Bad Old Days

The Myth of the 1950s

Alan J. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351298346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

For many, especially those on the political left, the 1950s are the "bad old days." The widely accepted list of what was allegedly wrong with that decade includes the Cold War, McCarthyism, racial segregation, self-satisfied prosperity, and empty materialism. The failings are coupled with ignoring poverty and other social problems, complacency, conformity, the suppression of women, and puritanical attitudes toward sex. In all, the conventional wisdom sees the decade as bland and boring, with commonly accepted people paralyzed with fear of war, Communism, or McCarthyism, or all three.

Alan J. Levine, shows that the commonly accepted picture of the 1950s is flawed. It distorts a critical period of American history. That distortion seems to be dictated by an ideological agenda, including an emotional obsession with a sentimentalized version of the 1960s that in turn requires maintaining a particular, misleading view of the post-World War II era that preceded it. Levine argues that a critical view of the 1950s is embedded in an unwillingness to realistically evaluate the evolution of American society since the 1960s. Many--and not only liberals and those further to the left--desperately desire to avoid seeing, or admitting, just how badly many things have gone in the United States since the 1960s.

Bad Old Days shows that the conventional view of the 1950s stands in opposition to the reality of the decade. Far from being the dismal prelude to a glorious period of progress, the postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s was an era of unprecedented progress and prosperity. This era was then derailed by catastrophic political and economic misjudgments and a drastic shift in the national ethos that contributed nothing, or less than nothing, to a better world.

Chapter 1

The Myth and the Problem

For many, especially on the political left, the 1950s are the “bad old days.” Most people are familiar with the conventional list of what was allegedly wrong with that decade. The Cold War, McCarthyism, racial segregation, self-satisfied prosperity and empty materialism, coupled with ignoring poverty and other social problems, complacency, conformity, the suppression of women, and puritanical attitudes toward sex. In all, it was bland and boring, too, although people are supposed to have been paralyzed with fear of war, Communism, or McCarthyism, or all three.

But the common picture of the 1950s, is, to put it mildly, defective, in whole and in detail. It seriously distorts a critical period of American history. That distortion often seems to be dictated by an ideological agenda, and an emotional obsession with a sentimentalized version of the 1960s, that in turn requires maintaining a particular, misleading view of the post-World War II era that preceded it. That view is mixed up with an unwillingness to realistically evaluate the evolution of American society since the ’60s. Many—and not only liberals and those further to the left—desperately desire to avoid seeing, or admitting, just how badly many things have gone in the United States since the 1960s. (At least in public discourse; older people, even of liberal or farther left persuasion, in private, and occasionally even in unguarded public moments, sometimes let slip that they think of the late 1940s and 1950s as being nicer than the present.) There is a powerful need to go on seeing the 1960s as “The Age of Great Dreams” (to borrow the title of David Farber’s book); but while the dreams may have been great, the achievements turned out to be microscopic, or simply the product of an ongoing evolution that had begun long before. One way to avoid confronting such problems is to paint the postwar era in as bad a light as possible. And, on examination, the common misconceptions not only distort what happened, but, arguably even worse, distort our ideas of the way in which things happen. They derail not only the understanding of a particular period, but any realistic understanding of any time.

The rest of this book will show that the conventional view of the 1950s practically stands reality on its head. Far from being the dismal prelude to a glorious period of progress, it was the postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s that was an era of unprecedented progress and prosperity, which was then derailed by catastrophic political and economic misjudgments and a drastic shift in the national ethos that contributed nothing, or less than nothing, to a better world.

Much of the hostile version of the decade alluded to above is not new. Some of it actually dates from the late 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s. The mood of American intellectuals in particular, in 1960, was “good riddance” to the Fifties. The historian Eric Goldman actually wrote an article with that title, commenting that “we’ve gotten unbelievably prosperous. We maunder along in a stupor of fat. Probably the climate of the late fifties was the dullest and dreariest in all our history.” William V. Shannon wrote of the decade’s flabbiness, self-satisfaction and gross materialism—it was the “age of the slob.” Ronald Berman, reviewing the faded magazines of 1960 with a skeptical eye in 1968, dryly commented, “The Fifties were for many intellectuals a captivity in Babylon. They were the bloated Fifties in which a nation was trapped by its own affluence.”¹ To be sure, this attitude was hardly universal. A television special of the era bid goodbye to the “Fabulous Fifties.” But a glum attitude toward the American situation was by no means limited to fashionable intellectuals after the shock of Sputnik in October 1957, for some of the prevailing sort of social criticism then circulated very widely. It was promoted even by “mainstream” elements of the mass media, like the Time-Life empire, and even by conservatives, including President Eisenhower and his closest associates. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for example, regarded Sputnik as a fortunate kick in the pants for American complacency.

The persistence of such attitudes, long afterwards, of course, has other causes. Most important, perhaps, is the need to view the 1960s, as “a Promethean moment,” as David Frum sarcastically put it, or, as the well-known historian Arthur Marwick insists, a miniature Renaissance (no kidding), a need curiously intertwined with a need to defend the superiority of the present. Marwick matches an enthusiastic description of the 1960s with a list of the alleged “key features” of the 1950s that include “rigid social hierarchy: subordination of women to men and children to parents, repressed attitudes to sex, racism, unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem; Cold War hysteria (which apparently translates as “opposition to Communism”); a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes, a dull and cliché-ridden popular culture, most obviously in popular music, with its boring big bands and banal ballads.”

Others might find some of these indictments, if true, to be unintended compliments. Still others might find it hard to reconcile this picture of the era with, say, Dr. Spock, Dr. Kinsey, The Blackboard Jungle, concern over what was quaintly called “juvenile delinquency,” the move toward European unity and the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the United States, and the marvelous works produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and others working in New York and Hollywood at their peak, to name just a few examples—but we will return to such matters later. It should be said that Marwick is courteous enough to provide his readers a brief mention of what “conservatives” might like about the 1950s and dislike about the later decade, though his concept of “conservatism” is suggested by his description of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a figure of the “radical right.” In a similar vein, Morris Dickstein blandly describes the United States under President Eisenhower as the “Old Regime,” “whose substance was the increasingly decayed and irrelevant tradition of rural or small-town America, and whose stability was grounded in a suppression of grievances and new energies that could be suppressed no longer.”²

Not everyone, to be sure, thinks in terms of such supposed political polarizations. Some neoconservatives, such as George Will, have “conceded” that today “America is a much better place” than it was in the 1950s, “primarily because of racial progress.” Other neoconservatives, such as Joseph Epstein, however, take a much friendlier view of the 1950s. Some unreconstructed liberals, such as the late Steve Allen, have at least implicitly taken a very dim view indeed of developments in America since then; and it may be that such people are truer to what liberalism once stood for than men like Will are true to conservatism.

Indeed, it should be pointed out that, back in the late 1960s, many liberals took a very sour view of the way things were going. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in 1969, the renowned liberal journalist Richard Rovere mournfully wrote, “It has been an awful decade, a slum of a decade.…” The noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his book, The Crisis of Confidence, took a similar tone.³ Given most liberals’ view of the war in Indochina, by that time, any other view would have been strange indeed. It is a curious fact that it often seems that those who were most hysterical in opposing the Vietnam War at the time are often the most insistent, decades later, that the 1960s were a wonderful period!

David Halberstam’s tome, The Fifties, is a partial attempt to break out of the exaggerated “opposition” sometimes postulated between the 1950s and 1960s, by emphasizing the “social ferment” behind the scenes in the earlier decade, and attempting to trace the origin of many later developments back into the 1950s. His efforts along these lines are interesting and intelligent, but might have been more useful if they were not vitiated by factual errors, an inability to question many regnant dogmas, and his addiction to a sterile antithesis of his own—an obsession with seeing the 1950s as the scene of a clash between an “old order,” an “entrenched cultural and social hierarchy,” and “conformism” on the one hand and the forces of “freedom and dissidence” on the other, none of which are clearly defined. Almost anything unusual, slightly offbeat, or even critical in the 1950s is subsumed as a “forerunner” of the moods of the 1960s.

Ultimately, this seems a way to preserve, as much as modify, the exaggerated opposition between the 1950s and the subsequent period. It is related to another misleading idea, which will be analyzed later, which opposes the 1950s, or the Eisenhower era, as a “stagnating status quo” (as Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak described it) to the creative later period. In Halberstam’s view, it was the glory of the 1950s that they preceded and paved the way for a later era.⁴

This view has not proven too popular among liberals and leftists. Perhaps it is just too far from their favored clichés. For that matter, conservatives might wonder if any decade next to the 1960s might have something wrong with it—must be guilty by association so to speak. But such a view has not been popular among them, either. The main problem with it may be that the whole postwar era actually pointed in a very different direction from that taken by later American history.

Thinking in Terms of Decades

Rational readers may object that there is something a bit absurd about the whole form of discussion described above, that it doesn’t really make sense to talk about history in terms of neatly separated decades of differing character.

And they are right. There are not necessarily any historical turning points or divisions at the end or beginning of decades. To cut up American history, at least since World War II, in this way is basically a false approach. At best, it is a hangover from the period between the two World Wars. Then, as it happened, the end of World War I, the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, and the beginning of World War II were real landmarks or turning points that came at least approximately at the end of each decade and marked off the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s fairly neatly into very different periods. Moreover, the events that separated those decades were in no sense abstract or distant from people’s everyday lives; they affected everyone. A little thought will show that it is much harder to find turning points of such universal impact since World War II. Such as there have been, starting with the end of that war, have tended to fall in the middle, rather than the start or end, of decades.

The 1950s were marked off, to some extent, by the start of the Korean War and the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. But it is a little much to regard those things as comparable to the start of the Great Depression or World War II. It would seem to be more realistic to view the twenty years following the war as forming a coherent period, ended, albeit rather blurrily, by the massive troop commitment to Indochina in 1965, the urban riots, and the tremendous change in the national mood that took place within a few years in the mid-1960s. The Kennedy presidency now seems more like a backwash of the Eisenhower era than the remaining years of the 1960s—which, it may be suggested, is the main reason JFK’s reputation remains far higher than he deserves. Moreover, the 1950s divide into three periods—the grim Korean War years, the four years between the Korean armistice and Sputnik, which perhaps most resembles the common “Happy Days” stereotype of the decade, and the very different period of the late 1950s, which resembles the stereotype the least, but which, inconveniently, spills over to some extent into the 1960s. The last three years of the Eisenhower presidency, however, had a very peculiar flavor all their own. Both the Korean War era and the period after Sputnik were notably different in tone from the era of peace and complacency of which we are often told—most notably in the fear of nuclear war, acute during at least part of the Korean War, receding thereafter, and rising again in the late 1950s. The latter was the sole period of the Cold War in which many Americans, and other Westerners, really feared that they might lose the struggle, and even that while the Communist side might be evil, it was somehow superior to, or at least more efficient than the West, in some ways. The United States, in particular, feared it was being overtaken at its own game—technological and economic supremacy. The anxieties of that time may well have been unfounded, but it is little consolation for those who lived through them to be told that their fears didn’t exist at all.

The rest of this book will try to cut through the existing confusion by trying to distinguish between the two postwar decades, and the narrower topic of the 1950s. I use the word “try,” because the confusion around these things has been so great that it would be foolish to guarantee that it can always be done.

Notes

1Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties (New York: Harper 1970) pp. 2-3; J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country (New York: December, 1986), pp. ix-x, 426-427; Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), esp. pp. 6-7, 131, 233, 250.

2Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 3-9, 16-20; David Frum, How We Got Here (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. xxii; Morris Dickstein, The Gates of Eden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 54, 56-57, 63. It should be noted that Marwick’s grasp of American affairs is often, to be kind, inadequate, as in his supposition that busing for desegregation involved shipping black children out of cities and into superior suburban schools.

3Arthur Schlesinger, The Crisis of Confi dence (New York: Bantam 1969); Newsweek, March 23, 1992; Steve Allen, Dumbth (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1998); Steve Allen, Vulgarians at the Gate (Buffalo: Prometheus, 2001); Joseph Epstein, “My 1950s” Commentary (September 1993), pp. 37-42.

4David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties (New York: Bantam 1987), p. 29. For an extensive critique of the Halberstam book, see Alan Levine, “A Myopic View of the Eisenhower Era,” pp. 106-109 in Religion and Public Life Volume 29 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 1995).

Chapter 2

The Post-World War II Era: Its Characteristics, Achievements, and Problems

The decade and a half to two decades following World War II formed a marked contrast to both the bleak period before the war and the expectations most people held during the war itself. The vast changes that took place at home in the United States proved overwhelmingly welcome; those in the rest of the world often much less so—but neither sort were widely foreseen. To understand the postwar era, it may be helpful, at least, to briefly examine what had come before, which was a standard, if not the standard, by which adults in the postwar era measured how things were going.

Prewar

The United States in 1939 was finally recovering from the Great Depression, in terms of the level of business activity and consumption. But a huge unemployment problem—17 percent of the working-age population—remained, falling to 10 percent by mid-1941. Only in 1940, in the midst of a wartime boom that no one expected to last, did conditions surpass those of 1929. Nor did anyone expect much beyond “recovery.” The prevalent belief, strange as it sounds today, was that the American economy was “mature” and had only limited possibilities for further growth. (Indeed, there had been little growth ever since 1929.) In contrast to the traditional, and generally correct stereotype of American optimism, there was a strong tendency to project the stagnant conditions of the era between the world wars indefinitely into the future.

The United States of 1939 was still a nation with a large, mostly poor farm population, most of whom did not yet have electricity. Indeed the farmers, along with miners and people in the old textile towns of New England and the South, had lived in Depression conditions even before 1929. The rest of the American people were largely crowded in cities, where, by our standards, or even contemporary middle-class standards, half were poorly housed. New urban construction has been almost at a standstill since the 1929 crash. Only a minority, overwhelming upper or upper middle-class, lived in suburbs, then largely strung out on commuter rail lines. (Suburbs, however, were the only housing sector where there had been some growth in the 1930s.) Although the proportion of the population that was college-educated had doubled in the last generation, it still formed something of a social elite; graduation from a college was almost a guarantee of officer status in World War II. Population growth was slight. The birth cohort of the 1930s was small; we have never had a president born between 1929 and Pearl Harbor.

Probably four-tenths or more of the population were poor. One in four American houses had no running water at all, 35 percent no flush toilets, 40 percent no bathtub or shower. A majority of people did not own a telephone or a car, although the United States had the biggest automobile industry in the world. Along with the five-day workweek (put into cold storage during the war) the large-scale industrial unions of the CIO were still a controversial novelty, often bitterly at odds with the old AFL craft unions. The United Automobile Workers completed organizing the workforce at Ford, against bitter resistance, only in 1941. Industry was overwhelmingly concentrated in its traditional centers in the Northeast and Midwest. New York City was still a major manufacturing town and by far the biggest port, taking half the n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. The Myth and the Problem
• 2. The Post-World War II Era: Its Characteristics, Achievements, and Problems
• 3. Race: The Great American Obsession
• 4. The Myth of McCarthyism
• 5. Prosperity and Poverty in the Postwar Era
• 6. Men and Women
• 7. Conformity, the “Silent Generation,” Liberalism, and Social Criticism
• 8. Postwar Culture
• 9. Seeds of Disintegration?
• 10. Post-Sputnik “Declinism”
• 11. Those Suburbs—Suburbia, Disturbia, and the Slurbs
• 12. Cars: Getting Around, Gorp, and the “Vaginal Look”
• 13. The Economy and Industry in the Postwar Era
• Index