Why doesn't the Golden Era extend to the 50s or early 60s?

[Foxer55]

Sprinkles,

As a young college person of this modern age, who has the misfortune of being surrounded by the much more prevalent, less respectable folk in "higher education", I have to say the total downgrade of society as compared to 30s-60s really irritates and distresses me. It seems all anyone of my age cares about anymore is the next time they can black out or get high...and I silently wish for dreadful things to happen to these cretins when they discover the "real world" (which still pales in comparison to the Golden Age!) Of course in the future, society may become so collapsed that the situation I describe indeed becomes the new "real world", although I hope at some point in the future there will be a re-awakening of the early values that gave the average citizen such spirit and pride, especially in the USA. I will step down from my soap box now!

I think it will be up to you and people like you to keep it alive within yourselves. I don't hold out much hope for the ones who want to blackout and get high or the ones who expect the world to give them a life. Keep the faith.

 

[dhermann1]

I'd like to challenge this whole "quality" argument, most vigourously. GM invented the annual style change in the 1920s. And believe me, people have been making shoddy merchandise since the dawn of time. In the Civil War manufacturers sold the government military uniforms that were actually made of PAPER, and totally dissolved the first time they were rained on.
Conversely, the Golden Age automobile that could expect to go 200,000 miles was only a fantasy. Today cars with 150,000 miles on them are considered great trade in value.
There has always been good, bad and indifferent quality, and I expect it will always be that way.
Now as far as dates are concerned, I always say it started on Nov., 12, 1918, the day after the shooting stopped in WW I, and ended on Nov., 21, 1963, the day before JFK was killed.
I think you can make an argument to push it back a couple of decades, into the 1890s if you want. But being a child of the 60s, I gag at the idea of it extending into the ABOMINABLE 70s.
But that's just the perspective of when I was born. That's really a key factor.
Lizzie, no love for good old Harry Truman???

 

[AtomicEraTom]

This is very true. I just saw an ad at an antique shop, I think it was for a 1949 Mercury, bragging that it was "the car that lasts 100,000 miles."

Today, if a car has 100,000 miles on it, it's not even broken in yet. My high-mileage car is my Cadillac, which will hit 163,000 in the next week or so. I expect years out of it, yet. My buddy has a 1997 Chevy Silverado with around 500,000 miles on it and still going strong. Practically an unthinkable feat during the Golden Era.

I would consider the Golden Era to be more about styling, and from a mechanical aspect, ease of maintenance. Take a prewar car and some WD-40, a crescent wrench, a flathead screwdriver, and some duct tape, and you can fix just about anything on it.

Conversely, the Golden Age automobile that could expect to go 200,000 miles was only a fantasy. Today cars with 150,000 miles on them are considered great trade in value.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Lizzie, no love for good old Harry Truman???

Harry's OK most of the time, but in general I'm no fan of the postwar era: the generation that could have rebuilt the world from scratch sold its birthright for a mess of pottage, a beaverboard house in Levittown, and a new Mercury every other year. If you can't break the Spirit of '37 with goon armies and blackjacks, just buy them off.

Plus, the New Look was grotesque. Dior was a demented misogynist.

As for quality, if they can build a modern car with a 200,000 mile engine, why do the chintzy plastic door handles break off if you look at them sideways?

 

[Foxer55]

Mmmm... I don't think its about the quality of the products. Its about the quality of culture. As the younger person posted earlier, their peers want to black out or get high all the time. Not many years ago kids could carry their rifles to school for marksmanship classes on tehe public city bus but, today, those same kids are mass murdering each other. Look at these people here in this forum, products of the Golden Era, at least almost, and they take pride in themselves but when you look at the average person on the street today they look, and act, like bums. Speaking of which, how disresepctful of others is it to look and act like a bum when you engage them in daily business yet everyone expects respect? The daily salution these days is FU! Everybody has a chip on their shoulder or is posturing about something. Today artists celebrate the Piss Christ while they burn Rockwell or burn his works. The culture of the Golden Era is g-o-n-e and you can see it in the cars, the clothes, the people, the art, the music, you name it.

 

[Sprinkles]

Well I can understand the quality of products problem as well. I feel like washing machines are a great example...my parents just bought a new one after the last one only lasted 3 years (and then 1 year of quasi-function). Meanwhile the dryer is ancient and still going strong, although washers are a little more prone to problems than dryers. Anyway, I think even products made in the 80s and 90s were still a lot better than nowadays. Other examples include a coffee grinder that was probably made in the late 80s and still works great! Would not expect a product made in 2013 to last 25 years...

 

[dhermann1]

Foxer55: Right on.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well I can understand the quality of products problem as well. I feel like washing machines are a great example...my parents just bought a new one after the last one only lasted 3 years (and then 1 year of quasi-function). Meanwhile the dryer is ancient and still going strong, although washers are a little more prone to problems than dryers. Anyway, I think even products made in the 80s and 90s were still a lot better than nowadays. Other examples include a coffee grinder that was probably made in the late 80s and still works great! Would not expect a product made in 2013 to last 25 years...

The problem now is that the public no longer *expects* or *demands* products that will last. They've been brainwashed by sixty years of "planned obsolescence" into thinking they don't need or want a washing machine that will run for eighty years (like the one I have) or a refrigerator that'll run for sixty-eight years (like the one I have) or a telephone with an effectively-infinite lifespan (like the ones we all had prior to the mid-eighties). So the manufacturers can give them flimsy trash with a big smile and say "we're just giving the people what they want." Wastefulness no longer a sin? What's a sin, anyway?

Forced obsolescence is the next step, and people have bought into that too. Spend a thousand dollars for a fancy new computer from that certain Cupertino-based company and then you're forced to buy a new one in three or four years if you want to "keep up," because the new software won't run on your old one. Or what's happening to the motion-picture exhibition business: billions of dollars in fully-paid-for, functional equipment being rendered worthless and replaced by a system that's entirely gamed for the benefit of the production companies and the corporate-chain exhibitors, to the detriment of independent businesspeople. And the digitization of over-the-air television is yet another example -- millions of sets rendered obsolete in a stroke, for no particularly good purpose, and people just smile and whip out their credit cards. A Nation Of Suckers.

 

[Capesofwrath]

Well you know what they say. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be...

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Every time we advance somewhere, we lose somewhere else. The cars run longer, but they are built cheap, and look like they are, too!

As for quality, if they can build a modern car with a 200,000 mile engine, why do the chintzy plastic door handles break off if you look at them sideways?

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Forced obsolescence is the next step, and people have bought into that too. Spend a thousand dollars for a fancy new computer from that certain Cupertino-based company and then you're forced to buy a new one in three or four years if you want to "keep up," because the new software won't run on your old one.

And the digitization of over-the-air television is yet another example -- millions of sets rendered obsolete in a stroke, for no particularly good purpose, and people just smile and whip out their credit cards. A Nation Of Suckers.

I managed to get eleven years out of my old computer until it was no longer compatible with the new software. But then I went through two CDR drives, which I seldom used, on my computer while the "obsolete" diskette drive, which I used constantly, was still going strong. And then what got me steamed about the analog to digital conversion of television was that the government spent millions of dollars to subsidize the purchase of converter boxes. I never even bothered to get one.

Right now, I'm in the process of fixing up and redecorating my house and I'm not too crazy about getting a new TV which would mainly be for houseguests because I seldom watch TV myself.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm still using Claris Emailer and Office 97, which were on the machine when I found it at the side of the road. And I barely use those. If something won't work unless I "upgrade," I figure I got along for thirty or forty years without it, I can get along without it now.

As far as The Great Digital Swindle goes, before digitization I could get four channels over the air on rabbit ears. After digitization, I can get no channels over the air. And meanwhile, the public airwaves get sold off for profit to corporate concerns. Nice trade.

The word "upgrade" is like vinegar to the teeth. Marketingspeak for "fresh way to swindle you."

 

[Fletch]

Harry's OK most of the time, but in general I'm no fan of the postwar era: the generation that could have rebuilt the world from scratch sold its birthright for a mess of pottage, a beaverboard house in Levittown, and a new Mercury every other year. If you can't break the Spirit of '37 with goon armies and blackjacks, just buy them off.

That generation wasn't meant to rebuild. They were brought up to make do with a worn-out world. Not to rebuild. Then they were trained to conform and destroy. Not to rebuild. And when they got home, they learned to conform and destroy in more peaceful ways, and to build. But not to rebuild.

The past was more than past, it was anathema. It was depressing and troubling and useless and made no sense. What could not be changed to serve the new reality had to go - good, bad, innocuous, indifferent - all of it.

Plus, the New Look was grotesque. Dior was a demented misogynist.

Heh! Like that's any impediment to success in women's fashions.

As for quality, if they can build a modern car with a 200,000 mile engine, why do the chintzy plastic door handles break off if you look at them sideways?

Think of the door handles as subsidizing the engine, and perhaps things begin to make a cold kind of sense.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That generation wasn't meant to rebuild. They were brought up to make do with a worn-out world. Not to rebuild. Then they were trained to conform and destroy. Not to rebuild. And when they got home, they learned to conform and destroy in more peaceful ways, and to build. But not to rebuild.

You may be right. And they gave the world a generation that claimed to be interested in rebuilding, but was actually just interested in having sex, smoking dope, and making sure that all future wars were fought by People Unlike Themselves -- and in the end proved just as susceptible to the Grand Buyout as their parents were.

"Everywhere now, men are rising from their sleep. Men-- men are understanding the bitter, black total of their lives. Their whispers are growing to shouts. They become an ocean of understanding. No man fights alone." -- Clifford Odets, "Paradise Lost."

Only kidding there, forget we ever believed in anything. Oh and hey, how about that Hydramatic transmission?

 

[Fletch]

Oldsmobile drivers were a bunch of tea-sipping cake-eaters.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, all except Ralph Parker's dad and Malcolm X.

 

[Foxer55]

Fletch,

Oldsmobile drivers were a bunch of tea-sipping cake-eaters.

Hey! I take issue with that as Oldsmobile was one of my favorite cars for stodgy, middle of the road, common folk years ago. I even owned some of them and loved 'em. Always liked their middle class quality and style.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

be thankful you don't have to pay for a television license. We have to give the government MONEY to provide those zero channels over the air.

As far as The Great Digital Swindle goes, before digitization I could get four channels over the air on rabbit ears. After digitization, I can get no channels over the air. And meanwhile, the public airwaves get sold off for profit to corporate concerns. Nice trade.

 

[Edward]

Post-WWII brought in the age of the consumer and the start of the Cold War. The end of the golden era would vary depending on what you thought was golden about it, or perhaps, when the list of things you hate about the modern world began happening.

Naturally. and unpopular as this sentiment has sometimes proven in the past, different eras have been better or worse for different people based on who they are and where they are. Thirties Germany was a rubbish place to be Jewish. If I'd bee black, I doubt I'd have been over the moon about he idea of living in much of the US before the early Sixties. It's an awful lot easier to be Irish in London now than some of my relatives and acquaintances found it between c1968-c1997....

To what, specifically, does "Golden Era" refer, anyways? The years 1927 (to take fedora fan's dates just for fun) to 1950, but for a few years at each end, were pretty darn miserable for most involved. I always understood it to be a term referring to the Movie Industry and its satellites and hangers on.

Is the British Invasion of the middle 60s really seen as a Harbinger? Were we really that decadent? (methinks not)

It's a term I've come to loathe. It would be interesting to see an academic research study done into this type of nostalgia (for any time period, really), especially if you could compare how the people who lived it felt about it at the time and then much later on, looking back, with those of us who didn't live through it. I'd expect, adjusted for variations in individuals and backgrounds, it'd some appear that most periods have their good and bad elements.

As everyone else has said, it's all personal. My own "Golden Era" runs from March 4, 1933 to April 13, 1945, a period when ordinary Americans actually dared to dream that a Better World was possible.

We could certainly do with some more can-do optimism these days. I could live without the war, though. Not that we're exactly at peace now....

be thankful you don't have to pay for a television license. We have to give the government MONEY to provide those zero channels over the air.

It could be worse, though. When a friend of min lived in Berlin a few years ago, I marvelled at how many channels he had, free to air, with no licence fee. "Yeah," he said sourly, "...but they're all ITV 1."

Technically, of course, we don't have to pay for it if we don't want to watch tv....

 

[Shangas]

I don't agree with dhermann. Of course there has been bad quality stuff and indifferent quality stuff throughout history - Hell, the Brooklyn Bridge is full of it. Every single one of those cables holding the damn thing up was below-par. The only reason it hasn't collapsed already is because Roebling had such HIGH STANDARDS that even inferior cabling didn't damage the bridge.

My issue was not so much whether or not quality has, or has not existed in history, and to what extent, my issue is that these days, NOBODY EXPECTS QUALITY, and that NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IT IS. Which is different from saying that everything built yesterday was quality, and that everything built today is crap. Of course it's not true. What I think IS TRUE, is that these days people don't KNOW what quality is, and that back then, people received quality as a matter of course, whereas today you have to pay through the nose for it.

The problem now is that the public no longer *expects* or *demands* products that will last. They've been brainwashed by sixty years of "planned obsolescence" into thinking they don't need or want a washing machine that will run for eighty years (like the one I have) or a refrigerator that'll run for sixty-eight years (like the one I have) or a telephone with an effectively-infinite lifespan (like the ones we all had prior to the mid-eighties). So the manufacturers can give them flimsy trash with a big smile and say "we're just giving the people what they want." Wastefulness no longer a sin? What's a sin, anyway?

Forced obsolescence is the next step, and people have bought into that too. Spend a thousand dollars for a fancy new computer from that certain Cupertino-based company and then you're forced to buy a new one in three or four years if you want to "keep up," because the new software won't run on your old one. Or what's happening to the motion-picture exhibition business: billions of dollars in fully-paid-for, functional equipment being rendered worthless and replaced by a system that's entirely gamed for the benefit of the production companies and the corporate-chain exhibitors, to the detriment of independent businesspeople. And the digitization of over-the-air television is yet another example -- millions of sets rendered obsolete in a stroke, for no particularly good purpose, and people just smile and whip out their credit cards. A Nation Of Suckers.

Lizzie essentially gets it. These days, things just aren't built to last anymore. In fact, they're DESIGNED not to last, which is even worse. And that's even more terrible is that people now think that THIS is 'quality'.

THAT is my gripe here. Back in the Golden Age, people would NEVER have accepted that. If it wasn't quality...sorry. Chuck it in the bin. Throw it in the fireplace. The idea that you BOUGHT SOMETHING only to BUY IT AGAIN two, four, five, ten, or even twenty years later, or more!...was just not within their comprehension. Why should you? It's supposed to last, isn't it? If it isn't, why the hell are you blowing your money on junk??

That is the issue I was trying to raise.