10 Misconceptions About the 1950s

Ah, the 1950s—a time of poodle skirts and saddle shoes, drive-ins, diners, and sock hops. Elvis ruled the radio, and on TV, it was all about Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. But decades after the ‘50s came and went, pop culture and good old-fashioned nostalgia for simpler times have left us with many misconceptions about this so-called golden era.

1. Misconception: “The Fifties” were only the 1950s.

Here’s one that might blow your mind: While most of us think of the 1950s as beginning in 1950 and ending in 1959, according to historians, the period of time that many call “the Fifties”—and the trends associated with that era—started in 1945 and lasted until maybe 1964. This list, however, will discuss phenomena that occurred in the actual ‘50s.

2. Misconception: The 1950s were a peaceful time.

According to some, people living in the 1950s had it made—it was basically all American Dream, all the time. Waving to neighbors over white picket fences, sharing casserole recipes with the ladies’ auxiliary … life was good! 

This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about the 1950s. Life actually had plenty of strife and conflict, including a couple of wars, in this decade.

In June 1950, troops from the North Korean military marched into South Korea, kicking off the Korean War, which the U.S. entered in July. The war lasted three years; an estimated 5 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were killed. The Korean War is sometimes called “the Forgotten War,” and not just because we forget about it today—apparently, the U.S. media didn’t even really cover it at the time. (A couple of decades later, though, the conflict would get its own pop culture moment via a little TV show called M*A*S*H.)

One war that has not been forgotten is the Cold War, the conflict between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic U.S. of A., which began in the 1940s and reached its peak in the early 1950s. The USSR had performed its first nuclear bomb test in August 1949, and by the early 1950s, paranoia and anxiety about a possible nuclear attack were so high that kids were doing duck-and-cover drills in schools, huddling under their desks, arms tightly covering their heads and necks. To teach the proper technique there was a 1952 educational film called Duck and Cover that featured a turtle named Bert. 

The film explained that it was important to be prepared for a nuclear attack, because if you weren’t, the blast “could hurt you in different ways. It could knock you down, hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion, it can smash in buildings, and knock signboards over, and break windows all over town. But, if you duck and cover, like Bert, you will be much safer.”

Today we find all of this duck and cover stuff kind of silly, but that was not the case at the time. “People who today talk about doing duck and cover drills talk about being terrified by them,” Stevens Institute of Technology historian Alex Wellerstein told History.com. “They talk about them really hammering home that this stuff is real, and ... that the world is a really disturbing place.” The Cold War continued with varying degrees of intensity until the 1980s. So much for peace!

3. Misconception: Joseph McCarthy put away a ton of Communist spies and sympathizers.

In February 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin claimed to have a list of over 200 communists working for the State Department. He’d continue attacks for the next few years, but in 1953 the Republicans gained a majority in the Senate and McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy’s power during this time was basically unchecked, and even his own colleagues were too afraid to stand up to the senator, lest they be accused of being communists themselves. It wasn’t until McCarthy turned his attention to the U.S. Army that President Eisenhower finally put his foot down. Ike used executive privilege to give government employees permission to ignore McCarthy’s subpoenas to testify. 

The era of McCarthyism culminated in 36 days of televised hearings. At one point, McCarthy accused Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Army, of employing someone who had once belonged to a communist group, leading Welch to ask: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Eventually, the Senate censured McCarthy, and soon, the era of McCarthyism was finished. 

Thanks to all of McCarthy’s aggrandizing, it’s easy to assume that he probably unearthed a lot of communist activity and put a bunch of people in prison. But the senator never actually sent a single person to jail because by the time he ramped up his efforts, according to Louis Menand at The New Yorker, “there were almost no communists left to fire or spies left to convict” thanks to previous efforts to weed them out in the late 1940s. Or at least, there wasn’t enough evidence to put people away. To be clear, many people with suspected communist ties were sent to jail during this era. But weird as it is to say, McCarthy is not McCarthyism. He just exemplifies the Second Red Scare.

4. Misconception: The 1950s were uniformly prosperous.

Generally speaking, the 1950s were a time of post-war prosperity where the economy was booming; some even have the idea that during the ‘50s, everybody had a long-term, steady job that they held onto until they retired. Affluence was the norm.

But that’s not quite right. Yes, the 1950s were a period of economic growth, but there were also two recessions between 1950 and 1959. The first, which occurred after the Korean War when the government dialed back on wartime spending, lasted from July 1953 to May 1954. Unemployment peaked at almost 6 percent, and prices were high.

The next recession in the ‘50s occurred in the midst of a global recession that in a small part was caused by a flu pandemic. It hit in August 1957 and lasted until April 1958, and unemployment hit nearly 7.5 percent.

5. Misconception: America became more “equal” during the 1950s.

Here’s a misconception that was being peddled during the 1950s: The economy was so good, the story went, that life got better and more equal for everyone in a literal sharing of the wealth. 

Many Americans got a lot wealthier during the 1950s, but not all. And as Columbia University American history professor Alan Brinkley writes for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, while total wealth increased, that wealth wasn’t redistributed any differently than it had been previously: “Distribution patterns, in other words, remained unchanged—the wealthy and the poor experienced roughly the same rates of growth. The gap between them remained the same.”

As Stephanie Coontz writes in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, as many as 50 million Americans were poor in the mid-’50s, noting that “in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing.” By the end of the ‘50s, Coontz writes, “a third of American children were poor.” 

Inequality wasn’t just an economic issue. Post-World War II, 18 million people moved to the suburbs, in part thanks to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill. This legislation was, as its nickname suggests, a way to help returning WWII veterans by providing them with things like low-interest mortgages so they could buy homes and money for tuition so they could go to school, along with medical care and weekly unemployment benefits. 

White veterans began buying up houses in suburban areas in droves. But the key word there is white. Black veterans were largely not able to use the benefits provided by the G.I. Bill. The bill itself didn’t exclude them, but some racist Southern senators held out until they secured that the act would be administered locally rather than federally. Those state-level administrators followed the Federal Housing Authority’s lending guidelines, which, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “restricted housing assistance on the condition that prospective homeowners not buy homes in D-rated communities, which were deemed risky investments ... Because the presence of even one Black family could earn a neighborhood a ‘D’ grade, this policy effectively restricted housing assistance to White Americans purchasing homes in White neighborhoods.”

Even if they were able to secure some of the benefits, the U.S. was segregated at that time, ensuring that Black Americans’ options for education and housing were minimal at best.

Landmark legislation enacted during the 1950s didn’t necessarily make things more equal, either: 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education may have ended school segregation on paper, but it persisted in many places. And let’s not forget that 1955 saw both the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till for supposedly flirting with a white woman—whom we now know lied about the incident—and Rosa Parks being arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white man, kicking off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to History.com, “during the 1950s … the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life.”

So no, things were not especially equal during the 1950s—not by any stretch of the imagination.

6. Misconception: The nuclear family was a long-standing bedrock of American life.

If all you know about the ‘50s comes from Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver, one can hardly blame you for thinking that the middle-class nuclear family unit—a dad who goes off to work, a mom who stays home to do the housework and care for their two kids (and the dog), all living in a beautiful home complete with a white picket fence in the ‘burbs—was par for the course in the 1950s.

Coontz writes in The Way We Never Were that nuclear families did exist—they were both “a new invention” and “a historical fluke based on a unique and temporary conjuncture of economic, social, and political factors”—but the situation was decidedly more complex than TV would have you believe. 

Take, for example, the role of women as happy homemakers: June Cleaver was perfectly content to stay home and devote herself to housework, but for a lot of real women, that was a harder pill to swallow. Many had entered the workforce during World War II while the country’s men were off fighting, and by 1945, most of them had decided that they would like to stay working. But when the war was over, they were either fired or demoted to what were considered “female” jobs, which, of course, came with lower pay. Women who didn’t want to stay home, according to Coontz, “were labeled neurotic, perverted, or schizophrenic.”

And, as we mentioned before, a whole lot of people were pretty poor in the ‘50s, which is a starkly different story than what was seen on TV. Television was also nearly uniformly white, and while America was majority white at the time, the country was also significantly more diverse than what was on TV screens. According to the book Television and the American Family, 97 percent of families on television during the 50s were white, 2 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Native American, and 0 percent African American or Asian American. As Coontz points out, non-white groups “were almost entirely excluded from the gains and privileges accorded white middle-class families.” 

And as Alyce Reybould notes on Medium’s Exploring History, women have always worked: “Whether this [was] in agriculture or food production—women did it. More than that, they did it and balanced having children at the same time. Even 200 years ago, most women in Europe and the USA worked. … if we take a wider historical perspective of family types, there is nothing particularly traditional about the nuclear family. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that this family form emerged in Western countries, and it only grew to its most prevalent in the 1950s.”

The fact is, then—as now, and in the time before the 1950s—there was no one kind of “normal” family, no matter what TV might show you.

7. Misconception: The 1950s were extremely conservative.

Thanks to the fact that marriages were at an all time high, divorce rates were declining, the baby boom was a-boomin’, and church attendance was on the rise, many assume that the 1950s were a conservative era where conformity was the norm. And maybe there’s some truth to that, but there was plenty of dissent happening. 

The participants in the civil rights movement were not just letting the status quo endure. Nor were the Beats, whom University of Washington history professor William Rorabaugh called “the first post-war critics of American society and culture.” Figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac protested and challenged societal norms, especially those surrounding sex, drug use, and American materialism. In 1955, Ginsberg performed a reading of his poem “Howl,” about the many failings of American society; when the poem was published a year later, Ginsberg’s publisher ended up in court for charges of obscenity (but was acquitted in 1957). The Avant-Garde movement, which was putting society on blast via art, music, theater, and films, was also going strong at this time.

8. Misconception: The Interstate Highway System was President Eisenhower’s idea.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions about the 1950s is that President Dwight D. Eisenhower came up with the idea for the Interstate Highway System, and when the thing goes by the name Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, what else are you supposed to think? But the idea actually goes all the way back to a report for Congress from 1939 with the scintillating title Toll Roads and Free Roads, and the highways were authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944. Ike—who, as a former general, understood the importance of roads for moving people and things around—supported the construction, and signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which paved the way (ahem) for funding and building the system. 

9. Misconception: The food was gross.

A couple of years ago, a meme began circulating that featured an ad for Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup that included a recipe for tuna and waffles. The meme part was a line of text stating “The 1950s were a lawless hellscape.”

This recipe was not a one-off—the ‘50s were a time of dishes that seem downright bizarre to us today. Take, for example, the Jell-O salads that had a craze back then, which could include ingredients like grated onion, cottage cheese, and fish salad. 

There are a few things that separate foods of the ‘50s from dishes of today. One is that there just wasn’t as much variety as there is these days, and what people can afford is much different, too—a lot of stuff we buy without blinking today was much pricier in the mid-20th century. 

But there’s something else at play entirely with recipes like the one featured in the meme. Many of the food products hitting shelves in ‘40s and ‘50s were brand new, and because of that, according to Food and Drink magazine, “No one knew what to do with them. To make them more popular and also encourage them to be a part of family dinners, companies created recipes with them. The problem is, most companies didn’t know where to begin cooking with them, either. So, they ended up with some fairly weird recipes along the way.” The recipes apparently weren’t even tested by the people creating them.

There might also be a bit of snobbishness at play here, too—the fact of the matter is, people in the 1950s likely made these recipes and probably also enjoyed them. They only seem gross to our modern palates, which, it should be said, encounter plenty of foods that our descendants are probably going to deem gross.

10. Misconception: Poodle skirts and saddle shoes were the height of fashion.

If you’re a fan of movies like Grease or shows like Happy Days, you probably have a very specific idea of what 1950s fashion was like, and it probably includes poodle skirts, flouncy blouses, and saddle shoes. But as vintage beauty and fashion YouTuber Karolina Żebrowska points out in a video about ‘50s fashion, those outfits were reserved for young people. Anything really fashion-oriented was aimed at adults, and totally different: “It was what young people wore at the time, but young people did not dictate fashion ... young people’s outfits were not what you would show in Vogue. What you would show in Vogue or fashion magazines were dresses for people over 30, 40, 50.” No polka dots in sight.

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This story was adapted from an episode of Misconceptions on YouTube. Subscribe here so you never miss a video.