About once a month, I get some e-mail chain letter that carries on about how great Americans and America was in the 1950, and how, in comparison, we're all crap now. Mostly, they're the whining of conservatives about how the world isn't the way they imagined it was when they were kids. I delight in replying and proving the lie to the e-mail, point by point. Today, I turned the fun up another notch and made a preemptive strike. What follows is a fictional conversation with my grandparents that tries to set the record straight. The Good Old Days never were....
Grandpa and Grandma sat on the front porch swing, sipping lemonade. I sat on the steps, leaned against the porch rail, and looked up at the stars in the summer sky. "Tell me," I said softly, sweetly, "about the good old days."
There was a moment of silence when Grandma and Grandpa looked at each other and smiled -- then the moment was shattered by his guffaws and her roar of laughter. They held their sides and laughed until tears ran down their cheeks and they gasped for air.
Finally, Grandpa spoke. "What're you? Daft?"
Grandma was kinder. "Did you think life was ever like it was on Leave it to Beaver? Silly boy. TV's not real life."
"But, but, but...." I stammered, "wasn't life easier back in the day?"
Grandpa chuckled. "Which day would that be?"
"The 1950s -- our golden era," I said, sounding a bit defensive.
"Yeah, right. If you didn't mind dying young." Grandpa snorted in disgust. In the '50s, women could expect to live 71 years and men 65; today it's over 80 and 75."
"The vaccines and antibiotics on which we depend today, didn't even exist in the '50s," Grandma added. Then, showing off her encylopedic knowledge, she listed off the origination dates of 13 vital vaccines and more than 100 antibiotics developed after the 1950s (you can find her list below). Then she added, "Smallpox ravaged the bodies of children and killed untold thousands during that decade alone. Smallpox infected an individual person and an entire community with remarkable speed; and it proved fatal to nearly one third of its victims. Those who somehow survived a painful two-week ever, skin eruptions, and internal organ damage were usually left with severe scarring and sometimes blinded. There was no cure.
"That wasn't the only killer, either. From 1950 to 1959, 257,455 cases of polio were reported, mostly in children; 11,957 died of it."
"I s'pect it depends on who you're talking about," Grandpa said. "Back then, one out of every three children lived in poverty. Today, it's less than half that. Heck, back then between a fifth and a fourth of all families lived in poverty. Today, it's down to 10 percent" Medicare and Medicaid didn't come along until 1965, so if you were sick when you were poor, elderly or disabled, you were pretty much out of luck.
"Go back even more," Grandma said. "In 1940, one out of every 10 kids in the US didn't live with either birth parent. Today, it's one in 25."
"Things weren't so hot if you weren't white, either." Grandpa's expression turned sad. He gazed into the night a while, shook his head, and continued: "In the 1950s, racism was deeply institutionalized. Half our black families lived below the poverty line; migrant workers suffered appalling working and living conditions; people of color were not permitted to take part in the American dream. In lots of places, there were public schools, public libraries, churches, public beaches, public parks and pools, clubs, business organizations, diners, toilets, drinking fountains -- you name it -- that simply were off-limits to anyone who wasn't white.
"There were whole communities that were off limits. I remember that, in 1957, there were 10,000 Blacks working at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, but not one could live in Dearborn itself.
"Time was when blacks and whites lived side-by-side. In southern cities, for example, black servants and laborers lived side by side with their white employers, and in northern urban areas, blacks were more likely to share a neighborhood with whites than to live in racially segregated communities. Black people were generally residentially integrated with whites in the North. The two racial groups regularly interacted in a common social world, sharing cultural traits and values through personal and frequent interaction. But that changed after the world wars and we moved into the 1950s.
"Segregationist zoning ordinances, which divided city streets by race, coupled with racially restrictive covenants between private individuals became the common method of legally enforcing racial segregation. Racial segregation became the de facto policy of local governments and standard operating procedure for individual landowners. The emergence of the black ghetto did not happen by chance, but was the result of the deliberate housing policies of the federal, state, and local governments and the intentional actions of individual American citizens. The results have been devastating."
Grandpa fell silent, so Grandma picked up his theme. "We actually had to pass a law the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 -- to knock down racial and ethnic barriers to becoming a U.S. citizen. America in the early '50s was a deeply divided country, on the verge of hysteria about communism and digging more deeply into the national wellspring of racial mistrust and hatred. Rosa Parks hadn't demanded her seat on the bus yet. Think about that, in the '50s, you had to sit in a certain spot if you rode a public bus.
"James Stewart, who served in WWII, once wrote: 'After the Navy, I joined the Washington Police Department. I could not drive any police vehicles in the nation's capital. When I was assigned on weekends, I could not arrest white people west of 7th St., I could only arrest whites when the white officers were off and we were needed to fill in.' That's what the world was like in the '50s.
"It would be few more years before the Supreme Court would rule against segregated schools -- and three more years before they'd be put it into effect in Little Rock. The governor of Arkansas ,Orval Faubus ,called out the National Guard to prevent the nine black kids from attending Little Rock's Central High School. On the first day of school, only one of the nine students showed up because she did not receive the phone call about the danger of going to school. She was harassed by whites outside the school and the police had to take her away in a patrol car to protect her.
"Faubus' order set him on a collision course with President Eisenhower, who was determined to enforce the orders of the federal courts, even though critics charged he was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and ordered them to return to their barracks. Eisenhower then deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students.
"The students were able to attend high school, although they had to pass through a gauntlet of spitting, jeering whites to arrive at school on their first day and to put up with harassment from fellow students for the rest of the year. Although federal troops escorted the students between classes, the students were still teased and even attacked by white students when the soldiers weren't around.
"In the end, only one of the Little Rock Nine got the chance to graduate; after the 1957-58 school year was over, the Little Rock school system made the decision to shut down completely rather than continue to integrate, and other schools followed suit.
Grandpa spoke up again. "Heck, we had a bunch of nitwits screaming about music if it was made by the wrong color of musician. A member of the Alabama White Citizens' Council actually said, in public, as if he were proud of it: 'We've set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock and roll bop.'" Grandpa smiled. "Guess that didn't turn out so good for them.
"As desegregation progressed, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan grew. The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or black civil rights. Klan terror, including intimidation and murder, was widespread in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media.
"We even had laws telling you who you could and could not love and marry. Today, when one out of every 15 American marriages is interracial, many people are surprised to learn that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were so deeply embedded in U.S. history that they would have to be considered America's longest-lasting form of legal race discrimination -- they lasted far longer than either slavery or school segregation. All told, miscegenation laws were in effect for nearly three centuries, from 1664 until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared them unconstitutional in the Loving decision."
"Such a wonderful era," Grandma added with sarcasm in her voice, "that in 1954 the Bible was displaced by other books as the best seller on the non-fiction list.
"You didn't have to be the wrong color to be run out of town on a rail in the '50s," she said. "All you had to do was think different from the folks in power. In 1957, the Supreme Court had to change its own ruling from 1951, because the earlier ruling (regarding the Smith Act in Yates v. United States) had said that merely urging a person to believe something, as opposed to urging a person to do something, can not be made illegal. What utterly un-American nonsense.
"We had to endure way too much of that idiot from Wisconsin, too," said Grandpa.
"Joe McCarthy," Grandma said. "He went on TV to hold hearings into Commies in the Army and kicked off the Red Scare. A lot of innocent people got hurt by a bunch of narrow-minded, hysterical cowards and people like McCarthy who manipulated them. During the 1950s, 2,611 civil servants were fired as security risks, and 4,315 resigned while being investigated. In an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in red-baiting.
"You gotta understand that most of the hysteria wasn't about national security, it was about slapping down people who didn't think or believe like the goons in power. The inquisitors were trying to get satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, reformers, internationalists, intellectuals, and finally even against a Republican administration that failed to reserve liberal policies. What was involved, above all, was a set of political hostilities in which the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to socialism, and socialism to Communism. In this crusade Communism was not the target but the weapon.
"It was all about conform, conform, conform. Most of our trouble from earlier decades like women's rights, civil rights, imperialism, and war were relatively suppressed or neglected during the '50s. We didn't just stick our heads in the sand, we forced others to do it too -- or we shut them up for good. This country is still paying the price for that."
Grandpa chimed in again. "Your grandma hasn't mentioned it, 'cause she's too nice a person, but thinking the wrong thoughts or being the wrong color weren't the only things that could make life ugly for you in the '50s -- having the wrong reproductive parts could, too. Women who failed to conform to the June Cleaver role of housewife and mother were severely criticized. One bestselling book said women who wanted to think for themselves suffered a 'deep illness' and said that women who wanted equal pay and equal educational opportunities were engaged in a 'ritualistic castration' of men. Women were often denied the right to serve on juries, convey property, make contracts (including leases on apartments), and establish credit in their own names (including mortgages and credit cards). Wife-beating was not really considered a crime. Many psychologists explained that battered wives were masochists who provoked their husbands into beating them. And a husband raping his wife was not a crime at all, but a sign that the woman was deficient in fulfilling her marital obligations.
"Life was sharply split between the male world and the female world. Girls played with Barbie dolls and Dale Evans gear, boys with Roy Rogers and Davy Crockett paraphernalia. Men wore gray flannel suits and women wore dresses with pinched in waists and high heels.
"It wasn't until the '60s that Congress passed the EqualPay Act, making it illegal for employers to pay a woman less than what a man would receive for the same job or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex. It was 1976 before the first marital rape law is enacted in Nebraska, making it illegal for a husband to rape his wife. And it was 1986 before the Supreme Court found that sexual harassment was a form of illegal job discrimination."
By this time, my head was spinning, as my delusions lay in shattered pieces around their feet. I made a last feeble attempt to salvage the "good old days."
"What about family life?" I asked. "Wasn't life more innocent back then?"
Grandma burst out laughing again. "Oh dear. You really are living in a fantasy, aren't you. People are people are people. We've had the same weaknesses and strengths since the dawn of history, and I suspect we always will. More couples reported their marriage 'happy' in 1977 than did in 1957. (The 'happy marriage' index dropped slightly by the late 1980s, but still remained higher than it was in 1957.) One half of the marriages that began in the 1950s ended in divorce. During the 1950s, more than 2,000,000 legally married people lived separately.
"While at the beginning of the decade only 9% of U.S. households had a television, over half had one by 1954, and 86% had them by the end of the decade. In the '50s, young people watched TV more hours than they went to school. What was portrayed on television -- strange as it seems -- became accepted as normal. The ideal family, the ideal schools and neighborhoods, the world, were all seen in a way which had only a passing relation to reality.
"Juvenile delinquency was said to be at unprecedented epidemic proportions in the US. Fewer than half the students who entered high school in the late 1940s ever finished. Congress discussed nearly 200 bills dealing with juvenile delinquency in 1955. In 1957, there were more than twice as many births to girls aged 15 to 19 than in 1983. In fact, in the 1950s, America had the highest rate of teen marriages in the industrialized world.
"I know every generation thinks that it was the one that discovered sex, but -- and you may have missed this -- a study released in late 2006 found that not only does 95% of America have sex before marriage (including those in recent graduating classes who were taught abstinence-only sex education), but the percentage hasn't changed much since the 1950s -- for men or women. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91% had had premarital sex, while among those born in the 1940s, 88% had."
Grandpa made a sound that sounded like a grunt of disgust. "You young folks also like to think you live in a more dangerous world and terror-filled than we had in the 50s. We had just come through two world wars, for which we sacrificed everything -- you kids got nothing to compare. No sooner were those over than the arms race and the Cold War began, and we started building bomb shelters in our basements. Government pamphlet 'You Can Survive,' become widely available. Kids practiced hiding under their desks as air-raid sirens wailed, as if that would help in a nuclear war. Then came the Korean War.
"Meanwhile, the Mau Mau begin their terrorist attacks against the British in Kenya. This lead to concentration camps in Kenya, the retreat of the British, and the election of former terrorist Kenyatta as leader of Kenya. France continued its occupation of Algeria and extensively used torture and death squads in a attempt to win the war. Later, they were forced out, but not until after training some of the most skilled torturers of the late 20th century. Africa saw the beginning of large scale top-down economic interventions that lead to horrible conditions for millions and charitable exhaustion by the West. The widespread corruption was not dealt with, and war, disease, and famine were constant problems. Haiti gained a dictator. Castro overthrew the corrupt Batista regime in Cuba. We got involved in an embargo just as the Soviet Union became involved in propping up the Castro regime. Our foreign policy toward Cuba, as well as a mix of thoughtlessness and incompetence, gave us an embarrassing abandonment of Guantanamo Base in the next decade that would be partially covered up by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. There were nuts in the CIA actually hoping to start World War III, and the FBI was trying to stop them. We had started playing nuclear chicken -- they called it Brinksmanship -- with the Russians, living every day under the threat of nuclear war, so don't talk to me about terror."
I felt like such an idiot -- I was such an idiot -- that I said no more. We just sat on the porch and watched the moon pass by....
Grandma's (incomplete) list of medical advances that didn't exist in the '50s: 1962 First oral polio vaccine 1963 First vaccine for measles 1967 First vaccine for mumps 1970 First vaccine for rubella 1974 First vaccine for chicken pox 1977 First vaccine for pneumonia (Streptococcus pneumoniae) 1978 First vaccine for meningitis (Neisseria meningitidis) 1981 First vaccine for hepatitis B 1985 First vaccine for Haemophilus influenzae type b (HiB) 1992 First vaccine for hepatitis A 1998 First vaccine for Lyme disease 1998 First vaccine for rotavirus 2006 First vaccine for human papillomavirus (first vaccine to target a cause of cancer) 1960 methicillin 1960 metronidazole 1961 ampicillin 1961 spectinomycin 1961 sulfamethoxazole 1961 trimethoprim 1962 cloxacillin 1962 fusidic acid 1963 fusafungine 1963 lymecycline 1964 gentamicin 1966 doxacycline 1967 carbenicillin 1967 rifampicin 1968 clindamycin 1970 cefalexin 1971 cefazolin 1971 pivampicillin 1971 tinidazole 1972 amoxicillin 1972 cefradine 1972 minocycline 1972 pristinamycin 1973 fosfomycin 1974 talampicillin 1975 tobramycin 1975 bacampicillin 1975 ticarcillin 1976 amikacin 1977 azlocillin 1977 cefadroxil 1977 cefamandole 1977 cefoxitin 1977 cefuroxime 1977 mezlocillin 1977 pivmecillinam 1979 cefaclor 1980 cefmetazole 1980 cefotaxime 1980 cefsulodin 1980 piperacillin 1981 amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (co-amoxiclav) 1981 cefperazone 1981 cefotiam 1981 cefsulodin 1981 latamoxef 1981 netelmicin 1982 apalcillin 1982 ceftriaxone 1982 micronomicin 1983 cefmenoxime 1983 ceftazidime 1983 ceftiroxime 1983 norfloxacin 1984 cefonicid 1984 cefotetan 1984 temocillin 1985 cefpiramide 1985 imipenem/cilastatin 1985 ofloxacin 1986 mupirocin 1986 aztreonam 1986 cefoperazone/sulbactam 1986 ticarcillin/clavulanic acid 1987 ampicillin/sulbactam 1987 cefixime 1987 roxithromycin 1987 sultamicillin 1987 ciprofloxacin 1987 rifaximin 1988 azithromycin 1988 cefaclor 1988 flomoxef 1988 isepamycin 1988 midecamycin 1988 rifapentine 1988 teicoplanin 1989 cefpodoxime 1989 enrofloxacin 1989 lomefloxacin 1990 arbekacin 1990 cefozidime 1990 clarithromycin 1991 cefdinir 1992 cefetamet 1992 cefpirome 1992 cefprozil 1992 ceftibufen 1992 fleroxacin 1992 loracarbef 1992 piperacillin/tazobactam 1992 rufloxacin 1993 brodimoprim 1993 dirithromycin 1993 levofloxacin 1993 nadifloxacin 1993 panipenem/betamipron 1993 sparfloxacin 1994 cefepime 1999 quinupristin/dalfopristin 2000 linezolid 2001 telithromycin 2003 daptomycin