Chapter 24 The Golden Age

Chapter 24 Outline The Golden Age • After the war, the American economy enjoyed remarkable growth. • Numerous innovations came into widespread use during these years, transforming Americans' daily lives. - A Changing Economy • The Cold War fueled industrial production and promoted a redistribution of the nation's population and economic resources. • Since the 1950s, the American economy has shifted away from manufacturing. • The numbers of farms declined since the 1950s, but farm production increased. - The center of gravity of American farming shifted decisively to Texas, Arizona, and especially California. - A Suburban Nation • The main engines of economic growth during the 1950s were residential construction and spending on consumer goods. • The dream of home owner ship came within reach of the majority of Americans. - Levittown - Shopping mall - The Growth of the West • California became the most prominent symbol of the postwar suburban boom. • Western cities were decentralized clusters of single-family homes and businesses united by a web of highways. - A Consumer Culture • In a consumer culture, the mea sure of freedom became the ability to gratify market desires. • Americans became comfortable living in never-ending debt, once seen as a loss of economic freedom. • Consumer culture demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life to communism. - The TV World • Television replaced newspapers as the most common source of information about public events and provided Americans of all regions and backgrounds with a common cultural experience. • TV avoided controversy and projected a bland image of middle-class life. • Television also became the most effective advertising medium ever invented. - A New Ford • Along with a home and tele vision set, the car became part of what sociologists called "the standard consumer package" of the 1950s. • Auto manufacturers and oil companies vaulted to the top ranks of corporate America. • The automobile transformed the nation's daily life. - Women at Work and at Home 1 • After 1945, women lost most of the industrial jobs they had performed during the war. • By the mid-1950s women were working again, but the nature and aims of women's work had changed. • Women were expected to get married, have kids, and stay at home. - Baby boom • The family also became a weapon in the Cold War. - Feminism seemed to have disappeared from American life. - A Segregated Landscape • The suburbs remained segregated communities. • During the postwar suburban boom, federal agencies continued to insure mortgages that barred resale of houses to non-whites, thereby financing housing segregation. - Public Housing and Urban Renewal • A housing act passed by Congress in 1949authorized the construction of over 800,000 units of public housing in order to provide a "decent home for every American family." • Suburbanization hardened the racial lines of division in American life. - Seven million whites left the cities for the suburbs while 3 million blacks moved into the cities. - Puerto Ricans - The Divided Society • The process of racial exclusion became self-reinforcing. - Whites viewed urban ghettos as places of crime, poverty, and welfare. - Blockbusting • Suburban home owner ship long remained a white entitlement. - Religion and Anticommunism • To many observers in the 1950s it seemed that the ills of American society had been solved. - If problems remained, their solution required technical adjustments, not structural change or aggressive political intervention. • Americans celebrated religiosity as opposed to "godless" communism and affirmed the nation's faith with amendments to its Pledge of Allegiance and its coinage. • There emerged a new Judeo-Christian heritage, a notion that became central to the cultural and political dialogue of the 1950s. • The idea of a unified Judeo-Christian tradition reflected the decline of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism in the wake of World War II. - Secularization - Selling Free Enterprise • More than political democracy or freedom of speech, an economic system resting on private owner ship united the nations of the Free World. • The selling of free enterprise became a major industry. - The Advertising Council 2 - People's Capitalism • Until well into the twentieth century, most ordinary Americans had been deeply suspicious of big business. • Large-scale production was not only necessary to fight the Cold War but enhanced freedom by multiplying consumer goods. - Stock market - The Libertarian Conservatives • To libertarian conservatives, freedom meant individual autonomy, limited government, and unregulated capitalism. • These ideas had great appeal in the rapidly growing South and West. • Milton Friedman identified the free market as the necessary foundation for individual liberty. - The New Conservatism • The new conservatism became increasingly prominent in the 1950s. • The new conservatives insisted that toleration of difference offered no substitute for the search for absolute truth. • They understood freedom as first and foremost a moral condition. • The conservative movement was divided between libertarians and new conservatives. • Two powerful enemies became focal points for the conservative revival. - The Soviet Union abroad - The federal government at home The Eisenhower Era - Ike and Nixon • General Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952. • Richard Nixon ran as his vice president. - Nixon gained a reputation for opportunism and dishonesty. - The 1952 Campaign • Nixon's Checkers speech rescued his political career. - Illustrated the importance of TV in politics • Eisenhower's popularity and promises to end the Korean conflict brought him victory in 1952. • During the 1950s, voters at home and abroad seemed to find reassurance in selecting familiar, elderly leaders to govern them. - Modern Republicanism • Wealthy businessmen dominated Eisenhower's cabinet. - Eisenhower refused to roll back the New Deal. • Modern Republicanism aimed to sever the Republican Party's identification in the minds of many Americans with Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and indifference to the economic conditions of ordinary citizens. 3 - Core New Deal programs expanded • Government spending was used to promote productivity and boost employment. - Interstate Highway Act - National Defense Education Act - The Social Contract • The 1950s witnessed an easing of the labor conflict of the two previous decades. - AFL and CIO merged in 1955. - Social contract • Unionized workers shared fully in the prosperity of the 1950s. - Massive Retaliation • Ike took office at a time when the Cold War had entered an extremely dangerous phase. • Massive retaliation declared that any Soviet attack on an American ally would be countered by a nuclear assault on the Soviet Union itself. • Critics called the doctrine brinksmanship. - Ike and the Russians • Eisenhower came to believe that the Soviets were reasonable and could be dealt with in conventional diplomatic terms. • Khrushchev's call for peaceful coexistence with the United States raised the possibility of an easing of the Cold War. • In 1958, the two superpowers agreed to a voluntary halt on the testing of nuclear weapons. - The Emergence of the Third World • The Bandung Conference was attended by twenty-nine Asian and African nations. • The post–World War II era witnessed the crumbling of European empires. • Decolonization presented the United States with a complex set of choices. - The Cold War in the Third World • The Cold War became the determining factor in American relations with the Third World. - Guatemala - Iran • The Suez Crisis in 1956 led to the Eisenhower Doctrine. - Origins of the Vietnam War • Anticommunism led the United States into deeper and deeper involvement in Vietnam. • A peace conference in Geneva divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel. • Events in Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam, considered great successes at the time by American policymakers, cast a long shadow over American foreign relations. - Mass Society and Its Critics 4 • Some intellectuals wondered whether the celebration of affluence and the either-or mentality of the Cold War obscured the extent to which the United States itself fell short of the ideal of freedom. - C. Wright Mills • One strand of social analysis in the 1950s contended that Americans did not enjoy genuine freedom. - David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd • Some commentators feared that the Russians had demonstrated a greater ability to sacrifice for common public goals than had Americans. - John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society - William Whyte's The Organization Man - Rebels without a Cause • The emergence of a popular culture geared to the emerging youth market suggested that significant generational tensions lay beneath the bland surface of 1950s life. • Cultural life during the 1950s seemed far more daring than politics. - Rock and roll - Playboy - The Beats • The Beats were a small group of poets and writers who railed against mainstream culture. • Rejecting the work ethic, the "desperate materialism" of the suburban middle class, and the militarization of American life by the Cold War, the Beats celebrated impulsive action, immediate plea sure, and sexual experimentation. The Freedom Movement - Origins of the Movement • The causes of the civil rights movement were many. • The United States in the 1950s was still a segregated and unequal society. • Few white Americans felt any urgency about confronting racial in equality. - The Legal Assault on Segregation • It fell to the courts to confront the problem of racial segregation. - The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) - Earl Warren • For years, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), under the leadership of attorney Thurgood Marshall, had pressed legal challenges to the separate-but-equal doctrine laid down by the Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. - The Brown Case • Marshall brought the NAACP's support to local cases that had arisen when black parents challenged unfair school policies. • Marshall argued that segregation did lifelong damage to black children, undermining their self-esteem. 5 • Earl Warren managed to create unanimity in a divided court, some of whose members disliked segregation but feared that a decision to outlaw it would spark widespread violence. • The black press hailed the Brown decision as a "second Emancipation Proclamation." - The Montgomery Bus Boycott • Brown ensured that when the movement resumed after waning in the early 1950s, it would have the backing of the federal courts. - Rosa Parks - Bus boycott - The Daybreak of Freedom • The Montgomery Bus Boycott marked a turning point in postwar American history. - Nonviolent movement - Gained northern support - Vaulted Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence as the movement's national symbol • From the beginning, the language of freedom pervaded the black movement. - The Leadership of King • In King's soaring oratory, the protesters' understandings of freedom fused into a coherent whole. • A master at appealing to the deep sense of injustice among blacks and to the conscience of white America, King presented the case for black rights in a vocabulary that merged the black experience with that of the nation. • Echoing Christian themes derived from his training in the black church, King's speeches resonated deeply in both black communities and in the broader culture. - Massive Resistance • In 1956, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). • In 1956, many southern congressmen and senators signed a Southern Manifesto. - Eisenhower and Civil Rights • The federal government tried to remain aloof from the black struggle. - President Eisenhower failed to provide moral leadership. • In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used the National Guard to prevent the courtordered integration of Little Rock's Central High School. - Eisenhower - The World Views the United States • Since the start of the Cold War, American leaders had worried about the impact of segregation on the country's international reputation. • The global reaction to the Brown decision was overwhelmingly positive. • However, the slow pace of change led to criticism from abroad. 6 The Election of 1960 - Kennedy and Nixon • The presidential campaign of 1960 turned out to be one of the closest in American history. • John F. Kennedy was a Catholic and the youngest presidential candidate in history. • Both Kennedy and Nixon were ardent Cold Warriors. - Missile gap - Television debate - The End of the 1950s • Eisenhower's Farewell Address warned against the drumbeat of calls for a new military buildup. - Military-industrial complex 7