Saylor.org HIST212: "1950's America"

In this lecture we're going to be focusing on 1950s America. In our last lecture we talked a little bit about the domestic impact of World War II as well as the domestic impact of the Cold War in the sense of this growing anti-communist fears in the United States and the sort of persecution of accused communists. In this lecture we're going to talk more about some of the other dominant trends in 1950s America. We're going to really focus on four particular areas that are important in understanding what the United States was experiencing in the 50s. The first of these is we're going to talk about was the economy and the fact that the 1950s were a period of economic prosperity. We're also going to talk about consumption and consumer behavior in the 1950s. We'll talk about the growth of the suburbs and the decline of the cities and finally we'll talk about politics during this era and how that shapes American society. The 1950s is very much, as some have termed it, a golden age of capitalism. It's a period where the economy after a decade of depression and a decade of war experiences this boom, this revival, and Americans live better than they had ever lived before. During this decade there's little price inflation, in other words the cost of living is not going up dramatically, there's low unemployment, there's a lot of work opportunities available for Americans, and as a result of this wages are going up. This leads to a rising standard of living. More Americans had better paying jobs, they had more income, they had more money available to spend it, and as a result by the end of the decade approximately 60% of Americans have reached the middle class, which is a dramatic number and in fact it's really a peak number. This number has been declining consistently since the end of the 1950s. Well, it's a decade, as this poster says, after the total war of the 1940s can come total living, and Americans wanted to live. They wanted to live well, they wanted to live better than they had lived before. Many Americans who had lived through the depression, they'd lived through the war, and they wanted to live life to the fullest. They wanted to embrace everything there was to embrace about the quote-unquote American dream or the American lifestyle. And so this is really a decade that sees that happen. Now ironically much of this economic prosperity of the 50s was a result of the Cold War itself. The federal government spends billions and billions of dollars building up America's defenses, supporting defense contractors, supporting nuclear weapons development, building missile bases, building aircraft facilities, building naval ports, all across the United States. And so all this Cold War spending trickles down to the American economy and creates what President Eisenhower later calls the military-industrial complex. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But definitely Americans are very prosperous during this decade. It's a decade where many people have good jobs, they're getting good pay. It's also a decade where we see the expansion of industrial jobs for the last time in America's history, and that there are more factory jobs during this decade, and the number ultimately ends up peaking during this decade. We also begin to see a gradual shift in the American economy from industrial employment to white collar service employment. This is certainly a trend that becomes very important in the 1960s and 70s. Lastly, it's a decade in which women's roles in the workplace change, become very important. Women, in fact, by the mid-1950s, had exceeded, in terms of the sheer numbers, the number of working women at the end of World War II. In World War II, about 18 million women were working, and then many left the workforce at the end of the war. But by 1950, women have returned to the workforce in even greater numbers. Of course, the kinds of work that they were doing was different than World War II, where they were working largely full-time blue-collar jobs. In the 1950s, many women enter white-collar employment on a part-time basis, or in some cases, young women who were college graduates enter the workforce for a few years until they get married, and then they retire to the home to raise children. But women in the 1950s, women's work becomes much more socially acceptable, as long as they were working part-time, or they were retiring once they were married and going home to raise their children. So we see a lot of working white-collar women during the decades of the 1950s, most of them working to supplement a husband's income, or to get access to middle-class things when they might not otherwise be able to afford them. But the assumption was always that when women got married or women had children, they would retire from the workforce and go home to raise their kids. And so, of course, the 1950s was a golden era of the housewife, of the woman in the home with all these great new high-tech appliances like stoves and refrigerators, electrical stoves and electrical refrigerators, who spent her time taking care of her children and providing for her husband and living this very domesticated, quintessential American lifestyle. Now, consumer behavior in the 1950s also reflects this sense of prosperity. Americans wanted to spend money in the 50s. They had no money during the Depression. Many of them had been unemployed or had been subsisting with barely enough money to live on. During World War II, they had money because many Americans who were working full-time, who weren't fighting overseas, had a lot of money, but they couldn't spend it on anything because there were rationing in place. There were restrictions. Many of the companies that manufactured cars and other goods were making tanks and airplanes. And so people just were saving and saving and saving or buying war bonds, which was essentially saving money, and they couldn't spend that money on anything. So in the 1950s, the dam breaks, and Americans just start to buy, buy, buy, buy. And in fact, government encourages them to buy. It's part of this American dream. And in the context of the Cold War, Americans' freedom to purchase and buy stuff becomes a very powerful tool in sort of the arsenal of democracy of America during the Cold War. The U.S. government goes to great lengths to depict the Soviet Union as a place where people can't buy anything. Soviet citizens went to the state-owned store, and they bought the one item on the shelf, and that was it. And Americans on the other end could go to a supermarket and have 50 things to choose from, 50 different types of soap or 50 different types of breakfast cereal instead of the one breakfast cereal or the one type of soap that you could get in the Soviet Union. So consumption and spending is really used as very much a Cold War propaganda tool by the United States. And Americans are, of course, encouraged to buy, buy, buy as much as possible. It's a decade where we see the development of the credit card. Americans being encouraged to, you know, buy now, pay later, put it on credit. Americans encouraged to buy cars on credit or buy homes on credit and get those 30-year mortgages that, you know, that meant they could buy a bigger, nicer house and they didn't have to have a bunch of money up front. Consumer goods also become cheaper during this decade as manufacturing technologies improve and it becomes easier for companies to make lots and lots of stuff. And so people, because things are cheaper, do buy more. Of course, another influence is that television becomes a popular medium during the 1950s. People get televisions in their homes. Televisions are a great way for companies to advertise. And so Americans have this stream of advertisements flowing into their house non-stop when they're watching television during the 1950s. Ultimately, all this comes down to the idea that endless consumption was part of living a good life. You couldn't be a good middle-class consumer in the United States, or even a real true American in the United States, unless you spent money on stuff, unless you bought things that you needed to buy, or in some cases that you didn't need to buy. Of course, one of the most important consumer goods of the 1950s is the automobile. Again, during the 30s, people couldn't afford to buy automobiles. They were buying used cars, so they were just making do with what they had. During World War II, all the car companies were making tanks, and aircraft, and other things. But in the 50s, once again, civilian production resumed, and people would take all their money that they had saved and buy new cars. So, car purchasing just goes through the roof in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, 80% of Americans owned at least one car. Many owned more than that. Many were replacing older vehicles on a regular basis. Every few years, they were buying that new car. They were trading in and trading up to a better, nicer car. And car culture, of course, becomes extremely important in American society. The drive-in movie theater, the drive-in restaurant. Late in the decade, by 1956, Congress authorizes the Interstate Highway Act, which creates these interstate highway systems crisscrossing the nation, providing high-speed transportation options to Americans with cars. And once again, this has a dramatic impact on car life and driving in the United States. So, in almost every way possible, Americans are being encouraged to spend money, to buy stuff, to travel, to engage in what would be considered the American dream or the American lifestyle. Another aspect of 1950s America, and one that's incredibly important because it certainly affects us to this day, is suburbanization. Americans in the 1950s flee the cities in record numbers for homes in the suburbs. Suburbs predated 1950s. In fact, we see suburbs as far back as the 1880s and 1890s. Typically, those older suburbs were along streetcar lines or along commuter railroad lines. But in the 1950s, we see a new kind of suburbia. A mass-produced, car-oriented suburbia. A suburbia that was far bigger, far more significant than these earlier kind of streetcar and railroad suburbs of the 1880s and 1890s. And during the 50s, there are a number of reasons why so many people moved to the suburbs. And partly, cities were overcrowded in the 19th, before World War II. And the Depression had led to a lot of people moving in and sharing apartments. Cities were very crowded. People were not enjoying living in the cities. And they wanted to move somewhere else. And during the Depression, they didn't have the money to do that. During World War II, the money was tied up in other things. But once the war ends, they have an opportunity to move out. Real estate developers recognize this. A real estate developer by the name of William Levitt, who of course gives his name to the so-called Levittown. There are a couple of Levittown, New York. Levittown, Pennsylvania. Works with banks and insurance companies to get the funding and builds these massive, almost essentially industrial scale suburbs. Here's just a little piece of one of these Levittown suburbs. And they were, they were, you know, this, take this and expand it five or six times to see the true scope of Levittown suburbia. Well, people like Levitt decide to build houses on an industrial scale, as I mentioned. And they use a lot of techniques that have been pioneered for mass production of consumer goods to build houses. Houses are no longer these craft constructions that require seven or eight months to build. People could start, they could use these new techniques, new building techniques, and turn out houses on a weekly basis. Homes no longer, you know, homes can be turned out literally as if they were on an assembly line. William Levitt decides to build a community in Long Island, just outside New York City, and buys essentially empty potato fields. And in a matter of five years, he's built 17,000 homes. And the population expands from zero, basically, to about 50,000 residents. And Levitt replicates the success elsewhere across the country, in Philadelphia, outside Washington, D.C., and so forth. So during the 1950s, the suburb as a concept becomes viable. Because again, industrial scale production of houses, automobiles, everybody is owning, at least white middle class people are able to buy automobiles. And so it becomes possible to live outside the city, and at the same time still have access to traditional jobs in the, you know, in the inner city. Suburbanization, as I just mentioned, it's based on the automobile. New highways, new roads are built to link the suburbs with the cities. Many of these suburbs have very little access to older, more traditional transportation systems, like streetcars, buses, and trains. Many of the old cities, in fact, start getting rid of these older public transit systems, because people weren't using them. People much preferred automobiles over streetcars. And so those who were poor, especially minorities and poor whites, who continue to live in the inner cities, suddenly lose access to a lot of their ability to move around, because cities just get rid of their streetcar systems, or they start cutting back on bus service. What this white flight, as it's termed, does, what white flight does, is it leads to a blighting or a decay of the inner city. Because as white middle class and upper class people flee the city, minorities and those who are poor are left behind. And as a result, it makes it harder for the inner cities to kind of keep up with the countryside. Now there are a number of reasons why poor minorities are left behind. One is simply a financial reason, that poor minorities couldn't afford cars. They often couldn't afford the houses that were being constructed in places like Levittown, New York, or Levittown, Pennsylvania. Another factor, though, was there was rampant discrimination in housing. Federal agencies that guaranteed mortgage loans, backed mortgage loans, wouldn't give loans to minorities. They were seen as being credit risks. White developers, like William Levitt, would not sell houses to African-American or other minorities. It literally was written into the housing contracts that they wouldn't sell to minorities. There was also a great deal of pressure placed on residents in these suburbs not to sell their houses, if they had to sell their house, to a minority. Because that would decline, that would lead to a decline in the housing value, and their neighbors would get mad at them. So there's an incredible amount of pressure placed on white middle class residents to live in the suburbs and to keep those suburbs lily white, to exclude minorities wherever possible. And this is reflected in housing statistics in the United States well into the 1980s and 1990s. As late as 1990, 90% of suburban whites lived in communities that had non-white populations of less than 1%. In other words, most suburban residents, 90% of whites living in the suburbs, are living in lily white suburbs with no minorities, African-American, Hispanic, and otherwise. And this creates a dramatic shift in the population in the United States. And as I said, a moment ago, has very negative consequences for American cities. Neighborhoods just begin to fall apart. Neighborhoods' houses are bulldozed and end up being vacant lots. Here we have St. Louis, which I think in some ways is the poster child for urban decline, that as whites flee the cities, tax base declines. Poor minorities can't afford to pay high taxes. And as a result, cities start slashing basic services like police, fire, trash, etc. So houses catch on fire and they burn down and nobody wants to replace them. Neighborhoods get more dangerous because there are fewer police on the street. And people, if they can, flee. They move out. As a result of this flight of white people, white middle-class people, and the decline of many of these minority urban environments, cities begin to try to do something about it. And they do so by creating housing developments. Public housing, or projects as they're commonly known, become very common in many cities that have large poor minority populations. All these early housing developments are not pleasant places. They're extremely institutional. Every one of them looks identical. All these buildings are identical and then probably on the inside look identical as well. Many of them were not well maintained and they start falling apart very quickly. And as a result, they become dirty, dangerous, unpleasant places to live for those who are there. They also perpetuate this cycle of poverty because you had to be poor to live in one of these developments. It would be one thing if middle-class people were allowed to live in these developments, but only poor people were allowed to live there. And so, as a result, people are surrounded by poverty and it perpetuates the cycle. There's no easy ability to escape. One of the other consequences of this sort of urban renewal and this development of projects and other things like that, is it just destroys what had once been vibrant neighborhoods. Here in the case of St. Louis, where you have you have in the sense this large Pruitt-Igoe, which is one of the most notorious housing developments built, constructed in the midst of what had once been a very vibrant neighborhood. And everything is bulldozed and you get these horribly ugly modernist high-rise housing projects built here instead. And it just really devastates these neighborhoods. Other cities replace vibrant neighborhoods with things like highways or commercial buildings, government buildings, sports facilities. And ultimately, for residents who are too poor to get out, they're condemned to horrible, horrible living and housing conditions. And this just creates a disaster that perpetuates throughout the 1960s and 70s in America, in major American cities. Well, the third or fourth and final area to talk about is politics in the 1950s. The 1950s is an era that we call an era of political consensus. It's an era or decade in which extremism is not welcomed, except for, of course, anti-communist extremism, as we talked about in the last lecture. The idea that Americans engage in politics is important, but politics is a politics of the center. It's not good to be extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing during this era. Certainly, the election of President Dwight David Eisenhower to office in 1952 is part of this kind of race for the middle. Because Eisenhower is hardly a polarizing figure. He's grandfatherly. People think of him as a nice guy. He doesn't have strong political opinions. In fact, he's just he's conservative, but pretty middle-of-the-road conservative. But he's elected in a pretty broad landslide. His one position that is pretty strong is that he's anti-communist, which of course is okay. It's good to be anti-communist during this decade. He comes into office promising to end the Korean War that the United States have been involved in for two years, and a lot of Americans have been killed. He also promises to keep America strong, to ensure that America has dominance in nuclear weapons, and can defend itself against the Soviet Union and communism abroad. And so Eisenhower is elected as a very moderate Republican, who embraces a lot of democratic things, such as New Deal institutions, like social security. He says social security is okay, and it helps make social security acceptable to both conservatives and to liberals in the United States. He's very pro-business, but also fiscally conservative, and doesn't feel that the United States will be spending huge amounts of money on big government projects as much as possible. But at the same time, as I said, he's not a polarizing figure. When it comes to nuclear weapons though, he's very much concerned, and his advisors are as well, with ensuring that the United States remains strong, including a strategy that's referred to as MAD, which stands for Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea was that the U.S. was going to build so many nuclear weapons that if the Soviet Union ever attacked the U.S., it couldn't possibly hope to destroy them all. And in return, the U.S. would use all of its remaining nuclear weapons to wipe out the Soviet Union. The idea being that the Soviet Union, as this is a strategy of deterrence, the Soviet Union would be deterred from attacking because it could never survive. And so he's a firm believer in this strategy of MAD, this strategy of massive retaliation, that said that if the Soviet Union or one of its kind of proxy states ever attack the U.S. in any way, the U.S. will respond with a massive nuclear assault. In other words, don't attack us and we will wipe you off the face of the earth. Of course, this is very scary stuff. This is not a strategy that most Americans feel very comfortable with. It leads to a lot of concerns about nuclear war during this decade. But for the most part, it's an idea that it's supposed to be ensuring peace, ensuring international stability because everybody's afraid to go to war. Now, Eisenhower also had a strong sense of the other parts, expanding U.S. influence and domination to other parts of the world. In 1957, he issues what becomes known as the Eisenhower Doctrine. It says the U.S. will defend the Middle East against communism and against Arab nationalism. It will do whatever it can to keep the Middle East essentially a colonial possession of other nations, to keep the Middle East from becoming dominated by Arab nationals. He also supports the French in Vietnam. He gets the U.S. involved in supplying military equipment and supplies to the French in Vietnam to fight the anti-communist forces there. Globally, Eisenhower is very proactive. He's very much involved in trying to keep the U.S. strong and trying to fight the Cold War, whereas domestically, he's pretty middle of the road and encourages kind of moderation and avoiding extremism. The last thing I want to briefly mention in this lecture is that while, of course, the 1950s might be considered a decade of consumerism, of middle-class lifestyle, of political moderation, there's some rumblings below the surface. There are some subcultures who are beginning to challenge this dominant kind of middle-class paradigm in the United States. One of these, of course, are teenagers. Teenagers really come into their own in the 1950s. Mostly, many of them are the baby boomers. These baby boomers have been born in the late 40s and by the late 1950s are beginning to enter their teens, and they become a hugely important subculture because much of the popular culture is geared towards them. Movies, books, television becomes marketed towards teenagers because they have money and they're willing to spend it. Teenagers, by and large, begin to reject many middle-class social and cultural values and embrace things like rock and roll that promotes sex and rebellion. Listening to music, that kind of blurs the line between what's considered to be socially acceptable and what's not. A lot of rock and roll, especially, comes out of blues traditions in African-American culture, and teenagers begin to embrace many of these sort of African and certain African-American cultural traditions, which really starts to freak out their parents. Teenagers are definitely a force to be reckoned with and something that we'll see in future lectures begin to influence American society in the 1960s. Another group that has an influence on 1950s culture, very much below the surface but later on more public, are a group called the Beats, sometimes also known as Beatniks. The Beats are very much a subculture problem, mostly in cities and some college towns, who are also sort of a underground scene. They embrace drug use, embracing sexual experimentation, personal freedom, becoming sort of... they try to set themselves apart from the mainstream community by adopting their own special lingo and their own words and own kind of places to hang out, coffee shops especially become a popular place for Beats to hang out. But once again, they provide a breeding ground for this emerging countercultural movement that breaks out in the mid-1960s as being a hugely important force, as the teenagers of the 50s, as the Beats of the 50s become kind of the countercultural rebels of the 1960s and have a huge impact on American society, and we'll talk about that in future lectures. So certainly the 1950s is a decade of prosperity, of very moderate middle-of-the-road behavior, but at the same time there's some interesting cultural forces brewing that do have an impact on the United States in the following decades.