A5ACVA The United States From the 1930s Lecture Number 3

The USA in the 1950s, Part 1

Note: the 1950s cover a period from the end of World War II in 1945 to the election of John
F. Kennedy, a Democrat, as president in 1961.

Part One. The Post-War Era: An Image of Affluence and Consensus

1/ Affluent America
--The US came out of the war victorious and prosperous. It returned quickly to a peace
economy. The majority of Americans had reached a middle-class status by the mid-1950s
(60%). Many jobs were unionized and provided good salaries and social benefits.
--Mass consumption (more products available for a larger number of consumers) grew
tremendously at a time when the media became more varied with the rise in transistor radios,
television (88% of American households owned at least one TV set by 1959), and magazines.
Americans also started to buy more goods on credit.
-- Thanks to the G.I. Bill of 1944 (The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), war veterans were
provided with health coverage, financial aid to pay for university as well as low-cost
mortgages and low-interest loans to buy a new house. Many veterans thus moved with their
families to new housing developments in the suburbs of American cities.
--The US society moved away from manufacturing jobs toward a service-oriented economy
with a high number of white-collar positions.
2/ Population Growth and Suburbanization
--Suburbanization augmented quickly and the suburbs became the symbol of middle-class
prosperity. The 1956 Federal Highway Act provided states with federal funds to build new
freeways and highways that connected newly-built suburban communities to the city center,
where jobs and shops were usually still located.
--Starting in 1946, the US witnessed a baby boom with a fast-growing birth rate (2.8 million
babies were born in 1945, 4.2 million in 1961) and families were larger. The population grew
from 133 million in 1945 to 180 million in 1960.
--For the first time, a new group (after women and children earlier) were targeted by
advertisers: teenagers.
3/ Suburbia: A White Middle-Class Model
--The suburbs became emblematic of the “American way of life” in a Cold War context. They
were mostly white and middle class: zoning restrictions and discriminatory red lining
practices by real estate agents restricted the settlement of Black and other ethno-racial
minorities in suburban communities. The nuclear family (a provider dad, a stay-at-home mom
and their children) was praised in political discourse and in popular culture and was regularly
opposed to the collectivist lifestyle in the Soviet Union.
--Suburbs appeared as sites of mass consumption, homogeneity, and conformity in a time of
political and economic consensus.
4/ The Limits of Consensus
--Some groups in the nation started to challenge the image of consensus: in the 1940s already
the Beat generation (beat writers A. Ginsberg, J. Kerouac among others) criticized
militarization, American conformism and materialism. Later some youths defied normative
codes by dressing differently and through alternative music choices (Rock and roll)
--Social Critics showed that the widespread discourse on prosperity actually hid persisting
problems in the nation: poverty and discrimination, especially in some rural areas and city
slums, and within ethno-racial populations.
--Among the social critics C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956), Kenneth Galbraith (The
Affluent Society, 1958), Michael Harrington (The Other America, 1962), and others countered
the image of American “exceptionalism” and showed some of the problems not solved by
apparent prosperity as well as the new challenges of a society dominated by consumption and
the fight against communism.
--some populations faced especially harsh conditions. Native Americans, the poorest in the
nation, were encouraged by the government to leave problem-ridden reservation and to move
to cities through the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. The termination of tribes (from the
mid-1940s to the mid-1960s) ended all federal aid and closed tribal rolls in an effort to
assimilate Indians into the general population.
--Some effort had been made to end racial segregation: the 1954 Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (often simply referred to as the Brown
decision) was supposed to put an end to segregation at school. Still, white resistance and very
difficult conditions in the South (disfranchisement, unemployment, exploitation, and
violence) increased the migration to cities in the North and on the West Coast.