Let's blame it all on the 1950s
Published Monday December 1st, 2008
The world is a mess. Our American neighbours are broke and we're staring down the pipe at who knows what next year.
Blame the 1950s.
At least, that's what you might be tempted to read between the lines of the fascinating book with the straightforward title, "The Fifties" by David Halberstam.
It's a good bet for Christmas because it's cheap — it was published in 1994 — and copies are readily available. A quick check at Amazon.ca came up with 35 copies last week ranging in price from 45 cents for a copy described as "used-good" to $59.59 for one listed as "used — very good."
It better be very very good to be worth that extra $59.14.
I got my hard-cover copy for a buck — Canadian — at a used book sale in the mall this fall. It looked interesting, covered the decade when I was born and at 816 pages seemed like a good deal.
It was.
I suppose I'm like most people. I figured the 1950s was a time of dull husbands in bland suits and equally dull housewives in swept-back hair styles running leave-it-to-Beaver households.
Nope, says Halberstam. Not even close.
Instead, he portrays the decade as a turning point in the history of the U.S. — and since when the American elephant gets a cold, we get pneumonia, that means us as well.
Halberstam had no idea the world's economy would jump on its own sword in 2008. But looking at many of the changes he describes a half century ago, we can see the seeds of the unholy mess we're in today.
The biggest change in society in the 1950s was the growing desire by just about everyone to satisfy their wants, as opposed to their needs.
From cars to TVs to houses in the suburbs, wants overwhelmed needs.
This was a fundamental shift in the way the world worked.
After the party that was the 1920s, the world met life nose-first in the 1930s as the world economy jumped into the toilet and stayed there. Jobs vanished, wrecking millions of lives and changing the way an entire generation saw the world.
Welcome to the era of needs.
With little money, families squeezed and stretched every penny until it screamed for mercy. Eating out meant visiting family or friends, and bringing something for the potluck. There probably weren't two horses in the yard, never mind two cars. And if you were lucky enough to own a pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers, you didn't have four other pairs in a variety of colours in the back of the closet.
The Second World War shook the world out of the Depression and by the time the fighting was over, the millions of men and women affected were eager to start living. They were young, the economy was booming and it was time to make babies and get on with their lives.
They did it with gusto. And they needed all those things a new family needs — a house, car, one of those new-fangled TV things, fridge, stove and lawnmower.
Business reacted in a hurry.
General Motors took no time to figure out in those days of cheap gasoline that size matters. The bigger the car, fins and fuzzy dice included, the bigger the profits. That addiction to profits would last until, well, just a few months ago.
Unable, or unwilling, to consider making less on each car since it never had to do that in the living memory of any of the company brass, or the generation that came before them, GM marched up to the financial cliff and jumped over with barely a thought.
The future of thousands of autoworkers is now in jeopardy, courtesy of that mistake.
The suburbs were created because everyone wanted a home with a lawn far from the maddening city crowds.
People flocked to those houses and kept doing it until, well, just a few months ago. Then reality came knocking on the doors of those guys making $14,000 a year and getting mortgages for $400,000 homes — I'm not making this up. They couldn't pay and banks starting pleading for help.
Halberstam does a lovely job of describing the fifties in about 30 chapters.
He also explains how we fell in love with Elvis, James Dean and Marlon Brando — our parents were squares who didn't understand us and what we were going through — like wow man.
That was a new. It was tougher to have teenage angst in the 1930s when simply getting enough to eat was the first topic for discussion each day.
He also talked about Alfred Kinsey and how the one-time insect expert turned into a sex doctor and figured out — who knew — that men and even women liked sex and weren't nearly as square as they let on.
Cool.
It's nearly Christmas. Get a loved one to order you a copy, sit back and learn where we came from. With the economic slowdown, things aren't likely to be all that busy the next little while anyway.
Author and former editor of the Miramichi Leader, Rick MacLean teaches journalism at Holland College in Prince Edward Island.
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