1950s

The 1950s are recalled in Barry Seaman’s church speech as an era when a smile had practical social value: it could open doors. Set against a present in which smiles invite suspicion or function as displays of perfection, the decade becomes the measure by which Seaman weighs usefulness against fashion and admiration.

The remembered currency of a smile

Seaman presents the fifties through a small, familiar gesture rather than through political milestones. A smile, he says, opened doors; he is less certain that it could take someone places. The qualification matters: its power is social and immediate, a way of making an entrance possible rather than a guarantee of advancement.

That convention crossed occupations. Salespeople, waiters, businesspeople, secretaries, doctors, scriptwriters, and gardeners were all expected to smile. Seaman marks out cops and prison guards as the exception, a contrast that makes the smile seem less like an expression of private feeling than a public requirement attached to ordinary working life.

From welcome to suspicion

In Seaman’s account, the old convention no longer holds. People now suspect that a smile conceals an enemy or signals that its wearer wants something from them. The gesture has not vanished, however: American television remains full of smiles and increasingly perfect teeth. Its function has changed from opening a door to attracting attention.

Seaman distinguishes admiration from trust. The television figures, in his telling, do not seek to persuade viewers that they are good or harmless; they want to be looked at. Perfect teeth, bodies, and manners turn the smile into a polished spectacle, which he figures as fragments of fire breaking away from the sun. The remembered social welcome has become a performance whose reward is worship rather than confidence.

Usefulness, fashion, and class

The fifties also anchor Seaman’s broader distinction between what is useful and what is imposed as fashion. He argues that some things once generally appreciated are now distrusted, while other things are pressed upon people without improving their lives. Children’s braces provide his example: he does not remember children wearing them when he was young, but says that today he has hardly met a child who does not.

For Seaman, such items can operate as markers of class, objects valued because fashionable or high-status people are expected to possess them. Fashion passes through its stages of decay, he says, while class markers endure until the person marked by them is dead and the corpse has rotted. The sharp contrast extends his memory of the fifties beyond nostalgia: the period supplies a point of comparison for asking whether a visible social custom serves people or chiefly solicits admiration.