The 50s

Was it the greatest decade of the last century?

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Yes but only in the USSR.

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Anime didn't exist so no

No, that's just your stupid nostalgia goggles.

I'd say 90s if I absolutely had to live in the 20th.

>he doesn't watch Astro Boy and.....something else

no, black ppl and woman was oppressed, only right wing incels like 50s

>polio
>thread of nuclear war
No Thanks

People pretend to idolize this period but if any of them were actually transported there, they would end up hanging out with beatniks because they would find the actual normies as depicted in that picture utterly insufferable.

60s was best

>thread of nuclear war

1900s was better

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The 50s were about appearances...however you had to lie, cheat or steal to look good and go along with society.
Many of the problems of today were there then -they were just swept under the rug and hidden.
Back then:

>husband is a drunk wife-beater...deal with it, he's the man of the house
>raped? Can't tell anyone
>molested? Definitely don't tell anyone, after all the priest is a respected member of the community and it would be really bad if everyone found out
>gay? get married to a woman you have no feelings for so nobody suspects.
The 50s have been way too romanticized.

>inb4 Butthurt Belt

I worked in an elder care facility once and some ladies I talked to said their memories of the 50s weren't necessarily that happy and one said she had a miscarriage from her husband beating her.

sure, if you weren't a

>woman
>person of color
>LGBTQ+ person

or didn't die of child polio or shit like that

Faggot

Unemployment was low and a factory worker could own his own home and car and support a family of three, but a lot of this was due to pent-up demand from the war and because the US had no major economic competitors for years; we controlled almost half of global GDP in the 50s.

As for low crime rates, a lot of crime particularly involving minorities was not reported on. Also migrant laborers were very common in much of the country but little discussed.

A lot of people wax nostalgic for those comfy union jobs where you could retire at 60 with a guranteed pension, but that was really only true if you worked for a big corporation like General Electric or GM or IBM. For smaller employers, wages, benefits, and job security were not as strong.

just stating the facts stupid snowflake

From what my relatives have told me about the 50s:

>separate water coolers and bathrooms even in workplaces
>buses had a separate set of doors on the back--guess why?
>why did movie theaters have balconies? Yep, blacks even had their own separate entrance
>the words "black" or "colored" weren't really used yet, instead try another word that starts with the letter N
>if a black man spoke to a white guy, he had to bow his head and say "Yes sir" or "No sir"
>and don't even think about talking to a white woman--are you suicidal?
>white guy murders a black guy--slap on the wrist, maybe pay a fine
>black guy murders a white guy--off to death row with you

Continued:

>gotta love those coathanger abortions--nobody talked about them, but my grandfather knew a few classmates who got them, at least one girl died
>summers were miserable without air conditioning
>four party phone lines
>doctors still made house visits in those days but medical care was still fairly medieval without many of the medicines or surgical procedures available today
>and then came Vietnam
>the National Guard and Coast Guard were a good way to get out of it since unlike today they weren't sent overseas
>going to college or getting married would also put you lower down on the draft list
>or else hide out in Canada

Well yeah if you were American because you manufactured 70% of all shit on earth because everywhere else was ooga booga or bombed to shit

In America it was a better age to raise a family and quite a few of our cities that are unlivable cesspits were in their golden age then. Still, I wouldn't trade the year I was fortunate enough to be born in for anything. The one good, consistent thing about the world is that is seems to get more and more interesting as time goes on.

i guess its kind of liberating knowing that even if you try you probably wont get a full time job let alone family let alone afford a house

Also being gay was something never talked about. My grandfather talked about those times when you would have an acquaintance or co-worker who was so obviously, flamingly gay that you couldn't deny it if you wanted to. You'd suspect that Bill from marketing was a fruitcake, but would be willing to overlook it provided he kept up a facade that wouldn't fool anyone with an IQ above room temperature. It's not like a man could live an openly gay life in those days outside San Francisco or Greenwich Village anyway.

A lot of people I knew who were old enough to remember the 50s said there were so many times when you knew someone you suspected was gay, even though the average person in the 50s wasn't entirely sure what a gay person was or exactly what he did, yet tolerated them as long as they pretended to be straight. You'd also have gay dudes married to a woman so people wouldn't suspect the truth and a lot of these women were deeply depressed and confused at their husband's lack of interest in them, often blaming it on themselves when there was nothing they could have done to make themselves sexually appealing to him.

While I don't think the 50s were the Dark Ages at all, I think in many ways it was admirable. I just don't think that people should try to make it into a time that it wasn't: people had sex before marriage, cheated on their spouses, slept with the same sex, had sex when they were teenagers, and so on. Or ignoring that there a lot of ugly aspects to the 50s as well: rampant homophobia, blatant sexism (the ads where the husband literally pets the wife on the head and says "good girl" and it's not meant to be ironic or even humorous just shows how bad it was), institutionalized racism was still very common, and if you had emotional, mental, or family problems, there wasn't much help available to you.

I just said the world was more interesting, I wasn't defending the awful status quo. Finding a full-time job is easy-as-piss here too. But yes, for most here having one no longer grantees you will be able to easily purchase a home anytime soon.

Based

A lot of very bad stuff happened in the 50s with the environment and technology simply because people didn't know any better.

>DDT spraying
>atom bomb testing dumping fallout on towns
>giving pregnant women various wonder drugs that caused a rash of birth defects
>leaded gasoline
>Dutch Elm Disease devastated an entire species of tree because people kept planting and planting and planting them in parks and city streets and created an unhealthy plant monoculture
>chemical fertilizers being dumped in waterways

Ah, yes, the great Eisenhower years.

When the poverty rate was twice what it is today.
When there was no Civil Rights Act, and one saw signs that said things like Whites Only
When marital rape was legal in all 50 states.
When the Hayes Code was in effect, with its long of things that Americans could not be shown in films because it might not teach them the right lesson, and when television was so intensely prudish that the word 'pregnant' was forbidden.
When the specter of nuclear annihilation loomed large and ever-present.
When you had to get a prescription for condoms in order to buy them in some states.
When uber-conformity was enforced by social disapproval (today some call that 'political correctness', but that's a term used by people who invariably think it only applies to those codes of speech and behavior of which they don't happen to approve).
When over 36,000 American soldiers died in Korea.
When merely being gay was a crime.
When McCarthyism raged in all its finger-pointing and legal-harassing glory, and when such a Big Brother-esque thing as HUAC could exist.
When crime was so wonderfully low! (but it wasn't - the U.S. homicide rate, for example, was 4.5/100k in 2016, compared to 4.4/100k across the entire decade of the 1950s).

On the flip side, the the top marginal tax rate was 91% and there was an attitude that actually supported, as opposed to contemptuously sneered at, such massive public-works projects as the national freeway system.

all of the traditionalism and perception of a righteous society is pure bullshit

50s would be a pretty shit decade to live through unless you consider economic mobility the only qualification to a high standard of living

thats true. I mean people love to go on about muh traditionalism and shit but is it really good? If you want that shit less develop countries are basically the same as we used to be. And it's pretty shithouse.

I would have had a gf if it was the 1950s and that's all I want.

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Pretty sure blacks were better off in the US economically than now

No you wouldn't.

Ain't no Jay-Z or Oprah in 1955.

>>raped? Can't tell anyone

Depends on the context. At least in the early-50's, you could tell people, and get the rapist lynched in parts of the country. No fucking around with liberal judges. Spousal/"intimate partner" homicides were actually lower back then, so the whole "everybody was a secret domestic abuser" theory doesn't really hold up as a statistical matter. If anything, people in the US today are more explosively violent toward their partners.

Mental health care was also primitive and horrible back then. Treatments like electroshock therapy were in vogue.

>blatant sexism... just shows how bad it was

And yet, female suicide is a lot higher now than ti was back then. Makes you think...

there's nothing horrible about ECT other than the fact that it's placebo

>When marital rape

No such thing.

>When merely being gay was a crime.

Never happened. Specific acts like sodomy were crimes. Simply being a homo wasn't.

That was what led to Ernest Hemingway's suicide, after quack psychiatrists did electroshock therapy on him.

>When McCarthyism raged

He was right about a lot of stuff, though. The big mistake he made was confusing some kind of vague "communist" threat with the much more specific actual problem of leftist Jews selling information to foreign countries.

> the U.S. homicide rate

It was 5.3 per 100,000 in 2017 (latest year available), despite massive advances in trauma medicine, surveillance, forensics, the advent of indoor-oriented time-sinks like computers, etc.

Time Magazine did a story about wife beating in 1975, before that time it had never really been discussed or brought up in the mainstream media.

The postwar US (1945 through the early-60's) was the most broadly-prosperous era in US history. Even mildly mentally-deficient people could get decent-paying work.

The thing is, the US should have become incredibly prosperous on a per capita basis, but this was diluted over the decades by mass-immigration. A US in 2019 with 100 million fewer people would be Luxembourg-tier rich per capita.

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There were three recessions during that period (in 1953-54, 1958, and 1960) and economic growth averaged 1-2% a year. That it seemed prosperous was relative to the recently-departed Depression.

Broadly prosperous. GDP is an aggregate measure which doesn't speak to things like decile distribution of income, income inequality, etc. GDP growth in the US was supposedly over 3% last quarter, but the prosperity is far narrower today.

Teen pregnancy rates in the 50s were very much higher than today since there was absolutely no sex education. Girls would disappear for a month or so to "visit" their elderly great aunt Nora in Kansas.

As a black man, shit no I wouldn't want to live in the fucking 50s.

According to my grandmother, it was.

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>The thing is, the US should have become incredibly prosperous on a per capita basis, but this was diluted over the decades by mass-immigration. A US in 2019 with 100 million fewer people would be Luxembourg-tier rich per capita
Utter horseshit. The reason we're not as rich per-capita is because of outrageous income inequality. We have the wealth to make every man able to own a house and raise a family just like the 50's, the average guy just isn't getting it bc we have to suck the cocks of rich WASPS and Chink billionaires who have to get their 5th mansion.

Immigrants have contributed to this wealth too, just like they always have. This country would be an underpopulated backwater without our long history of mass immigration.

>The reason we're not as rich per-capita is because of outrageous income inequality.

That's circular. "Income inequality" doesn't arise "ex nihilo," it happens for specific reasons. A big general reason is that distribution is a collective action problem, and nothing shatters a collective quite like mass-immigration.

>This country would be an underpopulated backwater without our long history of mass immigration.

Not a chance when you actually look at a map of the US, and our natural "factor endowment." Advantageous elements like navigable rivers and resource reserves are right there. They don't require anywhere near 330 million people to manage. The fact that tens of millions are outside of the entire labor force is proof of that:

data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

A strong, cohesive US of c. 215-230 million in 2019 would be absolutely incredible. But, we don't get to have that, because our ancestors and predecessors opened the floodgates and gave it away. Such is life.

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>We have the wealth to make every man able to own a house and raise a family just like the 50's
No we don't. Even in the 50s it wasn't true for a fairly significant part of the population.

The 1950s were only amazing if you're an American who confuses claiming to be something with actually being something.

well, it was the beginning of our decades long decay, so no, not for Argentina

My grandmother was a child then and she said it was for the birds. Women and girls had to wear dresses and skirts everywhere, even in the dead of winter when it was freezing. She was a tomboy who hated it and girls were discouraged from playing baseball or doing anything too rough or messy. When the 60s came, you can bet she jumped at that shit.

lol this is how gays are here today.

There were still black entertainers/celebrities though. Nat King Cole was the first black person to host a TV show.

While true, they did still face a lot of problems. Nat King Cole bought a home in the Hollywood Hills in 1947 and was immediately given a housewarming gift with the KKK burning a cross on his lawn. Someone killed his dog and residents complained about allowing undesirables in the neighborhood. He had to stay in segregated hotels when performing in the South and during a performance in Birmingham, Alabama, someone who belonged to a white supremacist group threw a chair at him (he ducked and it missed him).

The murder victimization rate for black Americans is quite a bit higher than it was in the 1950's. Things in certain ways got MUCH worse after that decade.

Of course crimes against minorities also weren't reported or investigated so much back then.

Read Robert Frank "The Americans".

no, that was the 90's

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>That's circular. "Income inequality" doesn't arise "ex nihilo," it happens for specific reasons. A big general reason is that distribution is a collective action problem, and nothing shatters a collective quite like mass-immigration.
i don't like immigration devaluing labor either but you're just making up arguments to support your conclusion, like it's mexican gardeners fault that everyone with political power in the US (be it the government, the ultra rich or the voters) have decided to destroy the middle class

They were certainly reported. Every single lynching was extensively documented by the 1910's. There is no way to massage the murder numbers - we're talking about thousands of "extra" black people being murdered every year after the 1950's and early-60's. Not a few hidden cases here and there, but actual thousands.

>like it's mexican gardeners fault

"Individual fault" isn't the right concept. I'm looking at the dynamics of the entire system. Obviously those with power, money, and influence did this intentionally - and they continue to do so. They control the system, after all.

God what I would give to live as a wealthy person in this time. Peak aesthetic

>sure, if you weren't a
>woman
>person of color
>LGBTQ+ person

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Electroshock therapy is proven to be a short term treatment for depression and is still used today

Unironically the late 80s to early 2000s was the peak of American society with the 90s being the best decade.

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Doesn't matter. Jow Forumscels still won't get layed even back then.

>Electroshock therapy is proven to be a short term treatment for depression and is still used today
Not in the way it was used in the 50s. Psychiatry in general was horrible.

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The 90s was the nadir of American political consciousness. It was an era in which Americans actually believed that history was over and we had won for the rest of time. People who idolize the 90s idolize blind listless stupidity. So yeah, a lot of Americans feel that way.

It was an era in which movies featured "terrorists" whose motivation was "they're bad guys".

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If you were black in the 50s, you could be:

1. Musician
2. Fry cook
3. Janitor
4. Bellhop
5. Maid
6. Ditch digger

>le based nuclear family time!!
big yikes
you'll never have sex

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You're forgetting "Christmas ornament"

My grandfather owned a bar in the 50s and he said sometimes women would come in with bruises or a black eye and you'd think "Man she must have really done something to deserve that."

There were plenty of black professionals back then. You can read old issues of newspapers online from the 1950's and earlier, and see the ads black doctors, attorneys, etc. There was a certain element of segregation in which black doctors largely dealt with black patients, but they were still licensed doctors and so forth.

Here's a good "primary source" - Jet Magazine. It started publishing in 1951, and was aimed at a black American audience, with black writers and editors:

books.google.com/books?id=XI8DAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1

You can see directly what black people in the 1950's thought about the 1950's.

Oh, and locking people in nightmarish state mental institutions.

Well we know what your 50s was like.

>walk into store with empty shelves except one moldy bread crust while staring up at the poster on the wall showing a muscled guy driving a tractor with a slogan about how agricultural output has increased 300% under the 5 year plan

They could be a lot of things, they just could only serve their community in the south.

And houses made out of Asbestos and pools being closed in the summer because polio outbreaks

And lobtomies were common procedures for people considered even just slightly off/too emotional