The Myth of the Myth of the 1950s

Reconnecting to History, Part 1

This is the first in what will be a new ongoing series about history and how our conceptions and misconceptions about it color our understanding of where we are today. This article will be free for a limited time before going behind the paywall.

Series Introduction

I grew up in the home of an historian; my world has been steeped in the past from the beginning—and yet I have found that background much more useful than constraining.

Partly this is because I am by nature a deviant (I would say “radical,” but that has political connotations. Instead, I use “deviant” in the sense of “reflexively avoids well-worn and reliable paths in favor of doing risky things”).

Partly it’s because the historians at whose feet I learned, despite being almost shockingly conservative in bent, were not particularly doctrinaire in their approach. As a result I learned early to draw strength and wisdom from the past without being imprisoned by its doctrines.

The upshot is that I tend to be a bit like Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings:

“I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side.”

The strange historically-nested world I inhabit has never mapped to a popular narrative, and I don’t expect that to change. This does mean, however, that I have had the privilege of traveling through, and befriending members of, every subculture from the pro-life fundamentalist radicals to the burning man crowd to the ultra-woke, and dozens of others in between and at odd angles.

But for most of those in my generation, history more-or-less began in 1941 (which makes sense as that was when the world we understand was born).

But nowadays, even looking back that far is an exercise in oddness; the attitudes and worldviews of our great-grandparents are nearly incomprehensible to the contemporary mind. In today’s world, history seems broken. This is because we are experiencing a change in epochs as momentous as the series of changes introduced by the invention of the printing press, and for nearly identical reasons. You can read all about how we got here in the series which kicked off this column.

Now it’s time for a new series, which I’m calling Reconnecting to History. In this new series I will examine the myths and dogmas of our current world and, to the best of my ability, show the ways in which the past might help us make sense the world as it seems to buck and heave around us—for the truth is that, while the world has never quite seen something quite like the current moment, the world we live in would look much more familiar to people who lived a hundred and twenty years ago than to those who lived from the 1950s through the 2010s.

If we survived the rise of Christianity, the Black Death, the wars and plagues ignited by the printing press, the Industrial Revolutions, and the 20^th century, then it’s probably a decent bet that we will survive this turn of the wheel.

There are no guarantees, but we have a seat at a cosmic poker table. The game may be rigged against us, but if we do not play, we cannot win.

So let’s start off looking at the 1950s, and why everything you know about them is wrong—and why this goes double if the things you know are true.

The 1950s: The Hollywood Picture

First, let’s look at the glamorous packaging. The story it tells goes something like this:

The 1950s were a golden age characterized by great optimism, fairness, equality, and brotherhood. People didn’t lock their doors at night. Gang violence and drugs just weren’t a thing. Americans were Americans, by God. A single-income family could afford a suburban house and two-or-more kids without a problem. Everyone was happy, everyone was free, everything was new, and everything worked. Sure, there were bad parts, but those parts were on the way out because universal brotherhood was the order of the day. Women were happy to be housewives, children had two-parent families, black folks were starting to win recognition, enterprise was free, and anyone who wanted to could afford college or trade school could make a good living.

We know it’s true because that’s what we saw on all those re-runs when we were kids (at least, those of us old enough to remember re-runs). I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, The Munsters, Mr. Ed, The Addams Family, and The Andy Griffith Show all showed a wholesome world that was pretty much like what we saw in the first Back to the Future movie.

It was a great time to be alive. No wonder the Boomers idolize this dynamic, wondrous period of their childhood! Who can blame them for wanting to Make America Great Again?

The 1950s: Not So Golden an Age?

Of course, we all know that the above is not true. Hollywood is about as reliable at reporting history as the Pentagon is at preventing war. The whole point of Hollywood is to sell products and make money at the expense of the rest of us, and they usually do it while getting a hand-up from the government’s shadiest corners. The Boomers didn’t revolt over nothing. Their whole generation went crazy and tried to burn the system down for a reason; their childhood nostalgia is obviously a lie they tell themselves.

Take a look at the facts, for God’s sake! First of all, that image of prosperity is totally phony. Most families lived in teeny tenements or small houses of less than 700 square feet. They took road trips because they couldn’t afford to fly. Those cars they drove? They broke down all the time and barely lasted past fifty-thousand miles. Almost nobody had air conditioning, most people lived in squalor, and the only reason parents didn’t divorce is that the laws were so backwards that marital rape was legal and divorce was basically impossible.

Half the country was segregated, and black folks got the raw end of every deal. Red-lining ruined their communities, they went to schools with dirt floors and out-of-date books and were treated like second-class citizens in public.

And pride in the flag? The US couldn’t even win the Korean War! It backed coups all over the world on behalf of corporate interests like the United Fruit Company. It undermined democratic governance in favor of military juntas and fascist dictatorships because it made a few extra bucks for the donor class.

And talk about cultural perversion! Sexual repression was so bad that on TV they showed separate beds for married couples and they wouldn’t let Elvis dance on Ed Sullivan.

Families were patriarchal and abusive. Mothers were hooked on uppers and tranquilizers and Freudian psychoanalysis, and fathers were drunks that smoked like chimneys, and even the kids in the “happy” homes got regular beatings. And that’s not even to mention what happened between kids. Bullying was out of control, and repression and ignorance meant that everyone was molested. As one boomer Science Fiction author once told me when he was very drunk (which is why I’m not naming him here):

“In the 50s and 60s, being buggered was part of being bullied. You just expected it. Being called a sissy didn’t mean you were gay, it meant you were too wimpy to fight of other boys who wanted to rape you.”

Anyone who wants to Make America Great Again is a racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist who secretly wants to return to the days of segregation and white supremacy, and probably kicks puppies for fun, too.

The Myth of the 1950s

In more charitable circles, those who view (or remember) the 1950s as closer to the Hollywood scenario are said (by the second crowd) to have fallen for “the myth of the 50s.” Those of the opposite persuasion will talk of the latter group being taken in by “anti-American propaganda.”

This poses a problem for us, the living, since those who grew up in the grip (or cradle) of the 50s still outnumber the rest of us at the ballot box (which is why all the viable candidates for President are over 70 years old).

In the 2020s, the 1950s haven’t yet disappeared from living memory, but those of us who are most online are those least likely to have first-hand memories of the time. We are left to trust either the recollections of those who were there, or to trust the history as best we can get a view of it. And, as I pointed out in my summaries of the above perspectives, that history has acquired political implications to such an extent that what you believe is often seen to define who you are, what you value, how you vote, and whether you are good or evil (by one or another set of standards).

It poses another problem, too, because the critical-of-the-50s crowd has something half-right. The 1950s are a myth...just not the kind of myth they mean.

Of Myths and Metaphors

The word “myth” has two meanings:

First, the one that Mythbusters dealt with. This “myth” is an untrue-yet-popular story, set of expectations, or view of how the world functions (or functioned). It persists because it has great emotional appeal of one sort or another.

Second, the word means “the stories through which one understands the world.” In this sense, everything from communism to liberalism is a “mythic” framework, and everything from The Odyssey to The Bible to Star Wars to the evening news is a “myth.” A myth in this sense may or may not be factually true—what matters is that it helps you understand the world (and how it does so).

Whenever you talk about history, you’re simultaneously talking about three things:

1. The facts about what happened

2. How what happened affected the world we live in now

3. How what happened helps us understand the world we live in now

History, in other words, is the story of the past,¹ and an historian is a person who takes the facts of the past and uses them to spin a story that the people of today can enjoy, understand, relate to, and use to make sense of their world.

When governments, activists, rhetoricians, priests, and earnest inquirers invoke history, they do so because a particular understanding of the past lends legitimacy to their pet issues and projects.

History, in other words, is myth. And it is a powerful kind of myth, because it shows us the context in which we operate, and the limits of our power and aspirations. Control over this myth literally equates to control over the minds of those that subscribe to it. Orwell spotted this well:

Who controls the past controls the present. Who controls the present controls the future.

—George Orwell, 1984

The True Nature of the 1950s

Alas, just because history is a myth doesn’t mean we can do without it. All human cognition—including formal logic—is narrative. In other words, we look for cause and effect; X happened because of Y, therefore Z. X made Y happen because of Z.

• Jimmy died because Bobby pushed him into a pool filled with piranhas, therefore Bobby isn’t allowed to use the pool anymore.

• Two added itself to another two and made four because we’re working in base 10.

We literally cannot make sense of the world without myths of some sort. In a world this complicated, especially when you’re looking at something as complex as history or culture, your myths will often hide within them short cuts that obscure the truth.

Consider this question:

Do women and men have diverging sex roles because of their biological differences?

Yes they do.

But those sex roles take the shape they do for literally thousands of reasons, some of them artifacts of historical blips (like the notion that “housewife” is a “natural” job for a woman) and some of them due to deep and more-or-less permanent parts of our evolved differences (like the fact that women have always been higher performers in fields that concentrate on people and relationships [mystery and romance fiction, sociology, obstetrics, and care-giving] while men tend to out-perform women in object-oriented fields [engineering, entrepreneurship, logistics, and mathematics]).

It’s just as easy to have a myth that says “a woman’s place is in the home” as it is to have one that says “women are capable of standing toe to toe with men in the professional world,” because both statements are obvious first-order consequences of things which are true about the differences between the sexes.

Human life is complicated and filled with apparent contradictions.

The reality of the 1950s was no less complicated. So which of our narratives about the 1950s accords best with what really happened?

Well...both of them. Both are—if you ignore some of the more question-begging rhetoric—more-or-less entirely correct on the facts.

How is this possible?

Because both of these narratives focus on particular sets of facts, while ignoring the day-to-day experience of life-on-the-ground in the era.

There were many reasons that the 1950s were nearly dystopic in their flavor, and I’ve gone into a lot of them here, and yet to those living through it, it not only seemed normal, it seemed, in many ways, idyllic, even for most of those who got a raw deal.

Yes, growing material prosperity helped this feeling. The speed of (and the propaganda about) technological progress helped it too. Perhaps most valuable of all was the sense that being “American” meant something important, and connoted a kind of familial identity for the people of the United States.

But all of these were effects, not causes, of the ground in which the 50s grew.

Those who wish to Make America Great Again like it was in the 50s (or the 80s, for that matter) are doomed in their pursuit, because they wish to restore the material conditions they imagine they remember (or can see in the history books). Those who hate on the MAGA crowd loathe the idea because they have no desire to return to either the material or social conditions of those eras.

Both completely miss the factor that made the 1950s a golden age:

War.

World War 2 was something we haven’t seen in America, before or since (though we came close in the 1860s): a total war.

A “total war” is one in which the entire economy of a country is devoted to the war effort, and in the US during World War 2 that was certainly the case. Industries were temporarily nationalized, the bulk of the fighting age men in the country were drafted and deployed overseas. The women were deputized into industry to feed the war machine. Children were encouraged to help out any way they could. Farms were controlled from the Federal level to provide the supplies and materiel needed for the war effort. Food was rationed. Substantial portions of swaths of the population (those of both Japanese and German ancestry) were interred. One way or another, every single life in the United States was touched by and defined by the war.

When the war ended in 1945, and the troops came home, the bulk of the productive male class had the military experience (and its associated PTSD) in common.

At no time in American history, before or since, has one experience so defined the populace. For a brief window, all the adults with power shared the sense that they were brothers (and sometimes sisters) in arms. They might squabble with one another, but they were family...

...and family trusts each other.

It was out of that trust and common experience of being an American that the Civil Rights movement emerged.

It was in that environment of high trust that those government agencies revealed to be tyrannical anti-American secret police during the scandals of the 1970s (the FBI and the CIA) and the 2010s (the NSA and the DHS) were fostered, succored, and given their wings.

It was in this environment that the government was trusted to wage war on drugs, poverty, dissent, counter-culturalism, racism, crime, and, finally, homophobia.

And, in the 1970s, the people who had living memory of that era—who shared the common bonds of identity and trust—began to slowly trickle off the stage and out of the waking world.

As they died, so too died the trust that made it all work, for good and ill.

When MAGA folks wish to recapture the 1950s, this is what they are wishing for (though they don’t always know how to articulate it, even to themselves):

A world where institutions are trustworthy. Where their neighbors are comrades-in-arms. Where strangers can be trusted because even if they’re scoundrels, they’re still Americans. Where you don’t have to lock your doors at night, because you know that there is a baseline of culture and decency that unites even the most fractious and mutually-hating groups in society.

This sense of trust was doubtless used in service of great mischief...

...but when it comes to quality-of-life, the average person cares very little for what their government does, so long as they themselves live in a world where they can trust that the world makes sense, and tomorrow will be at least as good as today (and maybe a little better).

The 1950s and the Next Golden Age

golden dawn over a beautiful greek city

The wokesters and the certain segments of right wingers have an interesting intuition in common:

They both believe that the world would be a better place if the races were separated. Whether through tough-on-crime measures targeting the inner city, or DEI discrimination in the workplace and schools, or new forms of segregation by either skin color (right wingers) or by “identity” (left wingers).

What both groups understand—but do not know they understand—is that trust has broken. In the world of 2024, eighty years after the last total war and sixty years after the last major shared national trauma (the Kennedy Assassination) and fifty-five years after the last major common cause (the moon landing), the word “American” does not mean anything.

Humans don’t function well without knowing where they belong, so hustlers of all sorts are selling stories that locate identity considerably closer to home, and in more palpable terms:

• “I am a victim”

• “I am an oppressor”

• “I am the favored race”

• “I am [political party]”

• “I am the one with the secret knowledge of the puppet masters”

• “I am special”

All these fill this hole in a way that “I am [profession],” “I am [X religion],” or “I am an American,” no longer can.

While there will always be a significant minority who can create identity and meaning by dint of their own tenacity—and while there will always be those healthy micro-communities (be they ethnic, professional, hobbyist-centered, or religious) which shield their members from most of this angst—the steady drip-drip-drip of meaninglessness, paired with the radical changes wrought on the social substrate by technological advance and added to the step-by-step distancing of this nation’s people from their history (good and bad, grand and mean) have robbed the voting public of its identity.

The odds are good that the next golden age will come to us, the living, during our lifetimes. From the Fall of Rome to the Black Death, from the death of Alexander to the ravages of Ghenghis Khan, great ages of high-trust and solidarity always follow times of great dislocation and confusion. The shared trauma creates common identity, common identity creates trust, trust encourages risk, and enough people trusting and risking enough creates uplift.

The sun will come again.

But the night may yet linger, or grow darker, before it does.

1. To understand more deeply what makes a story, take a couple minutes and watch this video from the creators of South Park.