The Good Old Days
I recall this conversation… probably my senior year in high school, probably my Journalism class. A fellow student, a young lady whose name escapes me, commented on the crass nature of today’s entertainment and landscape and said “I wish this were the 50s.”
To which I responded, “No you don’t. You wouldn’t get very far career-wise. And if I were to rape you, the judge would more likely get me off.”
I had gathered a sense, from my general sense of adolescent disillusionment I suppose or from somewhere or other, that there… are… no… good old days.
Actually, my seventh grade English teacher tipped me, and the rest of his class, off to this concept. Not that anyone there was paying attention, and not that I’m probably the only one who recalls that lecture.
I lifted the falling from an article from one of Russ Kick’s books, which when it gets to the 50s seems to reference, second-hand, from The Way We Never Were.
#1: 1820s to 1900: Of 20 million immigrants who came to America, 5 million returned to their place of origin.
#2: 1870s: Newsboys… sold newspapers until the age of 10, when they went on to bootblacking. Fierce turf and paper battles. Top of the heap earned about 30 cents a day. The majority were homeless. In 1880, there were 100,000 homeless children in New York City.
#3: WWI. “Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” — Woodrow Wilson
The WWI analogy to our current day “Freedom Fries” was not “Liberty Cabbage” or the banning of Beethoven at Opera Houses; it would be the banning of Irish-American papers at various locations. (although, even there it falls apart, as France wasn’t exactly an ally of Saddam Hussein in the true sense.)
#4: 1920s: 56 percent of students graduated high school. 60 percent of Americans earned less than the amount considered necessary to meet human needs.
#4: 1930s: The Commander of operations against the “Bonus Army”: Douglas MacCarthur. His third aide: Eisenhower. Third calvary led by George Patton.
A March 1938 survey found that 41 percent of Americans believed that the Jews held too much power in the United States.
#5: WWII: The US Navy gave a group of recent high school graduates a test of basic math skills. 60 percent failed. A US Army poll at the end of the war found that 22% of GIs thought that Nazi treatment of Jews was justified, and 23% were unsure. A December 1945 Fortune survey found that 23% of Americans wished the US had had the chance to drop many more atomic bombs on Japan before they had the chance to surrender.
#6: 1950s: Mid-decade, only half of the US population had savings, and a quarter had no liquid assets at all. 97 out of 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth during the decade. There was an 80 percent increase in out-of-wedlock babies placed for adoption between 1944 and 1955. (Then again… this is the baby boom.)