80 years? Things started to go awry around 1970. That's when the Boy Scouts stopped treating scouts like young adults and instead began treating them like delicate flowers.
The great depression destroyed the social fabric of the us more thoroughly than did the civil war. The 1950s weren't normal, they were the result of a generations want for stability and domesticity when they had no idea what either looked like. For one thing the end of generational households to be replaced by nuclear family households was seen by the people at the time as worse than single parent households are today and with good reason.
That the majority of conservatives today pine for the 50s us that we not only lost the ability to have a stable society but even the memory of what one should look like.
You can see the change in the Boy Scout manual.