Why the 1920s-1940s?

[ChiTownScion]

I think it started with my dad. He was born in 1924 and was a man of the '30s and '40s more than anything else. The Depression and WWII defined him, his value system, his approach to life. Growing up on the late '60s / '70s, I lived in two worlds - the cultural mishmash of the "outside" world and the very clear moral / ethical (I didn't say always right, but clear) world inside our house of the '30s / '40s. As a kid, I knew these two worlds were very different and parts of both appealed to me, but I also knew that most kids weren't experiencing this dichotomy.

The irony is that our dads were both born in the same year. My dad died in his 80th year, ironically from an on the job injury he suffered 5 days before his passing. He worked to the very end: it was how he was wired.

Aside from his work ethic, it's ironic but my dad actually hated it when I would wax too longingly for the "good old days" that I'd never seen. And he'd tell me that I was crazy to fixate on the past as if it were some long lost golden Eldorado. If, for example, I spoke about the great old trains that ran, he'd remind me that most of those trains were sooty, time worn, and that the open platform on the end that I thought was so cool was usually occupied by obnoxious drunks. I'd tell him about the Hiawatha clocking 112 miles per hour on its regular schedule to Milwaukee, and he'd remind me that most trains ran late and the conductors were crabby old bastards who hated the passengers.

I was constantly told that things are better when I was growing up than "the good old days" of his youth. I had a roof over my head, decent clothes, I ate well, and was sent to decent schools. His "golden era" consisted of an alcoholic father who abandoned him at an orphanage at age three after his mother died, arbitrary beatings, and hunger. If I spoke of being able to see a movie for a dime, he'd tell me that a dime was as good as ten dollars if you didn't have one. If Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby came on the radio he'd gripe about "those old guys who should step aside and give a younger kid a chance." In short: no rosy past for him. "These are the good old days," he'd tell me.


And I have to say that in some ways he was right: I have led a much more fulfilling and rewarding life than any of my grandparents lived. I've seen parts of the world that they could only read about in a National Geographic, and enjoyed better food, better drink, a nicer home, etc., than they could even imagine. My grandmother lived to watch me receive my law degree and be sworn in as a member of the bar: she was the only one in her family to even get a high school diploma.

As far as their having at one time facing adversity and "fighting the bosses?" Most of my mother's family were outspoken New Deal Democrats and big supporters of organized labor, and as much as they took pride in the advances in workers rights in which they played a small part, not a one of them would ever want to fight those battles on the picket lines again. Buying a small tract house in a Levitttown type suburb was a hard won stability for them: I don't see it as selling out at all. Compared to what they grew up with, it was a vast improvement.

That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate my Art Fawcett fedoras, or my pin stripe suits, or even my A-2 flight jacket. There's a lot to be said for the clothes, the music, the entertainment back then. It was a culturally rich time, and it left a legacy that I very much love. I can laugh at recordings of the old Jack Benny program, but I have to be honest: I really do not want to go back to living in a one bedroom apartment with three other people like so many of my relatives did when they first listened to Rochester, Frank Nelson, and Phil Harris. We have the good fortune to be able to enjoy the good parts of the past and not suffer its destructive and even fatal downsides: methinks that's something that would make the vast majority back in the Era quite envious of us.

 

[Harp]

That said, though, there were some good things in the sixties. "Green Acres" was a work of demented genius...

Eva Gabor

 

[LizzieMaine]

Eva Gabor

"I can shpeak Hungarian and do imitations of Zsa Zsa Gabor!"

There are, of course, many Era connections to "Green Acres." Aside from the fact that it's loosely derived from a failed radio sitcom, its head writer, Dick Chevillait, was one of the geniuses behind "The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show," perhaps the most cutting-edge radio comedy of its time.

 

[tonyb]

...

I was constantly told that things are better when I was growing up than "the good old days" of his youth. I had a roof over my head, decent clothes, I ate well, and was sent to decent schools. ... "These are the good old days," he'd tell me. ...

My father died at age 27 when I, the youngest of three brothers, was four months old. My 21-year-old widowed mother met another fellow a few months later and married him.

My "dad," who died last month, was in no way prepared -- financially, emotionally, developmentally -- for the responsibilities he had assumed in marrying that young woman with the three babies. He philandered, he squandered, he was given to violence and recklessness. The two of them -- Mom and Wally -- separated numerous times, and her dad, my grandfather, played an outsized role in my upbringing. I lived in his house during some of my elementary school years. We went fishing on Sunday mornings. He saw to it I was fed and clothed and did my schoolwork. It wasn't a Norman Rockwell painting, but it was safe and solid and decent. And that was mostly his doing.

I don't recall many in-depth conversations with my grandfather about life back in the good old days, but I can remember him scoffing at people romanticizing the world he came of age in. I don't recall him ever uttering the phrase "these are the good old days," but I often do, and I'm confident he would agree.

He became a grandfather at age 36, when the first-born of my generation, my cousin Linda, came along. (She passed on a couple-three years ago. Cancer did it.) Like many people of his time and station, he got an eighth-grade education. My mom's generation went through high school, mine through college, and the one following us through graduate and professional school. We've effectively pushed the "age of having to take care of yourself" from 14 or so to nearly 30.

You can say this for those who came up in the early part of the last century: They made a better world for us. They did that for themselves as well, of course, and they were fortunate to have lived through a time of great economic growth in a country with elbow room and vast natural resources and opportunity. I doubt they ever took that for granted, though.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What I mostly heard were regrets, rather than reflections. My grandmother often grumbled about having had to give up her plan to become a nurse because she'd gotten married instead -- I later figured out she'd *had* to get married, which much explained her bitterness on that point. My grandfather regretted getting himself punched in the mouth in a fight, thus ruining his lip and forcing him to give up the trumpet. Both of them regretted ever touching their first cigarette.

But there was no sense from either of them that the "old days" or the "present days" were any better or worse than each other. Life was simple in their view -- you got up, you worked, you ate your supper, and you went to bed. The routine of their lives in 1980 was unchanged from their lives in 1945, as was the case with most of the people in our neighborhood. They lived in the same house, cooked on the same stove, dealt with the same neighbors, and did the same work as long as they were physically able to do so.

They had no sense of rosy remembrance of the past, other than the usual "remember when we went out to the lake that summer and Edie got hold of some beer and fell off the dam" type of stuff. Nor did they think there was anything particularly rosy about their life in the then-present -- they were old and tired and sick and in debt, which didn't seem like much of an improvement. When they talked about the poverty they'd experienced as a young married couple during the Depression, it was neither in a sense of "ah, we were poor but proud," nor "thank God those days are over," because everyone they'd known had been in the same boat. It was a common experience for their generation, not a moral lesson, and there was no point in talking about it, because everybody knew what it had been like. If they mentioned it at all, it'd be in the sense of "hey, don't waste that, don't throw that away, you never know who might get some use out of it."

Growing up we were always aware of the Depression as something that had happened -- it was the defining experience of their lives and it shaped their personalities for as long as they lived -- but there was also a sense from the way they acted and things they did that we shouldn't get any too comfortable ourselves, because it'll probably happen again.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

I guess I'm a little off from the majority, I guess. While, I love the 20's through the 40's, my favorite point in history is 1946-1964. America was great, we were prosperous. TV was good, radio was good, society was still decent and moral. I wish I could live then, perpetually lol

 

[Stearmen]

We've had this discussion around here before, but the WW2 generation was far from uniform in being stereotypical "out behind the woodshed with you" beating-the-snot-out-of-kids-for-talkng-back" parents. The 1950s were very much an era in which "progressive parenting" was popular, with the whole "make a pal of your kids" philosophy coming into vogue then. There are those here who didn't have that experience, but that doesn't mean it wasn't extremely common, especially in upscale suburbs. Benjamin Spock's theories were very widely followed by families in all walks of life, with the WW2 Generation his most earnest disciples, "progressive" private elementary schools were popular among those who could afford them, and starting in the early sixties, Montessori education was a widespread American trend. The women's magazines of the fifties well document the back-and-forth debate over the "woodshed" mode of childrearing versus the "progressive" mode.

The WW2 Generation, when they were running the country, also gave us motivational research, planned obsolescence, and The Eighties, about which the less said the better.

I still don't get were you got the idea that we were all raised by Benjamin Spock? I can assure you, non of his books were in any of the neighborhoods I lived in during the 50s-70s. Working class families had better things to spend their money on. When I first heard of Spock's writings in the 60s on TV, I remember thinking, that pointy ear guy?

 

[Stearmen]

I like the style of the 30's to 40's, because this was real "style" to me.

But, to me, greatest moments of music are in the beginning until mid-60's, I think.

The Kinks - All day and all of the night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4DV-5d6a5g :rockon:

The cascades - rhythm of the rain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQstQST1GiM

I agree! Just as Motown and other American song makers were hitting their stride, the British Invasion came along. Here, is one of my favorite songs from the end of that era. It is so much better then the Moody Blues version that came out at the same time! [video=youtube;GPhNsGaaS4M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPhNsGaaS4M[/video]

 

[ChiTownScion]

I guess I'm a little off from the majority, I guess. While, I love the 20's through the 40's, my favorite point in history is 1946-1964. America was great, we were prosperous. TV was good, radio was good, society was still decent and moral. I wish I could live then, perpetually lol

It was an eighteen year stretch where we in the US were certainly on top of the world in terms of prosperity- although I can remember at the age of four (1958) living in fear of the Soviets- at least until the next broadcast of Captain Kangaroo came on. I do remember following the Cuban Missile Crisis as an 8 year old kid- and being quite frightened that nuclear war could break out at any moment. The Berlin Wall had been erected the previous year and tensions were quite high.

Not so sure that society was all that much more "decent or moral." Organized religion certainly had a greater control over the lives of a greater percentage of the American population, and whether that is a good or bad thing is open to debate. Questioning the major premises of organized religion certainly was less fashionable in the 1950's than it was in either the 1930's or the 1960's from all that I've read.

Clearly, however, 1964 was a turning point. If any optimism remained after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the escalation of the Vietnam War destroyed it.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

my favorite point in history is 1946-1964. America was great, we were prosperous.

We ??? .......yeah, America was great, if you were white & had a decent salary but it was even better if you were white & rich.

society was still decent and moral. l

That's debatable but I guess it all depends on one's definition of decency & morals.

 

[nick123]

Aesthetics for me. And everything just seemed to have substance. I always mention how much I prefer the obviously fake, but hand built movie props (take a plane cockpit scene in a WWII film for instance) to anything made on a computer today, realistic looking as it does. My brain is simply hard-wired to gel with those years. Modernity gives me a migraine, almost literally (with exceptions).

 

[CONELRAD]

The period I'm most fixated on lies around 1920 to 1950, and I admire different aspects of each period. Among other things, I admire the prosperity and good times of the 1920s, the spirit and perseverance through hard times in the 1930s, the return of prosperity in the postwar era, and many other things that I can't seem to put into words. There's not any specific event or occurrence that draws me to the era, trying to identify any would just be tedious and unnecessary, it's the very difficult to describe spirit of the times and overall feeling that those eras have to me that I find appealing.

I must admit that a very large part of it is attraction to the aesthetics, style, music, and so on, but that's not all there is to it. There are so many reasons that I couldn't even begin to make a list, and many of them I, once again, can't seem to find words for, but somehow, it seems to me to have been in many ways a better time than the present day. For one, just about everything seemed to be held to a higher standard of quality then, from mass produced goods to the way people composed themselves on a daily basis. Of course, it would be extremely naive to claim that everything was better then, but I feel certain that some, perhaps many things were.

Perhaps it's crazy, but I have always had a passionate love for history and these sorts of things, ever since I was a small child. I can't remember what sparked this interest, but all throughout my life I've built upon it. A few years ago, I focused more on the post-WWII era, but these days I've drifted back into the late 20s/early 30s. The more I've discovered, the more I found I preferred the earlier periods.

 

[CONELRAD]

We ??? .......yeah, America was great, if you were white & had a decent salary but it was even better if you were white & rich.

Are things so different today?

 

[Fading Fast]

...Growing up we were always aware of the Depression as something that had happened -- it was the defining experience of their lives and it shaped their personalities for as long as they lived -- but there was also a sense from the way they acted and things they did that we shouldn't get any too comfortable ourselves, because it'll probably happen again.

This was the atmosphere in my house - the Depression defined my Dad and everything was measured against that. You have food - you're lucky; clothes - lucky; a roof over your head - lucky; a job - lucky; medical care - insanely lucky. You're complaining - see prior list.

And yes, there was always a fear that IT was coming back. To this day, I can't shake it - I thought the 2007/8 economic events might have been it (and maybe will be, only delayed). It was so drilled into me that having a job was something to be treasured that I was walked on by bosses and managers for years until I figured out that my dad's advice was not applicable to the world I was living in.

I don't think a day goes by that I don't worry about the Depression returning - how could I, I lived with that as the dominant narrative of the first 17 years of my life. And I don't blame my dad one bit - his life at the age of 8 was blown up by the depression (and the death of his dad - maybe from the stress). They lost their house, moved into a tenement, nearly lost their small business and worried about food, clothes, shelter when, before that, those things all seemed secure at least to him as a young boy.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Are things so different today?

Yep, we have much better poverty & racism today..

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was similar but a bit different in my family -- my grandparents were young adults when the Depression hit, and neither of them had ever really known security. My grandfather was the third of eight kids in a family that had always scratched out a living. My grandmother was the daughter of a woman who'd had to get married at seventeen, and then six years later threw out her alcoholic husband and went to work in a shoe factory.

So they both grew up expecting to have to struggle as a matter of course-- but when the Depression came along they realized that the system was stacked against them: no matter how hard they worked, something completely beyond their control could knock them on their backsides and drop them right back to where they'd started. They took away from the experience an abiding hatred for banks and a lifelong compassion for the suffering of anyone who was victimized by forces beyond their control. Growing up I was not unmarked by these attitudes.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I still don't get were you got the idea that we were all raised by Benjamin Spock? I can assure you, non of his books were in any of the neighborhoods I lived in during the 50s-70s. Working class families had better things to spend their money on. When I first heard of Spock's writings in the 60s on TV, I remember thinking, that pointy ear guy?

I don't see any point where I said "all," I said his writings were extremely popular and he had followers in every level of society. We were working-class people to our core, but my mother had and read his book -- which was available for half a dollar on any drugstore spinner rack -- and his theories went far beyond just the pages of that book. Spock was everywhere in the fifties and sixties -- in the women's magazines, newspapers, being interviewed on TV and radio, and the influence of his teachings spread far and wide. He was a definitive figure of the postwar era, and his influence on the postwar generation as a demographic group was profound.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Not so sure that society was all that much more "decent or moral." Organized religion certainly had a greater control over the lives of a greater percentage of the American population, and whether that is a good or bad thing is open to debate. Questioning the major premises of organized religion certainly was less fashionable in the 1950's than it was in either the 1930's or the 1960's from all that I've read.

There's quite a bit of evidence that the explosion of "public religion" in the United States during the postwar era had more to do with the greater glory of the Boys than the greater glory of God. The National Association of Manufacturers promoted an elaborate "Religion In American Life" publicity campaign designed to promote the idea that unrestrained capitalism and Christianity were two sides of the same coin, and to undermine the lingering effects of the New Deal, and a number of leading public clergymen of the period -- notably Billy Graham -- fully colluded in this effort. Historian Kevin Kruse fully documents all this in his recent book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America."

 

[LizzieMaine]

My brain is simply hard-wired to gel with those years. Modernity gives me a migraine, almost literally (with exceptions).

Interesting you should put it that way. One of my own migraine triggers is modern -- as in rock-era -- music. I have a visceral reaction to it and go to great lengths to avoid hearing it because an actual throbbing-pain-and-projectile-vomiting migraine will often be the result if I'm exposed to it for too long. I can tolerate sixties folk-type music, but anything with a loud electric guitar or an emphatic bass line literally makes me sick. When we have concerts or movies at work featuring this type of music I shut off the monitor or close the doors so I can't hear it, and tune in something on the radio in my office to block it out.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, we have much better poverty & racism today..

We blame the poverty on the moral failings of the poor -- and we veil the racism behind "dog whistle" phrases. So yeah, "better." Especially if you're white and rich.