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On the face of it, life was God-fearing and respectable. Almost sixty per cent of American families owned their own homes, an unprecedented figure. The divorce rate was remarkably low, at 8.9 couples per thousand all told in 1958. According to Gallup polls, in 1940 a third of American adults went to church every week; by 1955 the proportion had risen to around half. To the ‘happiness question’, more than half of all Americans answered ‘very happy’ in 1957. Never had there been so much quantifiable happiness, and never would there be so much again. Anyone wishing to be catapulted back into the America of those years should take a look on YouTube at the home movie Disneyland Dream, filmed in the summer of 1956 by enthusiastic amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow, who
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