FTA: “On the right, there are a lot of people who lament that we’ve lost a common culture. I agree with that to a considerable degree. But they often point to the popular culture of a bygone era as if that popular culture reflected the common culture. On the left, there’s a lot of scorn for the old popular culture because it was supposedly a tool of the Man deployed to impose conformity to an Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. Both critiques have large elements of truth, but they miss the point that a lot of that 1950s suburbia stuff was a kind of subculture, too. It was an aspirational and relatively novel subculture. 1950 was the first year in which a majority of Americans owned a home. In the beginning of the 1950s, only about a quarter of Americans lived in the suburbs—about the same proportion as Americans who lacked indoor plumbing. The nuclear family wasn’t a recent invention, as some feminists claim, but it was fairly new as a major culture benchmark and norm.
“I don’t have the time or space to do a big debunking of the nostalgia and dystalgia (it’s sort of a word, meaning an overly negative view of the past) about the 1950s, but suffice it to say it was neither as great nor as terrible as some claim. But it was a time of remarkable economic growth, enjoyed by a recently victorious nation imbued with a new unifying sense of mission as a superpower (or at least elites broadly saw it that way). That’s where the sense of America’s once homogenous culture comes from. Some culture warriors who think popular culture is much more important and powerful than it is think that the alleged sense of national unity was enforced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
“Sure, maybe, a little.
“But you know what had a much, much more powerful homogenizing effect? A decade of the New Deal and half-decade of World War II. For nearly 20 years, Americans were pushed, nudged, exhorted, and sometimes literally forced into a regimented society that took its orders from big institutions and the central government. When they came out the other side of all that, it shouldn’t be surprising that they had a lot of shared attitudes and common desires for a good, peaceful, and prosperous life. Nor should it be surprising that they liked a popular culture about navigating the mostly benign, but also novel and confusing, world of suburban life.
“Spend a big chunk of your formative years desperate for work, or working in a factory, or sleeping in a foxhole: You might want some boring normalcy and conformity, too. And it shouldn’t be shocking that Hollywood and Madison Avenue catered to that. And in the case of Madison Avenue, let’s be honest, wouldn’t you want to target audiences with rising amounts of disposable income rather than those left behind? Lots of people in Appalachia still lived like the Clampetts, and many others had cultural memories of what it was once like to live like the Clampetts, but they only wanted to see that subculture when the Clampetts are dumped in Beverly Hills.
“However much you think the lived culture or the popular/shared culture of the 1950s was homogenous, that homogeneity was pretty unusual—and it was short-lived. By the 1960s, Dragnet gave way to Mod Squad, Ozzie and Harriet went dark and Love, American Style emerged.
“I’m sure I am missing things as I think out loud—or think as I type—but I think there’s an important point lurking in here. The forces of nostalgia crave a past that never was while the champions of, what “diversity,” “transgression,” “non-conformity,” fear “going back” to a past that may have existed in some concrete ways (Jim Crow was evil and real), but it wasn’t as culturally monolithic as they think. The past was full of good and bad, because human existence is full of good and bad.”
