“This is not the 1950s anymore,” Kamala Harris informed earlier this week.
Those words broadcast on a podcast called Call Her Daddy served as what radio Dragnet Joe Friday might call a “clue.” The, er, podcasts of the 1950s, of course, bore less racy titles (like Dragnet or the PG-rated Dimension X). And Adlai Stevenson did not sit for interviews on them. So, before explicitly saying so, Kamala Harris implicitly said it’s not the 1950s anymore.
Other evidence buttressing Harris’ claim include the popularity of the film Back to the Future, the breakup of revivalist band Sha Na Na, and the deaths of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.
Harris is right. It is not the ’50s anymore (stick around long enough, and it will be). Is her remark’s implication — that this marks a very good thing for Americans — so obvious?
Harris’ reference to the 1950s came in the context of a discussion of the family. She explained, “Families come in all kinds of forms.” Indeed, they do. And back then, indeed they didn’t.
In 1950, 4 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now, the figure reaches 40 percent. The fertility rate then doubled ours now. It exceeded 3.5 children per woman near the end of the 1950s baby boom; it falls below 1.7 children per woman during our baby bust. At the outset of the 1950s, married couples populated three in four households. Now fewer than half of households contain a married couple.
Is it better, as Harris seemed to suggest, that families now “come in all kinds of forms”? Or, alternatively, was the norm of two married parents raising children who grew up with brothers and sisters better? The popularity of children then relative to now would suggest that their system of bringing up children bettered our own.
Much else beyond the family differs.
By the end of that decade, the average man (166 pounds) weighed less than the average woman (171 pounds) does now. The foreign-born population (7 percent) has doubled (14 percent) since the 1950s. Children generally started school with a prayer. The murder rate cratered at 4.5 per 100,000 people in 1955; the number reaches 7.5 per 100,000 now. Gross domestic product, which hovers around 2 percent growth in recent years, reached 6.9 percent or above in four years of the 1950s. After fighting stopped in the Korean War, Americans enjoyed peace and prosperity largely uninterrupted until the Vietnam War.
Musicians introduced Americans to rock ‘n’ roll and, in contrast to today, few remakes, sequels, or brands disguised as movies dominated the box office. On the Waterfront, High Noon, All About Eve, Rebel Without a Cause, Singin’ in the Rain — films that now capture critical appreciation — captured massive audiences. Face tattoos occupied a few nightmares but not reality, and the only transgender one encountered was Milton Berle.
“In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society,” David Halberstam wrote in The Fifties. He described it as an “orderly era” seemingly lacking social dissent, which his book takes pains to indicate existed albeit often below the surface. “It was a good time to be young and to get on with family and career,” he concedes. “Prices and inflation remained relatively low; and nearly everyone with a decent job could afford to own a home.”
One cannot say that today without an accompanying laugh track. Yet, to hear Harris and other leftists reference the 1950s, the decade itself serves as the punchline the way the “Victorian Era” might for 1950s leftists and “the Dark Ages” did for Victorian-era leftists.
We can laugh at our 1950s forebears. If we retrieved a few of that decade’s denizens in a DeLorean, how do you suppose they might react to the sight of us?
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