Nostalgic for the 1950s: Yearning for a Nonexistent Past


For a little more than three years I worked diligently at an eatery called “The Chocolate Factory: Old Fashioned Subs and Ice Cream Parlor.” Every day I was greeted by vintage metal signs from the 1950s advertising Coca-Cola and Camel Cigarettes. The theme of the restaurant vaguely reflects the old fashioned nostalgic feel of malt shops and soda fountains. Nostalgia, as defined by the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past.” Nostalgia, specifically for the 1950s, surrounds us in our world today whether we see it on film, television, or as household decorations. Films like Pleasantville, reruns of Leave It to Beaver, switch plates that advertise an ice-cold glass bottle of Coca-Cola for 15¢, and drinking glasses with vintage-looking labels that proclaim “Cream Fizz Soda: Old Time Goodness;” all of these things embody the same yearning and desire for an idealized society now fifty-some years past. But what exactly is this “Old Time Goodness” that is conveyed through new “vintage” signs and decorations popping up in craft and retail stores? Was there ever a time when any problem could be solved with a trip to the local drive-in for a hamburger and a Coke? The truth is that we, as Americans, are nostalgic for a past that never really existed.

Nostalgia is evident through many different mediums in our culture; but why exactly are we nostalgic for a past that existed only in television shows, films and fiction? What makes us yearn for that seemingly blissful golden age of the past? Bill Bryson, author of the recent debut book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, shares his insight on these very questions: “No wonder people were happy. Suddenly they were able to have things they had never dreamed of having, and they couldn’t believe their luck. There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire” (6). When a nation goes from a regulated lifestyle during wartime in World War II to the ability to splurge endlessly with the cessation of the war, the mood is bound to be generally amiable. After toiling through the war-rationing time during the Second World War, American citizens, tired of sacrificing staple everyday items which included certain foods, went on a spending spree (Bryson, 5-6). This was the age in which consumerism went through the roof—we would never again return to the simplistic way of living before the 1950s. This age brought about our deepest desire for retail goods and for the perfect family as shown on frequent magazine covers.

Our nostalgia for the 1950s initially grew from a nostalgic craze in the early seventies where most of the “TV Land” reruns of today are shown. In the book God’s Country: America in the Fifties, author J. Ronald Oakley gives the seventies craze a closer examination. “As Americans entered the 1970s, they began to look back on the 1950s through nostalgic eyes. By then, the Eisenhower era appeared not as a bland and sterile age, but as a simple, happy time before the deluge of the sixties” (428). The stark contrast of the sixties turned out to be too much for the nation to handle so it reverted to a time that it felt was safer—which just happened to be the fifties. Oakley goes on to say that: “The nostalgia was, indeed, a natural yearning after the troubled sixties to return to a happier, simpler time, especially for the young, who had grown up in an age that robbed them of a carefree, optimistic youth” (429). Compared to the free love, flower power hippies of the sixties, the fifties, in contrast, was a complacent era of bobby socks and malt shops. It was an era in which people did as their government and magazines told them to do, where people were friendly and polite all the time, and children were perfect angels. What am I saying? That was nothing like the fifties; it’s the idealized image we conceive in our minds that tends to erase the bad things that occurred and exaggerate the good.

In the book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz analyzes how and why we tend to idealize things such as periods in history, events, and people. Coontz uses an excellent, yet simple, example demonstrating how everyone is inclined to idealize the past:
When schoolchildren return from vacation and are asked to list the good things and the bad things about their summer, their lists tend to be equally long. Over the year, however, if the exercise is repeated, the good list grows longer and the bad shorter until by the end of the year the children are describing not actual vacations but idealized images of vacation. (1)
Looking back on my own experiences with vacations, I agree completely with Coontz’s assessment. I remember many happy childhood memories of family vacations, but the images are few and far between. It is almost like I’ve subconsciously picked out the bad parts and pieced the good memories together. Perhaps it is just the way the mind works: to eventually soothe and remove painful or unpleasant events of the past and substitute them with inflated happy memories. When dealing with nostalgia, then, we Americans tend to block out the bad things that happened in the fifties and idealize the good. We need a “Golden Age” to look back on and wistfully dream about. Our present age is not at all what the idealized fifties embodied; our world today is scarier, more threatening, stressful and unstable. Romanticizing the fifties puts us into a familiar comfort zone and into a world of safety, security, and manners.

Not all of our romanticized visions of the fifties are that far-fetched. Bryson comments, “Happily, we were indestructible…we didn’t require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes…” (69). The safety laws back then were pretty lax or even nonexistent; maybe this was on account of there being a lack of stupid people for whom cautionary warnings are now blasted on every product’s label. Perhaps we live in an age where McDonalds has to clearly print all over their Styrofoam coffee cups “Warning! Contents May Be Hot!” because of our greed for money. The old woman who burned herself on that unlabeled cup of hot coffee sued McDonalds for not telling her that coffee is hot and when it hits your skin, you will burn. The one thing I’m the most nostalgic for is a collective common sense.

Besides common sense and the apparent indestructibleness of the average fifties man and woman, the 1950s ideal is something to marvel at. For a more modern version of what the romanticized dream of the 1950s embodied, I turn to the 1998 film Pleasantville. The main story for this film is of two teenagers who live in a dysfunctional family in the nineties and are magically transported into a fictional television show titled “Pleasantville” which is a perfect example of the idealized image of the fifties we have today. As Bud and Mary-Sue go through the motions of living in this fictional world, the director makes sure the audience notices the changes from the present world to this idealized version of the 1950s. For example, Betty, the mother in the “Pleasantville” television show, is always dressed to impress, complete with high heels, a pearl necklace and a cocktail dress. She attends to her husband’s every need, and cooks large, cholesterol-filled meals without dirtying an inch of the kitchen or fattening her family. The teenagers, as Bud and Mary-Sue discover, are just as idealized: every student brings an apple for the teacher, everyone respects everyone else, there are no fights, and the basketball team is undefeated. Girls wear sweaters, blouses and poodle skirts; boys wear pleated pants, collared shirts and sweaters. Pleasantville the film is an excellent example of a visual image of our distorted representation of the 1950s.

Not everyone’s vision of the idealized 1950s coincides with Pleasantville. Some of us draw from different media sources and oftentimes their own (idealized) memories, as Bill Bryson notes: “I don’t know how they managed it, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner? The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier…according to advertising” (69). It’s true, advertisers campaigned that cigarettes weren’t bad for consumers, and later they claimed that the filter blocks chemicals from the throat. This was an age where ignorance was bliss. It was an age in which the phrase “Eat, drink and be merry” reigned and hedonism prevailed. People were encouraged to “live it up”, to buy more, spend more, and consume more.

Most families in the fifties were funded only by the male breadwinner; however, it was the wife that bought food, clothes, appliances, and toys for her family. In the book The Feminine Mystique, author Betty Friedan writes about the ideal female of the 1950s: “Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands” (18). Women had stacks of magazines and papers to choose from in guiding their way of life. Later in the decade, their models were June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson. Friedan notes: “The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world” (18). The image that the magazines urged women to be is what we envision today as being the typical wife/mother image. Not only were women subjected to models of perfection, but men too (though their model wasn’t as maddening as a woman’s). Robert Bly, in the celebrated book Iron John: A Book About Men, describes the 1950s ideal for men: “The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide” (2). These two figures shaped our consciousness of the role of mother and father in the 1950s through mediums such as television and film. Many of our present idealized images of the fifties are collective memories from the media of the perfect family, the perfect house, and the perfect community. In the book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, Bill Bryson searches America for that perfect town but never actually finds one that is completely perfect: “It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place” (39). But that is the allure of nostalgia: we dream of something that isn’t tangible, a place where we can never go besides inside our imaginations. The sad truth is that some people would rather not face the fact that there is no perfect town and there never will be. The closest we can come to achieving perfection is through films like Pleasantville; however, even in the film perfection is viewed as stagnant and boring and the fight against it wins in the end.

The struggle to separate the real from the fake 1950s gets harder and harder as time passes. Coontz notes: “Like most visions of a ‘golden age,’ the ‘traditional family’ my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place” (9). If we want to preserve and remember our history for what it actually was, then we should rely on history textbooks to teach us, not the media sources such as film and television. However, if we want to continue to idealize the past and not be troubled by the horrors of history, we can turn off our brains and watch more television shows and movies from the fifties that idealize the era.

The 1950s was anything but a chipper “gee golly gosh” period in time. There was the Cold War, Communism, the arms race, the space race, the civil rights movement, the Korean War, and the beginning of the Vietnam War. Bryson jokes: “Only one thing came close to matching the fear of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism” (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 128). The Red Scare, ignited by Senator Joseph McCarthy, spread across the nation like wildfire. Pamphlets were handed out describing what behavior to look for in neighbors who might be Communists. There were laws that sent people to prison, barred people from entering the country, and even deported people on the suspicion that they were involved with Communism. Eisenhower, the president during which the Commie Scare took place, is often criticized for his leadership. Bly points out: “Under this good but naïve and incompetent president, the nation drifted along with a calm surface but with problems boiling underneath that would later surface to plague future presidents” (427). Not everything was the fault of the president or even government for that matter; some things were too celebrated and revered like the idea of the perfect male and female.

Now that the nostalgic idea of the fifties man and woman has been completely addressed the truth behind both figures should be exposed. The archetype of mother and father was a hard role to fill; the television shows of the era such as Leave It to Beaver does not show modern audiences the adversity involved with the roles. Let’s look at the male model first; Bly notes: “He [the fifties father] got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children, and admired discipline…This sort of man didn’t see women’s souls well, but he appreciated their bodies…Unless he has an enemy, he isn’t sure that he is alive” (1). Like the fictional town of “Pleasantville” and the town’s occupants, a man’s life was dull in that there was no real change. The man of the fifties was thrown into the mold of what the perfect husband and father should be. The problem with this is that if the whole country has the same exact mold everyone ends up being the same—we’d be a nation of robots. Bly also writes: “The Fifties male had a clear vision of what a man was, and what male responsibilities were, but the isolation and one-sidedness of his vision were dangerous” (2). Men in the fifties were trapped in a form that didn’t suit most of them. It wasn’t just the men who had a hard time fitting into the cast of society; the repercussions for women were sometimes even worse.

Women of the 1950s had problems similar to the problems women have today and yet the only thing they could do about their personal problems was to ignore it or hide behind a fake smile. Even if a woman confided to someone about her problems they were usually written off as something trivial and inconsequential. Coontz puts it best: “The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it” (9). Women’s problems were not topics of discussion back in the fifties; seeing a therapist was unnerving enough. Not only were women expected to play the perfect wife and perfect mother role, but also to embody the traits that went with them. Friedan writes: “…across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called metrical, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models” (17). The enormous pressure that these women were put under in some ways reflects the continual pressure of women today to be perfect and mirror super-beautiful celebrities. Women then were just as affected by the pressures and standards of society as they are now except now there is more help offered to us in forms of drugs, doctors, and counseling groups. Unfortunately the media is still applying the pressure to the problem, and we’ve only increased the ways in which to suppress the pressure. And, like in the fifties, the media is also responsible for creating the standard for both women and men.

The media can be both good and bad; more often than not, we think of it as good. From the media we get magazines, television, advertising, film, and radio. Media is the biggest driving force behind our nostalgia for a past that never was. Bryson recalls from his childhood specific movies shown in the fifties that stuck with him for particular reasons: “The one constant in these pictures was the background. It was always the same place, a trim and sunny little city with a tree-lined main street full of friendly merchants…and a courthouse square, and wooded neighborhoods where fine houses slumbered beneath graceful arms” (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 37). Bryson’s note does indeed demonstrate how we’ve allowed films to skew our visions of the past. Sure, there might have been hundreds of small towns with tree-lined streets, but they probably weren’t the embodiment of the nostalgic 1950s ideal community as we tend to think of today. Apart from older films there has been a more recent trend in making movies to promote nostalgia in our culture. Like Oakley discussed in his book, the seventies was a time when people were trying to go back to the simpler time of the fifties on account of the sixties being too progressive and serious. During this period, several movies came out that encouraged people to reminisce about the simplicity and perfection of the fifties. The most prominent film released for nostalgic viewers was Grease. Both the Broadway musical and the Hollywood film debuted in the seventies. The concept for both the musical and film thrives in the nostalgic ideals we’ve created.

Moving out of the seventies and into the more recent past of the nineties come two major films, the first one being The Sandlot. The concept of the film is pretty simplistic: it’s set in the fifties, and it’s about a group of boys who play baseball during their summer vacation. The main nostalgic concept of the film derives from the idealized image we have of summer. Growing up in the late eighties and early nineties, I still connected with this movie because I remember playing outside all day with neighbor friends and siblings. I remember what it was like to stay out till our mothers called us from the porch steps to come in for the night. I remember playing countless games of baseball and basketball and breathing that good fresh air. I’m of course idealizing all my summers because they weren’t always that good. But the point is that the movie made me (and probably a lot of other people) nostalgic for my childhood. Wrapping up the end of the decade of the nineties was the film Pleasantville. The film opens with a teenage-ridden society where kids smoke and drink way before they’re of the legal age. They act out, get in fights, swear and have premarital relations. The director contrasts the fifties nuclear family from the fictional show “Pleasantville” with the divorced and dysfunctional family of the nineties. Put these two images up against each other and which one will win the favor of the audience? Of course the fifties fictional family will prevail; our yearning for those good old days includes the presence of the perfect “Pleasantville” or a Leave It to Beaver family.

Not only do we idealize the 1950s from the films Hollywood churns out, but the original television shows of the fifties are still being rerun today. What makes the idealization even easier is the addition of television to DVD format so that we may rent all the old nostalgic shows from companies such as Netflicks. Some of the original shows include Leave It to Beaver and I Love Lucy; of course there were many more but these were two of the big ones. These shows (both available on Netflix) are the perfect examples of what we draw from when we fantasize about the 1950s. Leave It to Beaver is the most prominent with the traditional family and the “Honey, I’m home!” dialogue. Coontz notes: “Our most prominent visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms” (23). The sitcom of the fifties really was the starting ground for our present romanticized image of the era. Coontz goes on to discuss the actual behind the fictional in relation to television: “The reality of these families was far more painful and complex than the situation-comedy reruns or the expurgated memories of the nostalgic would suggest. Contrary to popular opinion, ‘Leave It to Beaver’ was not a documentary” (29). We tend to see television as real or something very close to it and over time as we distance ourselves from the era that we’re fantasizing about, the difference between what really was and what wasn’t gets harder and harder to identify.

As in the evolution of the nostalgic films from the fifties to the seventies, so it is with television. The trend with Grease didn’t stop with theaters—it branched out and found its way into millions of homes via television. Among the most popular sitcoms of the seventies both Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley flourished. Even the title, “Happy Days,” has a tendency to promote a nostalgic feel even before the viewer sees an episode. Essentially, Happy Days was Grease but for television. The nostalgic shows of the seventies were also created in part with the intention of going back to that golden age of the twentieth century where everything could be solved with an ice-cold glass of Coca-Cola and a cheeseburger at the local diner.

Nostalgia has come a long way since its early beginnings in the seventies. Oakley concludes: “Like the nostalgia for most periods, the nostalgia for the fifties was highly selective, emphasizing the best times and overlooking the bad ones” (434). We idealize our past to create good memories, comforting memories, not memories that will haunt us forever. We look upon the past for something that we have idealized into something beautiful, simple and easy. Oakley continues: “As so often happens after periods of change and strife, people sought escape from the present by turning back to a golden age, yearning for a time they never had, or, for the older generation, for a time they once had had, but now had lost” (429). Nostalgia is not a bad thing; it gives us something to fantasize about. Nostalgia is not a good thing either because we tend to idealize too much and forget other important events that happened and the fact that people were not entirely happy with their media-created roles. As we continue in years and decades away from the fifties, our culture separates itself further and further, and we’ve reached the point where there is never any hope of going back. Our nostalgic images will become more contrived and false, but we will not give them up. Nostalgia is in our blood; eventually we will have to choose whether to face the truth and get out of our romanticized reverie or we will be forever stuck, yearning for a past that never existed.