This was how it was in the USA in the 50's
I came across this well written article that I thought some might would enjoy reading it. I was a youngster in the 50's and it was most interesting to me. For us of us in their 60's and older, the last sentence should prove to be quite surprising.
Sometimes we idealize the United States from the 1950s. What was common in the 1950s that would horrify us now?
The 1950s were a time of prosperity for the US. Poverty and crime were at all time lows. It was a time when national unity was at one of it’s strongest points. It was far from idyllic however. As too who would be horrified by what that depends on how old you are and what your background was. Massive changes have occurred since the 50s.
Racism was the norm all over the world until the 50s. That was when the civil rights movement really began and when Whites in the US took a long hard look at the way minorities were treated and realized it was wrong. Changes were begun in the 50s but it would take until the 70s before racism was generally ended among Whites. The 80s were the time when I saw the lowest levels of racism in my lifetime. In the 1950s racism was still alive and well. Seperate doors and eating establishments existed. Coloured doors existed in not just the South but in areas outside the South.
Protestantism was very dominate and rather strict. Catholics were often treated like 2nd class citizens and Jews suffered open prejudice. Muslims were essentially unheard of what few there were kept rather quiet.
It was a time of innocence but also a time when being an unwed mother was a huge shame and got a girl shunned in her community. Divorce was legal but also scandalous. People who were divorced were often considered defective or low lifes. A divorcee was viewed as a sort of ****. Abortion was illegal but in high demand among teenage girls who trusted the wrong boy and got pregnant. Birth control consisted of mostly rubbers and was not legally available to teens. Backroom abortions killed thousands of teenage girls every year. Suicide was also a huge shame. It still happened but it was usually covered up as suicide was considered a great embarrassment to the survivors. Open gays were rare and generally beaten up on a regular basis.
Fist fights were not unusual in the 50s. In fact they didn’t start becoming uncommon until the 90s. Men and boys were expected to know how to use their firsts and be willing to use them until they reached their 50s. Even then many men still continued to get in occasional fist fights. A guy who wouldn’t fight was shunned by the community as a coward and suspected of being gay.
Safety until the 70s was an afterthought. Workplace deaths were common and car wrecks were an epidemic. Few cars even had seatbelts. Kids often played in the spacious back seats of cars or sat in their unbuckled mother’s lap in the front seat. Roads were nowhere near as good. Ike launched the Federal highway program in the 50s. Until then there was no Interstates. Instead roads like Highway 66 connected the country. These were a route through a series of state highways that often had hair pin turns, unbanked turns, iffy road signs, potholes, many were not even paved. Dirt roads were very common in the 50s still, especially once outside major cities and population centers. A lot of highways had no center stripe and few had guardrails.
Beating a confession out of a suspect was still the norm. Prisons were brutal places where guards and or inmate trustees (in that day trustees were armed prisoners who in exchange for privileges like extra food and better accommodations would do the dirty work for the guards) carried clubs and used them on a frequent basis. People with a record were shunned heavily. Enforcement was very subjective. Cops knew everyone in their community and looking the other way was normal for locals but strangers faced a myriad of hazards going through small towns where law enforcement often saw them as victims to be fleeced. Most people still lived in the same communities they were born in, though people migrating started in earnest during the 50s. Economic opportunities drew people all over the country and this was creating a lot of tension with locals as their communities would double in size in as little as 5 years sometimes.
Hispanics were a tiny percentage of the population. Almost negligible and most Hispanics in the US were of Cuban or Puerto Rican descent. Waves of migrant workers first started coming to the US and the first Illegals began to appear. The US was 90% White. There were only 15 million Blacks in the country and 3 million Hispanics and 300,000 Asians.
It was normal to buy a new car with cash. In fact most people didn’t finance much of anything. People saved up and bought houses with cash. Cars with cash. People rarely had insurance of any kind. It was used for emergencies only if anyone had it.
Health care was just about to advance light years, the 1950s marked and explosion in knowledge and waves of changes in health care. However lobotomies were still being performed in the 50s, insane asylums were nightmare places and hospitals were transforming into the kind of hospital we know today. Ambulances were strictly transport. The drivers min wage workers who knew little or nothing about health care and their job was simply to load em up and get em too the hospital as fast as they could. Many hospitals didn’t even have an ER yet. Trauma centers wouldn’t come about for another 20 years or so. People were still coming down with things like polio and iron lungs were still in use though the Polio vaccine began to erase Polio from the US during the 50s. It was however not at all uncommon to meet Polio survivors who were on crutches, in wheel chairs or otherwise permanently injured by their bout with Polio.
Dress codes were rather strict. Skirts above the knee were scandalous and showing a bare navel was super rare even in bathing suits. Guys with hair below their collar super rare. Beards were what convicts and sailors grew. Normal men almost never had a beard.
Efforts to eliminate wife beating had been going on since the 20s, but folks looked away still as late as the 50s and it was fairly common in many American subcultures. There was little legal recourse. The normal way it was handled was relatives of the lady took care of things.
Pregnant women often drank alcohol as nobody knew about alcohol’s effects on pregnancy yet. Drugs were often administered with little or no trials. It was massive drug disasters in the 40s and 50s that brought about our system of drug trials.
Child molesters were rare and usually just buried in an unmarked grave rather than prosecuted. So children were allowed to roam about and play where they wished. The entire neighborhood or community looked out for and after the children in their area.
Neighbors knew each other and people were out and about in their neighborhoods. Somebody from the 50s driving through a modern neighborhood would think it was a ghost town. Phones were what rich people had. In many areas they were still party lines where any conversation you had could be heard by anyone who picked up their phone at that time. TVs were expensive and few people owned them. Instead most people had a radio. Though by the late 50s TV became rather common for middle class families, but the poor still usually didn’t own a TV or phone.
Sports were normal, everyone played them as a kid and many adults did as well.
Few men didn’t know how to work on their car or did not do most of the constant maintenance cars of that period needed themselves. When you went to a gas station an attendant came out and pumped your gas for you, washed your windshield, checked your fluids and sometimes air pressure. Nobody pumped their own gas.
There were no ATMs. Banks were 9–5 but you could often float a check for a little extra cash at a grocery store. Though they too were generally closed by 7pm. After 8 pm there wasn’t much of anything open except bars, restaurants and theaters. If you were low on gas at 10pm you just didn’t go anywhere until morning as there were no gas stations open that late and you couldn’t just gas up at a station that was closed.
Anybody could walk in and buy a gun. At least anybody of age and kids could go in and buy something like a .22 rifle without questions. In rural areas it wasn’t unusual to see a pack of kids walking down a road all carrying rifles, as they were out shooting targets or hunting small game.
All men served a stint in the US military unless they were rejected. There was a universal draft still in effect and you could get a college exemption or go do your stint in the military before you were drafted but you were going into the military one way or another before you turned 25. Though exemptions were not difficult to get for people with money.
There was no welfare. No food stamps, no disability, social security was what elderly widows collected. Men worked until they died or had enough saved up to retire. Though most people had savings and being able to save in the 50s was considerably easier. Few people carried the kind of debt we do today and credit cards were just started to show up.
Multi-generational families living together was extremely common. The 50s was when young couples first started getting their own places too live. Housing combined with rapid growth in wages and opportunity first made owning a home affordable for a young couple. Subdivisions boomed and the first malls started opening up.
Everyone smoked, something close to 60% of the US population and about the only places you couldn’t smoke were if there was a hazard such as next to gas tanks.
Really old people were uncommon. The average American lived to their mid 50s and few lived past 65. 80 year olds were uncommon and only a rare few saw 90.