The business ventures of his later career were less successful than the film work of the early 1950s. By the late 1960s, the Western film genre that had sustained his acting career was contracting. Television had changed the market for B-Westerns and second-tier theatrical releases. The studios that had employed him were reorganizing. The specific economic position of a former film actor whose peak earning years had passed but whose expenses had been built for a higher income is a precarious one, and Murphy experienced it.
## The Veterans’ Advocacy in Historical Perspective
Murphy’s public advocacy for veterans’ mental health in the 1960s is best understood against the specific historical context of that decade.
The American veterans of the Second World War had largely been absorbed into civilian life by the 1960s. The postwar economic boom had given many of them opportunities for education, home ownership, and professional advancement that the Depression-era circumstances of their early lives had not suggested. The GI Bill, the expansion of the American economy, the growth of the suburbs — the material conditions of postwar American life had, for many veterans, produced an outcome that looked like successful reintegration.
What the material success could not address was the internal cost. The veterans of the Second World War had not been encouraged to discuss or process what they had experienced. The psychiatric understanding of the period was inadequate to the specific problem of combat trauma. Shell shock, the First World War term for the condition, had been partially recognized but was still associated primarily with physical shock — the concussive effect of artillery — rather than with the psychological consequences of sustained exposure to killing and death.