Because to achieve this required work, excellence, standards, and effort,
all things antithetical to being a leftist.
Still a great picture to see what humanity was capable of. So sad it was 60 years ago and we've deteriorated since.
All comments about "yeah, as the husband smacked the wife around the house" will simply be deleted.
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I find it telling, but rather sad that we went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 65 years, and 45 years later we can't get to the moon.
Mark Steyn had a good article on the same a few months ago: http://www.steynonline.com/7248/back-to-what-future
Mr. Clarey.
Would you agree that part of the economic prosperity of the 1950s came from the necessity of "rebuilding" Europe?
Hunter S. Thompson
To all those who are itching to sneer, "yeah, it was great if you were white, but if you were brown it was like a pogrom!" I will remind you that if you could ask a fifties dweller what he thought about life today, he would reply, "yeah, it's great if you're a pervert or a layabout, but for regular folks trying to make a decent life, it's like a pogrom!" Things haven't improved just because sexual taboos have been replaced with PC taboos. Those "conformist" fifties weren't anywhere near as stifling as today's PC culture.
Despite what your teachers have told you, the fifties were a good time for the dark-complected as well. Incomes for black families (that's right, there were intact black families in those days, unlike our more enlightened times) were rising faster than that of white families. That's right, hipster--the "inequality" was actually shrinking unlike in our more enlightened times.
And just stifle that "sure it was great...unless you had CANCER and those cars were polluting deathtraps!" crap. We're not talking about scientific advances, but about culture.
Hunter, How does dumping money into Europe equate to prosperity at home? We weren't being paid for most of the work that we did. This is another take on the "broken window theory", that breaking windows causes economic growth because the window maker gets hired to fix those broken windows, thus causing cash flow. The flaw in the argument is that it assumes that nothing else would have been done with that money had the window stayed whole.
Post WWII the US had 80% of the world's available manufacturing capacity and 80% of the world gold supply. We essentially destroyed the axis powers, then helped them rebuild, as well as rebuilding the allies. It was nearly impossible to not be successful in the following 20 years after the war. This is when Warren Buffet made his fortune, buying up cash rich companies as described in his biography "Snowball". We are in the period where all companies will have to be their own banker to survive - like Apple's immense cash position. We are in the 4th turning. 12 more years of economic collapse and war. The 50s were the first saeculum after reset. While social issues may have stagnated pre 1946, there was so much growth and innovation it was difficult to not like the stability. Of course, if you fought in Korea you might not wax nostalgic about the 50s. Hell, even the civil rights movement started in the 50s. It was partially due to economic growth and blacks' desire to get a bigger slice of the pie - economic or otherwise. Economics influences culture and vice versa.
Today, the wife smacks her wife around the house.
Married, lesbian, domestic violence is becoming more mainstream.
Probably something they didn't see in the 1950's.
If it makes you feel any better, I can still get four kids to sit like that. If you take the picture fast enough, anyway.
I don't have a white rail fence...
...but there is, in fact, a father in the picture.
I'm still glad we're not (quite) as repressive about things like family dynamics and mental health as we were back then. I'm not getting that from school. I'm getting that from my grandmother, who lived through the '50s with a husband with developmental issues and anxiety disorders out the wazoo. "Pretending perfection" was one hell of a strain.
Ironically, the same people who make the "this isn't the 1950s anymore!" quip will turn around on a dime and try to make men adhere to 1950s standards when it serves their interests. The entire "man up" movement is intended to do just that, headed by men who think somehow the Sexual Revolution and three waves of feminism haven't resulted in any socio-economic, political, cultural, moral and religious upheavals.
@Heresolong,
My understanding is that it's essentially a Keynesian argument (I've never run the numbers myself).
The idea is that US manufacturing benefited from having to provide goods/services to a destitute Europe. I'm not adopting it because (as stated) I've never really done any research on it.
My recollection is that (at least in the case of the UK) this was partially financed by a loan from the US, and to a lesser extent, Canada.
However, I would assume that there is a least some truth to the analysis (although I generally favor an Austrian analysis). If Germany/France/Italy need widgets, and the US is the only place that can make them, this would tend to benefit the US economy.
It would be interesting to see how the interest paid (which was apparently quite favorable to the UK) compared to the (hypothetical) benefit to the US economy.
Hunter S Thompson.
Actually the wife beating happened less back then than it does today. Only today they call it a DV charge.
Hunter,
I just saw a piece recently that the UK had made its final payment for WWII. The US has still not paid off on WWI!
Oh, the 50s. Horrible for minorities. Let's see: what was the divorce rate among blacks? Virtually none. So, stable families. The whole folk/people crips/bloods and other gangs as we know them today simply did not exist. So no big drug problem, heck, no drug problem. Coke and heroin would get you shunned in any community. Crime in black or white neighborhoods was nowhere near what it became in the 60s with urban renewal, coddling criminals, excuse making. Yes, there were black neighborhoods with booming commercial districts, not commercial deserts like now in many places. At one time there was this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqn5OmF23HY
Baseball became integrated, but as a result, a whole class of black ownership and management lost work.
The civil rights movement was mentioned. Back then you had men in suits carrying signs "I am a man." They wanted to be able to get into the trades that the whites had a lock hold upon. They were bottled up in neighborhoods way too small for their numbers and wanted the breathing room that the whites enjoyed once the expressways made suburbs possible. I believe I mentioned on this blog before that whites would've somewhat emptied the cities once the car came to every family even if it was an all European country just to get away from the crowding, pollution, and corruption. Today you got guys in tank tops and cargo shorts looting stores because a thug and felon got shot by a cop.
Sure back then you had slum housing and fire traps that needed reform. But nothing like Detroit today (which was the richest city in the 50s) that looks like Nagasaki after the blast and is as dangerous as 1982 Beruit.
Man, I grew up in Gary. I heard older blacks as well as whites moan, "In my day, it was never like this." The blacks in the 40s and 50s were just as black as the ones in the dangerous 60s and 70s, so what gives?
Public housing didn't require one to be indigent, so at least in Chicago it was quite white, mirroring the group living in or near that neighborhood, Poles, Croatians, Italians, and of course blacks. It was decent living quarters for all the G.I.s coming home from WW II or Korea, and no one tore up the joint.
And I don't think social repression has let up one bit. It has shifted focus, but us being freer today? Hardly. Case in point everything the SJWs ever do to make people into social and workplace pariahs.
The first reliable inexpensive mass produced overhead valve V-8s happened in the 1950s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_V8_engine
Silly ass Progressive commercial. " Where's your husband?"
The Left hates the 50s....except for inked broads trying to pass for pinup girls.
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