Which cultural memory is more responsible for the romanticization of the ’50s: patriarchal authority, or knowing your neighbors? Are people more nostalgic for “an era when white Christians in particular had more political and cultural power,” as one pollster put it, or an era when kids rode bikes until sunset and you could put groceries on a tab at the store?
For many Americans, it’s hard to tease them apart. Conservatives contend that the relationship is causal: the social hierarchies of the ’50s were natural and abiding by them made society more stable, while dispensing with them has made things go topsy-turvy. Our culture lacks a convincing alternative account of mid-century social cohesion, one that decouples it from the common chauvinistic race and gender attitudes of the day. As people search for answers to mounting social problems, we’ve begun to see startling phenomena like a sharp rise in agitation for gender-role orthodoxy, like the recent spike in public opinion that women should return to their traditional roles in society.
There’s a different explanation for why society may have felt friendlier, more trusting, and more social. The mid-century decades, often known as the “Great Compression,” boasted the lowest income inequality, the highest unionization rate, the highest real wages, the most strike activity, the highest progressive taxation, the most industry regulation, and the most public investment in American history. Improved wages and services allowed millions of workers to achieve a measure of security that had eluded previous generations, reducing competition for resources. And workers’ individual economic prospects increased relative to the nation’s overall prosperity, imbuing society with a sense of common purpose. These dynamics were responsible for a more cohesive society, not the dominant conservative cultural values of the era.
This story is all but untold. When Americans were asked this year which decade saw the greatest share of worker power vis-à-vis employers, they drew a complete blank. No particular decade or period stood out. Americans don’t know that the time many of them remember fondly as an era of security, abundance, and family and community bonds was the high-water mark of worker power and economic equality. In that vacuum, strictly cultural explanations for social decline are increasingly popular — threatening to drag us back to the social dark ages without resupplying the economic prosperity and mutual trust we’ve lost.