50's and 60's fedora lounge?

[Viola]

Be that as it may, saying "things were better then" is just plain false if you're not a white male.

I wouldn't say this is across-the-board plain at all. Sorry. Its true in some ways and untrue in others.

 

[get_atomized]

Loungers, I thought of you all and this thread particualrly the other day when I was was having a discussion with an acquaintance. I was expounding on the merits and subsequent influence of the new wave music of '75-'85, and got told I was living in/romanticising the past!

lol lol lol !

 

[John in Covina]

One thing is time marches on and as the years roll by what is vintage is relative to the continual procession of events. What qualifies: 20 years, 30, 40, 50 years? I think if you can look back with a sense of nostalgia, it helps qualify a time for discussion. For myself, I don't know that I can say I have a lot of nostaligia for the 90's, while the 80's and back more so. The 70's and 60's were filled with turmoil, 80's and 90's seemed to be less social turmoil but still frenetic with changes in technology mostly. To me anyway.

I think that as time progesses if you stay in one place and don't evolve at least a little, you will be encapsulated, passed by and eventually become irrelavent.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I was passed by, encapsulated and irrelevant before it was cool!

I'm trying to write that into a song. What rhymes with encapsulated???

 

[Widebrim]

I was passed by, encapsulated and irrelevant before it was cool!

I'm trying to write that into a song. What rhymes with encapsulated???

Marinated? lol

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Discombobulated?



.

 

[Senator Jack]

Emasculated, which is pretty much what happened to men after 1969.

 

[jamespowers]

Emasculated, which is pretty much what happened to men after 1969.

:eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap

 

[Widebrim]

Emasculated, which is pretty much what happened to men after 1969.

And another :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap

 

[Lincsong]

Emasculation got into full force with the banning of metal lunch pails in schools. That began the onslaught of emasculating two and three generations of boys.

 

[Dr Doran]

Getting back to '50s-'60s Fedora Lounge, as Lady Day commented, this forum was originally started with a general time-frame of 1930-45 in mind.

Yes. And as I commented to someone once ... let us pretend there was another forum called let's say "The Acid Lounge" with tie-dyed background instead of a black background, and the threads concerned Grateful Dead live recordings, how to tie dye your shirts, draft-avoidance techniques, Haight-Ashbury squats, etc., and I tried to post about early Duke Ellington recordings and how cool peak lapels are ... well, I wouldn't expect the warmest welcome.

But I do see plenty of interest here in 50s and 60s.

For the record, it was I who started the humungous "Why do I hate the 70s so much?" thread a few years ago. I went back recently and it was CLOSED. And I thought "you know, that's OK." It was a laugh for a while, but it got too negative and turned into a black hole of ugliness.

Yet would a separate '50s/'60s "Stingy Brim" Fedora Lounge be of value? Judging by many of our comments, sure would be! Maybe someone will design and promote one someday...

The Cad is perfect for this. A sensible forum with a somewhat later focus. No need to start up another one as I see it.

 

[Widebrim]

Emasculation got into full force with the banning of metal lunch pails in schools. That began the onslaught of emasculating two and three generations of boys.

May words exactly! (I had a metal pail...)

 

[Dr Doran]

Marc,

As a trained historian and college instructor, I have to offer up a correction to what I perceive to be a misconception.

The professor may or may not be a relativist, but that's not the point he was trying to get across. He was talking to his students about avoiding "Presentism," which is a term historians use to describe the act of judging the past through the prism of our modern values. Presentism is not part of the methodology that historians use. As a human being, it's fine to say that those people were racist, but historians are social scientists, and try to adhere, as much as possible, to scientific practices.

In the study of history, historian judge others in the past within the context of the time and society in which they lived. It does no good to judge others in the past within the context of today, because that's like equating apples and oranges.

For instance, historians aren't saying that the Eugenics movement of the '20s and '30s was okay because those folks in the past were okay with it. It's about understanding the context in which these people lived that enabled these ideas to become as prevalent as they did.

Yes, I've been one to say I hate the Sixties, but that's not the historian in me speaking, it's the conservative.

Brad

+1 here on historical methodology. I'm a trained historian as well, working on my PhD now at Berkeley. The thing that drives ME the most nuts when I teach (which I often do) is undergraduates (particularly female undergraduates) who gasp and freak out when they hear that women in ancient Greece could not vote. First of all, how long ago was it that women were not allowed to vote in the US? Not long. Second, How many OTHER pre-industrial settled societies featured voting for women? judging the past against the early 2000s is inappropriate. You can judge ancient Greece against similar pre-industrial settled societies (such as Persia of the same period, or the Phoenicians, or the Romans, or ancient China) and see what opportunities THEY offered women ... that's a meaningful exercise. Similarly, if we look at e.g. eugenics in the USA and are horrified that's fine personally, but we need to put that into the perspective of long, long traditions in many societies of careful breeding and ideas about what hereditary characteristics are useful and which not ... and after seeing the film Idiocracy, eugenics will never be the same to me.

 

[Widebrim]

and after seeing the film Idiocracy, eugenics will never be the same to me.

I've got to see that film!

 

[MisterCairo]

And another :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap

And another -
:eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap

 

[Geesie]

I took a few days out from reading this thread to make sure I had a level head.

Here's the deal with what I was saying:
It was directly in response to the sort of comment that does pop up when discussing the past, and to paraphrase, "things were better then, our culture took a nose dive in the 60s".
Unqualified, I have to take exception to that sort of statement.
One may argue that fashion was better, that aesthetics were better, that specific attitudes were better, but to make that broad statement is just not right.
The late 50s into the mid 60s was when American culture finally advanced to the point where meaningful civil rights legislation could be passed. It wasn't there before. I am not condemning individual people and tut-tutting from the "candyland" present. It's not an opinion. It's a historical fact that there was not enough popular support for meaningful civil rights legislation until the mid 20th century.
This is not minor. This is not an insignificant cultural shift. So if you say that you preferred the culture of the "Golden Age", you have to be specific about what aspects you mean.

 

[Lincsong]

There's some aspects of the '70s I like; the Lincoln Mark II, IV and V. There are aspects of the 30's and 40's I dislike. However, this forum is about things one likes about the 30's and 40s. If someone doesn't like certain aspects of it, why attempt to bring a bucket of ice onto everyone's enjoyment? It would appear that such a person is 1. either highly insecure or 2. crying out for attention.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the question is what "American Culture" do you mean, the Northern or the Southern? There was strong support in the North, and especially in the Northeast, for meaningful civil rights legislation as far back as the mid-forties -- the Truman Administration's Civil Rights Commission report of 1946 recommended a strong, comprehensive course of legislative and social action that wouldn't be implemented for twenty years, largely due to opposition from hard-core Southern segregationists in Congress, who were no doubt reflecting the beliefs of the people who put them in office.

But that culture wasn't shared by all Americans, or even, likely, a majority of them, and there's evidence to prove it in the results of the 1948 election, in which the anti-civil rights Dixiecrat party couldn't even find enough support to get on the ballot in 29 of the 48 states, and in some of the states where it did, it got no meaningful support at the polls. (In Missouri, for example, a state with a very spotty history on the civil rights front, a grand total of 42 people voted Dixiecrat.) Despite all their fulmination, the Dixiecrats won exactly four states: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and it was clear that even in much of the South the appeal of the hard-core segregationist view was beginning, ever so slightly, to wane.

Probably more than any other, the 1948 election was a referendum on the future of the Civil Rights movement -- if the Dixiecrats had drawn the support they expected to draw outside the South, the movement would have been politically dead, with politicians of any party being unlikely to touch any such legislation for decades to come. Instead, the organized civil rights groups of the day took it as a sign that the average American was in favor of what they were working for -- and that gave them the momentum for what was to come.

That being so, I'd submit that civil rights legislation was stalled largely by the way in which legislation makes its way thru Congress and the political strong-arming that's part of that system, rather than lack of significant mainstream public support. Had it not been for the realities of legislative politics, and the influence those realities gave to the old-school Southern pols of the day, I think it's safe to suggest that those laws would have passed quite a bit earlier than they did.

My point, in all this, is simply to emphasize that the advances on the Civil Rights front didn't just flare up out of nowhere in the sixties -- and they certainly weren't a *product* of the sixties. Instead, they were the culmination of continuous pressures that had been building for years, especially since the end of WW2. And it was, more than any other, the generation born between 1910 and 1930 that made those changes happen.

 

[docneg]

the advances on the Civil Rights front didn't just flare up out of nowhere in the sixties -- and they certainly weren't a *product* of the sixties. Instead, they were the culmination of continuous pressures that had been building for years, especially since the end of WW2. And it was, more than any other, the generation born between 1910 and 1930 that made those changes happen.

Very well said, and this statement needs more exposure!

It's all too easy to think of a particular point in time as being "the moment"--especially if one happened to be there. To me, it's a little like a corporation owning the patent and making millions from the invention of a nameless employee. We like to steal the glory of the previous generation because we are the ones who made it "hip", or whatever...

 

[Senator Jack]

Indeed, well-stated, Lizzie. The Josephine Baker incident at The Stork was in 1951 and it had many people boycotting the place. In fact, the incident sparked a series of strikes by its staff which led to the decline of The Stork.


Oh, and I'm glad everyone got a kick out of my Sammy Cahn inspired rhyming scheme. Maybe I should get back to song-writing again.