As a baby boomer who graduated high school in 1964, i grew up in this era in a degregated school in Texas. I enjoyed your debunking those myths. You did not mention the polio mass vaccination program. I was a "polio pioneer" being in the early groups to be vaccinated.
I have a grandfather who contracted polio as a young adult while the vaccine was rolling out for children. The advice at the time was for him to do physical labor to keep his body functional. What this did was speed up the disease progression, not the other way around. He was on crutches and leg braces when I was born but has been wheelchair bound most of my life. Needless to say we believe in vaccines here.. Polio here might as well be extinct which makes getting him proper medical care difficult (they were going to put him on hospice because they didn’t know what the polio affected. He had a bleeding ulcer, cauterized it and he’s great.. almost 90 years old!)
I knew two people who got polio. Then the Commonwealth of Virginia passed laws that unless children were up to date with their immunizations and boosters.
We never had duck and cover drills in school but we had fire drills where we had to go outside when the bell rang. We were to see how quickly we could empty the building. Sometimes the fire trucks were parked outside the school. We were looking to see if the building was burning but sadly it wasn’t burning. So we had to go back to school after the drill was over. Bummer.
I grew up in the 70s & 80s and our house had a definite retro vibe. Furniture was only replaced if it was broken. TVs we’re rented and you had clothes that were functional and definitely not fashionable.
I drove a 70’s car in the late 1980s. In many movies supposed to be set in the 50’s everyone is driving brand new cars. Not a single 40’s car in the streets.
I think the reason people assume poodle skirts, etc., were the height of 50s fashion is that, as you say, that's what the young people were wearing...and SO MUCH of the popular conception of the 1950s was shaped by nostalgic Baby Boomers, who were poodle-skirt age in the '50s.
I turned 9 in 1958. I remember tar paper shacks in our town that my mom warned me not to go near. We were a white blue-collar family in a growing small town near the capital city. I also remember nuclear war drills where we went to the basement of the school that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Even as a little girl, I didn't understand how that was safer.
It's all very selective memory. If you have no reason to observe otherwise, you just see the things that were worth remembering by those that lived through it. Thank you for shedding some more light on culture as a whole during that time.
Being born in 1943 and graduating from college in 1965, I think I have a clear vision of the 50s. It was a very conservative, highly racist, terrifying time. The "Duck and Cover" drills at school were awful. Polio was a high risk. I remember a sweet girl in my fifth-grade class who contracted Polio and had never heard of it since. Yes, the "Beatniks" were around, but they were a underground movement. When I hear people say, "I wish it was like it was in the '50s", as a woman, I can only say, God, no! Yes, there were fun times. I was in school, so I didn't have adult issues. But, by the time I got into college, I had 'woken' up. To the dismay of my Father's "Eisenhower Republican's" heart, at 17, I worked for JFK, took a stand against racism, and started my awareness of the environment. When I see how hateful this country has again become, I really cry for our country because this is like the '50s.
You worked for democrats….. the party of slavery, the party that founded the kkk, the party that opposed civil rights….. and you think you stood up against racism? Lol
It's actually quite logical. The 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic and the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic were both caused by novel coronavirus. Whereas the influenza pandemic in the 1950s was merely a mutation of the same Coronavirus of the 1918 Spanish pandemic, thus no longer "novel". When a virus is novel, it is new, so humans have zero immunity to it. Darwin taught us that after centuries of catching and surviving a particular virus, our offspring will be stronger against it. Ergo; comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to a century old virus pandemic doesn't really make sense. 👍
The nuclear Family originated mostly from christianity and was meant to break up the clan structures that existed previously. The Anglo and Latin European Cultures had strong Nuclear families, which carried over to the Americas. The celtic and germanic areas tended to have more patrilenial families, and eastern europe had exogamous clans. The 50s style nuclear family people stereotype has existed for hundreds of years, but in general one child got to stay in the family home with his wife and kids, usually the chosen heir among the elites in Anglo Culture.
Having a distorted view of a historical era has been a thing well before the 50's - much of our conceptions of are based off of 70's movies and TV, much like our view of the 60's being based off of movies and TV of the 80's. To find some of the worst offenders, you need to go back to Victorian London, where much of what we 'know' of the Middle Ages was mostly made up by writers and artists taking some very *strong* artistic license. And around the same time you started having myths about the American 'Wild West', where East Coast writers and newspaper editors embellishing stories about the West just to, you know, sell newspapers.
And now kids do shooter drills, and it has the same mental effect on them while doing as much good; none. While the real cause of the problem is ignored.
@@MrPaxiolack of gun laws or gun restrictions. Guns should be at least a licensed thing. Guns have evolved since the constitution was written and so has security.
Finally, an antidote to all the treacle-laden 1950s nostalgia on TH-cam. As a geezer I was there and it was anything but paradise. The "good old days"? HA!
I was a middle-class kid born in 53. My view of the 50's is that it was a paradise, at least for me, but it is easy to forget how modern conveniences have improved our lives today.
The thing is most of the people who remember the "1950s" so fondly are the boomers, people who were literally children during that period. Most kids have little exposure to things outside their immediate worldview, especially before the internet, and most people tend to remember their childhood with rose colored glasses. So you have a group that only knows about their happy and prosperous nuclear family in their cute little (segregated) neighborhood so of course this group will think of that mid-century time period as the most wonderful amazing thing and "why can't we just go back to that?" The key is to make everyone realize that there has always been strife all through history and things can always be improved upon for the next generation. Not regressing just because it gives you warm fuzzies.
@rogerjordan3919 you're boomers because your parents screwed like wild rabbits after the strife of the great depression and two major wars. It's funny the troglodyte fluff people will believe about themselves or their groups just to feel superior. 😅
If I recall, wasn't Jello popular because it was cheap and it was way to stretch out left-overs? I feel like people forget that the parents of the 1950's had lived through the great depression and world war 2 and were used to stretching out their food budgets.
1952 boomer here. At the tender age of seven, I was turned loose on the neighborhood, unsupervised, every day all summer long. Momma was not about to let us sit around and watch tv. We came in for lunch and then back out the screen door until dinner time. After dinner we played outside until dusk. There was no thought even considered that it might be dangerous other than the occasional scraped knee. We rode our bikes all over town, went swimming, and to the movies. Freedom!!! To be a 50s kid was to be part of the neighborhood kid herd. I'm so grateful for those sweet memories.
My mom used to make grated carrot jello salad with raisins in the 90's. I remember enjoying it My family still makes cream of mushroom soup chicken. It's super easy to make and tastey
People are so short sided and ungrateful. They have nostalgia for a time they never lived in. The cars were shitty and cheaper, yet 40% of people never lived in it. The housing was cheaper, yet a large percentage of the houses were unsafe to live in, did not have electricity, and lots of states did not have central plumbing. Houses were also smaller. Yes, America was above most nations that had their economy destroyed during WW2. That does not mean America was a richer nation compared to today. We are still way above the competition with many of the countries that have had their economies recovered. We had polio paralyzing a bunch of kids compared to today. The one issue that is facing America is single parent households, as divorce has gone up. But even with that, people still do pretty decently.
My mom did the housework in heels and a shirt waist type dress called a house dress. She didn't wear pearls though, too pricey. Oh, and she wore lipstick too. We listened to radio programs all day. Paul Harvey was one of her favorites. And Fulton Lewis Sheen, whoever he was. Then there were the stories, soapbox operas, you know. She had her favorites. I was born in 1952, so these are childhood memories and are background to my life, where I thought I was the center of the universe.😉 The 50s were an improvement on the decades that came before, so keep that in mind when thinking about them. Yeah, they sure weren't the golden age portrayed in Happy Days, The Ozzie and Harriet Show, Leave It To Beaver or Donna Reed, but they were so much better than the difficulties of the 30s with the depression, dust storms and displaced people escaping the hardships of drought and the results of poor farming practices. And the 40s with the war, constant worry for family fighting overseas, rationing of damn near everything, and I'm just thinking about the US. Britain and Europe were in ruins by the end of the war. I don't think that PTSD was really noticeable because pretty much everyone suffered from it. Growing up in the 50s, the war, though over, was still a big part of our lives. Heck, when I was 13 we were studying the war and were assigned to interview 3 veterans. We shared my tape little recorder and my partner interviewed her father, I interviewed my father and we both interviewed our junior high school assistant principal. He had been Navy while our Dads were Army and I think he really enjoyed telling us about his experiences on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific. We were on the edge of our seats and the interview ran long. That was actually fun for 2 young girls, because we grew up on war stories and they followed us into the 60s. I could go on, but I have a sudden craving to watch a few Perry Mason episodes I black & white.😉
I just started reading S. Coontz's book this morning. Way back when I was in a marriage and family relationships class in college, the textbook included a chapter titled, The Facade Decade that was about the myths of the1950s. I sold back all my textbooks as soon as I could each semester for beer money but that is one book I wish I'd kept, just for that chapter. I've searched for it but so far haven't found it. So much of our (in the US) thinking and policies are buried in 1950s false nostalgia and don't serve well or at all today. Thanks for this video!
I remember back in the 70's one time, we were attending a company picnic for my dad's workplace. My mother brought along a chicken noodle soup Jell-O mold, which quickly melted in the August sun.
8:30 While there is a lot of focus on the lack of access to the GI Bill for Black Veterans, it is important to note that it applied to other Veterans of Color like Native and Hispanic Veterans. My Grandfather was not allowed to us the GI Bill because he was Hispanic.
The crazy thing about the Korean War is that while the shooting war lasted only three years (a "shooting war" because while it ended with an armistice, there was no formal peace treaty officially ending hostilities), the show M*A*S*H, which was set in the Korean War, lasted for eleven seasons!. Additionally, the movie upon which the TV show was based was actually author Ring Lardner's indictment of the Vietnam War, only set during the Korean War so that the script would be approved and the film made.
Plus, if you look at the timeline within the series, you would think that the shooting war lasted twice as long or even longer. I mean, they had like FOUR different Christmas and New Year's episodes - even one single episode that lasted the entire year. (Not to mention that the series itself had a lot of inconsistencies. Like Radar having issues of comics that wouldn't be printed for another 10-15 years. Or at one point Hawkeye referencing the movie Godzilla, even though the film didn't come out until 1954.)
I always thought that M.A.S.H was set in the Vietnam War! I guess I was too young to understand the difference (we watched it on reruns in the 80s when I was 10 or so).
The concept of fashion has multiple prongs: 1 - What appeared on the runways, the designers' drawing boards, and in fashion magazines, 2 - What people actually wore, and 3 - What later generations "remember" being worn at the time. The first group is idealized and what you tend to see worn in contemporaneous tv programs and films. This last group can end up being a caricature of the era's fashions (and often what you see in "period" tv shows).
My gram used the GI bill to buy a house in the early 60s, she said time was running out on it so she was glad she was able to take advantage of it before it ended. My grandfather (also a WW2 vet) freaked out after my mom was born and left them, so my gram became a single mother. My gram was never a housewife, she always had a job. She credits the fact that she had a union job to her being able to support my mom. Growing up I never thought, oh I want to be a housewife. My paternal grandma is the only one of the women in my family who was a housewife. She had 10 kids to take care of so it wasn't so much an option she chose as something she had to do.
The duck and cover thing in schools didn't actually stop. We did the pretty much the same thing but for practicing for lockdown when theirs a school shooter
As someone who was there, it's hard to describe the terror of being 8 or 9 years old, going to bed anticipating that bright flash of a nuclear bomb. The jolly "Duck and Cover" ditties only served to magnify the fear.
Those 'Duck & Cover' drills didn't bother me, but the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 did. I kept asking my dad when were we going to get a bomb shelter. We didn't because we were renting, and we lived in Phoenix at the time, and Phoenix was a very small city, not likely to be a bomb target.
In the 50’s, I was about 9 and lived in Detroit. We went on vacation to Florida, some of my friends and I’m were walking down a small sidewalk, a black man was coming toward us. He got off the sidewalk to let us by! That never happened in Detroit! We were taught to respect our elders no matter who they were! There was more discrimination down there than up here.
You sort of touched on it, but this is true of EVERY decade. You can't map social, political, pop-culture, etc. trends onto decades. That's just a construct we create because we like categories. These phenomena happen randomly. They don't know what the date is, and they don't all change on New Years Eve at the end of each decade. For example, music between say, 1976 and 1982 can be more similar than music was between 1982 and 1988 (not saying that was the case, just using it as an example). It's a fallacy hiding in plain sight.
As late as the early 1960s, nuke war fear was part of the everyday school kid experience. I used to walk past the big yellow sirens on utility poles wondering if it was going to go off and announce the coming firestorm.
Omg, thank you thank you! I had given up hope anyone saw the past like it was. I have been arguing with peers about what the reality of the past meant. People I talk to say I am wrong and accuse me of ruining their memories. All I have to say is I was a child in the 50's and a teen in the 60's and I would never, ever want to go back. My childhood was good but society and culture stunk. And because of this video I am subscribing!❤
I will admit of being guilty of the 1945-early 60’s part. I always associate the 50’s with those high pitched male singers. First time I saw a clip from the 60’s with that music I was floored. Lol.
I grew up in the 80s and now that I'm older, I see a huge resemblance between culture pushed by Hollywood and TV shows in the 80s and the 50s.... I thought about this for a long time and came to the conclusion that the media goes all out to appeal to people's nostalgia 25-30 years after they graduate from High School and the reason is that that's the time when most of them are becoming empty nesters.
Thanks for the video, I was born in the late 1950's but I did get to sit on the back of the bus with my grandma in Norfolk Virginia. I didn't know what was going on. It was fun sitting on the back to me, I would look at the sights out the window. It was warmer in the back during the winter. I remember the 'Fallout Shelters too. Also The teacher could discipline you with a wooden paddle and then you would go home and get a spanking again. Well, I guess, thank you for the memories. Just kidding, yes, I do thank you for the memories and the information.
Misconception: The 50s were from 1950 to 1959. Fact: The 1950s were from 1951 to 1960. You start counting years at 1, not 0. If you start a new job on January 1, 2024, for instance, Jan 1, 2024-Dec 31, 2024 is your first year, or year 1. This was the same for the new millenium back in 2001. Everyone was celebrating it in 2000, but 2000 was the final year of the 20th century.
THE FOOD,,, Some of the stuff my grandmother would make,,, fried salmon croquettes,,, gelatin based ambrosia salad,,, thinly sliced hard-boiled eggs on top of lumpy mashed potatoes. Salads that didn’t have anything to do with lettuce….. how do you mess up chocolate??? Divinity every Christmas. Jesus!!!!
In another TH-cam video I learned that he also took away the idea of better transportation from the time when he was a young lieutenant participating in an army exercise to see how long it would take to traverse the United States back around WW I - I think back then it took about four MONTHS to complete the trek.
A whole generation, my generation, the Baby Boomers, grew up terrified of The Bomb. We really did those duck and cover drills. I would lie awake at night and and dread the sound of jet aircraft for fear that they were ICBMs sent to fry us by the goddess communists. But as afraid as I was of an attack, I was more afraid that there’d be one and I’d survive. No, the fifties were definitely not restful to your average second grader living a couple of miles from the Strategic Air Command’s primary B22 base.
I wasn't traumatized by duck and cover drills in elementary school. My school was in the middle of Tornado Alley, and we called them tornado drills. My school was also near a SAC (Strategic Air Command) base, aka "ground zero." In the event of an attack, we knew there wouldn't be time to duck nor anything left to cover.
Cool video. Another misconception about the 1950s is that juvenile delinquents were goofball pranksters in leather jackets, with no "real" problems, and who's behaviors were, supposedly, "nothing like today," as in "never killed anyone, never used guns, and never used drugs, unlike today." They were, supposedly, "bad boys, but not really bad." Rather than type as to why that is a myth, here are two TH-cam videos that illustrate why those are myths, as well as how those myths got started two decades later, during the 1970s: "Rebels Without A Cause: Post War Youth Crime": th-cam.com/video/CmA_gCLpVdQ/w-d-xo.htmlsi=1tr5bOkzshySCcUt "The Word On Grease: Comparing The Movie to Actual 1950s Teens": th-cam.com/video/psJDlKqLihQ/w-d-xo.html I'll happily share your video, by the way, on my various Facebook groups, as I just admittedly engaged in shameless self-promotion. ;-) One more thing, in regards to 1950s fashions. Teenage fashions themselves were actually way more diverse than today's mainstream "nostalgia" for the 1950s would have us believe, and they evolved during the decade. One would actually be hard pressed to see the Halloween or party-themed "Fifties costume" stereotype (leather jacket, t-shirt, rolled blue jeans for the boys and plastic or felt poodle skirt for the girls) in any teenage magazine of the time, as they are conspicuously missing from the pages of 'Teen, 16, Hep Cats, Dig, or (especially!) Seventeen magazines. You'll never see a period photo of "American Bandstand" regulars Pat Molittieri, Arlene Sullivan, or Justine Carrelli wear them, though in the case of Justine, we do see her wear a poodle skirt "costume" in a photo during a Dick Clark reunion, and also for a photo shoot for a People magazine special on former teen idols, but those photos were taken decades after the 1950s, actually dating from the late 1980s. Those stereotypes for "Fifties fashions" are also generally missing from most of the high school yearbooks of the time period (well, admittedly, the ones that I have seen, and I collect high school yearbooks from the 1950s.) I am NOT saying that teens did not wear them. Some teens did, as we have actual 1950s photos of some teenage girls wearing the "poodle skirt," though they usually weren't as low-priced or "cheap" looking as the Halloween costume, if for no other reason, than that I am making an (unfair) comparison to "costumes." As for the leather jacket and jeans with t-shirt look that we see both in the 1978 film version of "Grease" and, again, the Halloween "Fifties" costume, we do have photos from the actual 1950s of...19-year-old Charles Starkweather, 17-year-old Frank Santana, and 17-year-old Angel Luis Velez, during their arrests, for murder, sporting that look, between 1955 to 1958. (I did say that the modern mainstream "goofball prankster" stereotype for 1950s teen delinquents was a myth.) More often than not, however, the teens from actual period 1950s photos usually are shown, at least in those magazines and high school yearbooks, wearing...what the adults wore.
Back then, a single working class worker could afford a small house to rent in most parts of the country. And a working class family could easily afford to live on 1 salary. Right now to own a house in the United States, you need at keast 2 working class incomes, both parents need to work full time. So back then, most families had one parent home that All the time, typically the mother. It meant that families didn't have to pay for daycare.
Every family gathering my great aunt Judy brings orange cottage cheese jello. In my opinion, it's gross, and I don't like the mouth feel. It's sweet, watery, and lumpy. Cream cheese jello is delicious, It's smoother and richer with more fat.
Nobody thinks the 50’s were perfect. We are rightfully nostalgic for things that were good then, that we don’t necessarily have or do now. The 50’s were the dawn of modern civilization. I probably know more about the 50’s than most people my age. I know how they were. Good and bad. I already knew everything in this video. The 50’s were objectively a time of innovation, prosperity, and patriotism. Atomic energy was the legitimate potential for a glorious future. Iconic music was made. We had good leadership in the White House. We were pioneering space. Home life was getting better. Cars and homes were more available. The cost of living was lower. Television became common. The 50’s are an iconic and great American decade. People need to stop going “well akshually dur dur dur”.
We did duck and cover in elementary school in the 1960s, also. The Cold War lasted through the 1960s and beyond Dates: Mar 12, 1947 - Dec 26, 1991, hence movies like "The Day After," from 1984. Check your dates; you weren't actually there. You are making a fool of yourself. These were serious times.
As a baby boomer who graduated high school in 1964, i grew up in this era in a degregated school in Texas. I enjoyed your debunking those myths. You did not mention the polio mass vaccination program. I was a "polio pioneer" being in the early groups to be vaccinated.
We Boomers were the first skin cancer generation because the polio vaccine made it safe for us to go to the swimming pools and catch a deep deep tan.
I have a grandfather who contracted polio as a young adult while the vaccine was rolling out for children.
The advice at the time was for him to do physical labor to keep his body functional.
What this did was speed up the disease progression, not the other way around. He was on crutches and leg braces when I was born but has been wheelchair bound most of my life.
Needless to say we believe in vaccines here..
Polio here might as well be extinct which makes getting him proper medical care difficult (they were going to put him on hospice because they didn’t know what the polio affected. He had a bleeding ulcer, cauterized it and he’s great.. almost 90 years old!)
I knew two people who got polio. Then the Commonwealth of Virginia passed laws that unless children were up to date with their immunizations and boosters.
I didn’t like the first polio vaccine because you got it as a jab 😮. But later you got it on a sugar cube which was more pleasant. 😊
We never had duck and cover drills in school but we had fire drills where we had to go outside when the bell rang. We were to see how quickly we could empty the building. Sometimes the fire trucks were parked outside the school. We were looking to see if the building was burning but sadly it wasn’t burning. So we had to go back to school after the drill was over. Bummer.
Your opening line is right on.
People don't instantly change because the decade does.
Growing up we had 1980's furniture way into the late 1990's
I grew up in the 70s & 80s and our house had a definite retro vibe. Furniture was only replaced if it was broken. TVs we’re rented and you had clothes that were functional and definitely not fashionable.
@@markedis5902 Totally
And now they're antiques, lol.
I drove a 70’s car in the late 1980s. In many movies supposed to be set in the 50’s everyone is driving brand new cars. Not a single 40’s car in the streets.
I think the reason people assume poodle skirts, etc., were the height of 50s fashion is that, as you say, that's what the young people were wearing...and SO MUCH of the popular conception of the 1950s was shaped by nostalgic Baby Boomers, who were poodle-skirt age in the '50s.
I turned 9 in 1958. I remember tar paper shacks in our town that my mom warned me not to go near. We were a white blue-collar family in a growing small town near the capital city. I also remember nuclear war drills where we went to the basement of the school that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Even as a little girl, I didn't understand how that was safer.
It's all very selective memory. If you have no reason to observe otherwise, you just see the things that were worth remembering by those that lived through it.
Thank you for shedding some more light on culture as a whole during that time.
Being born in 1943 and graduating from college in 1965, I think I have a clear vision of the 50s. It was a very conservative, highly racist, terrifying time. The "Duck and Cover" drills at school were awful. Polio was a high risk. I remember a sweet girl in my fifth-grade class who contracted Polio and had never heard of it since. Yes, the "Beatniks" were around, but they were a underground movement. When I hear people say, "I wish it was like it was in the '50s", as a woman, I can only say, God, no! Yes, there were fun times. I was in school, so I didn't have adult issues. But, by the time I got into college, I had 'woken' up. To the dismay of my Father's "Eisenhower Republican's" heart, at 17, I worked for JFK, took a stand against racism, and started my awareness of the environment. When I see how hateful this country has again become, I really cry for our country because this is like the '50s.
You worked for democrats….. the party of slavery, the party that founded the kkk, the party that opposed civil rights….. and you think you stood up against racism? Lol
80 y old in the internet? Witnessed something new today
Commies in your college turned you against your own country. Women have no sense of national pride
@@КолзакМикхаылов huh? The vast majority of Boomers use the internet everyday.
So psyched you referenced Karolina Zebrowska!
I’m wondering who thought people were especially equal in the 1950s, considering the civil rights movement is associated with the 1960s?
6:28 Interesting that when Covid hit lots of people talked about the Spanish flu of 1918 but no one really brought up this 1950s one
I know about it because my parents have mentioned it. My mother caught it early so she ended up in a completely empty school.
It's actually quite logical. The 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic and the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic were both caused by novel coronavirus. Whereas the influenza pandemic in the 1950s was merely a mutation of the same Coronavirus of the 1918 Spanish pandemic, thus no longer "novel". When a virus is novel, it is new, so humans have zero immunity to it. Darwin taught us that after centuries of catching and surviving a particular virus, our offspring will be stronger against it. Ergo; comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to a century old virus pandemic doesn't really make sense. 👍
The nuclear Family originated mostly from christianity and was meant to break up the clan structures that existed previously. The Anglo and Latin European Cultures had strong Nuclear families, which carried over to the Americas. The celtic and germanic areas tended to have more patrilenial families, and eastern europe had exogamous clans. The 50s style nuclear family people stereotype has existed for hundreds of years, but in general one child got to stay in the family home with his wife and kids, usually the chosen heir among the elites in Anglo Culture.
Having a distorted view of a historical era has been a thing well before the 50's - much of our conceptions of are based off of 70's movies and TV, much like our view of the 60's being based off of movies and TV of the 80's. To find some of the worst offenders, you need to go back to Victorian London, where much of what we 'know' of the Middle Ages was mostly made up by writers and artists taking some very *strong* artistic license. And around the same time you started having myths about the American 'Wild West', where East Coast writers and newspaper editors embellishing stories about the West just to, you know, sell newspapers.
And now kids do shooter drills, and it has the same mental effect on them while doing as much good; none. While the real cause of the problem is ignored.
whats the cause? the issue of not having AI turrets keeping schools safe?
@@MrPaxiolack of gun laws or gun restrictions. Guns should be at least a licensed thing. Guns have evolved since the constitution was written and so has security.
I was thinking the same thing😢
@@HopeGardner3amed Would you require a license for a news organization to exist and operate? A religious group? Would a criminal respect such rules?
@@JV-pu8kx Gun legislation works in literally all other countries. Even Russia. So quit with the BS.
Finally, an antidote to all the treacle-laden 1950s nostalgia on TH-cam. As a geezer I was there and it was anything but paradise. The "good old days"? HA!
I think people who pine for “the good old days” have watched to much leave it to beaver and confuse that show for a documentary.
I was a middle-class kid born in 53. My view of the 50's is that it was a paradise, at least for me, but it is easy to forget how modern conveniences have improved our lives today.
Well, I am a geezerette and I doubt I would be alive today without the science and medicine that was developed since the 60's.
What you need to do is compare the 1950's to the 30-years preceding. To those who lived through the 20's, 30's and 40's, the 50's were great.
The thing is most of the people who remember the "1950s" so fondly are the boomers, people who were literally children during that period. Most kids have little exposure to things outside their immediate worldview, especially before the internet, and most people tend to remember their childhood with rose colored glasses. So you have a group that only knows about their happy and prosperous nuclear family in their cute little (segregated) neighborhood so of course this group will think of that mid-century time period as the most wonderful amazing thing and "why can't we just go back to that?" The key is to make everyone realize that there has always been strife all through history and things can always be improved upon for the next generation. Not regressing just because it gives you warm fuzzies.
That's me with the 90s, remembering life as a child and before 9/11.
You know why they call us Boomers? When some know it all gets in our face with their 'We know better' attitude, it's BOOM! Lights out!
@rogerjordan3919 you're boomers because your parents screwed like wild rabbits after the strife of the great depression and two major wars.
It's funny the troglodyte fluff people will believe about themselves or their groups just to feel superior. 😅
Throughout human history, There has never been good ole days. Even if we go back to the very first human.
@@RikDog91 Same. The 90s were a happy time for me, but I prefer the technological paradigm of today to that of the 90s.
My Mom made a lime jell-o salad with pineapple chunks and cottage cheese. It was pretty good.
I was just thinking about that! My mom would also top it with a dollop of Miracle Whip!
Mmmmm, lime jello…
If I recall, wasn't Jello popular because it was cheap and it was way to stretch out left-overs? I feel like people forget that the parents of the 1950's had lived through the great depression and world war 2 and were used to stretching out their food budgets.
I once tried one that was cherry jello with sliced apple in it, it was nice. The apple was a bit sour compared to the jello.
Jello was considered a health food and was on every diet plate in the 50s.
1952 boomer here. At the tender age of seven, I was turned loose on the neighborhood, unsupervised, every day all summer long. Momma was not about to let us sit around and watch tv. We came in for lunch and then back out the screen door until dinner time. After dinner we played outside until dusk. There was no thought even considered that it might be dangerous other than the occasional scraped knee. We rode our bikes all over town, went swimming, and to the movies. Freedom!!! To be a 50s kid was to be part of the neighborhood kid herd. I'm so grateful for those sweet memories.
My mom used to make grated carrot jello salad with raisins in the 90's. I remember enjoying it
My family still makes cream of mushroom soup chicken. It's super easy to make and tastey
I make that salad all the time. No one eats it, more for me. I adore it!❤
People are so short sided and ungrateful. They have nostalgia for a time they never lived in.
The cars were shitty and cheaper, yet 40% of people never lived in it.
The housing was cheaper, yet a large percentage of the houses were unsafe to live in, did not have electricity, and lots of states did not have central plumbing. Houses were also smaller.
Yes, America was above most nations that had their economy destroyed during WW2. That does not mean America was a richer nation compared to today. We are still way above the competition with many of the countries that have had their economies recovered.
We had polio paralyzing a bunch of kids compared to today.
The one issue that is facing America is single parent households, as divorce has gone up. But even with that, people still do pretty decently.
My mom did the housework in heels and a shirt waist type dress called a house dress. She didn't wear pearls though, too pricey. Oh, and she wore lipstick too. We listened to radio programs all day. Paul Harvey was one of her favorites. And Fulton Lewis Sheen, whoever he was. Then there were the stories, soapbox operas, you know. She had her favorites. I was born in 1952, so these are childhood memories and are background to my life, where I thought I was the center of the universe.😉 The 50s were an improvement on the decades that came before, so keep that in mind when thinking about them. Yeah, they sure weren't the golden age portrayed in Happy Days, The Ozzie and Harriet Show, Leave It To Beaver or Donna Reed, but they were so much better than the difficulties of the 30s with the depression, dust storms and displaced people escaping the hardships of drought and the results of poor farming practices. And the 40s with the war, constant worry for family fighting overseas, rationing of damn near everything, and I'm just thinking about the US. Britain and Europe were in ruins by the end of the war. I don't think that PTSD was really noticeable because pretty much everyone suffered from it. Growing up in the 50s, the war, though over, was still a big part of our lives. Heck, when I was 13 we were studying the war and were assigned to interview 3 veterans. We shared my tape little recorder and my partner interviewed her father, I interviewed my father and we both interviewed our junior high school assistant principal. He had been Navy while our Dads were Army and I think he really enjoyed telling us about his experiences on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific. We were on the edge of our seats and the interview ran long. That was actually fun for 2 young girls, because we grew up on war stories and they followed us into the 60s. I could go on, but I have a sudden craving to watch a few Perry Mason episodes I black & white.😉
It was Fulton J. Sheen, one of the earliest TV evangelists. I think he was a Bishop. At least that's what my 70 year old memory thinks...
@@61rampy65you are right, hewas a bishop. We're about the same age but my memory is not quite as sharp as yours.
@@rowdysgirlalwaysNot quite. I am now able to hide my own Easter eggs.
@@61rampy65 The great Fulton J. Sheen was an Archbishop.
I grew up in the 50's . We were always at War. We played war. Then we went to war in Vietnam.
I just started reading S. Coontz's book this morning. Way back when I was in a marriage and family relationships class in college, the textbook included a chapter titled, The Facade Decade that was about the myths of the1950s. I sold back all my textbooks as soon as I could each semester for beer money but that is one book I wish I'd kept, just for that chapter. I've searched for it but so far haven't found it. So much of our (in the US) thinking and policies are buried in 1950s false nostalgia and don't serve well or at all today. Thanks for this video!
I read that in a marriage and family class, too! It was so fascinating. One of the best and most relevant classes I took in college.
I remember back in the 70's one time, we were attending a company picnic for my dad's workplace. My mother brought along a chicken noodle soup Jell-O mold, which quickly melted in the August sun.
I grew up in the 1950's. Well done, sir. Well done!
I hate when people insist the past was better. I'll be sharing this a lot.
8:30 While there is a lot of focus on the lack of access to the GI Bill for Black Veterans, it is important to note that it applied to other Veterans of Color like Native and Hispanic Veterans. My Grandfather was not allowed to us the GI Bill because he was Hispanic.
I remember having to crawl under my desk in 1st grade, in 1970. As if the desk would protect us from nuclear annihilation!
Holy cow we were still doing duck & cover drills when I was in elementary school in the 70's, same song too. And yes the terrified kids.
I was born in 1961. My parents (both White) never waxed poetic about how great the economy of the 1950s was!
A+ video!
Fascinating and very helpful facts about that decade!
The crazy thing about the Korean War is that while the shooting war lasted only three years (a "shooting war" because while it ended with an armistice, there was no formal peace treaty officially ending hostilities), the show M*A*S*H, which was set in the Korean War, lasted for eleven seasons!. Additionally, the movie upon which the TV show was based was actually author Ring Lardner's indictment of the Vietnam War, only set during the Korean War so that the script would be approved and the film made.
Plus, if you look at the timeline within the series, you would think that the shooting war lasted twice as long or even longer. I mean, they had like FOUR different Christmas and New Year's episodes - even one single episode that lasted the entire year.
(Not to mention that the series itself had a lot of inconsistencies. Like Radar having issues of comics that wouldn't be printed for another 10-15 years. Or at one point Hawkeye referencing the movie Godzilla, even though the film didn't come out until 1954.)
I always thought that M.A.S.H was set in the Vietnam War! I guess I was too young to understand the difference (we watched it on reruns in the 80s when I was 10 or so).
If you think of next week's show as occurring the next day, the time frame comes out about right.
The concept of fashion has multiple prongs:
1 - What appeared on the runways, the designers' drawing boards, and in fashion magazines,
2 - What people actually wore, and
3 - What later generations "remember" being worn at the time.
The first group is idealized and what you tend to see worn in contemporaneous tv programs and films.
This last group can end up being a caricature of the era's fashions (and often what you see in "period" tv shows).
Yessss, quoting Karolina Żebrowska!
My gram used the GI bill to buy a house in the early 60s, she said time was running out on it so she was glad she was able to take advantage of it before it ended. My grandfather (also a WW2 vet) freaked out after my mom was born and left them, so my gram became a single mother. My gram was never a housewife, she always had a job. She credits the fact that she had a union job to her being able to support my mom. Growing up I never thought, oh I want to be a housewife. My paternal grandma is the only one of the women in my family who was a housewife. She had 10 kids to take care of so it wasn't so much an option she chose as something she had to do.
The duck and cover thing in schools didn't actually stop. We did the pretty much the same thing but for practicing for lockdown when theirs a school shooter
As someone who was there, it's hard to describe the terror of being 8 or 9 years old, going to bed anticipating that bright flash of a nuclear bomb. The jolly "Duck and Cover" ditties only served to magnify the fear.
Those 'Duck & Cover' drills didn't bother me, but the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 did. I kept asking my dad when were we going to get a bomb shelter. We didn't because we were renting, and we lived in Phoenix at the time, and Phoenix was a very small city, not likely to be a bomb target.
In the 50’s, I was about 9 and lived in Detroit. We went on vacation to Florida, some of my friends and I’m were walking down a small sidewalk, a black man was coming toward us. He got off the sidewalk to let us by! That never happened in Detroit! We were taught to respect our elders no matter who they were! There was more discrimination down there than up here.
Elders don't deserve respect just for existing.
You sort of touched on it, but this is true of EVERY decade. You can't map social, political, pop-culture, etc. trends onto decades. That's just a construct we create because we like categories. These phenomena happen randomly. They don't know what the date is, and they don't all change on New Years Eve at the end of each decade. For example, music between say, 1976 and 1982 can be more similar than music was between 1982 and 1988 (not saying that was the case, just using it as an example). It's a fallacy hiding in plain sight.
As late as the early 1960s, nuke war fear was part of the everyday school kid experience. I used to walk past the big yellow sirens on utility poles wondering if it was going to go off and announce the coming firestorm.
Couple schools i went to in late 80s early 90s still had us do bomb raid drills alongside fire and tornado drills
90s kid here living in the south and we did those drills until the early 2000s
Omg, thank you thank you! I had given up hope anyone saw the past like it was. I have been arguing with peers about what the reality of the past meant. People I talk to say I am wrong and accuse me of ruining their memories. All I have to say is I was a child in the 50's and a teen in the 60's and I would never, ever want to go back. My childhood was good but society and culture stunk.
And because of this video I am subscribing!❤
I was in elementary school in the early 70's. We had drills were we had to hide under out desks. Not just in the 50's...
Can you do a misconceptions video about Mental Floss’ misconceptions show?
I will admit of being guilty of the 1945-early 60’s part. I always associate the 50’s with those high pitched male singers. First time I saw a clip from the 60’s with that music I was floored. Lol.
I love that you referenced Karolina
You're a Good Man, -Charlie- -Brown- Justin Dodd!🥰
Im glad we have at least moved on from the gelatin cuisine era.
1950's prices - 27per gallon Gasoline, .15 cents for a burger, 50 cents per gallon of milk. 12 oz Coke for 10 cents.
OK, so what? What was the median wage then?
Good show!
I grew up in the 80s and now that I'm older, I see a huge resemblance between culture pushed by Hollywood and TV shows in the 80s and the 50s.... I thought about this for a long time and came to the conclusion that the media goes all out to appeal to people's nostalgia 25-30 years after they graduate from High School and the reason is that that's the time when most of them are becoming empty nesters.
It was never "the good old days" there was heaps of crime and disease. Queen Elizabeth II came to Australia and there was a major Polio outbreak
You should videos like this for the other decades as well.
Thanks for the video, I was born in the late 1950's but I did get to sit on the back of the bus with my grandma in Norfolk Virginia. I didn't know what was going on. It was fun sitting on the back to me, I would look at the sights out the window. It was warmer in the back during the winter. I remember the 'Fallout Shelters too. Also The teacher could discipline you with a wooden paddle and then you would go home and get a spanking again. Well, I guess, thank you for the memories. Just kidding, yes, I do thank you for the memories and the information.
Funny that a good conservative friend of mine idealizes the 50s when trying to argue against my view that marriage has never benefited women.
Yep, ducking under our desks offered no feeling of comfort, and at my school we had to start learning Russian.
Every buffet had Jello with cottage cheese and vegetables. To this day I cringe at those little white specks suspended in green Jello.
love yuour show Justin
Misconception: The 50s were from 1950 to 1959. Fact: The 1950s were from 1951 to 1960. You start counting years at 1, not 0. If you start a new job on January 1, 2024, for instance, Jan 1, 2024-Dec 31, 2024 is your first year, or year 1. This was the same for the new millenium back in 2001. Everyone was celebrating it in 2000, but 2000 was the final year of the 20th century.
Wow, life in the US in the 50s was so different from the rest of the world.
Trivia: at the time we finished duck and cover with kiss your a$$ goodbye 😅😢
My dad described the takeaway from duck and cover as stick your head under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye
2:34 i did duck and cover drills in early elementary school and i was born in 1972!
We still do duck and cover drills but for Earthquakes, not for bombs. (grew up in 90s Southern California)
THE FOOD,,, Some of the stuff my grandmother would make,,, fried salmon croquettes,,, gelatin based ambrosia salad,,, thinly sliced hard-boiled eggs on top of lumpy mashed potatoes. Salads that didn’t have anything to do with lettuce….. how do you mess up chocolate??? Divinity every Christmas. Jesus!!!!
I wonder how many men in those "nuclear" families had a "legal" nuclear family as well as an "illegal" nuclear family on the side.
Ike also took some inspiration from The autobahn in Germany , which was built by Hitler.
In another TH-cam video I learned that he also took away the idea of better transportation from the time when he was a young lieutenant participating in an army exercise to see how long it would take to traverse the United States back around WW I - I think back then it took about four MONTHS to complete the trek.
The 50s had some of the best music
And some of the worst!
naw, the 1990s drum n bass/ambient movement gave us better music than the 50s
Oh great, another person who thinks they had the "best music".
@@MirzaAhmed89 I wasn't born in the 50's. I am a 60's baby, but I have always found oldies to be the best music.
A whole generation, my generation, the Baby Boomers, grew up terrified of The Bomb. We really did those duck and cover drills. I would lie awake at night and and dread the sound of jet aircraft for fear that they were ICBMs sent to fry us by the goddess communists. But as afraid as I was of an attack, I was more afraid that there’d be one and I’d survive. No, the fifties were definitely not restful to your average second grader living a couple of miles from the Strategic Air Command’s primary B22 base.
I'm gonna be honest: Tuna & Waffles doesn't sound that bad.
Was there-you are correct sir
To be fair "duck and cover" IS in fact what you do during an earthquake or a tornado.
Times were hard in the 50’s. Korea (1950-1953).
Recession in 1958-1959.
I wasn't traumatized by duck and cover drills in elementary school. My school was in the middle of Tornado Alley, and we called them tornado drills. My school was also near a SAC (Strategic Air Command) base, aka "ground zero." In the event of an attack, we knew there wouldn't be time to duck nor anything left to cover.
I lived near McConnell too. I was afraid of tornadoes and the bomb. But much more afraid of the bomb.
June Cleaver was later on the movie Airplane and she could translate jive talk being said by some black men on the plane.
I would extend an invite for you to try the Lime Jello, Marshmallow, Cottage Cheese Surprise
Good vid, gives some balance to an era of false good times.
Cool video. Another misconception about the 1950s is that juvenile delinquents were goofball pranksters in leather jackets, with no "real" problems, and who's behaviors were, supposedly, "nothing like today," as in "never killed anyone, never used guns, and never used drugs, unlike today." They were, supposedly, "bad boys, but not really bad."
Rather than type as to why that is a myth, here are two TH-cam videos that illustrate why those are myths, as well as how those myths got started two decades later, during the 1970s:
"Rebels Without A Cause: Post War Youth Crime":
th-cam.com/video/CmA_gCLpVdQ/w-d-xo.htmlsi=1tr5bOkzshySCcUt
"The Word On Grease: Comparing The Movie to Actual 1950s Teens":
th-cam.com/video/psJDlKqLihQ/w-d-xo.html
I'll happily share your video, by the way, on my various Facebook groups, as I just admittedly engaged in shameless self-promotion. ;-)
One more thing, in regards to 1950s fashions.
Teenage fashions themselves were actually way more diverse than today's mainstream "nostalgia" for the 1950s would have us believe, and they evolved during the decade.
One would actually be hard pressed to see the Halloween or party-themed "Fifties costume" stereotype (leather jacket, t-shirt, rolled blue jeans for the boys and plastic or felt poodle skirt for the girls) in any teenage magazine of the time, as they are conspicuously missing from the pages of 'Teen, 16, Hep Cats, Dig, or (especially!) Seventeen magazines.
You'll never see a period photo of "American Bandstand" regulars Pat Molittieri, Arlene Sullivan, or Justine Carrelli wear them, though in the case of Justine, we do see her wear a poodle skirt "costume" in a photo during a Dick Clark reunion, and also for a photo shoot for a People magazine special on former teen idols, but those photos were taken decades after the 1950s, actually dating from the late 1980s.
Those stereotypes for "Fifties fashions" are also generally missing from most of the high school yearbooks of the time period (well, admittedly, the ones that I have seen, and I collect high school yearbooks from the 1950s.)
I am NOT saying that teens did not wear them.
Some teens did, as we have actual 1950s photos of some teenage girls wearing the "poodle skirt," though they usually weren't as low-priced or "cheap" looking as the Halloween costume, if for no other reason, than that I am making an (unfair) comparison to "costumes."
As for the leather jacket and jeans with t-shirt look that we see both in the 1978 film version of "Grease" and, again, the Halloween "Fifties" costume, we do have photos from the actual 1950s of...19-year-old Charles Starkweather, 17-year-old Frank Santana, and 17-year-old Angel Luis Velez, during their arrests, for murder, sporting that look, between 1955 to 1958. (I did say that the modern mainstream "goofball prankster" stereotype for 1950s teen delinquents was a myth.)
More often than not, however, the teens from actual period 1950s photos usually are shown, at least in those magazines and high school yearbooks, wearing...what the adults wore.
News flash: the Korean War is still on.
Ike saw firsthand in 1945 the Autobahn that had been built in 1930s Germany.
People say it was cheaper back then. What they don’t realize wages were lower too!
Back then, a single working class worker could afford a small house to rent in most parts of the country. And a working class family could easily afford to live on 1 salary. Right now to own a house in the United States, you need at keast 2 working class incomes, both parents need to work full time. So back then, most families had one parent home that All the time, typically the mother. It meant that families didn't have to pay for daycare.
Every family gathering my great aunt Judy brings orange cottage cheese jello.
In my opinion, it's gross, and I don't like the mouth feel.
It's sweet, watery, and lumpy.
Cream cheese jello is delicious, It's smoother and richer with more fat.
You mention the "Communist Soviet Union and the democratic U. S. of A." The system in contrast to communism is capitalism, not "democracy."
Ok, but that wallpaper though!
Why does this feel like 50s were only happening in the USA? The video should be titled misconceptions about 50s in the USA.
I can understand thinking of why we're too far removed to give reparations for slavery. But we *definitely* need reparations for racial redlining.
"Sharing the wealth" sounds a little "red" to me. 🤔🤨
The average woman had four children during the 1950s not two. This high birth rate no doubt put the kibosh on women's careers.
"And soon, the era of McCarthyism was over." HAHahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
More more!
lovely video, as always, but also:
trans thumbnail trans thumbnail trans thu--
So glad someone else sees it!
Nobody thinks the 50’s were perfect. We are rightfully nostalgic for things that were good then, that we don’t necessarily have or do now. The 50’s were the dawn of modern civilization. I probably know more about the 50’s than most people my age. I know how they were. Good and bad. I already knew everything in this video. The 50’s were objectively a time of innovation, prosperity, and patriotism. Atomic energy was the legitimate potential for a glorious future. Iconic music was made. We had good leadership in the White House. We were pioneering space. Home life was getting better. Cars and homes were more available. The cost of living was lower. Television became common. The 50’s are an iconic and great American decade. People need to stop going “well akshually dur dur dur”.
The 1950's definitely had superior brassieres.
All the trans people: "Are we a joke to you?"
If your replying with "yes" then EW.
Who on Earth thinks the 50s was peaceful?!
Ah Gushers!
HAPPY DAYS MY ASS.
i will not have gushers candy slander!!!
Don't forget America got involved in Vietnam. In the late 50's.
Is it any wonder why a social upheaval took place in the mid 60's?
Blame the Beat Generation. 😞
We did duck and cover in elementary school in the 1960s, also. The Cold War lasted through the 1960s and beyond
Dates: Mar 12, 1947 - Dec 26, 1991, hence movies like "The Day After," from 1984. Check your dates; you weren't actually there. You are making a fool of yourself. These were serious times.