What the 1950s Were Like in the United States.

Posted by John Engelman

The decade of the 1950’s was the golden era for the white working class. White blue collar workers benefited from the economic reforms of the New Deal two decades earlier, and from the fact that the Second World War destroyed the factories of our trade rivals while leaving ours intact. This meant that American manufacturers enjoyed a buyers’ market for natural resources and a sellers’ market for what they produced. Nevertheless, they had a shortage of employees because the Immigration Reform Act of 1924 restricted the number of immigrants who could apply for work, and the birth rate during the Great Depression had been low.
     

Employers could afford to be generous with benefits and wages and they needed to be to attract and keep employees. One third of the work force belonged to labor unions. Because the top tax rate rarely dipped below 91%, taxes were low for working class Americans. During the 1950’s a white man with nothing more than a high school degree could buy a house in the suburbs and a car. He could support a wife who did not need to work and several children.
     

When Vice President Nixon had his Kitchen Debate with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, it was in a realistic replica of the home an American factory worker could afford to own.

The illegitimacy rate was six percent. Two thirds of marriages lasted. Most black children and the vast majority of white children were raised to adulthood by both biological parents living together in matrimony. Children so raised tend to have many fewer problems in life than children who grow up in other situations. 
   

The crime rate was low. Most Americans attended church or synagogue every week. I was a child back then. It was a good time to be a child.
   

Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America great again,” resonates with Trump’s white blue collar supporters because they are nostalgic for the economic situation of the 1950’s. Since 1979 the religious right has tried to restore the moral ethos of the 1950’s.