Welcome to the "Values from '50s TV" Blog

Hi, I'm a dinosaur! Welcome to my blog about the values I imbibed from the tube when I was growing up.

I'm old enough to have developed my lifelong value system by watching, as a child, the TV fare of the 1950s. Everything from "I Love Lucy" to "Dr. Kildare," "Dragnet" to "Maverick," "The Lone Ranger" to "Watch Mr. Wizard," and "Father Knows Best" to "Ozzie and Harriet."

There were Perry Mason, "The Defenders," and even, though set in an earlier era, "Sugarfoot," to guide otherwise blind Justice and to keep the forces of law and order on the up and up.

There were Paladin of "Have Gun Will Travel," Josh Randall of "Wanted, Dead or Alive," and Johnny Yuma's "The Rebel": true knights-errant of the Old West.

There was Alfred Hitchcock, presenter of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," subverting week-by-week the sanctity of corporate sponsorship and the sanctimony of much else besides.

There were the Cartwrights of "Bonanza" — brothers Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, and father Ben — to teach us the values of masculine honor and family responsibility.

"Dragnet": Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Joe Friday showed us how it is hard, self-effacing work by individual citizens — as a police officer, in his case — that best serves the public weal.

"Maverick": Bret, along with Brother Bart and countless other siblings and cousins whose names all began with "B," taught us how a self-seeking, individualistic card-sharp often finds himself making common cause with partners of yet shadier mien — not to mention some pretty liberated ladies, considering the tenor of the times — just to thwart the schemes of the really bad folks.


I could go on and on. The values that informed 1950s TV, and thus America, were a far cry from what we see today. There was no sex, beyond an occasional smooch. There was no violence for its own sake; the Lone Ranger would simply shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand, and the fight would be over. There was no cussin', no scraggly beards (except on bad guys), no "wardrobe malfunctions" or indecent exposure. Even the "darkest" protagonists — Josh Randall, Ben Casey, Paladin, Johnny Yuma, U. S. Marshal Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke," etc. — were unfailingly polite, civil, respectful, and clean-living. You could rely on it: if a television character was in any way coarse or rude in his outward behavior, he was bad through and through.

Some of the shows still managed to be subversive, fostering sober skepticism of entrenched power structures: the established cattle barons of the Old West, rather than the newcomer sheepherders; the criminal justice system of the modern day, when it tramples the rights of the weak and powerless; the stupid rich, perennial targets of the heroes of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Zorro."

How all that has changed! Nowadays, the current generation of 18-to-25-year-olds — "Generation Next" is their appellation — list getting rich as their topmost or second most prominent goal in life. (See this poll-based portrait of Gen Next.) Where every family on '50s TV went to church as a matter of course — so much so that it rarely needed to be mentioned on the air — today about one in five Gen Nexters has no religion at all. Where casual sex, binge drinking, illegal drug use, and person-on-person violence were once taboo, "large majorities of today's young adults believe that [all of these] are more prevalent among young people today than was the case 20 years ago."

Back then, to judge by TV, there were seemingly little nonmarital sex, few unwanted pregnancies, few abortions. Abortion was illegal, and in some states, so were certain kinds of sex. On TV, these subjects rarely came up, and when they did, it was made clear that no decent person would voluntarily break the sexual codes of the day.

On occasion, on "serious" shows like "The Defenders," there would be plots in which an unfortunate woman (often, in her teens) had been raped or was the victim of incest, became pregnant — a word that was itself taboo throughout much of the decade — and had to decide what to do. If she went to an abortionist, this was presented as a bad-but-understandable choice, given the circumstances. Far worse was the rapist, the perpetrator of incest, or the crude, money-grubbing abortionist.

There was never any suggestion, however, that every woman is entitled to what we today refer to as discretionary abortion, or abortion-on-demand.


For that matter, there was never any suggestion that people of either sex are entitled to much of anything. Americans have developed their vaunted "sense of entitlement" since the 1950s. Back in that world, you had to earn what you get. Even Ozzie Nelson, he of the perpetual cardigan-sweater-wearing day off, was understood to have some kind of job, somewhere, doing gainful work.

The importance of education was implicit on '50s TV. The protagonists were often doctors or lawyers. Even Sugarfoot, nominally a saddle tramp, was trained as a lawyer, and Johnny "The Rebel" Yuma was conspicuously a highly literate keeper of a personal journal. Even the television news if the day was saturated with images of Negroes (as African Americans were then called) being barred from schoolhouse doors by irate white muckety-mucks. (And, by the way, I include in "'50s TV" much of the stuff that was on the air in the early-to-middle 1960s, before the culture began to change radically.)


So this blog will be dedicated to looking back at a bygone age that, though it wasn't without its blemishes and warts, was better at instilling "good" personal and communal values than is the culture of the present day.

Although it is admitedly not all that apparent from the above, my overriding intent is not so much to chide or nag as to inquire as to how such idealistic values as were portrayed on TV in the '50s could be replaced so rapidly by values that seem diametrically opposite to them. I am not so much interested in discussing values as in discussing what I call "metavalues." For example, it looks to me like we as a society have nurtured, as a "metavalue," a radical resentment of standards in general. Anything which smacks of a set of values being imposed on groups or on individuals — no matter how gently or indirectly it is done — is bad. We as a society have developed a bad case of "standards phobia," and I am curious as to how and why.

Obviously, if our metavalues have spun on a dime since the 1950s, when it was tacitly assumed that all decent folks could agree on basic matters of right and wrong, an important question becomes: Can it be reversed? Can we get back to expecting "right behavior" of each other? Can we get back to sharing a common sense of what that right behavior is?

Another question that is important to me has to do with the prevailing cynicism of the present day. Which came first, the abandonment of "old-fashioned" standards of behavior and belief or the cynicism about the willingness and ability of people in general, and especially people in positions of power, to live by them?

Through it all, I hope the posts I make in this blog will address the overarching issue of what needs to happen in the popular culture to "take back the night," values-wise. It is my belief that most people still do the right thing, most of the time. The "bad" behavior we see around us, especially from sports stars and celebrities, is, I think, partly the result of living in a culture that does not instill in us mental images of self-control. When situations arise that tax our human kindness and charity, we are simply too brittle. We snap. Then comes the need to apologize in the media. How often do we hear, "I just don't know where all that came from. That wasn't me"?

It's a lot easier not to lose control and destroy our personal image in responding threatening situations if our culture acts, as it were, as "Styrofoam," encasing our outward behavior and softening the blows we might otherwise receive from selfish people and from hostile situations. The Styrofoam of the kinder, gentler culture of yore has melted. We need to make new Styrofoam containers in which each of us has our own little compartment and in which we can all be comfortably well-behaved.

For I think that, at the bottom of the "culture of few ideals" that we have today, is the assumption that each of us has that unless we stand ready to assert ourselves (violently, if necessary) and take what we each feel entitled to, we will wind up "losers" in the game of life. Our cynicism is that deep. Meanwhile, our veneer of civility has grown correspondingly shallow. We all need to go back and spend some time watching '50s TV, if only we could.