Amongst a few other things, McCarthyism.                   

                     Deleted                   

                     

    Believe it or not, I agree with most of the social customs and standards of the world back in the Good Old Days, and I'd be perfectly happy living with them.  In fact, I think that without many of these allegedly "outdated" values, we (especially in America) have lost our direction and sense of purpose.

Well said, Buddy.  Try emulating those fine customs nowadays and one often ends up looking like an idiot because those values are so dead as to be completely foreign to most folks under 50, and probably a few over 50, as well.  I blame the baby Boomers for this, of course. :wink: But keep fighting the good fight.                   

                     Of course, it wasn't all great back in the "Good old days", which is what this thread is about, the not-so great things of yesterday.  Segregation, HUAC, Vietnam, etc.  I guess there was a trade-off, manners and common courtesy went out with common sense, even though society is better off without all that small-minded racism that was the downfall of the "Greatest Generation."
As for the "everyone had manners back then" to hear the old folks tell it, there were plenty of a$$hole$ to deal with, and that's even if you don't include Hitler and Stalin...                   

                     YES, all these things are true.  I think we can all agree that there was NO period of time, where EVERYTHING was pie in the and just peachy, and not EVERYONE was like Carey Grant.  I suppose I was only referring to the positive things of that era.  Although, I am conscience of negative things that have transpired, I choose to focus on the positive things rather that the negative.  Gosh, forget I said anything.:blush:                   

                     The widespread acceptance of ethnic/racial/religious bigotry as a societal norm.                   

                     the racist parts of Nancy Drew originals                   

                     Oh my, Jay...  You just brought to mind a memory I thought was long forgotten:  the blasted tuna casserole.  The only difference was that my mom served it over toast and put peas in it.  No chips on top.  I still gag at the thought!  :?                   

                     Not too big on black face over here                   

                     I think everybody's pretty much of a consensus that there have been vast social changes, largely for the better - racism and sexism is largely discouraged, or at least never practiced overtly.

But I've often wondered if it was ever possible to separate the positive social trends from what we obviously perceive at the negative ones - a "dumbing down" of society, and certainly a "ruding up"; a decline in manners and courtesy and social grace.

If seems to me that working people have suffered most of all, especially in places like Britain, where working class culture has been replaced by aggressive "ladism", and generally, where a sense of solidarity has been undermined, and working people in general are more atomised, socially.

A few years ago, I was working on a magazine article about the neighbourhood where I grew up here in Toronto - a working class suburb that my family came to almost 100 years ago. I found a forty-year run of a community newspaper, and was amazed at how coherent and engaged it all seemed - baseball teams and social events and local news on a block-by-block level. It was like a small town, but in the middle of a rapidly growing city. There was a social notice of my aunt Helen's wedding; here the story of a cab driver murdered on the job, with an appeal for funds for his family. That's all gone now, needless to say.

Of course, I can remember how casually racist my parents' generation could be, and how many strains of racism there were - my mother hated "cockneys", while there was still a remarkable incidence of anti-Catholicism. Social liberalism drove that sort of thing underground, and I don't recall the first black family on the street getting a bad reception - I certainly spent a lot of time playing on their lawn.

So was there a trade-off - we get to become a more equitable, just society at the loss of a good deal of manners and grace? It's a hard question to answer.

(Oh, and for the record, I'm unwilling to lump in HUAC and McCarthy in with a lot of the patent negatives - McCarthy was painted as a vulgar villain, and HUAC as a witch-hunt, but the fact was that there were Communists in important posts all over government, and Communism was - sorry folks - the enemy, any way you look at it. I'm certainly glad that Alger Hiss had his career stopped dead in its tracks, at least in government. Not that he was sent to the gulag - doesn't Bard College still have an Alger Hiss Professor Of Social Studies? Executing Ethel Rosenberg was an awful thing, but her husband was a spy, period. I don't agree with the death penalty, but it was the punishment for treason at the time. And I know how badly this is going to go down as I write this, but there it is.)                   

                     Racism and sexism are still more than alive and well.

If you are raped or sexually harassed here you either 1)asked for it, 2) wanted it no matter what you said, or 3) are lying. And then there is number 4 - no one saw it - even if you were in a room full of people.

I managed to barely notice or understand racism til' I was 15. Lets just say I know it far, far, far too well now. Virginia is still a place where I like my father can have a klansman two inches in front of my face.

But at least I can sit where I want on the bus and drink water out of any fountain I want. It's segregation that is a bit more dead than racism.                   

                     

Begging to differ, Buddy, but Julius Rosenberg was executed for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, not for "saying something critical of our government". What he was doing went even further than doing something critical of the government - he was trying to bring it down. I don't agree with the death penalty, but let's call treason treason.

I'm sure that treason was the pretext for their indictment, but have they ever actually found any proof of that?  And furthermore, okay, let's say Julius Rosenberg DID in fact perpetrate treason against the US government (we'll probably never know either way), but why did they then see fit to execute his wife as well?  The fact is, we live under a totalitarian government that has and forever will give us only the facts that they want us to know, while conveniently sweeping others under the rug.  How else do you explain the Kennedy assassination and subsequent cover-up?