Vice President Richard Nixon in Moscow

I n 1959, at the height of the Cold War, Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow to open Americas National
Exhibit. After sipping Pepsi-Cola, Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev got into a heated discussion of the relative mer- its of Soviet and American societies. Stand- ing in the kitchen of a model American home, they talked dishwashers, toasters, and televisions, not rockets, submarines, and missiles. Images of the kitchen debate fl ashed across TV screens around the world.

Vice President Richard Nixon in Moscow
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What was so striking about the Moscow exhibition was the way its American planners enlisted affl uence and mass consumption in service to Cold War politics. The suburban lifestyle trumpeted
at the exhibition symbolized the superiority of capitalism over Communism. During the postwar era, Americans did enjoy the worlds highest standard of
living. But behind the affl uence, things were not as they seemed. The suburban calm masked contradictions in womens lives and cultural rebelliousness among young people. Suburban growth often came at the expense of cities, sowing the seeds of inner-city decay and exacerbating racial tensions. Nor was prosperity ever as wide- spread as the Moscow exhibit implied. The suburban lifestyle was beyond the reach of the working poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants, and most African Americans. And in the South, a civil rights revolution was in the making.
Economic Powerhouse The United States enjoyed enormous economic advantages at the close of World War II. While the Europeans and Japanese were still picking though the rubble, America stood poised to enter a postwar boom. The American economy benefi ted from stable
The nation of the well-off
must be able to see through
the wall of affluence and
recognize the alien citizens
on the other side. And
there must be vision in
the sense of purpose, of
aspiration. . . . [T]here
must be a passion to end
poverty, for nothing less
than that will do. Michael Harrington, 1962
The Age of Affluence 1 9 4 5 1 9 6 027
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796 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
internal markets, heavy investment in research and development, and rapid diffusion of new technology. For the fi rst time, employers generally accepted collective bargain- ing, which for workers translated into rising wages, expanding benefi ts, and a growing rate of home ownership. At the heart of this postwar prosperity lay the involvement of the federal government. Public outlays for defense and domestic programs gave a huge boost to the economy. Not least, the federal government recognized that pros- perity rested on global foundations. U.S. corporations and banking institutions soon so dominated the world economy that the postwar period has rightly been called the Pax Americana.
Engines of Economic Growth American global supremacy rested partly on economic institutions created at a United Nations conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. The World Bank provided loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the develop- ment of Third World countries. A second institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was set up to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark for other
The Kitchen Debate
At the Moscow Fair in 1959, the United States put on display some of the technological wonders of American home life. When Vice President Richard Nixon visited, he and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had an impromptu debate over the relative merits of their rival systems, with the up-to-date American kitchen as a case in point. This photograph shows the debate in progress. Khrushchev is the bald man pointing his fi nger at Nixon. On the other side of Nixon stands Leonid Brezhnev, who would become Khrushchevs successor. Getty Images. For more help analyzing this image, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 797
currencies. In 1947, multinational trade negotiations resulted in the fi rst General Agree- ment on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which established an international framework for overseeing trade rules and practices.
The World Bank, the IMF, and GATT were the cornerstones of the so-called Bretton Woods system that guided the world economy after the war. The Bretton Woods system encouraged stable prices, the reduction of tariffs, fl exible domestic markets, and international trade based on fi xed exchange rates. All this effectively served Americas conception of the global economy, paralleling Americas ambitious diplomatic aims in the Cold War.
A second linchpin of postwar prosperity was defense spending. The military- industrial complex that President Eisenhower identifi ed in his 1961 Farewell Address had its roots in the business-government partnerships of two world wars. But after 1945, unlike 1918, the massive commitment of government dollars for defense continued. Even though the country was technically at peace, the economy and the government operated practically on a war footing, in a state of permanent mobilization.
Based at the sprawling Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, the Defense Department evolved into a massive bureaucracy. In the name of national security, defense-related industries entered into long-term relationships with the Pentagon. Some companies did so much business with the government that they in effect became contractors for the Defense Department. Over 60 percent of the income of Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon came from military contracts, and the percentages were even higher for Lockheed and Republic Aviation. All of these were giant enterprises, given an inside track because of the Pentagons inclination to favor the largest fi rms.
As permanent mobilization took hold, science, industry, and the federal govern- ment became increasingly intertwined. According to the National Science Foundation, federal money underwrote 90 percent of the cost of research on aviation and space, 65 percent for electricity and electronics, 42 percent for scientifi c instruments, and even 24 percent for automobiles. With the government footing the bill, corporations lost little time in transforming new technology into useful products. Backed by the Pentagon, IBM pressed ahead with its research on integrated circuits, which were cru- cial to the computer revolution.
The defense buildup created jobs lots of them. Taking into account the indirect benefi ts (the additional jobs created to serve and support defense workers), perhaps one worker in seven nationally owed his or her job to the military-industrial complex by the 1960s. But increased military spending also limited the resources for domestic social needs. Critics of military spending calculated the tradeoffs: The money spent for a nuclear aircraft carrier and support ships could have paid for a subway system for Washington, D.C.; the cost of one Huey helicopter could have built sixty-six units of low-income housing.
Americas annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) jumped from $213 billion in 1945 to more than $500 billion in 1960; by 1970, it exceeded $1 trillion. To working Americans, this sustained economic growth meant a 25 percent rise in real income between 1946 and 1959. The downside was that while in earlier peacetime years, military spending had constituted only 1 percent of GDP, now it represented 10 percent.
Postwar prosperity featured low infl ation. After the burst of high prices in the immediate postwar period, infl ation slowed to 2 to 3 percent annually, and it stayed
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798 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
low until the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. Low infl ation meant stable and predictable prices. Feeling secure about the future, Americans were eager to spend and rightly felt that they were better off than ever before. In 1940, 43 percent of American families owned their homes; by 1960, 62 percent did. In that period, moreover, income inequality dropped sharply, the share of total income going to the top tenth down by nearly one-third from the 45 percent it had been in 1940 (Figure 27.1). The fastest rate of income growth, in fact, was at the sixtieth percentile. However, the pic- ture was not as rosy at the bottom, where poverty stubbornly hung on. In The Affl uent Society (1958), the economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the poor were only an afterthought in the minds of economists and politicians. Yet, as Galbraith noted, one in thirteen families at the time earned less than $1,000 a year.
The Corporate Order For over half a century, the consolidation of economic power into big corporate fi rms had characterized American enterprise. That tendency continued indeed, it acceler- ated. In 1970, the top four U.S. automakers produced 91 percent of all motor vehicles sold in the country; the top four fi rms in tires produced 72 percent, those in cigarettes 84 percent, and those in detergents 70 percent.
The classic, vertically integrated corporation of the early twentieth century, origi- nally designed to service a national market (see Chapter 17), was now driven increasingly by research and new technology. CBS, for example, hired the Hungarian inventor Peter Goldmark, who perfected color television during the 1940s, long-playing records in
F I G U R E 27.1 Income Inequality, 19172002
This graph shows the share of total income (minus capital gains) going to the richest 10 percent of Americans, a fi gure that economists regard as a good proxy for economic inequality more generally in the country. Most Americans living in the postNew Deal decades had good reason to feel a sense of economic well-being: In these four decades, they were sharing more equitably in the fruits of industrialism than they ever had before or would afterward.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 799
the 1950s, and a video recording system in the 1960s. As the head of CBS Laboratories, Goldmark patented more than a hundred devices and created multiple new markets for his happy employer. Because big outfi ts such as CBS had the deepest pockets, they were the fi rms best able to diversify through investment in industrial research.
Deep pockets also fi nanced sophisticated advertising that enabled large corpora- tions to break into hitherto resistant markets. This was the case with beer, for example, where loyalty to local brews in their infi nite variety was legendary. To erode that prefer- ence, Anheuser-Busch and other national producers sponsored televised sports, parlay- ing the aura of championship games into national acceptance of their standardized lighter beers. Bud, the King of Beers was just as good for the little guy as for the big- league star. By 1970, big multiplant brewers controlled 70 percent of the beer market.
More revolutionary was the sudden rise of the conglomerates, giant enterprises consisting of fi rms in unrelated industries. Conglomerate building resulted in the nations third great merger wave. (The fi rst two had taken place in the 1890s and the 1920s.) Because of their diverse holdings, conglomerates were shielded from instability in any single market. International Telephone and Telegraph transformed itself into a conglomerate by acquiring Continental Baking (famous for Wonder Bread), Sheraton Hotels, Avis Rent-a-Car, Levitt and Sons home builders, and Hartford Fire Insurance. Ling-Temco-Vought, another conglomerate, produced steel, built ships, developed real estate, and brought cattle to market.
Expansion into foreign markets also spurred corporate growth. At a time when Made in Japan still meant shoddy workmanship, U.S. products were considered the best in the world. Especially when domestic demand became saturated or recessions cut into sales, American fi rms looked overseas. During the 1950s, U.S. exports nearly doubled, giving the nation a trade surplus of close to $5 billion in 1960. By the 1970s, Gillette, IBM, Mobil, and Coca-Cola made more than half their profi ts abroad.
Directing such giant enterprises required managers to place more emphasis on planning. Companies recruited top executives who had business school training; the ability to manage information; and skills in corporate planning, marketing, and investment. A new generation of corporate chieftains emerged, operating in a com- plex environment that demanded long-range forecasting and close coordination with investment banks, law fi rms, and federal regulators.
To staff their bureaucracies, the postwar corporate giants required a huge supply of white-collar foot soldiers. Companies turned to the universities, which, fueled partly by the GI Bill, had grown explosively after 1945. Better educated than their elders, the mem- bers of the new managerial class advanced more quickly and at a younger age into respon- sible jobs. As one participant-observer remarked: If you had a college diploma, a dark suit, and anything between the ears, it was like an escalator; you just stood there and moved up. (He was talking about men; few women gained entrance to the managerial ranks.)
Corporations offered lifetime employment, but they also expected lifetime loyalty. Atlas Van Lines, which was in the business of moving these people, estimated that corporate managers were transferred an average of fourteen times once every two and a half years during their careers. Perpetually mobile IBM managers joked that the companys initials stood for Ive Been Moved.
Climbing the corporate ladder rewarded men without hard edges the well adjusted. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), the sociologist David Reisman contrasted the
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800 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
independent businessmen and professionals of earlier years with the managerial class of the postwar world. He concluded that the new corporate men were other-directed, more attuned to their associates than driven by their own goals. The sociologist William Whyte painted a somber picture of organization men who left the home spiritually as well as physically to take the vows of organization life. A recurring theme of the 1950s, in fact, was that the conformity demanded of the man in the gray fl annel suit (the title of Sloan Wilsons popular novel) was stifl ing creativity and blighting lives.
Labor-Management Accord For the fi rst time, collective bargaining became a major factor in the nations economic life. In the past, thanks to the bitter resistance of antiunion employers, collective bar- gaining had been confi ned to a narrow band of craft trades and a few industries, pri- marily coal mining, railroading, and the metal trades. The power balance shifted during the Great Depression (see Chapter 23), and by the time the dust settled after World War II, labor unions overwhelmingly represented Americas industrial workforce. The question then became: How would labors power be used?
In late 1945, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (UAW) challenged General Motors in a fundamental way. The youthful Reuther was thinking big, beyond a single company or even a single industry. He aimed at nothing less than a reshaped, high-employment economy. To jump-start it, he demanded a 30 percent wage hike with no price increase for GM cars, and when General Motors said no, it couldnt afford that, Reuther demanded that the company open the books.
General Motors implacably resisted this opening wedge into the rights of manage- ment. The company took a 113-day strike, rebuffed the governments intervention, and soundly defeated the UAW. Having made its point, General Motors laid out the terms for a durable relationship. It would accept the UAW as its bargaining partner and guarantee GM workers an ever higher living standard. The price was that the UAW abandon its assault on the companys right to manage. On signing the fi ve-year GM contract of 1950 the Treaty of Detroit, it was called Reuther accepted the companys terms.
The Treaty of Detroit opened the way for a more broadly based labor-management accord not industrial peace, because the country still experienced many strikes, but general acceptance of collective bargaining as the method for setting the terms of employment. For industrial workers, the result was rising real income, from $54.92 a week in 1949 to $71.81 (in 19471949 dollars) in 1959. The average worker with three dependents gained 18 percent in spendable real income in that period. In addition, col- lective bargaining delivered greater leisure (more paid holidays and longer vacations) and, in a startling departure, a social safety net.
In postwar Europe, Americas allies were constructing welfare states. That was the preference of American unions as well. But having lost the bruising battle in Washington for national health care, the unions turned to the bargaining table. By the end of the 1950s, union contracts commonly provided defi ned-benefi t pension plans (supple- menting Social Security); company-paid health insurance; and, for two million workers, mainly in steel and automaking, a guaranteed annual wage (via supplementary unem- ployment benefi ts). Collective bargaining had become, in effect, the American alterna- tive to the European welfare state.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 801
The sum of these union gains was a new sociological phenomenon, the affl uent worker as evidenced by relocation to the suburbs, by homeownership, by increased ownership of cars and other durable goods, and, an infallible sign of rising expecta- tions, by installment buying. For union workers, the contract became, as Reuther boasted, the passport into the middle class. Generally overlooked, however, were the many unorganized workers with no such passport those consigned to casual labor or low-wage jobs in the service sector. In retrospect, economists came to recognize that America had developed a two-tiered, inequitable labor system.
The labor-management accord that generated the good life for so many workers seemed in the 1950s absolutely secure. The union rivalries of the 1930s abated. In 1955, the industrial-union and craft-union wings joined together in the AFL-CIO, representing 90 percent of the nations 17.5 million union members. At its head stood George Meany, a cigar-chomping former New York plumber who, in his blunt way, conveyed the reassur- ing message that organized labor had matured and was managements fi t partner.
The labor-management accord, impressive though it was, never was as durable as it seemed. Vulnerabilities lurked, even in the accords heyday. For one thing, the sheltered markets, the essential condition for passing on the costs of collective bargaining, were in fact quite fragile. In certain industries, the lead fi rms were already losing market share for example, in meatpacking and steel and nowhere, not even in automaking, was their dominance truly secure. A second, more obvious vulnerability was the nonunion South, which the unions failed to organize, despite a strenuous postwar drive. The Souths success at attracting companies pointed to a third, most basic vulnerability: the abiding antiunion- ism of American employers. At heart, they regarded the labor-management accord as a negotiated truce, not a permanent peace. It was only a matter of time and the onset of a more competitive environment before the scattered antiunion forays of the 1950s turned into a full-scale counteroffensive.
The postwar labor-management accord turned out to be a transitory event, not a permanent con- dition of American economic life. In a larger sense, that was also true of the postwar boom.
The Affluent Society Prosperity is more easily measured how much an economy produces, how much people earn than is the good life that prosperity actually buys. For the 1950s, how- ever, the contours of the American good life emerged with exceptional distinctness: a preference for suburban living, a high valuation on consumption, and a devotion to family and domesticity. In this section, we ask: Why those particular choices? And with what not necessarily happy consequences?
The Suburban Explosion Migration to the suburbs had been going on for a hundred years but never before on the scale that the country experienced after World War II. Within a decade or so,
In what ways can the prosperity of the 1950s be explained by the Cold War?
Why is the man in the gray fl annel suit the representative businessman of the 1950s?
What do we mean by the labor-management accord?
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802 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
farmland on the outskirts of cities fi lled up with tract housing and shopping malls. Entire counties that had once been rural, such as San Mateo, south of San Francisco, went suburban. By 1960, more people lived in suburbs than in cities.
Home construction had ground to halt during the Great Depression, and return- ing veterans, dreaming of home and family, faced a critical housing shortage. After the war, construction surged to meet pent-up demand. One-fourth of the countrys entire housing stock in 1960 had not even existed a decade earlier.
An innovative Long Island building contractor, William J. Levitt, revolutionized the suburban housing market by applying mass-production techniques and turning out new homes at a dizzying speed. Levitts basic four-room house, complete with kitchen appliances, was priced at $7,990 in 1947. Levitt did not need to advertise; word of mouth brought buyers fl ocking to his developments in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (all called Levittown, naturally). Dozens of other developers, including Californias shipping magnate Henry J. Kaiser, were soon snapping up cheap famland and building subdivisions around the country.
Even at $7,990, Levitts homes would have been beyond the means of young families had the traditional home-fi nancing standard half down and ten years to pay off the balance still prevailed. That is where the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) came in. After the war, the FHA insured thirty-year mortages with as little as 5 percent down and interest at 2 or 3 percent. The VA was even more lenient, requiring only a token $1 down for qualifi ed ex-GIs. FHA and VA mortages best explain why, after hovering around 45 percent for the previous half-century, home ownership jumped to 60 percent by 1960.
What purchasers of Levitts houses got, in addition to a good deal, were homoge- neous communities. The developments contained few old people or unmarried adults. Even the trees were young. There were regulations about maintaining lawns, and no laun- dry could be hung out on the weekends. Then there was the matter of race. Levitts houses came with restrictive covenants prohibiting occupancy by members of other than the Caucasian Race. (Restrictive covenants often applied to Jews and Catholics as well.)
Levitt, a marketing genius, knew his customers. The United Auto Workers learned the hard way. After the war, the CIO union launched an ambitious campaign for open- housing ordinances in the Detroit area. White auto workers rebelled, rebuking the union leadership by voting for racist politicans who promised to keep white neighbor- hoods white. A leading advocate of racial equality nationally, the UAW quietly shelved the fi ght at the local level. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants, but the practice persisted informally long afterward. What kept it going was the red-lining policy by the FHA and VA, which routinely refused mort- gages to blacks seeking to buy in white neighborhoods.
Suburban living, although a nationwide phenomenon, was most at home in the Sun Belt, where taxes were low, the climate was mild, and open space allowed for sprawling subdivisions (Map 27.1). Fueled by World War II, the South and West began to boom. Florida added 3.5 million people, many of them retired, between 1940 and 1970. Texas profi ted from an expanding petrochemical industry. Most dramatic was Californias growth, spurred especially by lots of work in the states defense-related aircraft and electronics industries. Californias climate and job opportunities acted as magnets pull- ing people from all parts of the country. By 1970, California contained one-tenth of the nations population and surpassed New York as the most populous state.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 803
Boosters heralded the booming development of the Sun Belt. But growth came at a price. In the arid Southwest, increasing demands for water and energy made for environmental problems. As cities competed for scarce water resources, they depleted underground aquifers and dammed scenic rivers. The proliferation of coal-burning power plants increased air pollution, and so did traffi c. The Wests nuclear industry, while good for the economy, also brought nuclear waste, uranium mines, and atomic test sites. And growth had a way of consuming the easy, uncongested living that had attracted people to the Sun Belt in the fi rst place. Still, for folks occupying those ranch- style houses with their nice lawns, barbecues, and air-conditioning, suburban living seemed at its best in sunny California or Arizona.
Without automobiles, suburban growth on such a massive scale would have been impossible. Planners laid out subdivisions on the assumption that everybody would drive. And they did to get to work, to take the children to Little League, to shop. With gas plentiful at 15 cents a gallon, no one cared about the fuel effi ciency of their V-8 engines or seemed to mind the elaborate tail fi ns and chrome that weighed down their cars. In 1945, Americans owned twenty-fi ve million cars; by 1965, the number had tripled to seventy-fi ve million (see Voices from Abroad, p. 804).
M A P 27.1 Shifting Population Patterns, 19501980
A metropolitan area is generally defi ned as a central city that in combination with its surrounding territory forms an integrated economic and social unit. The U.S. Census Bureau introduced the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) in 1950, but later changes in the defi nition of SMSA have made it diffi cult to generalize from the 1950 fi gures. This map compares the population of central cities in 1950 with population fi gures for the more broadly defi ned metropolitan areas in 1980 to illustrate the extent and geographical distribution of metropolitan growth in the postwar period. For more help analyzing this map, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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San Diego
Denver
Minneapolis- St. Paul
Chicago
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Houston Tampa
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New York
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Washington
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San Francisco- Oakland St. Louis
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Our immediate decision to buy a car sprang from healthy instincts. Only later did I learn from bitter experience that in California, death was preferable to living without one. Neither the views from the plane nor the weird excursion that fi rst evening hinted at what I would go through that fi rst week.
Very simple the nearest supermarket was about half a kilometer south of our apartment, the regional primary school two kilometers east, and my sons kindergarten even farther away. A trip to the post offi ce an undertaking, to the bank an ordeal, to work an impossibility.
Truth be told: the Los Angeles munici- pality . . . does have public transportation.
Buses go once an hour along the citys boulevards and avenues, gathering all the wretched of the earth, the poor and the needy, the old ladies forbidden by their grandchildren to drive, and other eccentric types. But few people can depend on buses. . . . There are no tramways. No one thought of a subway. Railroads not now and not in the future.
Why? Because everyone has a car. A man invited me to his house, saying, We are neighbors, within ten minutes of each other. After walking for an hour and a half I realized what he meant ten minute drive within the speed limit. Simply put, he never thought I might interpret his remark to refer to the walking distance. . . .
At fi rst perhaps people relished the freedom and independence a car provided. You get in, sit down, and grab the steering
wheel, your mobility exceeding that of any other generation. No wonder people refuse to live downtown. . . . Instead, they get a piece of the desert, far from town, at half price, drag a water hose, grow grass, fl owers, and trees, and build their dream house. . . .
The result? A widely scattered city, its houses far apart, its streets stretched in all directions. Olympic Boulevard from west to east, forty kilometers. Sepulveda Boulevard, from Long Beach in the south to the edge of the desert, forty kilometers. Altogether covering 1,200 square kilometers. As of now.
Why as of now? Because greater distances mean more commuting, and more commuting leads to more cars. More cars means problems that push people even farther away from the city, which chases after them.
The urban sprawl is only one side effect. Two, some say three, million cars require an array of services. . . . Why bother parking, getting out, getting in, getting up and sitting down, when you can simply drive in? . . . That is how dirty laundry is deposited, electricity and water bills paid. . . . That is how the anniversary wreath is laid on the graves of loved ones. There are drive-in movies. And, yes, we saw it with our own eyes: drive-in churches. Only in death is a man separated from his car and buried alone.
Everyone Has a Car H A N O C H B A R T O V A leading Israeli writer, Hanoch Bartov spent two years in the United States working as a
newspaper correspondent. As a newcomer to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he was both
fascinated and appalled by Americans love affair with the automobile.
V O I C E S F R O M A B R O A D
S O U R C E : Oscar and Lilian Handlin, eds., From the Outer World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 293296.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 805
More cars required more highways, and the federal government obliged. In 1947, Congress authorized the construction of 37,000 miles of highways; major new legisla- tion in 1956 increased this commitment by another 42,500 miles (Map 27.2). One of the largest civil-engineering projects in history, the new interstate system linked the entire country, with far-reaching effects on both the cities and the countryside. The interstate highways rerouted traffi c away from small towns, bypassed well-traveled main roads such as the cross-country Route 66, and cut wide swaths through old neighborhoods in the cities.
Mass transit systems, such as those of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, gave way to freeways. Federal highway funding specifi cally excluded mass transit, and the auto industry was no friend either. General Motors made a practice of buying up trolley lines and scrapping them. By 1960, two-thirds of Americans drove to work each day. In Sun Belt cities such as Los Angeles and Phoenix, the proportion came closer to 100 percent.
The Search for Security There was a reason why Congress called the 1956 legislation creating Americas mod- ern freeway system the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The four-lane freeways, used every day by commuters, might some day, in a nuclear war, evacuate them to safety. That fact captured as well as anything the underside of postwar life, when suburban living abided side by side with the shadow of annihilation.
The Cold War, reaching as it did across the globe, was omnipresent at home as well. Most alarming was the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. Bomb shelters and civil defense drills provided a daily reminder of mushroom clouds. In the late 1950s, a small but growing number of citizens raised questions about radioactive fall- out from above-ground bomb tests. By the late 1950s, nuclear testing had become a
M A P 27.2 Connecting the Nation: The Interstate Highway System, 1930 and 1970
The 1956 Interstate Highway Act paved the way for an extensive network of federal highways throughout the nation. The act pleased American drivers and enhanced their love aff air with the automobile. It also benefi ted the petroleum, construction, trucking, real estate, and tourist industries. The new highway system promoted the nations economic integration, facilitated the growth of suburbs, and contributed to the erosion of distinct regional identities within the United States.
Main U.S. highways, 1930 Interstate highways, 1970
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806 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
high-profi le issue, and protest groups such as SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and Physicians for Social Responsibility had emerged, calling for an international test ban. Federal investigators later documented illnesses, deaths, and birth defects among downwinders people who lived near nuclear test sites and weapons. The most shocking revelations came in 1993, when the Department of Energy released previously classifi ed documents on human radiation experiments conducted in the late 1940s and 1950s, experiments that had been undertaken with little concern for or understanding of the adverse effects on the subjects.
In an age of anxiety, Americans yearned for a reaffi rmation of faith. Church membership jumped from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 70 percent in 1960. People fl ocked to the Evangelical Protestant denominations, benefi ciaries of a remarkable new crop of preachers. Most eloquent was the young Reverend Billy Graham, who made brilliant use of television, radio, and advertising to spread the gospel.
The religious reawakening meshed, in a time of Cold War, with Americans view of themselves as a righteous people opposed to godless Communism. In 1954, the
Duck and Cover
The nations Civil Defense Agencys eff orts to alert Americans to the threat of a nuclear attack extended to children in schools, where repeated drills taught them to duck and cover as protection against the impact of an atomic blast. Variations of this 1954 scene at Franklin Township School in Quakertown, New Jersey, were repeated all over the nation. Paul F. Kutta/Courtesy, Reminiscences Magazine.
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phrase under God was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, and after 1956, U.S. coins carried the words In God We Trust.
Despite its evangelical bent, the resurgence of religion had a distinctly moderate tone. An ecumenical movement bringing Catholics, Protestants, and Jews together fl ourished, and so did a concern for the here-and-now. In his popular television pro- gram, Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen asked, Is life worth living? He and countless others answered that it was. None was more affi rmative than Norman Vincent Peale, whose best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) embodied the thera- peutic use of religion as an antidote to the stresses of modern life.
Consumer Culture In some respects, postwar consumerism seemed like the 1920s all over again: an abun- dance of new gadgets and appliances, the craze for automobiles, and new types of mass media. Yet there was a signifi cant difference. In the 1950s, consumption became associ- ated with citizenship. Buying things, once a sign of personal indulgence, now meant participating fully in American society and, moreover, fulfi lling a social responsibility. By spending, Americans fueled a high-employment economy. What the suburban family consumed, asserted Life magazine in a photo essay featuring one such family, would help to ensure full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation.
As in the past, product makers sought to stimulate consumer demand through aggressive advertising. More money was spent in 1951 on advertising ($6.5 billion) than on the public schools ($5 billion). The 1950s gave Americans the Marlboro Man; M&Ms that melt in your mouth, not in your hand; Wonder Bread to build strong bodies in twelve ways; and the does she or doesnt she? Clairol hair-coloring woman. Motivational research delved into the subconscious to fi nd out how the messages should be pitched. Like other features of the consumer culture, this one got its share of muckraking in Vance Packers best-selling The Hidden Persuaders (1957).
Advertising heavily promoted the appliances that began to fi ll the suburban kitchen. In 1946, automatic washing machines replaced the old machines with hand-cranked wringers, and clothes dryers also came on the market. Commercial laundries across the country struggled to stay in business. Another new item was the home freezer, which encouraged the dramatic growth of the frozen-food industry. Partly because of all the electrical appliances, consumer use of electricity doubled during the 1950s.
Televisions arrival was swift and overpowering. There were only 7,000 TV sets in American homes in 1947, yet a year later, the CBS and NBC radio networks began offering regular programming, and by 1950, Americans owned 7.3 million sets. Ten years later, 87 percent of American homes had at least one television set.
Although licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), television stations, like radio, depended entirely on advertising for profi ts. Soon, television sup- planted radio as the chief diffuser of popular culture. Movies, too, lost the cultural dominance they had once enjoyed. Movie attendance shrank throughout the postwar period, and movie studios increasingly relied on overseas distribution to earn a profi t.
What Americans saw on television, besides the omnipresent commercials, was an overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon world of nuclear families, suburban homes, and middle-class life. A typical show was Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and
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Jane Wyatt. Father left home each morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Mother was a full-time housewife, always tending to her three children but, as a stero- typical female, prone to bad driving and tears. The children were sometimes rebel- lious, but family confl icts were invariably resolved. The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason as a Brooklyn bus driver, and The Life of Riley, a situation comedy featuring a California aircraft worker, were rare in their treatment of working-class lives. Black characters such as Rochester in Jack Bennys comedy show appeared mainly as side- kicks and servants.
The types of television programs that were developed in the 1950s built on older entertainment genres but also pioneered new ones. Taking its cue from the movies, television offered some thirty westerns by 1959, including Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Bonanza. Professional sports became big-time television, far exceeding the poten- tial of radio. Programming geared toward children, such as The Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, and Captain Kangaroo, created the fi rst generation of children glued to the tube.
Although the new medium did offer some serious programming, notably live the- ater and documentaries, FCC Commissioner Newton Minow concluded in 1963 that television was a vast wasteland. But it did what it intended, which was to sell prod- ucts and fi ll Americas leisure hours with reassuring entertainment.
The Baby Boom A popular 1945 song was called Gotta Make Up for Lost Time, and Americans did just that. Two things were noteworthy about the families they formed after World War II. First, marriages were remarkably stable. Not until the mid-1960s did the divorce rate begin to rise sharply. Second, married couples were intent on having babies. Everyone expected to have several children it was part of adulthood, almost a citizens respon- sibility. After a century and a half of decline, the birthrate shot up: More babies were born between 1948 and 1953 than in the previous thirty years.
One of the reasons for this baby boom was that everyone was having children at the same time. A second was a drop in the marriage age down to twenty-two for men, on the average, and twenty for women. Younger parents meant a bumper crop of children. Women who came of age in the 1930s averaged 2.4 children; their counter- parts in the 1950s averaged 3.2 children. The baby boom peaked in 1957 and remained at a high level until the early 1960s.
To keep all those baby boom children healthy and happy, middle-class parents increasingly relied on the advice of experts. Dr. Benjamin Spocks best-selling Baby and Child Care sold one million copies a year after its publication in 1946. Spock urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding and baby-care schedules of an earlier genera- tion. New mothers found Spocks commonsense approach liberating without being wholly reassured. If mothers were too protective, Spock and others argued, they might hamper their childrens preparation for adult life. Mothers who wanted to work out- side the home felt guilty because Spock recommended that they be constantly avail- able for their children.
Less subject to fashion were the advances in diet, public health, and medical prac- tice that made for healthier children. Serious illnesses became merely routine after the
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introduction of such miracle drugs as penicillin (introduced in 1943), streptomycin (1945), and cortisone (1946). When Dr. Jonas Salk perfected a polio vaccine in 1954, he became a national hero. The free distribution of Salks vaccine in the nations schools, followed in 1961 by Dr. Albert Sabins oral polio vaccine, demonstrated the potential of government-sponsored public health programs. The baby boom gave the nations educational system a boost. The new middle class, Americas fi rst college- educated generation, placed a high value on education. Suburban parents approved 90 percent of proposed school bond issues during the 1950s. By 1970, school expendi- tures accounted for 7.2 percent of the gross national product, double the 1950 level. In the 1960s, the baby boom generation swelled college enrollments and, not coincidentally, the ranks of student protesters (see Chapter 28).
The passage of time revealed the ever-widening impact of the baby boom. When baby boomers competed for jobs during the 1970s, the labor market became tight. When career-oriented baby boomers belatedly began having children in the 1980s, the birthrate jumped. And in our own time, as baby boomers begin retiring, huge funding problems threaten to engulf Social Security and Medicare. Who would have thought that the intimate decisions of so many couples after World War II would be affecting American life well into the twenty-fi rst century?
Contradictions in Womens Lives The suburban housewife was the dream image of the young American woman, the feminist Betty Friedan wrote of the 1950s. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, con- cerned only about her husband, her children, and her home. Friedan gave up a psy- chology fellowship to marry, move to the suburbs, and raise three children. Determined that I fi nd the feminine fulfi llment that eluded my mother . . . I lived the life of a suburban housewife that was everyones dream at the time.
The idea that a womans place was in the home was, of course, not new. What Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique of the 1950s that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfi llment of their own femininity bore a remarkable similarity to the nineteenth centurys cult of true womanhood.
The updated version drew on new elements of twentieth-century science and cul- ture. Psychologists equated motherhood with normal female identity and suggested that career-minded mothers needed therapy. Television and fi lm depicted career women as social misfi ts, the heavies in movies such as Mildred Pierce. The postwar consumer culture also emphasized womans domestic role as purchasing agent for home and family. Love is said in many ways, ran an ad for toilet paper. Another asked, Can a woman ever feel right cooking on a dirty range?
Although the feminine mystique held cultural sway, it was by no means as all- encompassing as Friedan implied in her 1963 best-seller, The Feminine Mystique. Indeed, Friedan herself resisted the stereotype, doing freelance journalism while at home and, as a result of that work, stumbling onto the subject and writing the book that made her famous. Middle-class wives often found constructive outlets in the League of Women Voters, the PTA, and their churches. As in earlier periods, some women used the rhetoric of domesticity to justify political activism, enlisting in campaigns for community improvement, racial integration, and nuclear disarmament. As for working-class women,
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many of them doubtless would have loved to embrace domesticity if only they could. The economic needs of their families demanded otherwise.
The feminine mystique notwithstanding, more than one-third of American women in the 1950s held jobs outside the home. As the service sector expanded, so did the demand for workers in jobs traditionally fi lled by women.
Occupational segmentation still haunted women. Until 1964, the classifi ed sec- tions of newspapers separated employment ads into Help Wanted Male and Help Wanted Female. More than 80 percent of all employed women did stereotypical womens work as salespeople, health-care technicians, waitresses, stewardesses, do- mestic servants, receptionists, telephone operators, and secretaries. In 1960, women represented only 3.5 percent of lawyers (many top law schools did not admit women at all) and 6.1 percent of physicians but 97 percent of nurses, 85 percent of librarians, and 57 percent of social workers. Along with womens jobs went womens pay, which averaged 60 percent of mens pay in 1963.
What was new was the range of women at work. At the turn of the century, the typical female worker had been young and unmarried. By midcentury, she was in her forties, married, and with children in school. In 1940, only 15 percent of wives had worked. By 1960, 30 percent did, and by 1970, it was 40 percent.
A Womans Dilemma in Postwar America
This 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover depicts some of the diffi cult choices women faced in the postwar era. Womens consignment to low-paid, dead-end jobs in the service sector encouraged many to become full-time homemakers. Once back in their suburban homes, however, many middle-class women felt isolated and trapped in endless rounds of cooking, cleaning, and diaper changing. 1959 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved. www.curtispublishing.com.
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Married women worked to supplement family income. Even in the prosperous 1950s, the wages of many men could not pay for what middle-class life demanded: cars, houses, vacations, and college educations for the children. Poorer households needed more than one wage earner just to get by.
How could American society steadfastly uphold the domestic ideal when so many wives and mothers were out of the house and at work? In many ways, the contradiction was hidden by the women themselves. Fearing public disapproval, women usually justifi ed their work in family-oriented terms: Of course I believe a womans place is at home, but I took this job to save for college for our children. Moreover, when women took jobs outside the home, they still bore full responsibility for child care and household management. As one overburdened woman noted, she now had two full-time jobs instead of just one underpaid clerical worker and unpaid housekeeper.
Youth Culture In 1956, only partly in jest, the CBS radio commentator Eric Sevareid questioned whether the teenagers will take over the United States lock, stock, living room, and garage. Sevareid was grumbling about American youth culture, a phenomenon that had fi rst been noticed in the 1920s and had its roots in lengthening years of education, the role of peer groups, and the consumer tastes of teenagers. Like so much else in the 1950s, the youth culture came down to having money.
Market research revealed a distinct teen market to be exploited. Newsweek noted with awe in 1951 that the aggregate of the $3 weekly spending money of the average teen- ager was enough to buy 190 million candy bars, 130 million soft drinks, and 230 million sticks of gum. In 1956, advertisers projected an adolescent market of $9 billion for transistor radios (fi rst introduced in 1952), 45-rpm records, clothing, and fads such as Silly Putty (1950) and Hula Hoops (1958). Increasingly, advertisers targeted the young, both to capture their spending money and to exploit their infl uence on family pur- chases. Note the changing slogans for Pepsi-Cola: Twice as much for a nickel (1935), Be sociable have a Pepsi (1948), Now its Pepsi for those who think young (1960), and fi nally the Pepsi Generation (1965).
Hollywood movies played a large role in fostering a teenage culture. At a time when Americans were being lured by television, young people made up the largest audience for motion pictures. Soon Hollywood studios catered to them with fi lms such as The Wild One (1951), starring Marlon Brando, and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean. What are you rebelling against? a waitress asks Brando in The Wild One. Whattaya got? he replies.
What really defi ned this generation, however, was its music. Rejecting the romantic ballads of the 1940s, teenagers discovered rock n roll, an amalgam of white country and western music and black-inspired rhythm and blues. The Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed played a major role in introducing white America to the black-infl uenced sound by playing what were called race records. If I could fi nd a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars, said the owner of a record company. The performer who fi t that bill was Elvis Presley, who rocketed into instant celebrity in 1956 with his hit records Hound Dog and Heartbreak Hotel.
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812 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
Between 1953 and 1959, record sales increased from $213 million to $603 million, with rock n roll as the driving force.
Many unhappy adults saw in rock n roll music, teen movies, and magazines such as Mad (introduced in 1952) an invitation to race mixing, rebellion, and disorder. The media featured hundreds of stories on problem teens, and in 1955, a Senate subcom- mittee headed by Estes Kefauver conducted a high-profi le investigation of juvenile delinquency and its origins in the popular media. Denunciations of course only bounced off the new youth culture or, if anything, increased its popularity.
Cultural Dissenters Youth rebellion was only one aspect of a broader discontent with the conformist cul- ture of the 1950s. Artists, jazz musicians, and writers expressed their alienation in a remarkable fl owering of intensely personal, introspective art forms. In New York, Jackson Pollock and other painters developed an inventive style that became known as abstract expressionism. Swirling and splattering paint onto giant canvases, Pollock emphasized self-expression in the act of painting.
Elvis Presley
The young Elvis Presley, shown here on the cover of his fi rst album in 1956, embodied cultural rebellion against the conservatism and triviality of adult life in the 1950s. 1956 BGM Music.
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A similar trend characterized jazz, where black musicians developed a hard-driving improvisational style known as bebop. Whether the hot bebop of saxophonist Charlie Parker or the more subdued cool West Coast sound of the trumpeter Miles Davis, postwar jazz was cerebral, intimate, and individualistic. As such, it stood in stark con- trast to the commercialized, dance-oriented swing bands of the 1930s and 1940s.
Black jazz musicians found eager fans not only in the African American community but also among young white Beats, a group of writers and poets centered in New York and San Francisco who disdained middle-class conformity and suburban materialism. In his poem Howl (1956), which became a manifesto of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg lamented: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging them- selves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fi x. In works such as Jack Kerouacs novel On the Road (1957), the Beats glorifi ed spon- taneity, sexual adventurism, drug use, and spiritu- ality. Like other members of the postwar genera- tion, the Beats were apolitical; their rebellion was strictly cultural. In the 1960s, however, the Beats would inspire a new generation of young rebels angry at both the political and cultural status quo.
The Other America While middle-class whites fl ocked to the suburbs, an opposite stream of poor and working-class migrants, many of them southern blacks, moved into the cities. What these urban newcomers inherited was a declining economy and a decaying environ- ment. To those enjoying prosperity, the Other America as the social critic Michael Harrington called it in 1962 remained largely invisible. Only in the South, where African Americans organized to combat segregation, did the stain of social injustice catch the nations attention.
Immigrants and Migrants Ever since the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924 (see Chapter 23), U.S. im- migration policy had aimed mainly at keeping foreigners out. Anti-immigrant senti- ment intensifi ed during the Great Depression, hardly budging even to rescue Jews fl eeing Nazi persecution. World War II caused the bar to be lowered slightly, enabling returning servicemen to bring home war brides and, under the Displaced Persons Act (1948), permitting the entry of approximately 415,000 Europeans, among them for- mer Nazis such as Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist. The overt anti-Asian bias of Americas immigration laws also became untenable. In a gesture to an important war ally, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. More far-reaching was the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which (in addition to barring Communists and other radicals) ended the exclusion under the 1924 act of Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians.
In what ways did the growth of the Sun Belt refl ect key themes of the suburban explosion?
What was the relationship between consumer culture and the emphasis on family life in the postwar era?
Is it correct to say that the 1950s was exclusively a time of cultural conformity?
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814 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
Although not many came until later, the impact on Asian immigrant communi- ties was considerable. On the eve of World War II, Chinatowns were populated pri- marily by men. Although most of them were married, their wives remained in China. The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the granting of naturalization rights encouraged those men to bring their wives to America. The result was a more normal, family-oriented community, a development also seen in the Filipino American and Japanese American communities. Approximately 135,000 men and 100,000 women of Chinese origin were living in the United States in 1960, mostly in New York State and California.
After the national-origins quota system went into effect in 1924, Mexico replaced eastern and southern Europe as the nations labor reservoir. During World War II, the federal government introduced the bracero (temporary worker) program to ease war- time labor shortages (see Chapter 25) and then revived the program in 1951, during the Korean War. At its peak in 1959, Mexicans on temporary permits accounted for one-quarter of the nations seasonal workers.
The federal governments ability to control the fl ow, however, was strictly limited. Mexicans came illegally, and by the time the bracero program ended in 1964, many of that group an estimated 350,000 had settled in the United States. When unem- ployment became a problem during the recession of 19531954, federal authorities responded by deporting many Mexicans in a program grimly named Operation Wetback (because Mexican migrants often waded across the Rio Grande), but the Mexican population in the United States continued to rise nonetheless.
Mostly, they settled in to Los Angeles, Long Beach, El Paso, and other southwest- ern cities, following the crops during the harvest season or working in the expanding service sector. But many also went north, augmenting well-established Mexican American communites in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and Denver. Although still important for American agriculture, more Mexican Americans by 1960 were employed as industrial and service workers.
Another major group of Spanish-speaking migrants came from Puerto Rico. American citizens since 1917, Puerto Ricans enjoyed an unrestricted right to move to the mainland United States. Migration increased dramatically after World War II, when mechanization of the islands sugarcane agriculture pushed many Puerto Ricans off the land. Airlines began to offer cheap direct fl ights between San Juan and New York City. With the fare at about $50, two weeks wages, Puerto Ricans became Americas fi rst immigrants with the luxury of arriving by air.
Most Puerto Ricans went to New York, where they settled fi rst in East (Spanish) Harlem and then scattered in neighborhoods across the citys fi ve boroughs. This mas- sive migration, which increased the Puerto Rican population to 613,000 by 1960, transformed the ethnic composition of the city. More Puerto Ricans now lived in New York City than in San Juan. They faced conditions common to all recent immigrants: crowded and deteriorating housing, segregation, menial jobs, poor schools, and the problems of a bilingual existence.
Cuban refugees constituted the third largest group of Spanish-speaking immi- grants. In the six years after Fidel Castros seizure of power in 1959 (see Chapter 28), an estimated 180,000 people fl ed Cuba for the United States. The Cuban refugee com- munity grew so quickly that it turned Miami into a cosmopolitan, bilingual city almost
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overnight. Unlike other urban migrants, Miamis Cubans quickly prospered, in large part because they had arrived with money and middle-class skills.
In western cities, an infl ux of Native Americans also contributed to the rise in the nonwhite urban population. In 1953, Congress authorized a program terminating the autonomous status of the Indian tribes and encouraging voluntary migration from the reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs subsidized moving costs and estab- lished relocation centers in San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and other cities. Despite the programs assimilationist goal, the 60,000 Native Americans who migrated to the cities mostly settled together in ghetto neighborhoods, with little prospect of adjusting successfully to an urban environment.
African Americans came in large number from the rural South, continuing the Great Migration that had begun during World War I (see Chapter 22). Black migration was hastened by the transformation of southern agriculture. Synthetic fabrics cut into the demand for cotton, reducing cotton acreage from 43 million acres in 1930 to less than 15 million acres in 1960. On top of that, mechanization reduced the need for farm labor. The mechanical cotton picker, introduced in 1944, effectively destroyed the sharecropper system. Although both whites and blacks fl ed the land, the exodus was greatest among blacks. By 1990, only 69,000 black farmers remained nationwide, a tiny fraction of the countrys farmers.
Where did these displaced farmfolk go? White southerners from Appalachia moved north to hillbilly ghettos, such as Cincinnatis Over the Rhine neighborhood and Chicagos Uptown. As many as three million blacks headed to Chicago, New York, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities. Certain sections of Chicago seemed like the Mississippi Delta transplanted, so pervasive were the migrants. By 1960, about half the nations black population was living outside the South, compared with only 23 percent before World War II.
The Urban Crisis Migration to American cities, whether from Europe or rural America, had always been attended by hardship, by poverty, slum housing, and cultural dislocation. So severe had these problems seemed half a century earlier that they had helped to spark the reform wave of the Progressive era (see Chapter 20). But hardship then had been temporary, a way station on the path to a better life. That had been true initially of the post-1941 migration, when blacks found jobs in the defense industry and, in the postwar boom, in Detroit auto plants and Chicago meatpacking houses.
Later migrants were not as lucky. By the 1950s, the economy was changing. The manufacturing sector was contracting, and technological advances what people then called automation hit unskilled and semiskilled jobs especially hard. These were the jobs in which Negroes are disproportionately concentrated, noted the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Black migrants, Rustin warned, were becoming econom- ically superfl uous, and in that respect their situation was far bleaker than anything faced by earlier immigrants.
A second difference involved race. Every immigrant wave Irish, Italian, Slavic, Jewish had been greeted by hostility, but none as virulent as that experienced by black migrants. In the 1950s, a more tolerant era, they were spared the race rioting that
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had affl icted their predecessors. But racism in its more covert forms held them back at every turn: by housing restrictions, by schools increasingly segregated, by an urban infrastructure that was underfunded and decaying because whites fl ed to the suburbs. In the 1950s, the nations twelve largest cities lost 3.6 million whites while gaining 4.5 million nonwhites.
As if joblessness and discrimination were not enough, black ghettoes were hit during the 1950s by a frenzy of urban renewal. Seeking to revitalize city centers, urban planners, politicians, and real estate developers proposed razing blighted neighbor- hoods to make way for modern construction projects.
Local residents were rarely consulted about whether they wanted their neighbor- hoods renewed. In Boston, almost one-third of the old city was demolished including the historic West End, a long-established Italian neighborhood to make way for a new highway, high-rise housing, and government and commercial buildings. In San Francisco, some 4,000 residents of the Western Addition, a predominantly black neighborhood, lost out to an urban renewal program that built luxury housing, a shopping center, and an express boulevard. Between 1949 and 1967, urban renewal demolished almost 400,000 buildings and displaced 1.4 million people.
The urban experts knew what to do with these people. They would be relocated to federally funded housing projects, an outgrowth of New Deal housing policy, now much expanded and combined with generous funding for slum clearance. However well inten- tioned, these grim projects had a distrastrous impact on black community life, destroying neighborhoods and relegating the inhabitants to social isolation. The notorious Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, a huge complex of 28 sixteen-story buildings and 20,000 resi- dents, almost all black, became a breeding ground for crime and hopelessness.
In 1962, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (author of An American Dilemma, a pioneering book about the countrys race relations) wondered whether shrinking economic opportunity in the United States might not trap an under-class of unem- ployed and, gradually, unemployable and underemployed persons and families at the bottom of a society. Myrdals term underclass referring to a population permanently mired in poverty and dependency would fi gure centrally in future American debates about social policy. It 1962, however, underclass was a newly coined word, describing a phenomenon that had not yet been noticed but was already well under way in the inner cities of 1950s America.
The Emerging Civil Rights Struggle Segregation prevailed in the South. In most southern states, blacks could not eat in restaurants patronized by whites or use the same waiting rooms at bus stations. All forms of public transportation were rigidly segregated by custom or by law. Even drinking fountains were labeled White and Colored.
Blacks understood that segregation would never be abolished without grassroots struggle. But that was not their only weapon. They also had the Bill of Rights and the great Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. In this respect, fighting segregation was different from fi ghting poverty. Blacks had no constitutional right not to be poor, but they did have constitutional rights not to be discriminated against, if only these rights could be exercised. The Cold War, moreover, gave civil rights advocates added
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leverage because Americas reputation in the world now counted to Americas leaders. So the battle against racial injustice, as it took shape after World War II, proceeded on two tracks: on the ground, where blacks began to stand up for their rights, and in the courts and corridors of power, where words sometimes mattered more than action.
During World War II, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) redoubled its efforts to combat discrimination in housing, transpor- tation, and jobs. Black demands for justice continued into the postwar years, spurred by symbolic victories, as when Jackie Robinson broke through the color line in major league baseball by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
African American leaders also had hopes for President Truman. Although capable of racist language, Truman supported civil rights on moral grounds. Moreover, he understood the growing importance of the black vote in key northern states, a fact driven home by his surprise 1948 victory. Truman also worried about Americas image abroad. It did not help that the Soviet Union compared the Souths treatment of blacks with the Nazis treatment of the Jews.
Lacking support in Congress, Truman turned to executive action. In 1946, he appointed a National Civil Rights Commission, whose 1947 report called for robust federal action on behalf of civil rights. In 1948, under pressure from A. Philip Randolphs Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, Truman signed an executive order desegregating the armed forces. Then, with his hand strengthened by the victory for civil rights at the 1948 Democratic convention, Truman went on the offensive, pushing legislation on a variety of fronts, including voting rights and equal employment oppor- tunity. Invariably, his efforts were defeated by fi libustering southern senators.
With Dwight Eisenhower as president, civil rights no longer had a champion in the White House. But in the meantime, NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie had been preparing the legal ground in a series of test cases challeng- ing racial discrimination, and in 1954 they hit pay dirt.
The case involved Linda Brown, a black pupil in Topeka, Kansas, who had been forced to attend a distant segregated school rather than the nearby white elementary school. In Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACPs chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued that such segregation was unconstitutional because it denied Linda Brown the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In a unani- mous decision on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court agreed, overturning the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (see Chapter 19). Speaking for the Court, the new Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:
To separate Negro children . . . solely because of their race generates a feeling of infe- riority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . . We conclude that in the fi eld of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
In an implementing 1955 decision known as Brown II, the Court declared simply that integration should proceed with all deliberate speed.
In the South, however, the call went out for massive resistance. A Southern Man- ifesto signed in 1956 by 101 members of Congress denounced the Brown decision as a clear abuse of judicial power and encouraged their constituents to defy it. That
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818 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
year, 500,000 southerners joined White Citizens Councils dedicated to blocking school integration. Some whites revived the old tactics of violence and intimidation, swelling the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan to levels not seen since the 1920s.
President Eisenhower accepted the Brown decision as the law of the land, but he thought it a mistake. He was not happy about committing federal power to enforce it. A crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, fi nally forced his hand. In September 1957, nine black students attempted to enroll at the all-white Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to bar them. Then the mob took over. Every day, the nine students had to run a gauntlet of angry whites chanting, Go back to the jun- gle. As the vicious scenes played out on television night after night, Eisenhower acted. He sent 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and nationalized the Arkansas National Guard, ordering them to protect the black students. Eisenhower thus became the fi rst president since Reconstruction to use federal troops to enforce the rights of blacks.
The Brown decision validated the NAACPs legal strategy, but white resistance also revealed that winning in court was not enough. Prompted by one small act of defi ance, southern black leaders unveiled a new tactic: nonviolent protest.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested and charged with violat- ing a local segregation ordinance. Parkss act was not the spur-of-the-moment deci- sion that it seemed. A woman of sterling reputation and a long-time NAACP member, she had been chosen to play that part. Middle-aged and unassuming, Rosa Parks fi t the bill perfectly for the NAACPs challenge against segregated buses.
Once the die was cast, the black community turned for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the recently appointed pastor of Montgomerys Dexter Street Baptist Church. The son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King embraced the teach- ings of Mahatma Gandhi, whose campaigns of passive resistance had sparked Indias independence from Britain in 1947. After Rosa Parkss arrest, King endorsed a plan by a local black womens organization to boycott Montgomerys bus system.
For the next 381 days, Montgomery blacks formed car pools or walked to work. The bus company neared bankruptcy, and downtown stores complained about the loss of business. But only after the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional did the city of Montgomery fi nally comply. My feets is tired, but my soul is rested, said one satisfi ed woman boycotter.
The Montgomery bus boycott catapulted King to national prominence. In 1957, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, he founded the Southern Christian Leader- ship Conference (SCLC), based in Atlanta. The black church, long the center of African American social and cultural life, now lent its moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement. Black churchwomen were a tower of strength, transferring the skills honed by years of church work to the fi ght for civil rights justice. Soon the SCLC joined the NAACP as one of the main advocacy groups for racial justice.
The battle for civil rights entered a new phase in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four black college students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworths. They were determined to sit in until they were served. Although they were arrested, the tactic worked the Woolworths lunch counter was desegregated and sit-ins quickly spread to other southern cities (see American Voices, p. 819). A few months later, Ella Baker, an administrator with the SCLC, helped to
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 819
The planning process was on a Sunday night, I remember it quite well. I think it was Joseph who said, Its time that we take some action now. Weve been getting together, and weve been, up to this point, still like most people weve talked about for the past few weeks or so that is, people who talk a lot but, in fact, take very little action. After selecting the technique, then we said, Lets go down and just ask for service. It certainly wasnt titled a sit-in or sit-down at that time. Lets just go down to Woolworths tomorrow and ask for service, and the tactic is going to be simply this: well just stay there.
. . . Once getting there . . . we did make purchases of school supplies and took the patience and time to get receipts for our purchases, and Joseph and myself went over to the counter and asked to be served coffee and doughnuts. As anticipated, the reply was, Im sorry, we dont serve you here. And of course we said, We just beg to disagree with you. Weve in fact already been served.
. . . At that point there was a policeman who had walked in off the street, who was pacing the aisle . . . behind us, where we were seated, with his club in his hand, just sort of knocking it in his hand, and just looking mean and red and a little bit upset and a little bit disgusted. And you had the feeling that he didnt know what the hell to do. . . . Usually his defense is offense, and
A M E R I C A N V O I C E S
weve provoked him, yes, but we havent provoked outwardly enough for him to resort to violence. And I think this is just killing him; you can see it all over him.
If its possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than Ive ever felt in my life. Seems like a lot of feelings of guilt or what-have-you suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood. . . . Not Franklin McCain only as an individual, but I felt as though the manhood of a number of other black persons had been restored and had gotten some respect from just that one day.
The movement started out as a movement of nonviolence and a Christian movement. . . . We knew that probably the most powerful and potent weapon that people have literally no defense for is love, kindness. That is, whip the enemy with something that he doesnt understand. . . . The individual who had probably the most infl uence on us was Gandhi. . . . Yes, Martin Luther Kings name was well- known when the sit-in movement was in effect, but . . . no, he was not the indi- vidual we had upmost in mind when we started the sit-in movement.
S O U R C E : Clayborne Carson et al., eds., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (New York: Viking, 1991), 114116.
Desegregating Lunch Counters F R A N K L I N M C C A I N Franklin McCain was one of the four African American students at North Carolina A&T
College in Greensboro, North Carolina, who sat down at the Woolworths lunch counter on
February 1, 1960, setting off by that simple act a wave of student sit-ins that rocked the
South and initiated a national civil rights movement. In the following interview, McCain
describes how he and his pals took that momentous step.
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820 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, known as Snick) to facilitate student sit-ins. By the end of the year, about 50,000 people had participated in sit-ins or other demon- strations, and 3,600 of them had been jailed. But in 126 cities across the South, blacks were at last able to eat at Woolworths lunch counters.
The victories so far had been limited, but the groundwork had been laid for a civil rights offensive that would transform the nations race relations.
S U M M A R Y
We have explored how, at the very time that it became mired in the Cold War, the United States entered an unparalleled era of prosperity. Indeed, the Cold War was one of the engines of prosperity. The postwar economy was marked especially by the
Who were the people who occupied the Other America? Why were they there rather than in mainstream America?
What were the key components of the urban crisis?
What is the signifi cance of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision?
The Greensboro Four
Pictured here are the four African American students who, entirely on their own, decided to demand service at the Woolworths whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and started a sit- down movement across the South. Second from the left is Franklin McCain, whose interview appears in American Voices on p. 819. Bettmann/Corbis.
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C H A P T E R 2 7 The Age of Affl uence, 19451960 821
dominance of big corporations. Corporate dominance in turn helped to make pos- sible the labor-management accord that spread the benefi ts of prosperity to workers beyond the dreams of earlier generations.
After years of depression and war-induced insecurity, Americans turned inward toward religion, home, and family. Postwar couples married young, had several chil- dren, and if they were white and middle class raised their children in a climate of suburban comfort and consumerism. The profamily orientation of the 1950s cele- brated social conformity and traditional gender roles, even though millions of women entered the workforce in those years. Cultural conformity provoked resistance, how- ever, both by the burgeoning youth culture and by a remarkably inventive generation of painters, musicians, and writers.
Not everyone, moreover, shared the postwar prosperity. Postwar cities increas- ingly became places of last resort for the nations poor. Black migrants, unlike earlier immigrants, encountered an urban economy that had little use for them. Without op- portunity and faced by pervasive racism, they were on their way to becoming, many of them, an American underclass. In the South, however, discrimination produced a civil rights uprising that white America could not ignore. Many of the smoldering contradictions of the postwar period Cold War anxiety in the midst of suburban domesticity, tensions in womens lives, economic and racial inequality helped to spur the protest movements of the 1960s.
Connections: Economy
In the 1950s, as we noted in the essay opening Part Six, no country had an economy that was competitive with Americas. The roots of that supremacy went back into the late nineteenth century when, as we discussed in Chapter 17, heavy industry, mass-production technology, and a corporate business structure emerged. In the 1920s (Chapter 23), this industrial economy was refi ned, and after the hiatus of the
1944 Bretton Woods economic conference
World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) founded
1946 First edition of Dr. Spocks Baby and Child Care
1947 First Levittown built Jackie Robinson joins the
Brooklyn Dodgers 1948 Beginning of network television 1950 Treaty of Detroit initiates labor-
management accord 1953 Operation Wetback 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka
1955 Montgomery bus boycott begins AFL and CIO merge 1956 National Interstate and
Defense Highways Act Elvis Presleys breakthrough
records 1957 Peak of postwar baby boom Eisenhower sends U.S. troops
to enforce integration of Little Rock Central High School
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) founded
1960 Student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina
T I M E L I N E
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822 PA R T S I X The Age of Cold War Liberalism, 19451980
Great Depression, it became the basis for the postWorld War II economic boom. In Chapter 29, we describe the fi rst stages in the decline of this manufacturing economy during the 1970s. The postwar consumer culture had roots that went back into the 1920s (Chapter 23), while the accompanying suburbanization went back even ear- lier, into the nineteenth century (Chapter 18). Similarly, we can trace back to earlier discussions the migratory patterns (see Chapters 17 and 22), the decay of the cities (see Chapter 18), and the rise of the civil rights movement (see Chapter 20) that character- ized the 1950s. The civil rights movement of that decade was, of course, only a precur- sor of the great struggles of the 1960s (Chapter 28) and 1970s (Chapter 29).
F O R F U R T H E R E X P L O R AT I O N
Two engaging introductions to postwar society are Paul Boyer, Promises to Keep (1995), and David Halberstam, The Fifties (1993). Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002), offers a searching account of the labor-management accord. The best book on the consumer culture is Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003). Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (1988), is the classic introduction to postwar family life. For youth culture, see William Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo (1990), and a classic of the period, Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960). On the urban crisis, see especially Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It Changed America (1991), and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996). Taylor Branchs biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 19541963 (1988), while focusing on Kings leadership, provides an engaging account of the early civil rights movement.
Literary Kicks: The Beat Generation, at www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/msg.jsp ?what=BeatGen, is an independent site created by New York writer Levi Asher devoted to the literature of the Beat generation. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has compiled materials from two Arkansas newspapers covering the Central High School crisis in Little Rock in 1957 at www.ardemgaz.com/prev/central.
T E S T Y O U R K N O W L E D G E
To assess your mastery of the material in this chapter and for Web sites, images, and documents related to this chapter, visit bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.