Transcript The Cold War

The Cold War
Through the Picture Window: Society and
Culture, 1945-1960
“This is a dream era, this is what every one was
waiting through the blackouts for. The Great
American Boom is on.” –Fortune magazine, 1946
A New World Power
People of Plenty
 PROSPERITY!
 Poverty still high among rural poor, urban minorities
 Consumer good production up
 Why?
 Gov. spending for military needs  end of GD
 Cold war tensions  gov. spending in defense  new industries (chemicals,
electronics, aviation)
 Wartime devastation to other industrial powers
 Automation of the workplace  increased productivity
 PENT-UP CONSUMER DEMAND
The GI Bill
 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944
  creation of Veteran’s Administration
 Unemployment pay, preference for gov. jobs, loans, access to healthcare, EDU
 1944-1956
 8 million vets, $14.5 billion – college, training programs
 5 million vets – homes
 Social result?
 Most educated workforce in world, working class have opportunity for college
degree  lever into middle class
 No broken racial barriers
 Segregated colleges/universities
The Baby Boom
 Why the boom?
 Return from war, end of depression
 1946 – 1964 = 76 million births
 Impact?
 High demand
Diapers, toys, houses, furniture, medicine, schools, books
 Raised during 50s-60s = US prosperity, expansion abroad
 Adults in 70s = energy crises, inflation, diminished nat’l presitge
 Enter in time of prosperity, leave in time of debt
It seems to me that every other young
housewife I see is pregnant.
-- British visitor to America, 1958
1957  1 baby born every 7 seconds
Dr. Benjamin Spock
and the Anderson
Quintuplets
The Expanding Consumer Culture
 Baby boom + construction boom  homeowners up 50%
 Demand for newer technology = household appliances
 Refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, ELECTRIC. . .
 Television
 ‘46- 7k black & white sets  ‘60- 50 million high-quality  ‘70- 38% color
 TV Guide in 50s
 Overtook radio as daily activity
 TV will make the US “ a more democratic, more progressive, more closely knit
community.”
1950  Introduction of the Diner’s Card
All babies were potential consumers who
spearheaded a brand-new market for food,
clothing, and shelter.
-- Life Magazine (May, 1958)
1946  7,000 TV sets in the U. S.
1950  50,000,000 TV sets in the U.
S.
Television is a vast wasteland.  Newton
Minnow, Chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, 1961
Mass Audience  TV celebrated traditional
American values.
Truth, Justice, and the American way!
Davy Crockett
King of the Wild Frontier
Sheriff Matt
Dillon, Gunsmoke
The Lone Ranger
(and his faithful
sidekick, Tonto):
Who is that masked man??
Glossy view of mostly
middle-class suburban life.
But...
I Love Lucy
Social Winners?...
The Honeymooners
AND…
Loosers?
What’s so different?
 Post-WWII prosperity vs. previous periods of prosperity
 Wide-spread dispersion of wealth
 African-Americans
 Surface look? Prosperity! Wages 4x higher than ‘40
 Rate of improvement behind whites in income
 neglect to address due to boosterism, need for united from vs. communism
  explode during 60s
 Emphasis on: consensus, conformity, economic growth
 Marketing

ADVERTISING- consumer desires, social envy
 1000% increase in TV ad expenses

. . . “advertising has created an American frame of mind that makes people want
more things, better things, and newer things.” –NBC President, ‘56
 Buying

Credit!
 Savings drop to 5%

1945-1960- credit increases 800%

Shopping = recreation
 Teen baby boomers- rock-n-roll records, hula hoops, Seventeen magazine

“Never before have so many owed so much to so many. Time has swept away the
Puritan conception of immorality in debt and godliness in thrift.”
The Suburban Frontier
 50s’-60s population increase- urban AND suburban
 AG technology  less need for manual laborers
 Farm to city. . . AGAIN (‘40-’70)
 Growth in South, SW, West (Carolinas  Texas, CA = SUNBELT)
 Air-conditioning = more attractive to Yankees!
 Suburbs grow 6x faster than cities
 “Suburbia is now a dominant social group in American life.” –Christian
Century, ’55
 Cars, highways, government-backed home mortgages, entrepreneurs
 William Levitt- NY based developer
 1,200 acres in Long Island = 10,600 houses  “Levittowns”
 Car production up, highway construction up (local, state, federal)
 Federal Housing Administration- loans to builders for low-cost homes
Levittown, L. I.:
“The American Dream”
1949  William Levitt produced
150 houses per week.
$7,990 or $60/month with no down payment.
•
1 story high
•
12’x19’ living room
•
2 bedrooms
•
tiled bathroom
•
garage
•
small backyard
•
front lawn
By 1960  1/3 of the U. S. population in
the suburbs.
SHIFTS IN POPULATION
DISTRIBUTION,
1940-1970
Central Cities
32.0%
Suburbs
41.6%
Rural Areas/
26.4%
Small Towns
1940
31.6%
19.5%
48.9%
1950
32.3%
23.8%
43.9%
1960
32.6%
30.7%
36.7%
1970
The Donna
Reed Show
1958-1966
Leave It
to Beaver
1957-1963
Father Knows Best
1954-1958
The Ozzie & Harriet Show
1952-1966
Car registrations:
1945  25,000,000
1960  60,000,000
2-family cars doubles from 1951-1958
1958 Pink Cadillac
1959 Chevy Corvette
1956  Interstate Highway Act  largest
public works project in American
history!
Å Cost $32 billion.
Å 41,000 miles of new highways built.
America became a more homogeneous
nation because of the automobile.
First McDonald’s
(1955)
Drive-In
Movies
Howard
Johnson’s
The U. S. population was on the move in the
1950s.
NE & Mid-W  S & SW (“Sunbelt” states)
1955  Disneyland opened in Southern California.
(40% of the guests came from outside
California, most by car.)
Frontier Land
Main Street
Tomorrow Land
In the 1950s  the word “teenager” entered
the American language.
By 1956  13 mil. teens with $7 bil. to spend
a year.
1951  “race music”  “ROCK ‘N ROLL”
Elvis Presley  “The King”
“Juvenile Delinquency”
???
1951  J. D. Salinger’s
A Catcher in the Rye
Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
(1953)
James Dean in
Rebel Without a
Cause (1955)
The “Beat” Generation:
f
Jack Kerouac  On The Road
f
Allen Ginsberg  poem, “Howl”
f
Neal Cassady
f
William S. Burroughs
“Beatnik”
“Clean” Teen
Behavioral Rules of the 1950s:
U Obey Authority.
U Control Your Emotions.
U Don’t Make Waves  Fit in
with the Group.
U Don’t Even Think About Sex!!!
The Great Migration Continues
 Mass migration of rural, southern blacks
 Post-’45: 5 million head north, west
 Better jobs, better pay, better housing, more equality
 Many displaced from Delta region- illiterate, provincial (Chicago)
 Reality?
 Slumlords, employers refusing to hire, denial of union membership
 Dysfunctional families, illiteracy, welfare dependency, gangs, crime, racism
 Tension as wave of black migrants stretch resources of urban govs,
tolerance of whites
 White mobs attack blacks moving to white neighborhoods (Nat’l Guard)
  massive public housing projects (all-black)
Conforming Culture
40s and 50s Culture
 Suburbs = white middle-class homogeny
 All same price ($7,990), same plan, tree every 28 ft, cut grass, no fences, etc.
 Fear from Cold War  encourage orthodoxy, tradition, uniformity
 Seen in suburban life- need for companionship, sense of belonging
 Fed by advertising, marketing, corporations
Corporate Life
 WWII- big business bigger!
 Relaxed antitrust activity, gov. defense contracts  corporate consolidation
 Continues after way- less are self-employed
 Corporations, large gov. agencies, universities
 New managerial personality, ethic of cooperation, achievement (vs. strong-minded
individuals, hardworking, competitive, creative)
Automation:
1947-1957  factory workers decreased by
4.3%, eliminating 1.5 million
blue-collar jobs.
By 1956  more white-collar than blue-collar
jobs in the U. S.
Computers  Mark I (1944). First IBM
mainframe computer (1951).
Corporate Consolidation:
By 1960  600 corporations (1/2% of all
U. S. companies) accounted for
53% of total corporate income.
WHY?? Cold War military buildup.
New Corporate Culture:
“The Company Man”
1956  Sloan Wilson’s The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit
Women’s “Place”
 The “ideal” middle-class woman
 32, “pretty and popular” housewife, mother of four, size 12, married at 16, good
volunteer, good hostess, good mother/wife, “home manager”, sang in choir,
worked with PTA, devoted to husband (Life, 1956)
 = revival of cult of feminine domesticity
 Reinforced by increased birthrate (women where? In the home.)
 “Of all the accomplishments of the American woman, the one she brings off with the
most spectacular success is having babies.” -Life
 The ex-serviceman is “head man again. . . Your part in the
remaking of this man is to fit his home to him, understanding why
he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.” – House
Beautiful, 1945
Changing Sexual Behavior:
Alfred Kinsey:
1948  Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male
1953  Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female
v Premarital sex was common.
v Extramarital affairs were frequent
among married couples.
Kinsey’s results are an assault on the family
as a basic unit of society, a negation of moral
law, and a celebration of licentiousness.
-- Life magazine, early 1950s
Search for Community- the “Joiners”
 Growth of social clubs, organizations (civic clubs, garden clubs, car
pools)

Why? Better mobility

20% move each year, relocation of sales/management

 desire for connection, community, “rootedness”
 Growth of churches, synagogues

Renewal of religion in 50s- upbeat, soothing (no brimstone and fire)

Away from personal sin, social guilt (segregation, inner-city poverty)  reassurances
in own comfortable way of life as God’s will
 Rev. Norman Peale- impresario of “positive thinking” & feel-good theology
 The Power of Positive Thinking (‘52)- simple how-to course in personal happiness
 “Start thinking faith, enthusiasm, and joy.”  “more popular, esteemed, and well-liked
individual.”
Today in the U. S., the Christian faith is back in
the center of things. -- Time magazine, 1954
Church membership: 1940 
64,000,000
1960  114,000,000
Television Preachers:
1. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen  “Life is
Worth Living”
2. Methodist Minister Norman Vincent Peale 
The Power of Positive Thinking
3. Reverend Billy Graham  ecumenical message;
warned against the evils of Communism.
Hollywood: apex of the biblical epics.
The Robe
1953
The Ten Commandments
1956
Ben Hur
1959
It’s un-American to be un-religious!
-- The Christian Century, 1954
Neo-Orthodoxy
 Peale too shallow, misleading for some
 Xnty/gospel message should be for . . .
 Promoting sociability, belonging
 Criticism of those who see US as only providential society, use faith to keep
status-quo
 Reinhold Niebuhr- preacher/professor @ Union Theological
Seminary (NY)
 Complacency, conformity of postwar life
 Against popular religion of self-assurance, material success
 Spiritual peace = reality of pain, love, responsibility for well-being of entire
human race
Cracks in the Picture Window
The Lonely Crowd
 Contrast b/t public mood & social criticism from intellectual world
 Fear of US slipping more into conformity, succumbing to corporate
“rat race,” consumer culture
 The Affluent Society (‘58), John Kenneth Galbraith
 Economic growth DOES NOT = end of social problems, poverty
 Kennedy, Johnson
 Criticism of middle-class bliss
 The Crack in the Picture Window (’56), John Keats
 Against Levittown- “conceived in error, nurtured in greed, corroding everything
they touch.”
  monotonous routines, mediocrity, suburbs  “postwar hell”
 The Lonely Crowd (‘50), David Riesman
 Shift in American personality
 Now- no internal values, hollow, grasp for sense of belonging and affection
 “inner-directed”  “other-directed”
 Individual vs. conformist
 White Collar Society (‘51), C. Wright Mills
 “When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy,
but their personalities as well. They sell by the week or month their smiles
and their kindly gestures, and they must practice the prompt repression of
resentment and aggression.”
Alienation and Liberation
The Stage, Novel, Art
 Stage- reinforcement of Riesman’s “lonely crowd”
 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (‘49
 material wealth gained through popularity, personality
 Novel- individual’s struggle for survival amid disorienting forces of
mass society
 Characters are restless, tormented, socially impotent, no contentment, no
respect from overpower or uninterested world
 James Jones- From Here to Eternity (‘51), J.D. Salinger- Catcher in the Rye
(’51), Joseph Heller- Catch-22 (61)
 Ralph Ellison- Invisible Man (‘52)
 “All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried
to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, too, though they were often in
contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and
asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
 John Updike- Rabbit, Run (‘61)
 Painting
 Edward Hopper
 Desolate loneliness, isolated individuals, motionless, melancholy, “silence”
 Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko
 NYC- younger
 “the modern painter cannot express this age- the airplane, the atomic bomb, the
radio- in the old form of the Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its
own technique.” –Pollack
 =abstract expressionism (40s-50s), act of painting as important as result
 “Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel.” -Motherwell
No. 13
Fishes with Red Stripe
The Beats: “mad to live, mad to talk, mad
to be saved.”
 Who?
 Young writers, poets, painters, musicians- rebel vs. horrors of war & middleclass life
 Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs
 Bohemian underground- Greenwich Village, NY
 Goal?
 The “desire for pure freedom.”
 Liberate self-expression, overcome organizational constrains, discard tradition
 Look for visionary sensibility, spontaneous way of life, idealistic,
desire to transform selves (vs. reform the world), personal
solutions to anxieties (vs. social)
 How? Salvation through drugs, alcohol, sex, jazz, street life of urban ghettos,
Buddhism, vagabond spirit
 NY  San Francisco
 Was an existential mania for intense experience, frantic motion
 Howl, ’56
 On the Road, ‘57
 Others- James Dean, Marlon Brando (Beat anti-heroes)
  youth revolt of 60s
Youth Culture & Delinquency
 50s = baby boomer teenagers
 The typical teen

Money, free time, carefree consumers, values of parents & capitalism
 “The Silent Generation”

Fraternity parties, “sock hops” before graduation, settling down
 Turbulence behind the middle-class mask

‘56- 1 m. teens arrested/year (car theft, rape, beatings)

Why?
 Lack of religious training (J. Edgar Hoover, FBI)
 Urban slums, bad environments
 But why middle-class criminals?
 Access to autos = escape from parental control & “private lounge for drinking and for
sex episodes”
Rock and Roll
 Another reason for delinquency? MUSIC

Mysterious new “frenzied teenage music craze” creating a “big fuss.” – Life, ‘55
 Rock and Roll emerges

Alan Freed (Cleveland), ’51

Little Richard, Ray Charles, Ritchie Valens, Chuck Berry

Elvis Presley- Rockabilly (‘56- Heartbreak Hotel)
 Hair, sideburns, hips, leather/jeans, self-confidence= defiance of adult conventions
 Desire for own cultural style & message away from parents

Gave sense of belonging, unique social group, intermingling of racial, ethnic, class IDs
 Conservative reaction?

Catholic Church- encouraged dishonesty, violence, lust

Patriotic groups- a tool of the communists to corrupt youth