke the other kids and such when God was invoked. Not the first time that religion was employed by a cynical authority to control the underlings... and no doubt wasn't the last, either.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I'm more an Internationale kind of gal myself.

My adopted- from- Russia son got into hot water in junior high for singing the words of the Star Spangled Banner to the tune of the Hymn of the Soviet Union: like "Amazing Grace" and "The Theme From Gilligan's Island," the words and tune of the two can be juxtaposed. I confess to an element of instigation in that caper.

 

[vitanola]

The only version of Star Spangled Banner I can handle is the one John Kiley used to play on the organ at Fenway Park. He ripped thru it in exactly forty-five seconds flat, and then it was time to play ball. Any other version sounds weird to me. At one of the radio stations where I used to work, we taped one of his performances off the network feed, put it on a cart, and used it as our sign-off for years.

For me, bass/baratone Frank C. Stanley's 12" Victor waxing is the definitive version of our national anthem. He includes the third verse "Oh thus be it ever when free men shall stand...", but omits the second "their blood shall wash out their foul footsteps pollution..." Must have been a good performance. It was recorded in '04 and remained in the catalogue until 1950

 

[BlueTrain]

On the subject of the boomers, how is it that someone born fifteen years later is part of the generation but not someone born five years earlier? And why was it called the baby boom when I knew no one who had no more than three children (two of whom were born before 1946) when my parents and the parents of my friends were all from families with far more children? My father was one of thirteen. He was number 12 and the next one died as an infant. My wife is one of four and that seemed like a really big family to me.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Boom was both a statistical one and a cultural one. The birthrate in the 1930s had been relatively low -- it reached an all-time low in US history in 1936, at an average rate of 2.1 births per woman. It began climbing from that point, and reached about 2.6 in 1942 before dropping again during the war years, bottoming out around 2.3. It began climbing again in 1946, and then spiked upward to 3.2 in 1947, dropped a bit in 1948 and 1949, and then began climbing until it peaked around 3.7 in 1956. It plateaued around that level until around 1963, and then began dropping sharply, falling below 1936 levels in 1972, and then bottomed out in 1977 at about 1.6. There was a smaller "echo boom" in the '80s and '90 as Boomers began banging out future millenials, bringing the birth rate back up to 2.1 by the early '90s, but we're currently in a post-Great Recession lull with a birth rate around 1.8.

These figures don't mean every woman had 3 and 7/10ths of a kid in 1956. They're simply a rate determined by dividing the total number of recorded births with the total estimated number of childbearing-age women in the country for any particular year. If you go solely by numbers, the boomiest boomers of all would be the 1956-63 kids, products of the highest birthrates in US History. But the "boom" is considered to be more the climb than the peak, thus the 1946-1956 period is considered to be most characteristic of the "boom"

The second aspect of it is cultural, and that basically becomes whatever you want it to be depending on your social or political point of view. Some writers characterize it as "back to normalcy," a return to the status quo, even though it actually wasn't that at all -- birthrates had been declining for years before the war, the result both of the Depression and an increasing push by women for independence. Some writers characterize it as a reactionary period intended to reverse prewar gains by women, and it wasn't solely that, either -- the percentage of married women working outside the home continued to increase thruout the Boom period. And some, mostly Boomers themselves, simply characterize the period based on their own childhood memories of popular culture, from Howdy Doody to the Beatles, a culture which was manufactured and marketed to them at an unprecedented level by mass media. Because Boomers have played a controlling role in the mass media since the 1980s, that's the version that's come to dominate over the last thirty years or so.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My pre-law advisor and professor was a primary school teacher before obtaining his Ph.D. and taught in a small rural Pennsylvania school in the 1950's. His experience was that the end of prayer in the schools took place once the Soviets launched Sputnik: the technology and space race was on, and every available minute in the schools was to be utilized for math and science- not prayer. He- a Marxist and an agnostic- admitted to employing classroom prayer time as a way of controlling the behavior of the more rambunctious kiddies as they were less likely to poke the other kids and such when God was invoked. Not the first time that religion was employed by a cynical authority to control the underlings... and no doubt wasn't the last, either.

The push against school prayer had been going on thruout the 1950s -- led at first by Catholic groups, which opposed the use of Protestant prayers in the classroom, and it quickly picked up ecumenical support. It wasn't an issue that a lot of people outside fundamentalist circles even noticed at first, because as you say, it wasn't considered a priority. The Religion In American Life Campaign, masterminded by the National Association of Manufacturers, was less interested in classroom religion than in encouraging the spread of anti-New Deal beliefs wrapped in a religious cloak.

But one group that did notice, and go on the counterattack, was the John Birch Society, which was growing at great bounds during the late fifites, and it was the Birchers, operating thru various fronts, who made the most vocal attack on the Supreme Court ruling in 1963. Echoes of their campaign are still heard today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And it’s true ---soap was used on kids as a punishment.

I was soaped repeatedly as a child. I'd smack my lips and say "That's great, Ma, gimme some more."

 

[tonyb]

...

Of course, the thing that was and remains shocking about American Graffiti is that the time it depicted was only 11 years earlier than when it came out... and it seemed impossible that things had changed so vastly in that short time!

I recall commentary to the effect that "American Graffiti" was the first movie "about nothing."

Dubious as that characterization might have been, the film was something of a departure from the typical way of telling a story.

What "American Graffiti" was "about," it seems to me, was how much the culture had changed over those 11 years separating the time the film was made and the time it depicted.

"Where Were You in '62?" was the tagline on the promotional material. I don't know if that was meant as a clue to the movie's "meaning," but I can see how it might be read that way.

 

[BlueTrain]

I suppose if you never saw American Graffiti, which I didn't, you would have no idea what this is all about, which I don't. But there is a peculiar thing about movies and TV shows like that. Many set in the not too distant past tend to be set between ten and fifteen years earlier than when they were made. There's no rule about it but it seems to be the case. I don't think the intention is ever to show how things have changed but rather to capitalize on the change for the sake of novelty. In other words, it's old enough to be fresh again.

Something else about the 1950s and perhaps the 60s is that I think people were more likely to be married (and therefore have kids). In the distant past before WWI, large numbers of men worked in places where there weren't a lot of women, like boom towns in the West, logging camps, mining towns in Alaska and so on. Logging camps as well as mining camps tended to disappear in the 1960s. But I could be all wrong about that. I'm sure there was more pressure to marry than before.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What's interesting about the new-marriage rate -- the per-thousand rate of unmarried people who got married in any given year -- was that it was essentially unchanged between the 1860s and the 1960s -- according to statistics from the U. S. Bureau of Vital and Health Statistics, it stood at 9.6 in 1867 and 9.7 in 1967. There are a lot of factors at work there -- the institution of nuclear-family marriage was a lot less common in the 19th Century in the US than we like to believe it was, with casual cohabitation and "common law marriage" without the benefit of clergy or formal civil sanction very common, especially among the working class, well into the 20th Century.

But there were peaks in the new-marriage rate in between those points. The rate reached a then-all-time high in the US in the years after the First World War, climbing to about 12.5 in 1922, and then immediately began to drop, cratering out at less than 8 in 1932 -- obviously a result of the Depression, which hit its bottom that year. But with the coming of the New Deal, the marriage rate immediately began to climb -- it was back over 10 in 1935, and was just under 12 by 1940. It dropped again during the war years, obviously, but reached a new peak of over 13 in 1946 as returning soldiers married in droves, and then dropped sharply to below 11 as that wave receded. The marriage rate then climbed steadily before hitting an all-time peak of almost 17 in 1950, in part as a response to men wanting to avoid service in the Korean War. It then collapsed to almost 1932 levels by 1960, and didn't begin to slowly rise again until 1965.

The divorce rate, meanwhile, rose steadily from the 1860s to the 1920s --- and took a sharp drop in the early thirties, only to resume climbing again with the coming of the New Deal, and from there it rose steadily before soaring to an all-time peak in the years just after the war. It then receded a bit, but the postwar divorce rate remained higher than prewar levels forever after.

 

[Bushman]

I was soaped repeatedly as a child. I'd smack my lips and say "That's great, Ma, gimme some more."

Heh, I remember being soaped only once. By my best friends mother when she caught us using foul language. Back home, I got a spoonful of hot sauce if I mouthed off.

 

[2jakes]

Heh, I remember being soaped only once. By my best friends mother when she caught us using foul language. Back home, I got a spoonful of hot sauce if I mouthed off.

I learned early on that as long as
my lips didn't touch the hot stuff
I could tolerate it better.
But I soon started to enjoy it that
they stopped doing it.