COMMENTARY: The `Good Old Days’ of the 1950s Weren’t So Good, or Simple

c. 2004 Religion News Service Four parents serve dinner at our church’s youth group meeting. I observe hesitant sixth-graders looking panicked, hopeful seventh-graders withering before 11th-graders, older boys and girls connecting while middle-schoolers choose his-or-her tables. I am reminded that, along about adolescence, life starts to seem confusing. And life remains confusing from that point […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

Four parents serve dinner at our church’s youth group meeting.

I observe hesitant sixth-graders looking panicked, hopeful seventh-graders withering before 11th-graders, older boys and girls connecting while middle-schoolers choose his-or-her tables.


I am reminded that, along about adolescence, life starts to seem confusing. And life remains confusing from that point on. Whether you are venturing off to college, boot camp or job market, settling in or still searching, feeling zesty or depleted, life seems to be one confusion after another. Life also has joy and meaning, but never again the uncomplicated serenity of being 8 years old.

Later, we watch “Mona Lisa Smile,” an adventure in stereotypes starring a miscast Julia Roberts and depicting predictable outbursts by Wellesley College girls of 1953-54.

The film captures some of the ugliness of the 1950s _ conformism, stifling of intellect and curiosity, marriage as life’s only acceptable outcome for women, perfect kitchens yielding perfect lives, stick-figure men following scripts, boundless booze, sex and cigarettes, but ignores realities such as labor strife, segregation, anti-communist scare-mongering and the fact, discovered later, that men were as trapped by these stereotypes as women.

I was a happy fourth-grader during the year depicted in this film. I walked to school, came home for lunch, learned in a peaceful classroom, played with neighborhood friends, walked to grandmother’s, enjoyed a bustling church, and was loved and encouraged by my parents.

It was an idyllic time for me. I was dimly aware of larger and troubling issues, but I wasn’t aware, when the idyll ended in adolescence, that life would never seem simple again. I felt betrayed by the onset of confusion, as if something good had been stolen before I had my turn at it.

Having experienced the 1950s, both as idyll and as truer stories encountered later, it perplexes me when that decade is held up as a golden era, a model of what modernity ought to be, as though everything would be right in the world if we reclaimed neighborhood schools, restored women to the kitchen and male dominance in the workplace, if churches “got back to basics,” if diversity and immigration could be discouraged, and everything were made simple again.

It wasn’t simple then. It only seemed simple because we were children. In fact, the 1950s were as odd in their own right as subsequent decades, the only difference being that post-war baby boomers experienced the 1950s as children, the 1960s and 1970s as adolescents, and the years since then as adults vulnerable to uncertainty.

Besides, not all were safe and serene, as gossamer stereotypes insist. Many experienced the 1950s through Jim Crow laws, broken marriages, unacknowledged incest and alcoholism, an artificially induced arms race and pillaging by the wealthy, which would bear horrific fruit in later decades.


The retro yearnings of our day claim to be a search for better ethics, better religion and better citizenship. In fact, they are a search for lost childhood. We were young, naive and safe. We lost that seemingly golden era, not because Communists, Secular Humanists, Moral Relativists, Situational Ethicists, Presbyterians, Hippies or Liberals stole it from us, but because we grew up. And no amount of anti-modernist yearning will put Humpty together again.

Christian fundamentalism tries to roll back religion’s clock to “old-time” purity. Traditionalists celebrate conformity and stand tall against modernity. They claim to be serving God. In fact, it’s just a power grab.

Politicians bluster about undoing changes and restoring “patriotic values.” They encourage us to look backward with regret, while they quietly do the thoroughly modern work of rewriting tax laws and reshaping government to satisfy their wealthy benefactors.

We are susceptible to retro yearnings because the real world is as confusing today as it was to our parents in the 1950s. Hearkening back to the “thrilling days of yesteryear” will get us nowhere, however. Nothing was stolen from us. It is time we stopped rewarding demagogues who appeal slyly to our wistful remembrance and offer us simple solutions that serve their interests and not ours.

Our 8-year-old children need to be loved and protected, not emulated.

MO/PH END EHRICH

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!