American History A Survey By Alan Brinkley

Chapter 30
The Affluent Society o The Economic Miracle Sources of Economic Growth By 1949, despite the continuing problems of postwar reconversion, an economic expansion had begun that would continue with only brief interruptions for almost twenty years The causes of this growth varied o Government spending continued to stimulate growth through public funding of schools, housing, veterans benefits, welfare, and the $100 billion interstate highway program o Technological progress also contributed to the boom There was the development of electronic computers The first modern computer emerged as a result of efforts during WWII to decipher enemy codes Not until the 1980s did most Americans come into direct and regular contact with computers, but the new machines were having a substantial effect on the economy long before that The national birth rate reversed a long pattern of decline with the socalled baby boom o The baby boom meant increased consumer demand and expanding economic growth The rapid expansion of suburbs helped stimulate growth in several important sectors of the economy Because of this unprecedented growth, the economy grew nearly ten times as fast as the population in their thirty years after the war o The American people had achieved the highest standard of living of any society in the history of the world The Rise of the Modern West No region of the country experience more dramatic changes as a result of the new economic growth than the American West By the 1960s some parts of the West were among the most important industrial and cultural centers of the nation in their own right As during WWII much of the growth of the West was a result of federal spending and investment o Dams, power stations, highways, and other infrastructure projects The enormous increase in automobile use after WWII gave a large stimulus to the petroleum industry and contributed to the rapid growth of oil fields in Texas and Colorado State governments in the West invested heavily in their universities Climate also contributed The New Economics The exciting discovery of the power of the American economic system was a major cause of the confident, even arrogant tone of much American political life in the 1950s

There was the belief that Keynesian economics made it possible for government to regulate and stabilize the economy without intruding directly into the private sector By the mid-1950s, Keynesian theory was rapidly becoming a fundamental article of faith o Armed with these fiscal and monetary tools, many economists now believed, it was possible for the government to maintain a permanent prosperity If any doubters remained, there was ample evidence to dispel their misgivings during the era Accompanying the belief in the possibility of permanent economic stability was the equally exhilarating belief in permanent economic growth by the mid-1950s, reformers concerned about economic deprivation were arguing that the solution lay in increased production The Keynesians never managed to remake federal economic policy entirely to their liking o Still, the new economics gave many Americans a confidence in their ability to solve economic problems that previous generations had never developed Capital and Labor A relatively small number or large-scale organizations controlled an enormous proportion oft eh nations economic activity A similar consolidation was occurring in the agricultural economy Corporations enjoying booming growth were reluctant to allow strikes to interfere with their operations By the early 1950s large labor unions had developed a new kind of relationship with employers o Postwar Contract Workers in steel, automobiles, and other large unionized industries were receiving generous increases in wages and benefits o In return the unions tacitly agreed to refrain from raising other issues The contract served the corporations and the union leadership well Many rank-and-file workers resented the abandonment of efforts to give them more control over the conditions of their labor The economic successes of the 1950s helped pave the way for a reunification of the labor movement o 1955, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations ended their 20 year rivalry and merged to create the AFL-CIO But success also bread stagnation and corruption in some union bureaucracies While the labor movement enjoyed significant success in winning better wages and benefits for workers already organized in strong unions, the majority of laborers who were as yet unorganized made fewer advances o New obstacles to organization Taft-Hartley Act and the state right-to-work laws In the American South impediments to unionization were enormous o Antiunion sentiment was so powerful in the South that almost all organizing drives encountered crushing and usually fatal resistance People of Plenty The Consumer Culture o

At the center of middle-class culture in the 1950s was a growing absorption with consumer goods It was a result of o Increased prosperity o Increasing variety and availability of products o Advertisers adeptness in creating a demand for those product o A growth of consumer credit To a striking degree, the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was consumer driven Because consumer goods were so often marketed nationally, the 1950s were notable for the rapid spread of creation national consumer crazes The Suburban Nation By 1960 a third of the nations population was living in suburbs The most famous of the postwar suburban developers, William Levitt, came to symbolize the new suburban growth with his use of massproduction techniques to construct a large housing development on Long Island, NY o They helped to meet an enormous demand for housing that had been growing for more than a decade Many Americans wanted to move to the suburbs o One reason was the enormous importance postwar Americans place on family life after five years of war in which families had often been separated or otherwise disrupted o They provided privacy o A place to raise a large family o They provided security from the noise and dangers of urban living o They offered space for the new consumer goods o Suburban life also helped provide a sense of community Suburban neighborhoods o They were not uniform The Suburban Family For professional men, suburban life generally meant a rigid division between their working and personal worlds For many middle-class married women, it meant an increase isolation from the workplace One of the most influential books in postwar American life was a famous guide to child rearing o Baby and Child Care Said that the needs of the child come before everything else Women who could afford not to work faced heavy pressures to remain in the home and concentrate on raising their children Yet by 1960, nearly a third of all married women were in the paid workforce The increasing numbers of women in the workplace laid the groundwork for demands for equal treatment by employers that became and important part of the feminist crusades of the 1960s and 1970s The Birth of Television Television is perhaps the most powerful medium of mass communication in history The television industry emerged directly out of the radio industry

Like radio, the television business was driven by advertising The impact of television on American life was rapid, pervasive, and profound o Television entertainment programming replace movies and radio as the principal source of diversion for American families Much of the programming of the 1950s and early 1960s created a common image of American life o An image that was predominately white, middle-class, and suburban o Programming also reinforced the concept of gender roles o Television inadvertently created conditions that could accentuate social conflict Science and Space There was an indication of the widespread fascination with which Americans in the age of atomic weapons viewed science and technology o Medicines were taking care of death rates o They were also impressed by other scientific and technological innovations The jet plane, the computer, synthetics, new types of commercially prepared foods The American space program The program began in large part because of the Cold War o Sputnik 1957 On May 5, 1961 Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space On February 2, 1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the globe Summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first men to walk on the surface of the moon Enthusiasm began to die down Early in 1986, an explosion destroyed one of the shuttles, the Challenger, shortly after it took off o The incident, and the widespread national grief that it provoked, made clear the degree to which the space program continued to embody some of the nations most romantic hopes Organized Society and Its Detractors Large-scale organizations and bureaucracies increased their influence over American life in the postwar era More and more Americans were becoming convinced that the key to a successful future lay in acquiring the specialized training and skills necessary for work in large organizations o The American educational system responded to the demands of this increasingly organized society by experimenting with changing in curriculum and philosophy The National Defense Education Act of 1958 Provided federal funding for development of programs in those areas of science, mathematics, and foreign languages As in earlier eras, many Americans reacted to these developments with ambivalence, even hostility

Novelists expressed misgivings in their work about the enormity and impersonality of modern society The Beats and the Restless Culture of Youth The most derisive critics of bureaucracy, and of middle-class society in general, were a group of young poets, writers, and artists generally known as the beats beatniks The beats were the most visible evidence of a widespread restlessness among young Americans in the 1950s In part, that restlessness was a result of prosperity itself o Tremendous public attention was directed at the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency and in both politics and popular culture there were dire warnings about the growing criminality of American youth Also disturbing to many older Americans was the style of youth culture o The culture of alienation that the beats so vividly represented had counterparts even in ordinary middle-class behavior Teenage rebelliousness toward parents, youthful fascination with fast cars and motorcycles, and an increasing visibility of teenage sex, assisted by the greater availability of birth-control devices and the spreading automobile culture that came to dominated the social lives of teenagers in much of the nation o The popularity of James Dean was a particularly vivid sign of this aspect of youth culture in the 1950s Dean became an icon of the unfocused rebelliousness of American youth in his time Rock n Roll One of the most powerful signs of the restiveness of American youth was the enormous popularity of rock n roll and of the greatest early rock star o Elvis Presley Presley became a symbol of a youthful determination to push at the borders of the conventional and acceptable Presleys music, like that of most early white rock musicians, drew heavily from black rhythm and blues traditions Rock also drew from country western music, gospel music, even from jazz The rise of such white rock musicians as Presley was a result in part of the limited willingness of white audience to accept black musicians The rapid rise and enormous popularity of rock owed a great deal to innovations in radio and television programming o Early in the 1950s, a new breed of radio announcers began to create programming aimed specifically at young fans of rock music Disk Jockeys Radio and television were important to the recording industry because they encouraged the sale of records o Also important were jukeboxes Rock music began in the 1950s to do what jazz and swing had done in the 1920s 40s o To define both youth culture as a whole and the experience of a generation

The Other America On the Margins of the Affluent Society In 1962, The Other America was published o Chronicles of the continuing existence of poverty in America The great economic expansion of the postwar years reduced poverty dramatically but did not eliminate it Most of the poor experience poverty intermittently and temporarily This poverty was a poverty that the growing prosperity of the postwar era seemed to affect hardly at all Rural Poverty Among those on the margins of the affluent society were many rural Americans Not all farmers were poor o But the agrarian economy did produce substantial numbers of genuinely impoverished people Migrant farm workers and coal miners fell to the same kind of poverty The Inner Cities As white families moved from cities to suburbs in vast numbers, more and more inner-city neighborhoods became vast repositories for the poor o Ghettos from which there was no easy escape African Americans helped this growth Similar migrations from Mexico and Puerto Rico expanded poor Hispanic barrios in many American cities at the same time For many years, the principal policy response to the poverty of inner cities was urban renewal o The effort to tear down buildings in the poorest and most degraded areas In some cases, urban renewal provided new public housing for poor city residents In many cases, urban renewal projects replaced slums with middle and upper-income housing, office towers, or commercial buildings One result of inner-city poverty was a rising rate of juvenile crime The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement The Brown Decision and Massive Resistance On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka o Ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional

The Brown decision was the culmination of many decades of effort by black opponents of segregation The Topeka suit involved the case of an African-American girl who had to travel several miles to a segregated public school every day even though she lived virtually next door to a white elementary school o The Court concluded that school segregation inflicted unacceptable damage on those it affected The following year, the Court issued another decision to provide rules for implementing the 1954 order o It ruled that communities must work to desegregate their schools with all deliberate speed, but it set no timetable and left specific decisions up to lower courts Strong local opposition produced long delays and bitter conflicts

o More than 100 southern members of Congress signed a

manifesto in 1956 denouncing the Brown decision and urging their constituents to defy it Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham Board of Education (1958) o Refused to declare pupil placement laws, placing a student in a school based on academic or social behaviors, unconstitutional The Brown decision, far from ending segregation, had launched a prolonged battle between federal authority and state and local governments, and between those who believed in racial equality and those who did not In 1957, federal courts had ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rick, Arkansas o An angry white mob tried to prevent implementation of the order by blockading the entrances to the school o President Eisenhower responded by federalizing the National Guard and sending troops to Little Rock to restore order and ensure that the court orders would be obeyed The Expanding Movement The Brown decision helped spark a growing number of popular challenges to segregation in the South December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger o The arrest of this admired woman produced outrage in the citys African-American community and helped local leaders organize a successful boycott of the bus system to demand an end to segregated seating o The bus boycott put economic pressure not only on the bus company but on many Montgomery merchants The bus boycotters found it difficult to get to downtown stores and tended to shop instead in their own neighborhoods A Supreme Court decision in 1956 declared segregation in public transportation to be illegal More important than the immediate victories of the Montgomery boycott was its success in establishing a new form of racial protest and in elevating to prominence a new figure in the movement for civil rights o Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kings approach to black protest was based on the doctrine of nonviolence He urged African Americans to engage in peaceful demonstrations The popular movement he came to represent soon spread throughout the South and throughout the country One important color line had been breached as early as 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed the great Jackie Robinson as the first African American to play Major League Baseball President Eisenhower signed a civil rights act in 1957 o Providing federal protection for blacks who wished to register to vote Causes of the Civil Rights Movement

Several factors contributed to the rise of African-American protest in these years o Millions of black men and women had served in the military or worked in war plants during the war and had derived from the experience a broader view of the world and their place in it o Another factor was the growth of an urban black middle class o Television and other forms of popular culture were another factor in the rising consciousness of racism among blacks Other forces were at work mobilizing many white Americans to support the movement once it began o The Cold War o Political mobilization of northern blacks o Labor unions with substantial black memberships By the early 1960s, this movement had made it one of the most powerful forces in America Eisenhower Republicanism Whats Good forGeneral Motors The first Republican administration in 20 years was staffed mostly with men drawn from the same quarter as those who had staffed Republican administrations in the 1920s o The business community Many of the nation's leading businessmen and financiers ha reconciled themselves to at least the broad outlines of the Keynesian welfare state the New Deal had launched and had come to see it as something that actually benefited them To his cabinet, Eisenhower appointed wealthy corporate lawyers and business executives Eisenhowers leadership style helped enhance the power of his cabinet officers and others Eisenhowers consistent inclination was to limit federal activities and encourage private enterprise The Survival of the Welfare State The president took few new initiatives in domestic policy Perhaps the most significant legislative accomplishment of the Eisenhower administration was the Federal Highway Act of 1956 o Authorized $25 billion for a ten-year effort to construct over 40,000 miles of interstate highways o The program was to be funded through a highway trust fund whose revenues would come from new taxes on the purchase of fuel, automobiles, trucks, and tires In 1956, Eisenhower ran for a second term o Republicans Adlai Stevenson o Eisenhower won Democrats still held power over Congress The Decline of McCarthyism In its first years in office the Eisenhower administration did little to discourage the anticommunist furor that had gripped the nation Among the most celebrated controversies of the new administrations first year was the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer o He opposed the building of the Hydrogen Bomb o In 1953, the FBI distributed a dossier within the administration detailing Oppenheimers prewar association with various left-wing groups

He was denied security clearance to government secrets But by 1954, such policies were beginning to produce significant opposition o The clearest signal of that change was the political demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy He overstepped his boundaries when he charged Secretary of Army Robert Stevens Army-McCarthy hearings In December 1954, he was condemned for conduct unbecoming a senator Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Cold War Dulles and Massive Retaliation Eisenhowers secretary of state, and the dominant figure in the nations foreign policy in the 1950s, was John Foster Dulles He entered office denouncing the containment policies of the Truman years o Arguing that the United States should pursue an active program of liberation which would lead to a rollback of communism expansion Massive Retaliation o The United States would, he explained, respond to communist threats to its allies not by using conventional forces to local conflicts but by relying on the deterrent of massive retaliatory power (nuclear weapons) By the end of the decade, the United States had become a party to almost a dozen such treaties of mutual defense in NATO in all areas of the world Korea and Vietnam The most troubling foreign policy concern of the Truman years, the war in Korea, plagued the Eisenhower administration only briefly On July 27, 1953, negotiators at Panmunjom finally signed an agreement ending the hostilities o Each antagonist was to withdraw its troops a mile and a half form the existing battle like The 38th parallel Almost simultaneously the` United States faced a difficult choice in Southeast Asia, where France was fighting to retain control of its onetime colony Vietnam o Opposing the French were the powerful nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh, which were determined to win independence for their nation Eisenhower supported the French o Only American intervention, it was clear, could prevent the total collapse of the French military effort Eisenhower refused to permit direct American military intervention in Vietnam o The French effort finally failed on May 7, 1954 They decided to settle the conflict at the Geneva Conference The agreement marked the end of the French commitment to Vietnam and the beginning of an expanded American presence there

Israel and the Crisis of the Middle East The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine had been the dream of a powerful international Zionist movement for more than half a century before WWII o On May 14, 1948, British rule ended and Jews proclaimed the existence of the nation of Israel The creation of Israel created some conflicts Palestinian Arabs, unwilling to accept being displaced form what they considered their own country, rejected the partition and fought determinedly against the new state in 1948 o America was deeply concerned about the stability and friendliness of the Arab regimes in the area The region contained the rickets oil reserves in the word, reserves in which American companies had already invested heavily o The United States reacted with alarm as it watch Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, begin to resist the presence of Western corporations in his nation In 1953, the American CIA joined forces with conservative Iranian military leaders to engineer a coup that drove Mossadegh from office They replaced him with the Shah of Iran He remained closely tied to the United States for the next twenty-five years American policy was less effective in dealing with the nationalist government of Egypt o In 1956, to punish Nasser, leader of Egypt, for his friendliness toward the communists, Dulles withdrew American offers to assist in building the great Aswan Dam across the Nile o Nasser retaliated by seizing control of the Suez Canal form the British o On October 29, 1956, Israeli forces struck a preemptive blow against Egypt The next day the British and French landed troops in the Suez to drive the Egyptians from the canal By refusing to join the invasion, the United States helped pressure the French and British to withdraw and helped persuade Israel to agree to a truce with Egypt o In 1958, as pan-Arab forces loyal to Nasser challenged the government of Lebanon, Eisenhower ordered 5,000 American marines to land on the beaches of Beirut to protect the existing regime The government managed to stabilize their position on their own, and within months the forces withdrew Latin America and Yankee Imperialism WWII and the Cold War had eroded the limited initiative of the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America Latin American animosity toward the United States grew steadily during the 1950s, as more people in the region came to view the expanding influence of American corporations in their countries as a form of imperials

Such concerns deepened when the Eisenhower administration ordered the CIA to help topple the new leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala No nation in the region had been more closely tied to America than Cuba o Beginning in 1957, a popular movement of resistance to the Batista regime began to gather power under the leadership of Fidel Castro On January 1, 1959, with Batista in exile in Spain, Castro marched into Havana and established a new government o At first, the American government reacted warmly to Castro Hopeful that Castro would be a moderate, democratic reformer who would allow American economic activity to continue in Cuba unchallenged BIG MISTAKE! o When Castro began accepting assistance form the Soviet Union in 1960, the United States cut back the quota by which Cuba could export sugar to America at a favor price Castro soon cemented an alliance with the Soviet Union Europe and the Soviet Union Although the problems of the Third World were moving slowly to the center of American foreign policy, the direct relationship with the Soviet Union and the effort to resist communist expansion in Europe remained the principal concerns of the Eisenhower administration In 1955, Eisenhower and other NATO leaders met with the Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, at a cordial summit conference in Geneva o They could find no basis for agreement Relations between the Soviet Union and the West soured further in 1956 in response to the Hungarian Revolution o Hungarians were demanding democratic reforms Soviets came in to crush the uprising o The suppression of the uprising convinced many American leaders that Soviet policies had not softened as much as the events of the previous two years had suggested The failure of conciliation brought renewed vigor to the Cold War and greatly intensified the Soviet-American arms race The arms race not only increased tensions between the United States and Russia o It increased tensions within each nation as well The U-2 Crisis In this tense and fearful atmosphere, the Soviet Union raised new challenges to the West in Berlin In November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev renewed his predecessors demands that NATO powers abandon the city o The United States and its allies refused Khrushchev suggested that he and Eisenhower discuss the issue personally o The United States agreed Only days before Eisenhower was to leave for Moscow the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down an American U-2, a spy plane, over Russian territory o

By the spring of 1960, Khrushchev knew that no agreement was possible on the Berlin issue The events of 1960 provided a somber backdrop for the end of the Eisenhower administration He warned in his farewell address of 1961 of the unwarranted influence of a vast military-industrial complex o His caution, in both domestic and international affairs, stood in marked contrast to the attitudes of his successors, who argued that the United States must act more boldly and aggressively on behalf of its goals at home and abroad