My 1950s

My friend Anita Abbott and I, both in our early nineties, were reminiscing about the Old Days. ‘The fifties,’ she suddenly said with total conviction, ‘was the best decade of my life.’ I was startled. ‘What about the treatment of Blacks’, I asked. Or of gays, the fifties being, as I recall it, a horribly homophobic decade, when those even faintly suspect of being gay couldn’t get job clearances. ‘But most people were much happier then’, she insisted. ‘And we had so much fun.’

Perhaps hers was just a reaction to having been young and hence happier in her twenties. But I must confess I feel the same way. For me, the 1950s was somehow a golden age. Why? In The Vienna Paradox (2004), I wrote about my childhood years, first in Vienna and then as a refugee from Hitler in the United States. The paradox of the book’s title refers to the contradiction between Viennese high culture – Bildung – as a form of religion versus the democracy of the United States, which functioned as a kind of alternative to it. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when I wrote The Vienna Paradox, I was probably much more positive about our democracy than I am today, and yet I still look back fondly on the Eisenhower years.

What was coming of age in the fifties really like? No story is more repeatedly misconstrued, whether in the movies, in novels, or in most historical accounts of the period. Films like Far from Heaven (2002) present the women of the 1950s as so many neurotic, pill ...