CHAPTER 24

An Affluent Society, 1953-1960

Chapter Study Outline
I.[Introduction: The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debates]
II. 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
1. The Cold War fueled industrial production and promoted a redistribution of the nation's
population and economic resources.
2. Since the 1950s, the American economy has shifted away from manufacturing.
3. The center of gravity of American farming shifted decisively to the West (especially to
California).
A Suburban Nation
4. The main engines of economic growth during the 1950s were residential construction and
spending on consumer goods.
5. The dream of home ownership came within reach of the majority of Americans.
a. Levittown
The Growth of the West
6. California became the most prominent symbol of the postwar suburban boom.
7. Western cities were decentralized clusters of single-family homes and businesses united by
a web of highways.
The TV World
8. 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.
9. TV avoided controversy and projected a bland image of middle-class life.
10. Television also became the most effective advertising medium ever invented.
Women at Work and at Home
11. After a sharp postwar drop in female employment, the number of women at work soon
began to rise, yet the nature and aims of women's work had changed.
12. Women were expected to get married, have kids, and stay at home.
. Baby boom
13. Feminism seemed to have disappeared from American life.
A Segregated Landscape
14. The suburbs remained segregated communities.
15. During the postwar suburban boom, federal agencies continued to insure mortgages that
barred resale of houses to nonwhites, thereby financing housing segregation.
16. Under programs of "urban renewal," cities demolished poor neighborhoods in city centers
that occupied potentially valuable real estate.
The Divided Society
17. Suburbanization hardened the racial lines of division in American life.
18. Between 1950 and 1970, about 7 million white Americans left cities for the suburbs.
19. The process of racial exclusion became self-reinforcing.
20. Suburban home ownership long remained a white entitlement.
Selling Free Enterprise
21. More than political democracy or freedom of speech, an economic system resting on
private ownership united the nations of the Free World.
22. The selling of free enterprise became a major industry.
The Libertarian Conservatives and New Conservatives
23. To libertarian conservatives, freedom meant individual autonomy, limited government,
and unregulated capitalism.
24. These ideas had great appeal in the rapidly growing South and West.
25. The new conservatism became increasingly prominent in the 1950s.
26. The new conservatives insisted that toleration of difference offered no substitute for the
search for absolute truth.
27. They understood freedom as first and foremost a moral condition.
28. Two powerful enemies became focal points for the conservative revival:
 . The Soviet Union abroad
a. The federal government at home
III. The Eisenhower Era
Ike and Nixon
1. General Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952.
2. Richard Nixon ran as his vice president.
. Nixon gained a reputation for opportunism and dishonesty.
The 1952 Campaign
3. This period illustrated the importance of TV in politics.
4. Eisenhower's popularity and promises to end the Korean conflict brought him victory in
1952.
5. During the 1950s, voters at home and abroad seemed to find reassurance in selecting
familiar, elderly leaders to govern them.
Modern Republicanism
6. Wealthy businessmen dominated Eisenhower's cabinet.
. Eisenhower refused to roll back the New Deal.
7. 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.
. Core New Deal programs expanded.
8. Government spending was used to promote productivity and boost employment.
The Social Contract
9. The 1950s witnessed an easing of the labor conflict of the two previous decades.
. AFL and CIO merged in 1955.
a. Social contract
10. Unionized workers shared fully in the prosperity of the 1950s.
Massive Retaliation
11. Ike took office at a time when the Cold War had entered an extremely dangerous phase.
12. Massive retaliation declared that any Soviet attack on an American ally would be countered
by a nuclear assault on the Soviet Union itself.
Ike and the Russians
13. Eisenhower came to believe that the Soviets were reasonable and could be dealt with in
conventional diplomatic terms.
14. Khrushchev's call for peaceful coexistence with the United States raised the possibility of
an easing of the Cold War.
15. In 1958, the two superpowers agreed to a voluntary halt on the testing of nuclear weapons.
The Emergence of the Third World
16. The post-World War II era witnessed the crumbling of European empires.
17. Decolonization presented the United States with a complex set of choices.
18. The Cold War became the determining factor in American relations with the Third World.
. Guatemala
a. Iran
Origins of the Vietnam War
19. Anticommunism led the United States into deeper involvement in Vietnam.
20. A peace conference in Geneva divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel.
21. Events in 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
22. 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.
. Wright Mills
23. One strand of social analysis in the 1950s contended that Americans did not enjoy genuine
freedom.
. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950)
Rebels without a Cause
24. 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.
25. Cultural life during the 1950s seemed far more daring than politics.
. Rock and roll
26. The Beats were a small group of poets and writers who railed against mainstream culture.
 27. 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 pleasure, and sexual experimentation.
IV. The Freedom Movement
Origins of the Movement
1. The United States in the 1950s was still a segregated and unequal society.
2. Few white Americans felt any urgency about confronting racial inequality.
The Legal Assault on Segregation
3. It fell to the courts to confront the problem of racial segregation.
. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
a. Earl Warren
4. 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
5. Marshall brought the NAACP's support to local cases that had arisen when black parents
challenged unfair school policies.
6. Marshall argued that segregation did lifelong damage to black children.
7. 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 Montgomery Bus Boycott
8. Brown ensured that when the movement resumed after waning in the early 1950s, it would
have the backing of the federal courts.
. Rosa Parks
a. Bus boycott
The Daybreak of Freedom
9. The Montgomery Bus Boycott marked a turning point in postwar American history.
10. It vaulted Martin Luther King Jr. as the movement's national symbol.
11. From the beginning, the language of freedom pervaded the black movement.
The Leadership of King
12. In King's soaring oratory, the protesters' understandings of freedom fused into a coherent
whole.
13. 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
14. In 1956, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
15. In 1956, many southern congressmen and senators signed a Southern Manifesto.
Eisenhower and Civil Rights
16. The federal government tried to remain aloof from the black struggle.
. President Eisenhower failed to provide moral leadership.
17. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used the National Guard to prevent the court-
ordered integration of Little Rock's Central High School.
18. Since the start of the Cold War, American leaders had worried about the impact of
segregation on the country's international reputation.
19. The global reaction to the Brown decision was overwhelmingly positive.
V. The Election of 1960
Kennedy and Nixon
1. The presidential campaign of 1960 turned out to be one of the closest in American history.
2. John F. Kennedy was a Catholic and the youngest presidential candidate in history.
3. Both Kennedy and Nixon were ardent Cold Warriors.
. Missile gap
a. Television debate
The End of the 1950s
4. Eisenhower's Farewell Address warned against the drumbeat of calls for a new military
buildup.
. Military-industrial complex