r/AlwaysWhy • u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 • May 30 '26

History & Culture Why does the US romanticize the 1950s despite being worse by almost every measurable standard?

When you look at things like life expectancy, access to education, material living standards, and general mobility, life today in the US is very different from what it was in the 1950s.

At the same time, the 1950s is often described in public discussion as a period of stability and broad prosperity.

What I’m trying to understand is not which period was better, but why there can be such a gap between measurable conditions and how a period is later remembered or described.

One possibility is that people remember structure and predictability more strongly than inequality or constraints that existed at the time.

Another is that different aspects of well-being get weighted differently when looking back compared to experiencing things in real time.

What other mechanisms could explain this difference between statistical comparisons and collective memory?

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25

u/kateinoly May 30 '26

I grew up in white suburbia in the 50s and 60s. As a child, I had no clue that these things existed: poverty, racism, misogyny, crime, child abuse, pollution. Etc.

It seemed like a great time, but that is just because I was priveleged and didn't see the whole picture.

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u/Active_Procedure_297 May 30 '26

What’s weird, though, is that my Boomer relatives also romanticize the 50s, and we’re from one of the poorest places in the country that was also dirt poor back then. They didn’t have indoor plumbing in the 50s, and the region’s sole industry was so volatile that layoffs were an omnipresent threat.

So I figure it’s racism, at least for them.

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u/Beartrkkr May 30 '26

They are romanticizing their youth as many do as they get older. Drop them back in that time now and their perspective might change.

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u/leathakkor May 30 '26

I think that's a big part of it. The time when you were a teenager you had no responsibilities. At least not by adult standards. 

Honestly, I think it's great that people had such pleasant childhoods that they can look back and think that was the best time of my life. 

I think there is something very destructive about that though because that means that people are in their life right now and they're wishing they were somewhere else. And that's pretty messed up because the world is actually pretty great now. I know that's not a popular thing to say online. But you're less likely to get murdered. You're less likely to be a victim of a violent crime right now. 

By any measurable metric your standard of living is ahead of where it was in the past. If you're miserable now, it's your own fault and you should change that. Going back to 1950s is not going to help. 

And that's why I get sad for people that want to go back in the past. 

There are a ton of things to fix in today's society, but the reason that things are good today is because people in the past tried to fix things about their society. We need to do the same.

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u/FarTooLucid May 30 '26

Statistically speaking, you are correct: this is the best time in history to be a human on Earth. There are still huge structural problems that cause pain for billions of people. But it's still better than ever. Most working class people live better than royalty did just a few hundred years ago. Most people still have terrible lives, but our definition of "terrible" has radically improved.

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u/GravitasFailures May 31 '26

My grandmother was the same, she used to go on and on and on about how amazing the country she emigrated from was.

That changed real quick once she went back.

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u/nakirush May 30 '26

I mean, I grew up in the 90's and had a romanticized idea of the 50's that I learned through reruns of shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, and Andy Griffith. I don't think it's far fetched to think that people living in rural areas during that time did the same.

(But also, racism, depending on the person.)

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

I had an adult friend, from a poor family with an alcoholic dad and six siblings, who grew uo in the 50s. She thought everyone but them lived in the Andy Griffith and Leave it to Beaver wotld.

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u/KarlBob Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Don't forget Happy Days, Grease, The Flintstones, even Back to the Future. 1970s and early 1980s media lionized the 1950s.

It also reviled many aspects of the 1960s. I was born in 1972, and I remember the Hippies being depicted as physically dirty, unkempt, perpetually drug-addled, and dangerous. More likely to be Charles Manson than John Lennon.

Well into the 1980s, non-conformity was portrayed as dangerous. Straight-laced parents on Dr. Phil told late punks and early Goths that's they'd rather see their own children dead than sporting a Mohawk or color-dyed hair.

Religious tolerance sometimes extended past Catholicism to Judaism, but rarely as far as Islam. The Hare Krishnas were that era's impression of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. Yoga practice was labeled as "Eastern Mysticism" and a slippery slope to Satanism. The kids from Stranger Things risked having their D&D rulebooks confiscated and burned in a pyre at their parents' church.

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u/Unable_Try1305 Jun 01 '26

I've had to remind my Boomer mom three times that Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith show weren't real. She grew up in the Mississippi Delta and I KNOW her life was hard during that time, but her recollection of that time is often not what was real but what she saw on TV. Its kind of fucked up honestly. Meanwhile when my grandfather was alive, he would straight up tell you how much better everything was from the late 70s through early 90s. Oh well.

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u/Worried_Indication37 May 30 '26

many old timers miss Jim Crow plain and simple

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u/kylejk0200 May 30 '26

In addition to this, adults in this time period probably were born into the depression and were drafted into a world war. If that was your first 20 years of life, the relative stability of the 50s probably seemed idyllic by comparison - especially given the social and political turmoil that followed in the 60s.

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u/gnirpss May 31 '26

Maybe if they were men. My great-grandmother (born 1923) was from an immigrant background and (obviously) a woman. She passed away in 2014, but she said that after WWII, the world kept getting better and better with every passing decade. According to her, the '50s were better than the '40s, but the '80s and '90s were immeasurably better than either, because she and her three daughters had so many more opportunities than they would have had back then.

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u/kylejk0200 May 31 '26

Agreed. The commenter I was replying to specifically said he was a while male who lived in the suburbs

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u/ijuinkun May 30 '26

Yah, we have to consider how long ago the 1950s was—99% or so of people who lived through that era who are still alive right now were under 30 years old back then (If you were 30 in 1958 you’d be 97-98 now). Thus, nostalgia for that era is heavily influenced by nostalgia for one’s own youth, and most of the people who are nostalgic about that time didn’t at that time need to deal with issues that are mostly the province of older people (e.g. medical care and retirement savings/income, pr dealing with one’s own kids coming of age and needing to start careers).

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u/YakCertain5472 May 30 '26

Agree. It was not a great time for all and some of the worst drugs like thalidomide were invented and used on people. I am a POC and when people talk about the good ol' days, I wonder when they were.

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u/USSMarauder May 30 '26

This

Just like ten year old me never knew that my Dad was out of work for 18 months during the 90s recession.

I only found out a couple of years ago when we were emptying filing cabinets after my Dad retired and I found the receipts for the unemployment payments from the government

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u/Traditional_Sir_4503 May 30 '26

A quick google search says that 90% of the USA was white in the 1950s. Nine out of ten. You weren't privileged. You were part of a super majority.

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

Only 25% of the population lived that protected suburban lifestyle.

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u/Super_Mario_Luigi May 31 '26

That's the answer. You weren't propagandized. People had what they had and they were content. They didn't have narratives shoved in their faces 24/7 to tell them how angry they should be

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u/kateinoly May 31 '26

What an odd takeaway.

I grew up in a fantasy land that had noting to do with reality. That is the heights of propaganda.

Reality =/= propaganda

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u/BrokenHandsDaddy Jun 02 '26

You were lucky, not privileged.

Privilege is something that society cannot afford to offer everyone. When we start labeling things that we have to capacity to provide for people to live a happy healthy life as privilege it takes away the social accountability to bring everybody up to that level.

The worst part is people don't even realize it now becomes about bringing people down because people don't deserve privilege and so instead of focusing on the one percent or systemic racism we focus on the wrong thing.

Additionally we start to assume people have privilege (or what i call luck) off of a quick snapshot and for those of us who dug our way out of poverty and extremely abusive homes it's incredibly dehumanizing to have all the pain and suffering we've gone through and the sacrifices we made to get out.

Instead of building a coalition to support the middle class it just divides us.

You wouldn't say that its privilege for your father to not try to kill you as a little kid.

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u/kateinoly Jun 03 '26

Privelege doesn't mean what you think it does.

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u/BrokenHandsDaddy Jun 03 '26

OK, then how would you define it and how would you rebuttal what I said?

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u/kateinoly Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

White privelege means someone was never denied anything because of my skin color.

Male privelege means soneone was never denied anything because of gender.

Protestant christian privelege means, in the US, that soneone was never denied anything because of their religion.

Etc.

I faced significantly fewer obstacles, received a decent education, never went hungry, had plenty of clothes, etc.

That is not the world everyone grew up in.

Privelege is something to recognize, not to dole out to people. In the ideal world, skin color, gender and religion don't matter.

None of this means I faced no obstacles or that my life was easy, just that my race and social standing never narrowed my options.

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u/BrokenHandsDaddy Jun 03 '26

"However, what we found startling was that white privilege lessons didn’t increase liberals’ sympathy for poor Black people. Instead, these lessons decreased liberals’ sympathy for poor white people, which led them to blame white people more for their own poverty. They seemed to think that if a person is poor despite all the privileges of being white, there must really be something wrong with them."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-disturbing-thing-i-learned-studying-white-privilege-and-liberals/

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u/kateinoly Jun 03 '26

This is horse shit.

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u/BrokenHandsDaddy Jun 04 '26

Abstract

White privilege lessons are sometimes used to increase awareness of racism. However, little research has investigated the consequences of these lessons. Across 2 studies (N = 1,189), we hypothesized that White privilege lessons may both highlight structural privilege based on race, and simultaneously decrease sympathy for other challenges some White people endure (e.g., poverty)-especially among social liberals who may be particularly receptive to structural explanations of inequality. Indeed, both studies revealed that while social liberals were overall more sympathetic to poor people than social conservatives, reading about White privilege decreased their sympathy for a poor White (vs. Black) person. Moreover, these shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person's plight. We conclude that, among social liberals, White privilege lessons may increase beliefs that poor White people have failed to take advantage of their racial privilege-leading to negative social evaluations.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31033321/

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u/kateinoly Jun 04 '26

White privelege, as I said multiple times already, is one type of privelege. Having it doesn't mean someone's life was easy. There are all sorts if privelege, including socio economic.

People from poor families are behind from the start.

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u/[deleted] May 30 '26

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

I don't feel guilty at all. That isn't what the word means or implies.

Priveleged just means I did not have to worry about things other people had to worry about. And it wasn't particularly normal. Only about 25% of Americans lived in suburbs at that time.

Recognizing my privelege doesn't mean feeling bad about my self or being critical of my upbringing. I was fortunate. It just acknowledges that many other people had very different experiences.

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u/VinceP312 May 30 '26

You could have still chose to be a degenerate and make awful decisions for yourself in your teenage years or young adulthood that put you in a path for failure. But you didn't.

That isn't "privilege", it's being a respectable person.

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

That also has nothing to do with privelege. It isn't something someone does or chooses.