What is the Golden Era to you?

[FedoraFan112390]

What, in my fellow forumer's minds, separates the Golden Era from the Roaring '20s and the Post War/Americana era ('45-74)?
What, to you, locks the Golden Era between the '30s and '40s? Where does it begin--1933? 1930? Where does it end? 1945? 1949?
What is, in essence, the Golden Era to you? What defines it and makes it separate from the other time periods?

 

[Shangas]

To me, the Golden Era is roughly from roughly 1850-1950.

It was during this era that many of the things we take for granted, were invented, manufactured, and produced. It was during this era that many of the social movements and laws which govern our lives today, were put in motion. It was during this era (for most of us, anyway) that our parents and grandparents lived.

It was this era that gave us the world we have today. Things which we take for granted today were created during this 100 year period.

The television.
The computer.
The typewriter.
The sewing machine.
The electric refrigerator.
The Motor-Car.
Air-transport.
Electric lighting.
Modern science and medicine.
Modern long-distance telecommunications.

More things were created in this period than at almost any other period in history.

It's the HUGE changes that happened in this period that make it the 'Golden Era' for me.

This era saw the Europrean powers at their strongest, and at their weakest. It saw the building of empires and the changing of the world. It saw the death of colonialism and the rise of new forms of government. Centuries of tradition which had lasted untouched in living memory were suddenly gone in a flash. In the space of a few decades, half the countries in Europe went from monarchies to democracies to republics to communist states...Asia changed in more ways than I can name as it came under Western influence in a big way for the first time in history.

I could go on for pages, but I better stop.

 

[Fading Fast]

Recognizing that this is completely subjective, I think for me it runs from post WWI to the late 1960s.

Post WWI saw the mass adoption of the automobile and radio, which changed society dramatically versus pre-WWI (also, most of the pre-WWI heavy dress and Victorian ways gave way post WWI with the flappers and the 1920s youth movement [overtime]).

And it wasn't until the late 1960s that the looking to your adults for your value system, dress and comportment broke down.

So while that period encompasses a lot of style changes in music, movies, clothes, values etc. - at a high-enough level, for me, there is enough similarity in the broad parameters (automobile, radio and, then, TV making society connected in a way it had not been) and values (until the late-1960s adults and our institutions were in control [not alway for the better]) for it to represent one period.

 

[LizzieMaine]

1936-37. The specific moment in time when American working people realized they really had a chance to change the world for the better. Before, there was aspiration. After, there was disillusionment.

 

[Fading Fast]

1936-37. The specific moment in time when American working people realized they really had a chance to change the world for the better. Before, there was aspiration. After, there was disillusionment.

As always, my history is shaky: are you referring to the failure of FDR's initiative to add justices to the Supreme Court to tilt the court's balance in favor of his New Deal initiatives?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm talking about the steel and automobile strikes of 1936-37, culminating with the successful organizing of General Motors. Those victories weren't won by politicians, or fat men in suits, but by the shed blood of real working people.

As far as the Supreme Court affair is concerned, that had as much to do with the deep personal animosity between FDR and Justice James McReynolds as anything else. McReynolds was probably the most openly vicious, hateful, racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic man ever to serve on the Court, and his stand against the New Deal was as motivated by his deep hatred for the man he publicly referred to as "that crippled son-of-a-bitch in the White House" as by any supposed devotion to the Constitution.

 

[Fading Fast]

Thank you. So if the workers won the strike, why was it immediately followed by disillusionment?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Thank you. So if the workers won the strike, why was it immediately followed by disillusionment?

The disillusionment was gradual, accumulating over a period of many years. As a song of the times put it, there were still plenty of people out there "Doin' The Reactionary."

 

[Harp]

... the failure of FDR's initiative to add justices to the Supreme Court to tilt the court's balance....

humanum est errare [angel]

 

[Fading Fast]

humanum est errare [angel]

Thank God for Google's ability to fill in the gaps of my mediocre education or I would have had no idea what you were saying.

 

[Edm1]

I googled McReynolds...he was quite a character. He seems to have been a very strange man. I would not have been able to put up with him. The funniest part is that he was a member of the Disciples of Christ. He would not fit in AT ALL today.

 

[Harp]

... I would have had no idea what you were saying.

My constitutional law prof thought FDR erred for the New Deal out of genuine concern and judicial intransigence,
and he slung that phrase about so often it sticks to my memory yet. ...like the time I was dragged over Marbury vs Madison.

 

[Stearmen]

Having been on this forum for several years now, I would say, most of the members seem to feel the golden age was between, November 12, 1918 to September 2, 1945. Some like the 50s, but most don't, and a few members have tried to start threads on WWI with a lukewarm response. Which is sad, since we are now in the , with the 100th anniversary!

 

[Big Man]

I recall someone asking my grandmother (1882-1983) about the "good old days." Her reply was, "there wasn't much good about those days except that they are over."

 

[Stearmen]

I recall someone asking my grandmother (1882-1983) about the "good old days." Her reply was, "there wasn't much good about those days except that they are over."

That's what my Grandparents and Mother always said!

 

[Shangas]

I recall someone asking my grandmother (1882-1983) about the "good old days." Her reply was, "there wasn't much good about those days except that they are over."

Granny lived to an impressive age!! Bravo!

I agree with that assessment. I asked my grandmother (1914-2011) a similar question once. Her reply was more or less identical.

 

[Fading Fast]

My father ('24 - '90) and Grandmother (~1890 - 1976) had almost nothing good to say about the '20s - '45, but were very positive, overall, on '45 - mid-'60s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandparents (born 1904 and 1911) never talked about such things one way or the other, which is understandable -- all in all their lives changed very little over the years of their marriage, and except for the infirmities of age, the lives they were living in 1980 were little removed from the lives they lived in 1940. They were running a gas station in 1940, they were still running it in 1980. They were in debt in 1940, they were still in debt in 1980. They ate beans on Saturday in 1940, they still ate beans on Saturday in 1980, and so on. Their kids were grown up, but those kids still lived on the same street as their parents, and spent as much time in their house as they did in their own.

They had technological changes over that period -- along the way they got a telephone, which only meant they didn't have to go over to the neighbors' house to call someone, they got an electric refrigerator, which only meant they paid the power company instead of the ice man, and they got a television -- which only meant they sat in the living room at night watching TV instead of sitting in the living room at night listening to the radio. But the overall pattern of their lives -- sleep, eat, work -- didn't change at all until they died. All eras were the same to them -- there was only one era, and when they died it was over. They didn't navel gaze about the past, and the future was irrelevant.

 

[Fading Fast]

And my father and grandmother had a completely different experience. Life went from okay in the '20s (small house, small business, a radio) to, in the '30s, one-step from the streets (house gone, living in a very shabby tenement, business in unofficial bankruptcy, a further impoverishing surgery), to the post-WWII improvement (business debt gone and on a paying basis, still in tenement, but probably could have moved, and finally a new car for the business - not fancy, but not twenty years old and a little freedom to buy a few things).

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think for a lot of people the impact of the Depression varied based on how much you had to lose and how far you had to fall. My family never really had much of anything materially -- my great-grandfather was a Canadian immigrant with eight kids, and made a living as a carpenter, so there wasn't much point in material aspiration because whatever money came in went to feeding the kids. Life was about sustaining a stable existence, not striving to have something more than the guy down the street, because you and he both knew he didn't have any more than you did.

My grandfather worked in a barrel factory, on construction gangs, as a longshoreman, as a semipro basketball player, as a smalltime dance band leader, and on the WPA during the worst part of the Depression, and usually made about $400 a year -- but he'd never known any other standard of living, so he'd never expected anything different. I think that kind of mentality made surviving that period easier than it would have been from someone used to a middle-class style of life. Even when he had the gas station, he never changed his mode of living beyond buying the little house he lived in -- paying the bank for the next thirty years instead of paying the landlord. Pretty much the entire practical scope of his life, from birth to death, was lived within the space of about six blocks in one small town, and he seemed perfectly contented with that.