History of the United States (1945–1964)
For the United States, 1945–1964 was a time of high economic growth and general prosperity. It was also a time of confrontation as the capitalist United States and its allies politically opposed the Soviet Union and other communist countries; the Cold War had begun. African Americans united and organized, and a triumph of the Civil Rights Movement ended Jim Crow segregation in the South. Further laws were passed that made discrimination illegal and provided federal oversight to guarantee voting rights.
Early in the period, an active foreign policy was pursued to help Western Europe and Asia recover from the devastation of World War II. The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe rebuild from wartime devastation. The main American goal was to contain the expansion of Communism, which was controlled by the Soviet Union until China broke away about 1960. An arms race escalated through increasingly powerful nuclear weapons. The Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of European satellites to oppose the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance. The U.S. fought a bloody, inconclusive war in Korea and was escalating the war in Vietnam as the period ended. Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, and when the USSR sent in nuclear missiles to defend it, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was triggered with the U.S., the most dangerous point of the era.
On the domestic front, after a short transition, the economy grew rapidly, with widespread prosperity, rising wages, and the movement of most of the remaining farmers to the towns and cities. Politically, the era was dominated by liberal Democrats who held together with the New Deal Coalition: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate who did not attempt to reverse New Deal programs such as regulation of business and support for labor unions; he expanded Social Security and built the interstate highway system. For most of the period, the Democrats controlled Congress; however, they were usually unable to pass as much liberal legislation as they had hoped because of the power of the Conservative Coalition. The Liberal coalition took control of Congress after Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and launched the Great Society.
This period witnessed the rise of suburbs and a growing middle class. Communitarianism and measurable social capital was at its highest point during this time.
Cold War
Origins
While Roosevelt was confident he could deal with Stalin after the war, Truman was much more suspicious. The United States provided large-scale grants to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan, leading to a rapid economic recovery. The Soviet Union refused to allow its satellites to receive American aid. Instead, the Kremlin used local Communist parties, and the Red army, to control Eastern Europe in totalitarian fashion. Britain, in deep financial trouble, could no longer support Greece in its civil war with the communists. They asked the United States to take over their role in Greece. With bipartisan support in Congress, Truman responded with the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Truman followed the intellectual leadership of the State Department, which, especially under the guidance of George F. Kennan, called for containment of Soviet communist expansion. The idea was that internal contradictions, such as diverse nationalism, would ultimately undermine Soviet ambitions.By 1947, the Soviets had fully absorbed the three Baltic nations, and effectively controlled Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Austria and Finland were neutral and demilitarized. The Kremlin did not control Yugoslavia, which had a separate communist regime under Marshall Tito; They had a permanent bitter break in 1948. The Cold War lines stabilized in Europe along the Iron Curtain, and there was no fighting. The United States helped form a strong military alliance in NATO in 1949 including most of the nations of Western Europe, and Canada. In Asia, however, there was much more movement. The United States failed to negotiate a settlement between its ally, nationalist China under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists under Mao Zedong. The Communists took over China in 1949 and the nationalist government moved to the offshore island of Formosa, which came under American protection. Local communist movements attempted to take over all of Korea and Vietnam. Communist hegemony covered one third of the world's land while the United States emerged as the world's more influential superpower, and formed a worldwide network of military alliances.
There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism. The United States envisioned the new United Nations as a Wilsonian tool to resolve future troubles, but it failed in that purpose. The U.S. rejected totalitarianism and colonialism, in line with the principles laid down by the Atlantic Charter of 1941: self-determination, equal economic access, and a rebuilt capitalist, democratic Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs.
Containment
For NATO, containment of the expansion of Soviet influence became foreign policy doctrine; the expectation was that eventually the inefficient Soviet system would collapse of internal weakness, and no "hot" war would be necessary. Containment was supported by Republicans, but was opposed by the isolationists led by Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio.1949–1953
In 1949, the communist leader Mao Zedong won control of mainland China in a civil war, proclaimed the People's Republic of China, then traveled to Moscow where he negotiated the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship. China had thus moved from a close ally of the U.S. to a bitter enemy, and the two fought each other starting in late 1950 in Korea. The Truman administration responded with a secret 1950 plan, NSC 68, designed to confront the Communists with large-scale defense spending. The Russians had built an atomic bomb by 1949—much sooner than expected; Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb. Two of the spies who gave atomic secrets to Russia were tried and executed.France was hard-pressed by Communist insurgents in the First Indochina War. The U.S. in 1950 started to fund the French effort on the proviso that the Vietnamese be given more autonomy.
Korean War
Stalin approved a North Korean plan to invade U.S.-supported South Korea in June 1950. President Truman immediately and unexpectedly implemented the containment policy by a full-scale commitment of American and UN forces to Korea. He did not consult or gain approval of Congress but did gain the approval of the United Nations to drive back the North Koreans and re-unite that country in terms of a rollback strategy.After a few weeks of retreat, General Douglas MacArthur's success at the Battle of Inchon turned the war around; UN forces invaded North Korea. This advantage was lost when hundreds of thousands of Chinese entered an undeclared war against the United States and pushed the US/UN/Korean forces back to the original starting line, the 38th parallel. The war became a stalemate, with over 33,000 American dead and 100,000 wounded but nothing to show for it except a resolve to continue the containment policy. Truman fired MacArthur but was unable to end the war. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 campaigned against Truman's failures of "Korea, Communism and Corruption," promising to go to Korea himself and end the war. By threatening to use nuclear weapons in 1953, Eisenhower ended the war with a truce that is still in effect.
Anti-Communism and McCarthyism: 1947–1954
In 1947, well before McCarthy became active, the Conservative Coalition in Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act, designed to balance the rights of management and unions, and delegitimizing Communist union leaders. The challenge of rooting out Communists from labor unions and the Democratic Party was successfully undertaken by liberals, such as Walter Reuther of the autoworkers union and Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild. Many of the purged leftists joined the presidential campaign in 1948 of FDR's Vice President Henry A. Wallace.The House Un-American Activities Committee, with young Congressman Richard M. Nixon playing a central role, accused Alger Hiss, a top Roosevelt aide, of being a Communist spy, using testimony and documents provided by Whittaker Chambers. Hiss was convicted and sent to prison, with the anti-Communists gaining a powerful political weapon. It launched Nixon's meteoric rise to the Senate and the vice presidency.
With anxiety over Communism in Korea and China reaching fever pitch in 1950, a previously obscure Senator, Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, launched Congressional investigations into the cover-up of spies in the government. McCarthy dominated the media, and used reckless allegations and tactics that allowed his opponents to effectively counterattack. Irish Catholics were intensely anti-Communist and defended McCarthy. Paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy, a very active conservative Democrat, was McCarthy's most ardent supporter and got his son Robert F. Kennedy a job with McCarthy. McCarthy had talked of "twenty years of treason". When, in 1953, he started talking of "21 years of treason" and launched a major attack on the Army for promoting a Communist dentist in the medical corps, his recklessness proved too much for Eisenhower, who encouraged Republicans to censure McCarthy formally in 1954. The Senator's power collapsed overnight. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote for censure. Buckley went on to found the National Review in 1955 as a weekly magazine that helped define the conservative position on public issues.
"McCarthyism" was expanded to include attacks on supposed Communist influence in Hollywood, which resulted in a black-list whereby artists who refused to testify about possible Communist connections could not get work. Some famous celebrities left the U.S.; other worked under pseudonyms. McCarthyism included investigations into academics and teachers as well.
Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations
In 1953, Stalin died, and after the 1952 presidential election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the opportunity to end the Korean War, while continuing Cold War policies. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was the dominant figure in the nation's foreign policy in the 1950s. Dulles denounced the "containment" of the Truman administration and espoused an active program of "liberation", which would lead to a "rollback" of communism. The most prominent of those doctrines was the policy of "massive retaliation", which Dulles announced early in 1954, eschewing the costly, conventional ground forces characteristic of the Truman administration in favor of wielding the vast superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence. Dulles defined this approach as "brinkmanship".A dramatic shock to Americans' self-confidence and its technological superiority came in 1957, when the Soviets beat the United States into outer space by launching Sputnik, the first earth satellite. The space race began, and by the early 1960s the United States had forged ahead, with President Kennedy promising to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s—the landing indeed took place on July 20, 1969.
Trouble close to home appeared when Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959 and forged increasingly close ties with the Soviet Union, becoming communism's center in Latin America. The United States responded with an economic boycott of Cuba, and a large-scale economic support program for Latin America under Kennedy, the Alliance for Progress.
East Germany was the weak point in the Soviet empire, with refugees leaving for the West by the thousands every week. The Soviet solution came in 1961, with the Berlin Wall to stop East Germans from fleeing communism. This was a major propaganda setback for the USSR, but it did allow them to keep control of East Berlin.
The Communist world split in half, as China turned against the Soviet Union; Mao denounced Khrushchev for going soft on capitalism. However, the US failed to take advantage of this split until President Richard Nixon saw the opportunity in 1969. In 1958, the U.S. sent troops into Lebanon for nine months to stabilize a country on the verge of civil war. Between 1954 and 1961, Eisenhower dispatched large sums of economic and military aid and 695 military advisers to South Vietnam to stabilize the pro-western government under attack by insurgents. Eisenhower supported CIA efforts to undermine anti-American governments, which proved most successful in Iran and Guatemala.
The first major strain among the NATO alliance occurred in 1956 when Eisenhower forced Britain and France to retreat from their invasion of Egypt which was intended to get back their ownership of the Suez Canal. Instead of supporting the claims of its NATO partners, the Eisenhower administration stated that it opposed French and British imperial adventurism in the region by sheer prudence, fearing that Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's standoff with the region's old colonial powers would bolster Soviet power in the region.
The Cold War reached its most dangerous point during the Kennedy administration in the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 16, 1962, and lasted for thirteen days. It was the moment when the Cold War was closest to exploding into a devastating nuclear exchange between the two superpower nations. Kennedy decided not to invade or bomb Cuba but to institute a naval blockade of the island. The crisis ended in a compromise, with the Soviets removing their missiles publicly, and the United States secretly removing its nuclear missiles in Turkey. In Moscow, Communist leaders removed Nikita Khrushchev because of his reckless behavior.
The Affluent Society
Wartime rationing was officially lifted in September 1945, but prosperity did not immediately return as the next three years would witness the difficult transition back to a peacetime economy. Twelve million returning veterans were in need of work and in many cases could not find it. Inflation became a rather serious problem, averaging over 10% per year until 1950 and raw materials shortages dogged the manufacturing industry. In addition, labor strikes rocked the nation and were in some cases exacerbated by racial tensions: African-Americans that took jobs during the war were faced with irate returning veterans who demanded that they step aside. Munitions factories shut down and temporary workers returned home. Following the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1946 elections, President Truman was compelled to reduce taxes and curb government interference in the economy. With this done, the stage was set for the economic boom that, with only a few minor hiccups, would last for the next 23 years. Between 1945 and 1960, GNP grew by 250%, expenditures on new construction multiplied nine times, and consumption on personal services increased three times. By 1960, per capita income was 35% higher than in 1945, and America had entered what the economist Walt Rostow referred to as the "high mass consumption" stage of economic development. Short-term credit went up from $8.4 billion in 1946 to $45.6 billion in 1958. As a result of the postwar economic boom, 60% of the American population had attained a "middle-class" standard of living by the mid-1950s, compared with only 31% in the last year of prosperity before the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. By the end of the decade, 87% of families owned a TV set, 75% owned a car, and 75% owned a washing machine. Between 1947-1960, the average real income for American workers increased by as much as it had in the previous half-century.Prosperity and overall optimism made Americans feel that it was a good time to bring children into the world, and so a huge baby boom resulted during the decade following 1945. Although the overall number of children per woman was not unusually high, they were assisted by improving technology that greatly brought down infant mortality rates versus the prewar era. Among other things, this resulted in an unprecedented demand for children's products and a huge expansion of the public school system. The large size of the postwar baby-boom generation would have significant social repercussions in American society for decades to come.
In 1963, Betty Friedan published her book The Feminine Mystique which ridiculed the housewife role of women during the postwar years; it was a best-seller and a major catalyst of the women's liberation movement.
The American economy grew dramatically in the post-war period, expanding at a rate of 3.5% per year between 1945 and 1970. During this period of prosperity, many incomes doubled in a generation, described by economist Frank Levy as "upward mobility on a rocket ship." The substantial increase in average family income within a generation resulted in millions of office and factory workers being lifted into a growing middle class, enabling them to sustain a standard of living once considered to be reserved for the wealthy. As noted by Deone Zell, assembly-line work paid well, while unionized factory jobs served as "stepping-stones to the middle class." By the end of the 1950s, 87% of all American families owned at least one T.V., 75% owned cars, and 60% owned their homes. By 1960, blue-collar workers had become the biggest buyers of many luxury goods and services. In addition, by the early-1970s, post-World War II American consumers enjoyed higher levels of disposable income than those in any other country.
The great majority of American workers who had stable jobs were well-off financially, while even non-union jobs were associated with rising paychecks, benefits, and obtained many of the advantages that characterized union work. An upscale working class came into being, as American blue-collar workers came to enjoy the benefits of home ownership, while high wages provided blue-collar workers with the ability to pay for new cars, household appliances, and regular vacations. By the 1960s, a blue-collar worker earned more than a manager did in the 1940s, despite the fact that the former's relative position within the income distribution had not changed.
As noted by the historian Nancy Wierek:
"In the postwar period, the majority of Americans were affluent in the sense that they were in a position to spend money on many things they wanted, desired, or chose to have, rather than on necessities alone."
As argued by the historians Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett:
"By the mid-1960's, the majority of America's organized working class who were not victims of the second Red Scare embraced, or at least tolerated, anti-communism because it was an integral part of the New American Dream to which they had committed their lives. Theirs was not an unobtainable dream; nor were their lives empty because of it. Indeed, for at least a quarter of century, the material promises of consumer-oriented Americanism were fulfilled in improvements in everyday life that made them the most affluent working class in American history."
Between 1946-1960, the United States witnessed a significant expansion in the consumption of goods and services. GNP rose by 36% and personal consumption expenditures by 42%, cumulative gains which were reflected in the incomes of families and unrelated individuals. While the number of these units rose sharply from 43.3 million to 56.1 million in 1960, a rise of almost 23%, their average incomes grew even faster, from $3,940 in 1946 to $6,900 in 1960, an increase of 43%. After taking inflation into account, the real increase was 16%. The dramatic rise in the average American standard of living was such that, according to sociologist George Katona:
More than 21 million housing units were constructed between 1946 and 1960, and in the latter year 52% of consumer units in the metropolitan areas owned their own homes. In 1957, out of all the wired homes throughout the country, 96% had a refrigerator, 87% an electric washer, 81% a television, 67% a vacuum cleaner, 18% a freezer, 12% an electric or gas dryer, and 8% air conditioning. Car ownership also soared, with 72% of consumer units owning an automobile by 1960. From 1958 to 1964, the average weekly take-home pay of blue-collar workers rose steadily from $68 to $78. In a poll taken in 1949, 50% of all Americans said that they were satisfied with their family income, a figure that rose to 67% by 1969.
The period from 1946 to 1960 also witnessed a significant increase in the paid leisure time of working people. The forty-hour workweek established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in covered industries became the actual schedule in most workplaces by 1960, while uncovered workers such as farmworkers and the self-employed worked fewer hours than they had done previously, although they still worked much longer hours than most other workers. Paid vacations also came to be enjoyed by the vast majority of workers, with 91% of blue-collar workers covered by major collective bargaining agreements receiving paid vacations by 1957, while by the early-1960s virtually all industries paid for holidays and most did so for seven days a year. Industries catering to leisure activities blossomed as a result of most Americans enjoying significant paid leisure time by 1960, while many blue-collar and white-collar workers had come to expect to hold on to their jobs for life. This period saw the growth of motels along major highways, as well as amusement parks such as Disneyland, which opened in 1955.
Educational outlays were also greater than in other countries while a higher proportion of young people were graduating from high schools and universities than elsewhere in the world, as hundreds of new colleges and universities opened every year. Tuition was kept low—it was free at California state universities. At the advanced level, American science, engineering, and medicine was world-famous. By the mid-1960s, the majority of American workers enjoyed the highest wage levels in the world, and by the late-1960s, the great majority of Americans were richer than people in other countries, except Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. Educational outlays were also greater than in other countries while a higher proportion of young people was at school and college than elsewhere in the world. As noted by the historian John Vaizey:
"To strike a balance with the Soviet Union, it would be easy to say that all but the very poorest Americans were better off than the Russians, that education was better but the health service worse, but that above all the Americans had freedom of expression and democratic institutions."
In regards to social welfare, the post-war era saw a considerable improvement in insurance for workers and their dependents against the risks of illness, as private insurance programs like Blue Cross and Blue Shield expanded. With the exception of farm and domestic workers, virtually all members of the labor force were covered by Social Security. In 1959, about two-thirds of the factory workers and three-fourths of the office workers were provided with supplemental private pension plans. In addition, 86% of factory workers and 83% of office workers had jobs that covered for hospital insurance while 59% and 61% had additional insurance for doctors. By 1969, the average White family income had risen to $10,953, while the average Black family income lagged behind at $7,255, revealing a continued racial disparity in income among various segments of the American population. The percentage of American students continuing their education after the age of fifteen was also higher than in most other developed countries, with more than 90% of 16-year-olds and around 75% of 17-year-olds in school in 1964–66.
Despite overall prosperity during the 1950s, economic growth only averaged 2% a year during Eisenhower's administration, and Federal income taxes remained extremely high at over 90%, although tax evasion was common with the porous tax code of the time. There were also three recessions: the first in 1953-54 following the end of the Korean War, the second in 1958, and the third in 1960–61. In each case, the Republican Party, which had begun the Eisenhower era with a plurality in Congress, suffered the consequences. In the 1954 midterms, the Democrats regained a solid majority of both houses and they would retain unbroken control of the Senate until 1981 and the House until 1995. The 1958 recession cost the GOP yet more seats, and the 1960 recession was used by John F. Kennedy as cannon fodder against the Republicans in his presidential run.
Unemployment peaked at 7% in the spring of 1961 before an economic rebound began that would continue to the end of the decade. President Kennedy then decided to break with the New Deal orthodoxy of high Federal taxes to force income equality. In a December 1962 speech, he announced his plans to reduce the top marginal tax rate to 75%, which one GOP Congressman wryly dubbed "the most Republican speech a president has made since McKinley". Although the president did not live to see his tax proposal passed, Lyndon Johnson quickly steered it through Congress, and by late-1965, real GDP growth was exceeding 6% a year.
Suburbia
Very little housing had been built during the Great Depression and World War, except for emergency quarters near war industries. Overcrowded and inadequate apartments was the common condition. Some suburbs had developed around large cities where there was rail transportation to the jobs downtown. However, the real growth in suburbia depended on the availability of automobiles, highways, and inexpensive housing. The population had grown, and the stock of family savings had accumulated the money for down payments, automobiles and appliances. The product was a great housing boom. Whereas an average of 316,000 new housing nonfarm units had been constructed each year from the 1930s through 1945, there were 1,450,000 built annually from 1946 through 1955 in all areas, especially suburbs. The G.I. Bill guaranteed low cost loans for veterans, with very low down payments, and low interest rates. With 16,000,000 eligible veterans, the opportunity to buy a house was suddenly at hand. In 1947 alone, 540,000 veterans bought one; their average price was $7,300. The construction industry kept prices low by standardization – for example standardizing sizes for kitchen cabinets, refrigerators, and stoves allowed for mass production of kitchen furnishings. Developers purchased empty land just outside the city, installed tract houses based on a handful of designs, and provided streets and utilities, as local public officials race to build schools. The most famous development was Levittown, in Long Island just east of New York City. It offered a new house for $1,000 down, and $70 a month; it featured three bedrooms, fireplace, gas range and gas furnace, and a landscaped lot of 75 by 100 feet, all for a total price of $10,000. Veterans could get one with a much lower down payment. Growth of the suburbs was especially prominent in the Sunbelt regions of the country; one example of a suburb on the West Coast was Lakewood, California, built largely to serve family of aviation workers. Going hand-in-hand with suburban development was the rise of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and coffee shops.With Detroit turning out automobiles as fast as possible, city dwellers gave up cramped apartments for a suburban life style centered around children and housewives, with the male breadwinner commuting to work. Suburbia encompassed one-third of the nation's population by 1960. The growth of suburbs was not only a result of postwar prosperity, but innovations of the single-family housing market with low interest rates on 20 and 30 year mortgages, and low down payments, especially for veterans. Meanwhile, the suburban population swelled because of the baby boom. Suburbs provided larger homes for larger families, security from urban living, privacy, and space for consumer goods.
Television and the consumer culture
At the center of middle-class culture in the 1950s was a growing demand for consumer goods; a result of the postwar prosperity, the increase in variety and availability of consumer products, and television advertising. America generated a steadily growing demand for better automobiles, clothing, appliances, family vacations and higher education. After the initial hurdles of the 1945-48 period were overcome, Americans found themselves flush with cash from wartime work due to there being little to buy for several years. The result was a mass consumer spending spree, with a huge and voracious demand for new homes, cars, and housewares. Increasing numbers enjoyed high wages, larger houses, better schools, more cars and home comforts like vacuum cleaners, washing machines—which were all made for labor-saving and to make housework easier. Inventions familiar in the early 21st century made their first appearance during this era. The live-in maid and cook, common features of middle-class homes at the beginning of the century, were virtually unheard of in the 1950s; only the very rich had servants. Householders enjoyed centrally heated homes with running hot water. New style furniture was bright, cheap, and light, and easy to move around. As noted by John Kenneth Galbraith in 1958:"the ordinary individual has access to amenities – foods, entertainments, personal transportation, and plumbing – in which not even the rich rejoiced a century ago." Television, a commodity virtually unheard of during the Second World War, was now prevalent in most American homes by the mid-to-late 1950s. Americans now had a wide bevy of shows to choose from, ranging from sitcoms such I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners to music and variety shows such as American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show, to fantasy programs such as Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Television also increasingly became a medium for which to advertise products.
Consumerism represented one of the consequences of the postwar economic boom. The initial quest for cars, appliances, and new furniture after the end of World War II quickly expanded into the mass consumption of goods, services, and recreational materials during the Fifties.
In addition to the huge domestic market for consumer items, the United States became "the world's factory", as it was the only major power whose soil had been untouched by the war. American money and manufactured goods flooded into Europe, South Korea, and Japan and helped in their reconstruction. US manufacturing dominance would be almost unchallenged for a quarter-century after 1945.
Prosperity also brought about the development of a distinct youth culture for the first time, as teenagers were not forced to work and support their family at young ages like in the past. This had its culmination in the development of new music genres such as rock-and-roll as well as fashion styles and subcultures, the most famous of which was the "greaser", a young male who drove motorcycles, sported ducktail haircuts and displayed a general disregard for the law and authority. The greaser phenomenon was kicked off by the controversial youth-oriented movies The Wild One starring Marlon Brando and Rebel Without A Cause starring James Dean.
Science, technology and futurism
With the prosperity of the era, the prevailing social attitude was one of belief in science, technology, progress, and futurism, although there had been signs of this trend since the 1930s. There was comparatively little nostalgia for the prewar era and the overall emphasis was on having everything new and more advanced than before. Nonetheless, the social conformity and consumerism of the 1950s often came under attack from intellectuals and there was a good deal of unrest fermenting under the surface of American society that would erupt during the following decade.One of the key factors in postwar prosperity was a technology boom due to the experience of the war. Manufacturing had made enormous strides and it was now possible to produce consumer goods in quantities and levels of sophistication unseen before 1945. Acquisition of technology from occupied Germany also proved an asset, as it was sometimes more advanced than its American counterpart, especially in the optics and audio equipment fields. The typical automobile in 1950 was an average of $300 more expensive than the 1940 version, but also produced in twice the numbers. Luxury brands such as Cadillac, which had been largely hand-built vehicles only available to the rich, now became a mass-produced car within the price range of the upper middle-class.
The rapid social and technological changes brought about a growing corporatization of America and the decline of smaller businesses, which often suffered from high postwar inflation and mounting operating costs. Newspapers declined in numbers and consolidated, both due to the above-mentioned factors and the event of TV news. The railroad industry, once one of the cornerstones of the American economy and an immense and often scorned influence on national politics, also suffered from the explosion in automobile sales and the construction of the interstate system. By the end of the 1950s, it was well into decline and by the 1970s became completely bankrupt, necessitating a takeover by the federal government. Smaller automobile manufacturers such as Nash, Studebaker, and Packard were unable to compete with the Big Three in the new postwar world and gradually declined into oblivion over the next fifteen years. Suburbanization caused the gradual movement of working-class people and jobs out of the inner cities as shopping centers displaced the traditional downtown stores. In time, this would have disastrous effects on urban areas.
Poverty and inequality in the postwar era
Despite the prosperity of the postwar era, a significant minority of Americans continued to live in poverty by the end of the 1950s. In 1947, 34% of all families earned less than $3,000 a year, compared with 22.1% in 1960. Nevertheless, between one-fifth to one-quarter of the population could not survive on the income they earned. The older generation of Americans did not benefit as much from the postwar economic boom especially as many had never recovered financially from the loss of their savings during the Great Depression. It was generally a given that the average 35-year-old in 1959 owned a better house and car than the average 65-year-old, who typically had nothing but a small Social Security pension for an income. Many blue-collar workers continued to live in poverty, with 30% of those employed in industry in 1958 receiving under $3,000 a year. In addition, individuals who earned more than $10,000 a year paid a lower proportion of their income in taxes than those who earned less than $2,000 a year. In 1947, 60% of black families lived below the poverty level, compared with 23% of white families. In 1968, 23% of black families lived below the poverty level, compared with 9% of white families. In 1947, 11% of white families were affluent, compared with 3% of black families. In 1968, 42% of white families were defined as affluent, compared with 21% of black families. In 1947, 8% of black families received $7000 or more compared with 26% of white families. In 1968, 39% of black families received $7,000 or more, compared with 66% of white families. In 1960, the median for a married man of blue-collar income was $3,993 for blacks and $5,877 for whites. In 1969, the equivalent figures were $5,746 and $7,452, respectively.As Socialist leader Michael Harrington emphasized, there was still The Other America. Poverty declined sharply in the 1960s as the New Frontier and Great Society especially helped older people. The proportion below the poverty line fell almost in half from 22% in 1960 to 12% in 1970 and then leveled off.
Rural life
The farm population shrank steadily as families moved to urban areas, where on average they were more productive and earned a higher standard of living. Friedberger argues that the postwar period saw an accelerating mechanization of agriculture, combined with new and better fertilizers and genetic manipulation of hybrid corn. It made for greater specialization and greater economic risks for the farmer. With rising land prices many sold their land and moved to town, the old farm becoming part of a neighbor's enlarged operation. Mechanization meant less need for hired labor; farmers could operate more acres even though they were older. The result was a decline in rural-farm population, with gains in service centers that provided the new technology. The rural non-farm population grew as factories were attracted by access to good transportation without the high land costs, taxes, unionization and congestion of city factory districts. Once remote rural areas such as the Missouri Ozarks and the North Woods of the upper Midwest, with a rustic life style and many good fishing spots, attracted retirees and vacationers.Civil Rights Movement
Following the end of Reconstruction, many states adopted restrictive Jim Crow laws which enforced segregation of the races and the second-class status of African Americans. The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson accepted segregation as constitutional. Voting rights discrimination remained widespread through the 1950s. Fewer than 10% voted in the Deep South, although a larger proportion voted in the border states, and blacks in the northern urban areas had shifted wholesale to the Democrats during the New Deal era. Although both parties pledged progress in 1948, the only major development before 1954 was the integration of the military.The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first piece of Federal civil rights legislation in almost a century, and would pave the way for the climactic Civil Rights Act of 1964.
''Brown v. Board of Education'' and "massive resistance"
In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, litigation and lobbying were the focus of integration efforts. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ; Powell v. Alabama ; Smith v. Allwright ; Shelley v. Kraemer ; Sweatt v. Painter ; and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents led to a shift in tactics, and from 1955 to 1965, "direct action" was the strategy—primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and social movements.Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark case of the United States Supreme Court which explicitly outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites, ruling so on the grounds that the doctrine of "separate but equal" public education could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans. One hundred and one members of the United States House of Representatives and 19 Senators signed "The Southern Manifesto" condemning the Supreme Court decision as unconstitutional.
Governor Orval Eugene Faubus of Arkansas used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent school integration at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. President Eisenhower nationalized state forces and sent in the US Army to enforce federal court orders. Governors Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama physically blocked school doorways at their respective states' universities. Birmingham's public safety commissioner Eugene T. "Bull" Connor advocated violence against freedom riders and ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators during the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade. Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, loosed his deputies during the "Bloody Sunday" event of the Selma to Montgomery march, injuring many of the marchers and personally menacing other protesters. Police all across the South arrested civil rights activists on trumped-up charges.
Civil rights organizations
Although they had white supporters and sympathizers, the Civil Rights Movement was designed, led, organized, and manned by African-Americans, who placed themselves and their families on the front lines in the struggle for freedom. Their heroism was brought home to every American through newspaper, and later, television reports as their peaceful marches and demonstrations were violently attacked by law enforcement. Officers used batons, bullwhips, fire hoses, police dogs, and mass arrests to intimidate the protesters. The second characteristic of the movement is that it was not monolithic, led by one or two men. Rather it was a dispersed, grass-roots campaign that attacked segregation in many different places using many different tactics. While some groups and individuals within the civil rights movement—such as Malcolm X—advocated Black Power, black separatism, or even armed resistance, the majority of participants remained committed to the principles of nonviolence, a deliberate decision by an oppressed minority to abstain from violence for political gain. Using nonviolent strategies, civil rights activists took advantage of emerging national network-news reporting, especially television, to capture national attention.The leadership role of black churches in the movement was a natural extension of their structure and function. They offered members an opportunity to exercise roles denied them in society. Throughout history, the black church served as a place of worship and also as a base for powerful ministers, such as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in New York City. The most prominent clergyman in the Civil Rights Movement was Martin Luther King, Jr. Time magazine's 1963 "Man of the Year" showed tireless personal commitment to black freedom and his strong leadership won him worldwide acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Students and seminarians in both the South and the North played key roles in every phase of the movement. Church and student-led movements, such as the Nashville Student Movement, developed their own organizational and sustaining structures. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957, coordinated and raised funds, mostly from northern sources, for local protests and for the training of black leaders. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, founded in 1957, developed the "jail-no-bail" strategy. SNCC's role was to develop and link sit-in campaigns and to help organize freedom rides, voter registration drives, and other protest activities. These three new groups often joined forces with existing organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942, and the National Urban League. The NAACP and its Director, Roy Wilkins, provided legal counsel for jailed demonstrators, helped raise bail, and continued to test segregation and discrimination in the courts as it had been doing for half a century. CORE initiated the 1961 Freedom Rides which involved many SNCC members, and CORE's leader James Farmer later became executive secretary of SNCC.
The administration of President John F. Kennedy supported enforcement of desegregation in schools and public facilities. Attorney General Robert Kennedy brought more than 50 lawsuits in four states to secure black Americans' right to vote. However, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, concerned about possible communist influence in the civil rights movement and personally antagonistic to King, used the FBI to discredit King and other civil rights leaders.
Presidential administrations
Truman: 1945–1953
Truman, a self-educated farm boy from Missouri, stood in sharp contrast to the urbane and imperious Roosevelt who kept personal control of all major decisions. Truman was a folksy, unassuming president who relied on his cabinet, remarking "The buck stops here" and "If you can't stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen." Truman faced many challenges in domestic affairs. His poll ratings were sky high when he took office in April 1945 after Roosevelt's sudden death, then plunged to low levels for most of his eight years in office. The disorderly postwar reconversion of the economy of the United States was marked by severe shortages of housing, meat, appliance, automobiles and other rationed goods. The country was hit by long strikes in major industries in 1946, and Truman's unpopularity was such that the GOP regained Congress in a landslide during the midterms that year, and proceeded to pass the Taft–Hartley Act over his veto. He used executive orders to end racial discrimination in the armed forces and created loyalty checks that dismissed thousands of communist fellow travelers from office. Truman's presidency was also eventful in foreign affairs, with the defeat of Nazi Germany and his decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan of 1948 to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 to contain communism, the beginning of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift of 1948, and in 1949 the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance.Truman confounded all predictions to win election in 1948, helped by his famous Whistle Stop Tour which reinvigorated the New Deal Coalition. In addition, the short-lived GOP dominance of Congress was ended as the Democratic Party regained a comfortable majority in both houses, something they would surrender only once in the next 32 years. His victory validated his domestic liberalism, his foreign policy of containment, and the new federal commitment to civil rights.
The defeat of America's wartime ally in the Chinese Civil War brought a hostile Communist regime to China under Mao Zedong. Soon the US became bogged down fighting China in the Korean War, 1950–53. Corruption in Truman's administration, which was linked to cabinet-level appointees and senior White House staff, was a central issue in the 1952 presidential campaign. Truman's third term hopes were dashed by a poor showing in the 1952 primaries. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, the famous wartime general, won a landslide in the 1952 presidential election by campaigning against Truman's failures in terms of "Communism, Korea and Corruption."
Eisenhower: 1953–1961
Eisenhower had been a prospective presidential candidate since the end of World War II, and although he publicly announced himself a Republican, he declined the party's offers to run in 1948. However, four years later, he reconsidered, in part because he believed the Democratic Party had had a monopoly on power for too long and it was necessary to restore a proper two party balance. Also, the GOP in their desperation to regain power had begun supporting controversial figures such as Joseph McCarthy. As a national hero, Eisenhower carried every major demographic bloc and all states outside the South in the 1952 presidential election. He ended the Korean War, maintained the peace in Asia and the Middle East, and worked smoothly with NATO allies in Europe while keeping the policy of containing Communism rather than trying to roll it back.While frugal in budget matters he expanded Social Security and did not try to repeal the remaining New Deal programs. He launched the interstate highway system that dramatically improved the nation's transportation infrastructure. The economy was generally healthy, apart from a sharp economic recession in 1958. Eisenhower remained popular and largely avoided partisan politics; he was reelected by a landslide in 1956.
In both foreign and domestic policy Eisenhower remained on friendly terms with the Democrats, who regained Congress in 1954 and made large gains in 1958. His farewell address to the nation warned of the dangers of a growing "military–industrial complex."