I’ve had a stupid question swirling in my brain for some time now, and I’m finally going to ask it.
One of the things liberals/progressives/Democrats (“lpDs”) worry most about is that a Republican/conservative agenda will roll back the clock, and undo 40 years of social experimentation. Implicit in this is the fear that we’ll go back to the horror of the 1950s. Now, there were two problems with the 1950s that I wouldn’t want to go back to: Jim Crow and the fact that women were denied career opportunities and equal pay for equal work. I also know that the lpDs fear going back to a time when abortions were illegal.
Other than these three things (and I’ll admit that they’re biggies), what were the other horrors of the 1950s we ought to worry about? Frankly, looking back through the mists of time, it doesn’t seem so bad. (And, while the Cold War was bad, it can’t be revived, so that’s not a worry. We’ve got our own war to worry about.)
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Hello Bookworm,
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Leftist phrase, “The silent march through the institutions.” You’re absolutely right. The Left has tried to mold America into their own image through judicial activism and institutionalized bureaucratic scribbles. This, in the end, was what drove the Leftists irate about President Bush. They were almost there to presenting us with a fait accompli, and then Bush comes in, abrogates the ABM treaty, attempts to shift our trade to Latin America away from China, appoints two Supreme Court Justices, rejects Kyoto out of hand, etc, etc.
I agree that there were many, many good things about the 1950’s, but I have a healthy awareness that I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in that world. It was a very virile, uncompromising world. A very good friend of mine lived out in the ranchlands of the Southwest. His grandpa and his dad lived in a world (circa 1930-1960) where townspeople and neighbors would send delegations to your home to ensure the peace. There were sheriffs around and they’re technically the law, but what enforced the peace were the clans, families that were heavily armed.
In that world, if I spoke the way I do now, I’d be hanging from a tree or pistol whipped or shot down for a dog. My friend told me of a story where his grandfather’s brother visited, and on this visit, the brother winked at a woman. Nothing fancy. Just winked!
Two hours later, the lady’s husband rides over with a rifle under across his lap looking for the brother who had the temerity to wink at his wife. Things of this sort are killing offenses back then. Luckily, the brother convinced the husband that he had a twitch in his eye that made it appear as though he winks (talk about Irish Blarney). Needless to say, the brother rode out of town that night.
With that said, I would love to bring back an updated, more modernized version of the 1950’s. Throw out the bad and keep the good. Lord knows, I wouldn’t be able to survive in that world if was served straight-up.
Ummm…what don’t we want to go back to in the 50s…lemme think…how about Bryl Cream, ducktails, polyester pants and nauga hide?
Danny,
Hey, I like those things!
Not sure what planet you’re talking about, Thomas, but I lived through the fifties, clearly lasted considerably more than five minutes, and it just wasn’t that tricky!
I can assure you, “clans” did not run the west, and anybody who was ass enough to shoot somebody for having winked at his wife would himself have been shortly swept up by those sheriffs.
What they fear is having to live with real morals and social norms. They’d acutally have to respect all Christians, not just the liberal ones. They’d have to live in a world with real definitions of right and wrong and >gasp
JJ,
I’m just giving you a real life account; not my own, of course. I didn’t live through the 1930’s and 1950’s in rural America where your nearest neighbor was miles and miles away. But I can assure you from the accounts my friends gave me and from my own research, the sheriff did not maintain the order all on his own. People used to have sizable families, and these families out in the middle nowhere were fairly well armed.
Think about it. A handful of sheriffs do not have the resources to police a huge county on horseback and dirt roads. We did not have the interstate highway then. That was Eisenhower’s plan and he didn’t get into office until ‘53. Furthermore, America was not uniform. Far from it.
What I recounted was a story from my friend’s family in Oklahoma, not another planet. I have reason to know quite a bit about the cowboy culture in the Southwest and in Texas, and I can assure, it’s accurate.
JJ,
One last thing, would you say that the speech your hear nowadays is much looser than back then? My friend think so. He grew up in the cowboy culture of the Southwest, and he reflected the other day how much looser his speech has become. If he had said half the things he says now back then, it would have brought all the men within hearing range over to him to whomp his butt and “teach him some manners” and right now.
Obviously, I’m a product of my generation, and my generation tolerates such speech as to pretty much ensure at least my butt kicking in such a world.
Black leather jacket with silver studs,white buck shoes ,rattail comb,greasy hair,and truckers wallet.Rocking!
I don’t think hugely looser. Although, define “looser.”
There tends to be a lot more of what was once quaintly referred to as “obscenity” around now in the (more or less ) public discourse than there once was. On the other hand, we have certainly become a great deal more politically correct, so in that sense contemporary speech is, if anything, a lot less loose. (When the Eisenhower administration decided they were fed up with illegal aliens and set to work to round them up and repatriate them, they had no qualms about calling it “Operation Wetback.” Seems pretty loose to me. I don’t think that would fly today.)
And as for sheriffs riding horses down dirt roads – you sure you’re talking about the 1950s and not the 1850s? I can assure you, by the 1950s most public roads were paved, even in farthest Oklahoma! Ranches and farms mostly had dirt roads, but even they were sufficiently maintained for cars, or at worst Jeeps. (Real ones, built by Willys.)
I’m pretty well armed right now – but then so are a lot of people in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and upstate New York, too. And remains entirely possible to be miles from your neighbors in Maine, NY, the Carolinas, and north-central Florida. Lots of places.
Everybody everywhere had sizeable families, which is more a function of no birth control, and the fact that it took hands in profusion to work the land, and more people were farmers or ranchers than are now. When I was a little kid, I’d get off the school bus in the afternoon, walk up to the house (about half a mile), have my milk and cookies, and, in season, go relieve somebody on a tractor, because a kid could drive a tractor but didn’t have the size, strength or coordination to do a lot of other stuff that seemed to need doing. Endlessly.
(There was your real revolution: when tractors became practical and reliable in the 1930s. All of a sudden an eight year old could turn more earth in a morning than a strong man and a team of horses could in two weeks. Farms all of a sudden didn’t bunkhouses with five guys living there; a two-kid family could handle it.)
Maybe because I was there the fifties just don’t seem that wild and woolly to me. Hell, by 1953 we even had television!
What I remember about the 50’s was the fear of The Bomb. I also remember we walked home from school. My mother worked. We minded ourselves after school — fought a lot, but cleaned up before the parents came home!
But we have to live in our own time, so no point in daydreaming about the 50’s. You can’t go back.
Jim Crow and the fact that women were denied career opportunities and equal pay for equal work.
Then you have nothing to worry about, for World War II’s attacks on the Germans in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, will be repeated in the endless wars of a future Republican administration. Since desegregation and equal opportunities for women were largely the result of the momentum provided in war time, more wars equals more progress. Course, some people don’t want to progress women’s rights, do they Book.
Frankly, looking back through the mists of time, it doesn’t seem so bad.
Medicine. Amputations.
It’s simple: in the 1950s, America was prosperous, strong, respected, and united. These things are nightmarish to the Left. They want an America weak, divided, humiliated, impoverished, and, ideally, devastated by terrorist attack.
That’s the goal of the modern Left: the destruction of America and the killing of Americans. They’ve abandoned all pretext of supporting any kind of ideology like Communism. They no longer even pretend to be working to benefit mankind. They don’t like mankind — they want humans to go extinct. And the chief target of their insane hatred is America.
I know this sounds crazy, but that’s because Leftists are crazy. Clinically, pathologically crazy. But there are so many of them and their media satraps are so powerful we don’t notice how utterly insane they are anymore. We think it’s right and normal for leaders of an American political party to openly work to bring defeat on our armies. We think it’s right and normal for news media to be openly, stridently partisan. We’ve come to accept that a whole slice of the political spectrum believe that human beings should be exterminated.
Leftists hate the Fifties because they hate everything.
We need some good ole 1950 Mcarthyism to straighten this country out.The Patriot Act is just silly kids stuff!
No lynchings or blood anything like that but just some good ole suspicious figure pointing at some things that are different because I don’t understand it and even more I don’t want to understand it.I respect authority unquestionably to the nth degree.Now how high do you want me to jump and where is that bridge ?
I am an expert on the ’50s. I was there for the whole decade. Went to high school, college, finished flight training, married and welcomed my first daughter.
The biggest difference between what I experienced then and what I observe now is the nature of the support systems. Most kid’s lives were centered on family, church, school and a fairly close-knit peer group. We did not look to media stars and celebrity icons as our role models. Ours were fairly ordinary people who lived much as we did.
Thomas, I saw some of the culture you are speaking of in rural Florida during the middle ’40s. FDR’s vaunted programs were very slow to benefit great parts of the South. With no telephones, electricity and only the main highways paved, the law was remote and often not trusted. That is one reason I personally consider the ‘50 a time of great change.
Swampacreage, sorry to disappoint but I never slicked my hair (crew cut all the way); never wore a black leather jacket with silver studs or carried a trucker wallet. No one I knew did that stuff either. You have seen too many movies my boy. McCarthy was not the dominant force in the country. We did not all go around searching for Communists under every rock. I will note, however, that anyone who was around in the post-war WWII ’40s and the Korean War ’50s took Soviet backed Communist expansionism fairly seriously. Ask a Berliner. Ask any Hungarian. Revisionist history is often so distorting–and depending on pop culuture for your understanding of life can be very misleading.
Hey Oldflyer you never disappoint but who is your favorite Hollywood anti – war celebrity? Come on is it Jane Fonda ?
ps.I bet you were one of those white guys that had a Mohawk hair cut in the 50’s.I betcha!I bet your favorite comic book was Seargent Fury(not that there is anyrhing wrong with that) ?
There is a difference between revisionist history and true historical analysis searching for the past no matter who was responsible for the atrocities.
Bw and Thomas,
Please don’t overlook the fact that Jim Crow laws were created by the deep south Democratic Party. Now, there’s The Who’s line of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”! It was the Republicans that pushed forward civil rights in the south.
I remember as a kid in Baton Rouge, La. seeing a cross burning at a major highway construction site. Must have not hired the “correct” company…
I have one major problem still existent in the 50’s – the draft.
Sorry, I’m a volunteer and I don’t want conscripts around me when the manure hits the air oscillation device.
SGT Dave
Here, here, SGT Dave! As a former draftee and veteran of the VOLAR army of 1973-1974 I don’t think there would anything worse for military professionalism, efficiency and espirit than loading it down with a bunch of conscripts who don’t want to be there.
JJ,
You said, “When the Eisenhower administration decided they were fed up with illegal aliens and set to work to round them up and repatriate them, they had no qualms about calling it “Operation Wetback.” Seems pretty loose to me. I don’t think that would fly today.”
Here’s what I mean by loose speech. Cussing in front of women and children, suggestive speech or manners toward a women (taken or not), disrespecting the elderly, etc. Most of the “do not’s” seems centered around the protect of women and children. The consequences would probably be a warning, and then they’ll be “calling you out”. Now, I’m not saying this happened in every case. From what I can glean, these kinds of events didn’t happen very often since everyone was aware of the consequences.
I’m not saying this is right. In fact, I think it’s the height of hubris to take it upon yourself to punish anything you disagree with, which is what that world did in spades.
The example you gave of Eisenhower’s operation above I do not consider loose speech. It was the accepted term for illegal Mexicans at the time…
Bookworm, I was mulling over your post last night and discussed it with a few friends, and it seems to me that we are all born to our times. When I was younger, I had the irrational idea that I was born in the wrong age; that I belonged in the 1950’s or the 1880’s. But no. To each of us, we are given a time and an age in which to live.
The rampant racism, where you can comfortably call a black man “nigger” or an Oriental a “chink/Chinaman” or whatever, is intrinsic to the values of the 1950’s apartheid. You cannot separate the bad for the good.
There is no lost Arcadia.
The 1950’s was a time of great virtues and moral courage. I was a peaceful time with America astride the earth in the up swell euphoria from the victory of WWII. Men acted without the entanglements of bureaucracies and politically correct mind control.
But the 1950’s was also a time of great evil as well. We treated the blacks abominably, sometimes lynching them just to lynch them because it’ll keep the rest of the blacks in fear and in their place. Women were locked into three professions: Teacher, secretary or nurse… or else housewife. And they were disenfranchised from having a say in our governance.
There is much to admire in the 1950’s world, but I don’t think it’ll serve us well to consider just the good and not the bad.
Swampacre, you and I are so far away from the same reality that it is almost funny. During the period you refer to; when the likes of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark were betraying our country and anti-war mobs were spitting on returning veterans, I was an attack pilot flying from an aircraft carrier.
My favorites from that era are exemplified by VADM James Stockdale, USN.