[caption id="attachment_1805" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Traditional America?"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/article-new_ehow_images_a07_5d_si_mens-fashion-1950s-1.1-800x800.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1805" title="article-new_ehow_images_a07_5d_si_mens-fashion-1950s-1.1-800x800" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/article-new_ehow_images_a07_5d_si_mens-fashion-1950s-1.1-800x800-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

<strong><em>"Is traditional America gone for good?"</em></strong>
<strong>-- BILL O'REILLY</strong>

To answer that question, the first thing we have to do is determine exactly what "traditional America" was. When O'Reilly used the question above for an explanation of why the Republican Party's message didn't resonate with voters in the recent election, he was referring to a lack of personal discipline.

"People want free stuff," he said.

Unlike traditional America, where people would rather die than accept welfare. People worked hard in those days and made an honest dollar for an honest day's work.

But which traditional America does O'Reilly mean? Could it be 1789, when only white men voted, when black people were slaves and when 95 percent of all working people were their own bosses? Or how about 1880, when the Industrial Revolution had changed everything and people were expected to do menial jobs for low pay? That was the era in which robber baron Jay Gould famously said he could hire half of the working class to kill the other half.

I doubt he meant the 1930s, when much of our present-day safety net was created. Since many people tend to see the "good old days" as the years when they were young, let's say for the sake of argument that he means the 1950s. The '50s are perhaps the most misunderstood of all decades, loved by the right primarily because they were the last "normal" decade before everything changes.

Let's look at the '50s for a moment:

-- According to the 1950 census, there were 150,697,361 people in the United States. That's less than half of our current population of 309.2 million. Our three most populous states -- California, Texas and Florida -- had as combined population of just over 21 million then, as opposed to 81.5 million today.

-- Unemployment in the '50s was as low as 3 percent in 1952 and peaked at 6.8 percent during the recession of 1958. By 1966 it was back to 3.8 percent.

-- In 1950, American CEOs made 50-60 times as much as the average worker. In 2011, the ratio was 380-1.

[caption id="attachment_1806" align="alignright" width="263" caption="House for everyone"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/images-1.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1806" title="images (1)" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/images-1.jpg" alt="" width="263" height="192" /></a>[/caption]

-- In the 1950s, it was still possible for a man with an eighth-grade education to get an entry-level blue collar job and work his way up to a position where he could support a family, own a home and live the American Dream.

It was a time when anyone who wanted to work could find a decent job, something that certainly isn't true anymore. There are a couple of things that didn't exist in the '50s that made all that possible.

First, many businesses were locally owned and nearly all businesses that operated in the United States were American-owned. We didn't have multi-national corporations doing business in the U.S. then, so the people who owned businesses felt a certain responsibility to their community and their country.

Second, financial speculation wasn't anywhere near what it became starting in the '80s. Far fewer people were in the stock market, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 500 for most of the decade.

So the biggest difference was that our rich people were a lot less wealthy than they are today, but average folks lived a lot better. Far more jobs included meaningful benefits like pensions, and even people who didn't have medical insurance could usually afford doctor visits and other preventative medical care.

[caption id="attachment_1807" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="&#39;50s ladies"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/kirche-kinder-kuche.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1807" title="kirche-kinder-kuche" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/kirche-kinder-kuche-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

Now the last thing I want to do is say the '50s were wonderful for everyone. They weren't. We still had a system of apartheid every bit as rigid as South Africa in parts of the country, and women who wanted to have anything other than the traditional <em>"kinder kueche kirche"</em> life that came from the old country (children, kitchen and church), could expect to have a difficult time of it. As for those of different sexual proclivities, they were firmly closeted and could expect to be called nothing much better than "degenerates."

But most folks knew their neighbors, and they had enough local networks that there were people they could rely on to help them if they needed it.

And they took pride in their families and their neighborhoods. General Colin Powell, who grew up in a poor neighborhood in New York, said that people behaved well even in bad neighborhoods because they didn't want to bring shame to their families.

"A sense of shame is not a bad moral compass," Powell said.

That's a good thing, and certainly it's one of the things to which O'Reilly refers when he speaks of traditional America. But if you want tradition, you've got to have it on both sides. You can't criticize people for behaving badly when you have taken away all their options.

And when you live in a country where the population has more than doubled in 60 years, and where the population of the three largest states has nearly quadrupled, you really can't be all that surprised when things change.

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