Cpt_pineapple wrote:

So why is the US so religious?  

 

They have the economic system of a third world banana republic, and their educational system is laughable at best. Add to this a tyrannical and all-powerful federal government which is wielding draconian laws and is armed to the teeth and beyond. As for the population, it seems to me that even the intellectuals are living under the delusion that the US of A is "special" in some ill-defined, almost mystical way, compared to other countries.

The american indians were risk takers?

 I don't know that the U.S. does stand out as uniquely patriotic.  Nationalism has a rich and unique history.

However, having said that, I do believe patriotism and religious fervor are similar cognitive states.

 

So why is the US so religious? Why are they the exception?

 

Latincanuck, I was aware that in Canada different people from other countries of origin do get along far better than in their original region. Perhaps for the same reasons, to fit in. The US had many episodes of outright warfare between each new group, as in the movie Gangs of New York. It was the Irish, the Germans, the Chineese etc. When a new group comes in they become the one that is ragged on. Right now, it's the illegals from Mexico. As these people assimilate it goes away. The patriotism thing seems to be how it's done. My ancestors were German and came here in 1898 and were held in suspicion big time during WW 1. By WW 2, they all joined the service right after Pearl Harbor to show they were patriotic.

I am not sure that I accept the premise that the 50's were that much more moral if at all than today.    Maybe through greater mass communication we've seen more of what people are doing and how they are living but I'm skeptical of the idea that people were more moral then.

The 1950s

From political pundits to parents to grandparents to Hollywood, everyone seems to be in agreement that the fifties were a swell time to be an American. Proponents of the Traditional Nuclear Family myth are particularly enamored of the decade, and at first glance, it appears that there's very good reason for this. For the first time in the 20^th Century, divorce and illegitimate births dropped sharply. For comparison, both were less than half that of the 1990s. Gang violence, drugs, and teenage rebellion were not yet considered to be social problems. School discipline was strict, and students were getting good educations, going to college, getting married, and starting families. From 1945 to 1960, the Gross National Product rose 250%. There were record numbers of housing starts. In 1954, the words “Under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. For the first time in the collective memory, upward mobility was a real possibility for almost everybody. On all counts, the 50's seemed to be a utopia of family values and morals.

Unfortunately, all of these statistics are grossly misleading. Though they are all essentially true, they mask a much less pristine reality. The fifties were a time of great social upheaval, widespread discontent, and the beginnings of heavy handed government intrusion into private lives. The prominence of the nuclear family was not so much due to the collective desire of individuals to form such bonds, but on the social, political, and legislative lack of other viable options.

Much like the nostalgic memories of colonial American life, our memories of the 50s are colored by our collective amnesia. During the 50s, twenty five percent of Americans – between 40 and 50 million people – were living below the poverty line. There were no food stamps, and very few options for low cost housing. Compared with the poverty in later decades, the fifties were intensely difficult for those below the line. Sixty percent of the elderly were poor. A staggering number of blacks and hispanics lived in squalor. Like every generation before, the poor had to work very long hours at the most undesirable jobs, and there was virtually no such thing as a nuclear minority family.

Things were not all rosy for the middle class whites, either. After World War II, a great many women lost the jobs they had entered while all the men were away. If they were not outright fired, they were forced into menial jobs with terrible pay. The reality for women was that they could either get married or starve. While television celebrated core families like the Cleavers, and Ozzie and Harriett, the real middle class women were being herded into marriage, motherhood, and domestic duty, whether they wanted it or not. Popular medical wisdom said that any woman who did not desire motherhood and family domesticity was neurotic, unstable, or worse, morally loose. There was a very common cure espoused by the medical community: Shock treatment. (If it sounds to you like women were tortured if they failed to conform to social expectations, you're not alone in that assessment.)

The general consensus among psychologists of the day was that women were essentially untrustworthy, and capable of little more than housework. While previous generations of middle class women were at least able to hire out their housework to lower class servants, the 50s generation was ridiculed, shunned, and often medicated if they didn't love to stay home and do the housework themselves. Consequently, even with the availability of modern appliances, the amount of housework for the average wife increased drastically.

Not surprisingly, women were not always as happy as the media portrayed them. Though there were shockingly few divorces in the fifties, approximately 1/3 of the marriages begun in that decade were dissolved by the seventies. In what is considered the definitive social survey of the decade, less than 33% of women indicated that they were either “happily married” or “very happily married.” Over 20% indicated that they were “unhappily married.”

Sexual battery, though largely unreported, appears to have been rampant. The medical community generally regarded sexual assault within the marriage as a female problem. If only the woman would be more sexually responsive, they said, things like that wouldn't happen. The problem of “female frigidity” was discussed much more than female repression or unhappiness. (It's worth noting that the cure for sexual frigidity, i.e. males sexually abusing their wives, was also shock treatment.) Similarly, battered children were quite common, and though it's difficult to get exact percentages, the evidence clearly shows that incest and sexual abuse of minors was at the least not uncommon.

Predictably, drug and alcohol abuse by women skyrocketed. Although much of it was hidden (specifically, in a flask underneath the unmentionables), there is clear evidence that alcohol abuse was at record highs. Also, a little known fact about the pharmaceutical industry is that tranquilizers were developed and marketed specifically as a solution to “the female problems.” Millions upon millions of prescriptions were filled for women unable to cope with the happiness gained from their traditional family.

By 1960, the problem was clear. Redbook magazine ran an ad soliciting stories explaining “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped.” The editors received over twenty four thousand entries. Even in 1949, Life Magazine had reported that young wives “suddenly and for no plain reason [have been] seized with an eerie restlessness.” Obviously, there was a lot more going on in this decade, and the emergence of the core family did not solve any problems, at least not without creating significantly more problems.

Although things were significantly better for men, they were not great. The same pressure that women were put under, to marry and reproduce, were felt by men as well. There are volumes of anecdotes about men who were passed over for promotions because they were not married. Bachelors in the fifties were regarded as reckless, deviant, and morally depraved. Men were expected to get married, buy a house, and start a family as soon as they finished school. If they didn't, there were sometimes very severe social repercussions.

Perhaps worse than the social consequences of bachelorhood were the potential political repercussions. Most of us are familiar with the Red Scare and McCarthyism, but what is not as well known was that sexual deviance was also considered potentially seditious. Gay bashing was almost as common as Commie bashing, though it was not flaunted publicly. Particularly in larger cities, an unmarried man was open to suspicion of sexual sedition. Whether the speculation was that he was gay, or that he was simply too undisciplined and deviant to have a respectable family life, the consequences were very real. Thousands of men lost their jobs and families due to the intrusive Big Brother tactics of overzealous communist hunters.

Lastly, one of the most commonly flaunted statistics from the 50s is the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy and illegitimate births. Again, however, these statistics, while technically accurate, are not reflective of reality. The most obvious reason is that with the emphasis on early marriage, women were simply getting married earlier, and thus reducing the number of unwed mothers. With more careful scrutiny, it becomes obvious thatmore teenage girls were having babies in the fifties, but because they were married, the statistics for teen pregnancy went down. Married women, after all, were not teens anymore, regardless of their age.

Another major contributor to this deceptive statistic is the way illegitimate births were reported. Due to an archaic quirk in the census data, no matter what age a girl conceived, if she was living with her parents, it was not reported as a single mother. In addition, babies that were born in wedlock were not counted, regardless of when they had been conceived. There was intense social pressure to marry if a girl was found to be pregnant. Specifically, the number of pregnant brides doubled!

Yet another factor must be considered. The sexual rules for women were changing drastically. Whereas in previous generations, men had been responsible for respecting the purity of women, teenage girls in the fifties found themselves on the other end of the stick, so to speak. Men were seen as actively pursuing women, and it was entirely up to the woman to protect her own virtue. In the interest of finding the right man, girls were constantly encouraged by their peers to engage in heavy petting, but they were considered loose if they allowed any penetration. (The question of how many teen pregnancies were the result of heavy petting gone too far – with or without the girl's consent – is another matter, but you can probably make an educated guess.)

The cold, hard facts belie the apparent bliss of the fifties. The “traditional core family” has never existed on its own, and for the one decade that it was forced, and enforced, the results were not nearly as wonderful as they were popularly portrayed. The Cleavers are a product of wishful thinking. The fifties were a failed experiment in social engineering. They were a last ditch effort by those who believed they could enforce happiness through conformation.

Ok the response raises another question:

Why is the US so patriotic? Once again to compare it to Canada where cultural expression is encouraged, whereas in the US if you're not American GTFO

...the bottom of the totem pole...