2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Fifties were a better time. We need to return to a better Democratic Party. [View all]raging moderate
(4,304 posts)A few people had trust funds, or money in the extended family which they could tap into, but most people did not have it so good. Not even all white people. And it was horrible what happened to various people of color. I think what was good about the fifties was the enlightenment that was starting to happen, with white men like Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Rockefeller talking respectfully about the needs of all people and the responsibility of rich people to take care of the society from which they had derived their wealth. During the Depression, there had been movies made by Cuckor and others, showing Black people as the real human beings they are, not just the slanderous caricatures of earlier movies. I think the Nazis had demonstrated how horrible a society could get in which it was okay to trashcan whole bunches of people while deifying whole other bunches of people. I think a lot of goodhearted intelligent white men felt a little ashamed of the selfish basis of their own prosperity and the slander they had heaped on many groups of people and newly aware of how much they owed their fellow human beings. Black writers like James Baldwin and WEB DuBois gained more listeners, and then of course people like Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King gained more respect. More white people realized that these guys were right about a lot of things, and things started to change. Some of the successful corporations began to give Black people a chance to show what they could do, to use their power to encourage social progress. That is what was good about the fifties, especially the late fifties. There was a sense of hope, a belief that things could get better for everybody, and that even the advantages the little clique of successful white men had might eventually seem petty compared to the splendor we could achieve if we all worked together.