The slogan "Make America great again" doesn't specify exactly when America was great, but it's generally understood to be the 1950s. Today, some Americans are passing laws to make the country more like what they imagine those times were like.
Hmm. That's the decade that brought us tranquilizers. If everything was so great, why were people popping Miltown like candy? Why were folks so uptight?
You have to be well over 70 to actually remember this period, now mythologized as an era of peace and prosperity. What peace? The decade began with the Korean War (1950-1953); the Cold War was in full swing; the Vietnam War quietly began in 1959. People built backyard bomb shelters. Schoolkids practiced duck-and-cover. It was scary.
The U.S. and USSR had divided Korea into two occupation zones which turned into two sovereign states. North Korea was totalitarian communist; South Korea was authoritarian capitalist. Neither would give an inch. North Korea invaded the South, and the U.S. jumped in.
My husband's draft number never came up, but America lost 40,000 soldiers in the Korean War. Koreans paid an even heavier price, with more than 3 million fatalities and destruction of their cities from heavy bombing. Today, there is still no peace treaty, and North Korea has probably the most repressive government in the world. We don't brag on that war.
On the other hand, U.S. prosperity was real. Between 1945 and 1960, GDP more than doubled. It was "the Golden Age of American Capitalism." Ironically, much of this prosperity came from government spending: the interstate highway system (biggest public works project ever); GI benefits; military contracts. Strong unions ensured middle-class wages for working men, who could own a home in the suburbs and send their kids to college. The percentage of workers who were union members reached an all-time high of 35 percent.
A third of women were in the work force, earning 60 cents to a man's dollar, but the zeitgeist promoted homemaking. Goodbye, Rosie the Riveter! Women gave up college, married young, and had lots of babies. Betty Friedan said they were "buried in the suburbs." By 1960, 36 percent of the population was under 18. Teenagers became a big consumer market. But now we worried about juvenile delinquency.
Besides a baby boom, there was an oil boom. Production doubled in the '50s. Oil took us into Middle Eastern wars. A CIA-engineered coup in Iran continues to play out 70 years later.
Everybody smoked cigarettes, including on the movie screen. We were cool, like the Marlboro man. DDT trucks killed mosquitoes and who knows what else. UFOs were sighted worldwide. They occasionally kidnapped people--or so claimed the abductees.
The decade saw scientific breakthroughs: the genetic code, transistors, polio vaccine, the Pill. Our cultural creativity was on display with Elvis, Disneyland, and rock 'n' roll. The biggest new thing was television.
In 1954, the whole country was watching the McCarthy hearings on TV. Despite a lack of evidence, Sen. Joe McCarthy had accused the State Department, CIA, and finally the Army of being riddled with Communists, Now the public saw his unscrupulous methods exposed on television. The Senate censured him, and the witch hunts finally ended, after ruining thousands of lives.
For most of the decade our president was Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military hero and moderate Republican. Eisenhower emphasized godliness as the bulwark against Communist oppression. With the aid of officially sanctioned religiosity, church membership rose 6 percent. Eisenhower helpfully warned us about the military-industrial complex. He also proposed the Domino Theory, a bad idea that ultimately mired us in Indochina.
The far-right John Birch Society, founded by wealthy businessmen, called Eisenhower a Communist sympathizer. Birchers also opposed the UN, the civil rights movement, and water fluoridation. They're making a comeback today.
The '50s weren't Shangri-La for everybody. Black vets had come back from war to the same old, same old at home. Boycotts followed Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began to lead demonstrations. Malcolm X appealed to the militants.
The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ended the "separate but equal" doctrine (it had been more separate than equal). One result was "white flight" and segregated private schools. In 1957 the Civil Rights Act, protecting voting rights, was the first of its kind since Reconstruction. The same year, Eisenhower sent the National Guard to escort the Little Rock Nine to school.
Meanwhile, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover continued to abuse his power, building secret files through surveillance and wiretaps, with the potential to blackmail politicians into doing his bidding.
If I had a favorite decade, it would not be the '50s. It's a good thing we can't actually repeat history. Once was enough.
Coralie Koonce is a writer living in Fayetteville, and the author of "Twelve Dispositions: A Field Guide to Humans."