Skip to main content

The 1950’s are often portrayed as a period of social cohesion, why is this misleading?

The 1950’s were a very stressful time for The United States. The country was just coming out of World War II and Korea and had to deal with a lot of issues back home as well. Many movements were becoming to take a stand such as woman’s rights and civil rights. The red scare was also a huge deal. The Russians began to become a huge super power and the idea of communism was spreading. The United States was very nervous about communism taking over the world and it put stress on the US. The government went crazy with power and began to sensor a lot of media. Part of this censorship was put on the comic book industry. Many people believed that the comic books that were being made had a bad influence on the youth of our nation. The comic book stories that were being developed were comics based on violence and horror. The idea of murder was amongst the comic book stories in great detail. The youth of America became more violent than ever before. This is what made the government put special codes on the comics being made. These codes limited what the comic book industries could produce. The nation began to see the violent comics go down and the funny, romantic, and heroism comics go up. The 1950’s were not a time of social cohesion. The issue with comics split the government from the people. People loved comics and the suspense that they possessed. When the government began to censor comics because of this silly idea that it was making the youth more violent it just added more splitting. The country was scared about communism and dealing with social movements as they were censoring the media. The country became more and more split during the 1950’s and it got worse during the 1960’s with Vietnam War. Social Cohesion is not the right word that describes the 1950’s in The United States.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why blame comics for societal failure?

Why blame comics for societal failure? Society blamed comics for the societal failures because it was a fairly new industry, and as things seemed to go “wrong” they figured it must be comic books. When a child grew up during the war, his father was probably killing people and the military and his mother was probably making things in factories to help kill the opposition. The only things kids had to “babysit” them was comic books, and they read many different kinds. So when kids starting acting differently in this new generation the figured it must be the comic books. Society didn’t want to believe it may have been the internal and external scars war causes on the soldiers and their families. Also the fact that young unattended children are reading these comics may not be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality. When society fails it always needs a scapegoat then it was comic books next it was rock and roll. Society naturally resist change.
2 comments
Read more

Mythology and Superheroes in Comics

Ohhh my goodness... When I decided on trying to analyze the mythological origins and references in superhero comics, I had no idea the can of worms I was opening up... On the one hand, it was awesome to see just how many connections there were between superheroes and psychology/mythology/philosophy, but all the information also made it terribly difficult to distinguish what I should be using and how to tie it all together. When I was talking to one of my sorority sisters about it she said, "Oh yeah, well, research essays are kind of like putting together puzzles..." and I think that really sums up what writing this paper was like for me. Fortunately, I was really interested throughout the whole process and I very much enjoyed writing the paper. Being a psychology major, I was especially interested in reading about the Jungian archetypes that had a lot of parallels with major modern comic books superheroes. I was also able to incorporate Joseph Campbell's "hero cycle...
2 comments
Read more

The 1950s are often portrayed as a period of social cohesion. Why is this misleading?

When we think of the 1950's, most people think of similar things such as "Leave it to Beaver", very conservative and cliched pop music, and high patriotism. Our view of that time is one of social conformity to conservative values, with a traditional nuclear family where the father worked and the mother stayed home, where a majority of people attended church, where crime was relatively low, where a majority of American citizens were extremely patriotic, and where entertainment media emphasized these same conservative values and were subjected to censorship if they did not conform. This is misleading because while these things were all true to a certain extent, the world was obviously not perfect and not everyone was conforming or upholding traditional values, even if it seemed like they were. The 1950's were actually a very tumultuous time period, with the end of World War II leaving Europe war torn and in debt, the outbreak of the Korean War and the clashes of opinion...
1 comment
Read more