Episode
The 1950's
- Podcast
- Disturbing History
- Published
- Sep 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3398
- Processing state
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- https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-1950-s--74943298
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Summary
Everybody carries a version of the 1950s around in their head, and the strange thing is that a surprising amount of it is true. For millions of American families, one paycheck really could support a house, a car, and children. Homeownership climbed from roughly 44 percent before World War II to about 62 percent by 1960. Television went from a novelty to a fixture in nearly nine out of ten homes, Elvis Presley drew an audience of roughly 60 million people on The Ed Sullivan Show, and when the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in 1955, church bells rang across the country. For a large group of mostly white, married, union-wage families, the 1950s delivered a level of prosperity and security their parents could scarcely have imagined. That part of the picture is real. But this episode turns the photograph over. In the first installment of The Good Old Lie, Disturbing History looks at what existed alongside that prosperity: whites-only housing restrictions, redlining, discrimination in GI Bill benefits, and the violent reaction that greeted Black families who attempted to move into newly built suburbs. It follows urban renewal and the interstate highway system through neighborhoods such as Rondo, Overtown, and Black Bottom, communities cut apart after their residents had already been excluded from much of the suburban boom.It also confronts the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, the open casket his mother insisted the world see, the acquittal of the men accused of killing him, and the confession they later sold to a national magazine. Then there was the danger falling from the sky. The episode examines the aboveground nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site, the downwind communities of southern Utah, the radioactive fallout that entered the food…