An organization previously unknown to me called the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) issued a report in 2016 on the views of Americans regarding, roughly speaking, whether American Society has changed for the better, or for the worse, since the 1950s. According to the report, most would say it's changed for the worse. A majority of the majority were white, Christian and Republican. Perhaps that goes without saying.
What is it about the '50s that makes most of us, apparently, think it better than what's been the case for the last 70 years? An argument can be made that the '50s were white, Christian and Republican, at least on the surface and as the country was portrayed in the media. It was also for many of us Baby Boomers the time we spent as children. There are many Boomers, after all, and some of us look back on our childhood with nostalgia.
It was a time when televisions began, and continued to, appear in the homes of the middle and upper classes, and the America portrayed in the medium was beneficent indeed. America fought evil then, successfully. Whether in the Old West as shown in The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke, fancifully as in Superman, through law enforcement as in The Untouchables, Dragnet and Highway Patrol, America and Americans promoted "Truth, Justice and the American Way" as stated in the introduction to Superman.
American families on TV were genial, sometimes comic, but always loving. Their problems were reassuringly mundane, and resolved. American women were sometimes ditzy, sometimes wise, but almost always motherly and beautiful when part of a family. In other contexts they might be femme fatales who were beautiful but bad. Even in that case, though, chances were excellent they had hearts of gold and had been led astray by bad men. American men were generally brave, sometimes fatherly, sometimes rich, sometimes befuddled and comic, sometimes poor, always patriots and on the side of good unless crooks or spies in place to be bested.
Economically, times were generally good. America had come out relatively well, economically, from the Second World War, in comparison with a great part of the world. One can understand that many would feel content, even smug, in light of American prosperity. Militarily, it seemed for a time at least that America was predominant.
But the Korean War didn't end nearly as well. And the Soviet Union got the bomb, and put a satellite in space, and the communist scare began. The '50s were the heyday of McCarthyism. Not all was well, but the Red scare served to highlight the fact that America was good, communism bad. So in a way the vision of goodness and the tendency towards self-righteousness were enhanced by America's problems in that time.
Nor did TV and other media uniformly portray our society as prosperous and benign. There were stirrings of disappointment if not discontent. The writers, musicians and poets of the Beat Generation were different from most of that time. There were some shows, like The Twilight Zone, which raised questions about American society. But that was late '50s, when things had begun to change, slowly.
Perhaps the Boomers who grew up watching Looney Toons, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Howdy Doody became disillusioned in the 1960s and 1970s with the American Dream as it was dreamed by them in the '50s. Perhaps they recognized that it was a dream. Or, perhaps they felt that they had been betrayed somehow, by someone. Not all was as clear as it was in the '50s, nor were they treated with the kindness and love they felt their due; they weren't entertained as they were in the past. All the gunfights we saw on TV didn't make the Vietnam War less bloody or more understandable. So the '50s at some point came to be mocked by the Boomers it created. It was their parents' time; they weren't children any more.
But something happened as we grew old. We want to be children again. We look back beyond the '60s as we grow satisfied and content, but at the same time cautious and fearful. Perhaps we even grow senile, in a way--culturally and politically. Our second childhood reminds us of our first. We find that our first was infinitely better. Many of us find it more peculiarly American. More particularly American in a particular way.
Whatever it was back then, those of us who were children at that time remember what we experienced as children, and for some and perhaps most of us what we experienced was what we saw on TV or as a result of efforts to mimic what we saw. Suburbs, vacations, big cars, sports, highways, diners, drive-ins, rock and roll, country clubs, good food, money, good and evil easily distinguished and evil always vanquished. Why can't it be like that again?
Ask those who think we've changed for the worst. They'll tell you. I think one of the things they'll tell you, unfortunately, is that what they see now isn't what they were shown on TV then. More specifically, that the people they see now aren't the people they saw on TV then.
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