SVEN writes:

Thank you for your thought-provoking blog. It has been great reading looking through your archives after recently discovering your blog.

I was thinking today about how the 1950s are the benchmark years for many conservatives. It is natural, given that the ’50s preceded America’s most disastrous decade, and are remembered fondly as the last time America was “normal.” However, it seems probable that many of the sicknesses that would boil to the surface in the ’60s had their beginnings in the decade of “wholesome Americaness.” Perhaps conservatives should not idolize that decade so much, and should find a new era as an anchor point to represent a healthy traditional society.

If you doubt me, I refer you to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” for a description of the proto hippies who were roaming America 15 years before their first real show of force in the ’60s. The roots of America’s terrible experiment in abandoning the rock of God and tradition run much farther back than many conservatives think, and most nostalgia for the ’50s is misplaced. The ’50s weren’t a shining example of American tradition, they were the just the last throes.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

I agree. The fifties were better in many ways, but they were part of the same cultural nosedive in less visible ways.

Though the birthrate was much higher and marriage was relatively strong, the Sexual Revolution was already well underway. Freud and Wilhelm Reich had by then been popularized. The Kinsey Reports were published in 1948 and 1953. Feminist ideas were so well established that in 1947 Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham wrote about the “Feminist Complex” in their book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Margaret Sanger had long since distributed her booklet, The Woman Rebel, and Planned Parenthood had been running birth control clinics since 1942. Anti-contraception laws had been overturned, beginning in the 1930s. The roles of men and women were highly differentiated compared to today, but the no-fault divorce revolution began in Oklahoma in 1953 and today’s standards of sexual equality in the workplace were taking hold.

Television was wholesome, but there was no moral authority to check its decline. The American Constitution, based on Enlightenment principles, could not protect standards of decency over the long run. Consumerism defined the fifties, as did the flight to the suburbs and the break-up of ethnic neighborhoods in the cities. Communities dispersed. Architects and modern artists had been spreading alienation and ugliness for decades. Realism and subtle portraiture were dead. The inhuman, spliced faces of Picasso were in. The Supreme Court declared in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, a decision that exemplified the growing power of the State and the rise of racial utopianism. Public schooling was secular; the modernist heresy was embraced by faddish theologians. Freemasons hailed the pontificate of John XXIII.

Intellectual discourse was more refined; college life was more civilized and universities were much less the Orwellian indoctrination centers they are today. One is tempted to wish the fifties would return. But the disease was there.

We really shouldn’t hold up any one era or decade as a standard. We should focus on truth and moral beauty instead. Just as every individual has complete and utter dependence on God, every society is a created being, bound by Eternal Law and a hierarchy of being. Societies can’t go to heaven but they express the will of human beings who do. The greatest and most significant similarity between today and the 1950s, the disease we share in common, is the belief that supernatural faith is a private affair. The soul is an airy abstraction. God has no rights. Desire is king.

— Comments —

Buck writes:

Sven writes that “most nostalgia for the ’50s is misplaced.”

Bunk. I think it’s well placed, if not “perfectly” placed.

What would we avoid before 1948 versus after 1948? Which is the better tradeoff? How do we work our way through American history avoiding all the bad and holding on only to the good? It all either nostalgia or a relief. It’s wishfull thinking, so why not wish for a favorite time that (on balance, in my book) still held on to what was best about an obviously flawed America and what it had recently achieved? There is no going back. When and where on this planet had it been so measurably better? By which measures of human suffering, social strife, family life, cultural denegration, was America not better going into the 1950s? We all know what happened after.

I don’t idoloze the fifties, but I certainly miss them and I would trade everything that followed (except for my son) to return. If I could, I’d push America right back to my birth year – 1948 – and be forever content to stay there. As fragile and as on-the-cusp or in the throws of failure and disaster as America was back then, she was never stronger and never more respected, more feared and admired; and perhaps never held a more united and proud American population. We were still a nation. Measuring any culture or society against perfection is folly. The leaking glass was more than half full in 1950s America, even on the “eve of its destruction”.

It’s a fantasy to think that modern liberalism could be held at bay if we could go back to 1950 and try it again. That’s not the point. ML was in our blood, but it had not fully metastasized. Most of our organs still functioned. We felt good.

How far back do we have to go to find what we’re looking for? The garden of Eden? Where has there ever existed a perfect culture and society? It is not possible. I’ve only experienced six decades. I’ll take the 50s hands down. I’m guessing that even my 92-year-old mother would chose the 50s over the 20s, 30s and 40s, though she did re-invent herself in the 60s. (Another reason I chose the 50s)

There have to be tradeoffs on this Earth. Post World War II America was better dressed, more well mannered, as well ordered and as enterprising and optimistic as ever, and feeling on top of the world. When and where were the tradeoffs suffered preferrable to those made in the 1950s?

Sven doesn’t offer a benchmark. Laura writes that “we really shouldn’t hold up any one era or decade as a standard.” There is no universal benchmark or standard. Life on Earth is never going to be fair, never going to be equally rewarding and satisfying, or equally free from suffering. By many traditional measures, life in 1950 America was about as good as it seems possible to get. If I could snap my fingers…

John writes:

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments on this thread.

For most of us of a certain age, the fifties were indeed a happier and more secure time precisely because the crisis in authority had not yet progressed to the stage where the malignancy was palpable and the pain could be felt.  This began to be discerned in the aftermath of the initial heady days of the sixties revolution, after it became apparent that something had indeed changed that perhaps was irreversible.  After that decade, it became more difficult for a man to enter into a relationship with a woman on the former basis––for the purpose of lifelong commitment and stable family formation with specific roles as understood and practiced by generations before.  After the decade of free love, everything was subject to negotiation and compromise.  The lucky couple who managed to attain some degree of normalcy and stability did so against the odds, and as the culture moved inexorably in the opposite direction.

We’ve heard conservatives lay the blame for the present malaise on the sixties; but we know this isn’t the whole story.  I remember once finding a packet of photographs of my mother as an eighteen year old taken in the mid twenties.  She was with a group of five or six girls of the same age on an outing in a park.  What surprised me was the mode of dress: short skirts, short hair, no bras, and looking decidedly rebellious and unserious.  Except for the fact that the boys were absent, the scene was a clear foreshadowing of what was to happen four or five decades later.  And, even though my mother grew up to be fairly conventional, I believe she absorbed certain ideas and a certain spirit from those times that later influenced her to be exceedingly headstrong and unwilling to accept my father’s leadership in the home.

The forms of rebellion that we saw full force in the sixties were already present in the twenties: the restless youth, the wild music, the spiritualism, and the overweening moral superiority of the intellectual class.  These things had entered into the public mind, but had not developed to the point of full blown fever.

The question of the ultimate antecedents of the modern crisis in authority was examined in a profound way by the conservative intellectual Richard Weaver.  For those who are interested, I would strongly recommend his work.

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