How the 1950s created Charles Manson
Charles Manson and his first wife, Rosalie Willis, 1955
When modern Fascists talk about Make America Great Again, they are more than likely thinking about the 1950s. It's an incredibly easy era to romanticize and idealize: World War II had revitalized the Depression economy, and the prosperity carried on into the next decades. GIs had their college educations paid for through the GI bill, which allowed a generation of farmers and blue collar workers to leap into the middle class.
Jobs were plentiful and homes were cheap. The suburbs were exploding. Beyond that, people dressed elegantly: men wore suits and hats and had respectable haircuts while women wore beautiful dresses with tightly-cinched corseted waists and hoops skirts with ruffled petticoats the recalled the Victorian era.
The 1950s, as outwardly prosperous and beautiful as they were, hid an immense darkness lying underneath, one that was hidden away and ignored.
In his 1966 masterpiece, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote recalls the 1959 seemingly random murder of the Clutter family by two no-account drifters. In it, he addresses the idea of two Americas: the good, virtuous, and upright, versus the dark, criminal, and deviant, and how they came into bloody conflict one dark night in Kansas.
Charles Manson had an absolutely terrible life. Born to a single mother, he often told the story that his mother traded him in once for a pitcher of beer. He was constantly committing petty crimes and was in and out of institutions that were rife with violence and abuse.
The stoicism that had brought America through the hard times of the Great Depression and World War 2 metastasized into a hardened attitudes and an outward obsession with keeping up appearances.
When bad things happened, you didn't talk about them, you just dealt with them and carried on with things. Domestic violence, sexual abuse, and child abuse were considered personal problems to be dealt with at home, and not something the rest of society should concern itself with. As long as you were making money and conforming to what society expected of you, things were good and there was no need to bring up old feelings. Obedience and conformity were the cure to all social ills and anyone who deviated from that was considered dangerous.
And that didn't even get into the racial politics of the time. For as prosperous as most people in the White community were, Black people were systematically excluded from that wealth. Jim Crow laws were still deeply in effect, and black boys and men like Emmett Till were still being lynched and subjected to horrific racial violence.
While many White people were coming around to the idea that segregation was bad and that Black people were deserving of civil rights, many still clung to White supremacist ideals and believed that racial equality would be the downfall of Western society.
And then there was the global politics: starting with the Korean War in 1952, America was constantly engaged not in the noble battle for freedom that World War II had been, but in a series of proxy wars in faraway places that all had the extremely vague premise of "fighting communism." At home, Joseph McCarthy brought together the House Un-American Activity Committee to persecute anyone he saw of having "communist sympathies." Paranoia set in, and everyone expected The Bomb to fall at any moment.
One of the best encapsulations of the 1950s that I've come across so far is this 1952 Tampa Tribune article describing the sermon at the funeral of four-year-old Wayne E. Dolham, who was starved and tortured to death by his parents:
This is the America that created Charles Manson.
