CHAPTER 28The Affluent Society

By Emely NavarroMonica ZhangJessica ClementeAlexis Montilla

Sources of Economic Growth1. Government spending

-public funding of; schools housing, veterans benefits, welfare, and the $100 billion interstate highway program

2. Military spending-Economic growth was at its peak during the first half of the 1950s, when military spending was highest because of the Korean War.3. Baby Boom-The national birth rates reversed a long pattern of decline with the so-called baby boom.4. Suburban GrowthWhite Flight: the move of white people into the suburbs

The Rise of the Modern West

• The West experienced dramatic changes as a result of the new economic growth.

• Population expanded dramatically; cities boomed; industrial economy flourished.

• By the 1960s, some parts of the West were among the most important industrial and cultural centers of the nation in their own right.

• What contributed to this growth were federal spending, military contacts, an increase in automobile use giving a large boost to the petroleum industry, and the climate.

The New Economics

• The exciting discovery of the power of the American economic system was a major cause of the confident tone of much American political life in the 1950s.

• The belief that Keynesian economics made it possible for government to regulate and stabilize the economy without intruding directly into the private sector.

• The British economist John Maynard Keynes had argued as early as the 1920s that by varying the flow of government spending and taxation and managing the supply of currency, the government could stimulate the economy to cure recession, and dampen growth to prevent inflation.

• By the mid-1950s, Keynesian theory was rapidly becoming a fundamental article of faith—not only among professional economists but also among much of the public.

Capital and Labor• Over 4,000 corporate mergers took place in the 1950s and

a relatively small number of large scale organizations controlled the nation's economic activity.

• Business leaders made concessions to unions in order to prevent strikes from interfering with growth.

• By the 1950s, large labor unions had developed a new kind of relationship with employers known as the “post-war contract”

• Workers in large unionized industries received increases in wages and in return the union agreed to refrain from raising other issues.

• The success led to the reunification of the labor movement with the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merging to create the AFL-CIO.

Science & Technology

Boom!

Medicine

• Antibiotics: more ordinary bacteria that can defeat virulent bacterial infection

• Sulfa drugs: derived from sulfanilamide• Penicillin: organism with antibacterial properties• Immunization: protection against bacterial disease

o TB vaccine: Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG)• Vaccines against viral/virus infection

o yellow fever vaccine (1930s)o influenza vaccine (1945)

• Salk Vaccine (1954): effective against polio (injection)o 1960- oral vaccine as sugar cube developed

• Decline in mortality/death rates for infants & youth

• Avg life expectancy rose by 5 yrs, to 71.

Pesticide

• Chemical pesticides: used to protect crops from destruction by insects and protect humans from insect-carried diseases

• Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT!)o discovered by Paul Mullero used in Pacific islands

during WWIIo saved thousands of lives

Electronics & Computers1. TV- 1940s

• broadcast programming• color tv (1950s)

2. Transistors- 1948• amplified electrical signals• mini devices• aviation, weaponry, & satellites

3. Integrated circuitry- late 1950s• combined electronic elements

into 14.Computers

• UNIVAC • IBM

Rockets & Missiles & Bombs, OH MY!

• In 1952, the U.S successfully detonated the first hydrogen bomb.

• The development of the hydrogen bomb gave considerable impetus to a stalled scientific project in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

• American & Soviet leaders struggled to build longer-range missiles (ICBMs)

• The Minuteman & The Polaris missiles

Space Race

• The Shock of Sputniko Americans very alarmedo massive failure for U.S.

• National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) • first American space pilots or “astronauts”

o nation’s most revered heroes• Mercury Missions

o Alan Shepherd- 1st American in spaceo John Glenn- 1st American to orbit Earth

• Apollo program- purpose to land men on the moono July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and

Michael Collins successfully traveled in a space capsule into orbit around the moon

o then they detached a smaller craft from the capsule, landed on the surface of the moon, and became the first men to walk on a body other than earth

The American Space Program

1950s "Americana" Culture

The Consumer Culture:

Prosperity fueled the automobile industry

• The Walt Disney-produced TV show the Mickey Mouse Club was a craze.

• Public interest in this TV show contributed to Disneylands sucess

• Consumers also really liked new products like; dishwashers, garbage disposals, television and stereos. The prosperity was consumer driven

The Landscape and the Automobile• Between 1950 and 1980,

the nation's population increased by 50 percent, but the numbers of automobiles owned by Americans increased by 400 percent.

• Reduced the time to travel • Trucking was more

convenient • Long, steady decline in

railroads • Travel by automobile a lot

faster • Encouraged economic

activities Creation of fast food restaurants

Effects of the AutoMobile and Highway.

Suburbia

• by 1960, a third of U.S. population living in suburbs

• Suburbanization: result of home-building innovations, which made single family homes available & affordable

• William Levitt creates "Levittowns"• Young couples rushed to purchase the

inexpensive homes

Why move to suburbs?1. importance of family life2. community life3. race/ethnicity

Suburbia (cont.)

• prevailing gender roles reinforcedo working meno prejudice against working

women• women pressured to be stay

at home mothers• HOWEVER, by 1960, a third

of all married women were part of the paid workforce... why?

Television Culture• 1946: 17,000 tv sets in the U.S.• 1957: 40 million tv sets in the U.S.• National Broadcasting Co. (NBC), Colombia

Broadcasting System (CBS), & American Broadcasting Co. (ABC) started out as radio companies

• driven by advertising; sponsors had direct/powerful role in programs

• televised news, sports, entertainment programs• most programs created ideal image of American life

o white, middle-class, suburban familyo again, reinforced gender roleso e.g. Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, I Love

Lucy, etc.• but there also shows that conveyed the opposite of the

"ideal" imageo e.g. The Honeymooners, My Little Margie, Amos 'n'

Andy

Travel, Outdoor Recreation, and Environmentalism• Paid vacation for American workers and the association of the

idea with travel had entered American culture.• Travel and recreation were popular especially in the nation's

national parks --> permanent surge in attendance in the 1950s.• Battle over development of wilderness areas--> Echo Park.

o Cause: The federal government's Bureau of Reclamation proposed building a dam across the Green River, so as to create a lake for recreation and a source of hydroelectric power.

o In 1950, "Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?"o Result: Congress blocked the project and preserved Echo

Park in its natural state in 1956.

Organized Society and Its Detractors. • Increasing proportion of White-collar workers worked in corporate

settings with rigid hierarchical structures. • Americans were becoming convinced that the key to a successful

future lay in acquiring the specialized training and skills necessary for work in large organizations.

• The American educational system changed curriculum and philosophy.o Elementary and secondary schools: science, mathematics, and

foreign languages. o Universities: expand their curricula.o "Multiversity"

• William H. Whyte Jr, The Organization Man (1956); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950).

• Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953); J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

The Beats and the Restless Culture of Youth

• Beats: a group of young poets, writers, and artists who wrote harsh critiques of what they considered the sterility and conformity of American live, the meaninglessness of American politics, and the banality of popular culture.

• The restlessness was a result of..o prosperity itselfo Limitless possibilitieso declined power of such traditional values as

thrift, discipline, and self-restraint.

Cont.

• Phenomenon of "juvenile delinquency"

• Many young people began to mimicked popular images of juvenile criminal gangs.

• James Dean, in such movies as Rebel WIthout a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), conveyed a powerful image of youth culture in the 1950s.

- Rock 'n' Roll was one of the most powerful signs of the restiveness of the American youth. - Elvis Presley became the symbol of a youth determination to push at the borders of the conventional and acceptable. - The rise of rock 'n' roll was due to radio and television programming.

-Radio and television were important to the recording business because they encouraged the sales of records.

- Record promoters were so eager to get their music on the air that they made secret payment to station owners. These payments were called "payola's" and they created many scandals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFtAOltn7iw

The "Other America"

• 1962, The Other America was published; about the continuing existence of poverty in America

• great economic expansion of the postwar years reduced poverty dramatically but did not eliminate it

• most of the poor experience poverty intermittently and temporarily

• this poverty was a poverty that the growing prosperity of the postwar era seemed to affect hardly at all

• among those on the margins of the affluent society was many rural Americans; not all farmers were poor

• but the agrarian economy did produce substantial numbers of genuinely impoverished people

• migrant farm workers and coal miners fell to the same kind of poverty

Inner Cities

• As white families moved from cities to suburbs in vast numbers, more and more inner-city neighborhoods became vast repositories for

the poor

• ghettos from which there was no easy escape

o African Americans helped this growth

o similar migrations from Mexico and Puerto Rico expanded poor Hispanic barrios in many American cities at the same time

• “urban renewal”: the effort to tear down buildings in the poorest and most degraded areas

The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement

The Brown Decision and "Massive Resistance" What was it?• Brown v. Board of Education of

Topeka (May 17, 1954)- considering the legal separation of public schools in Kansas led to the Courts rejection of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): ruled that communities could provide blacks with separate facilities as long as there were equal white facilities.

The Brown Decision: Involved lawyers that spent years looking at the "separate but equal" doctrine. These lawyers filed a suit against the school boards of Topeka, Kansas and several other cities that became the basis of the Brown decision.

How did the case begin?

• It all started because an African American girl had to travel several miles to attend a black school although she lived next door to a white school.

• When this case appeared in court they came to the conclusion that school segregation had lots of damage to the people it affected regardless of the quality of segregation.

The Conclusion:• The doctrine of "separate but

equal" had no place because anything separated, especially schools is inherently unequal.

• The following year the court issued a decision called the Brown II (1954) which said that schools should be desegregated "with all deliberate speed". o This left specific decisions up to

lower courts.

• Strong local opposition in the South was known as Massive Resistance.

• This produced long delays and bitter conflicts. o More than 100 southern member of Congress signed a

"manifesto" in 1956 denouncing the Brown decision and urging their constituents to defy it.

• Southern officials worked to obstruct desegregation, enacting "pupil placement laws" allowing school officials to place students in schools according to their scholastic abilities and social behavior.

"Massive Resistance"

The Effect of Desegregation

By the fall of 1957

only 684 out of 3,000

were desegregated

Many white parents didn't like desegregation and took their kids out of school!! White Resistance produced angry mobs and violence.

The president faced a case of direct state defiance of federal authority and felt like he needed to do something.

As a result, the Federal Court ordered desegregation

at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Brown decision didn't end segregation but launched a battle

between the federal, state and local government authority.

The Expansion Movement: • Rosa Parks arrested on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery

Alabama for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. • Her arrest produced outrage in the African

American community & helped leaders organize a bus boycott in hopes of ending seat segregation.

• The boycott would have failed if the Supreme Court didn't state that segregation in public transportation is illegal.

• Martin Luther King Jr.- important

leader in the civil rights movement . He was also chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

• King's approach to black protest was based on a doctrine of nonviolence. • He wanted African Americans to engage in peaceful demonstrations, to

allow themselves to be arrested or beaten and to respond to hate with love.

What led to the Civil Rights Movement?

• The growth of an urban black middle class flourished after WWII.

• Leaders of urban black communities encouraged a civil rights movement. o men and women who were more educated realized how much they had to lose compared

to those who were uneducated.

• Television & other forms of culture showed racism towards blacks. o reminded the blacks that the whites were majority. Black- minority

Cause: Effect:

African Americans realized after WWII that they had more power and potential, but their broader view of the world made their place in it smaller. They speeded the pace for racial change.

- Jackie Robinson signed to Brooklyn Dodgers.- President Eisenhower attempted to desegregate the workplace. Passed the civil rights act- protection for Africans who wanted to vote.

"What Was Good for ... General Motors"

• Many business leaders had reconciled themselves to at least the broad outlines of the Keynesian welfare.

• Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, was certain that "What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

• Eisenhower's consistent inclination:o he supported the private development of natural resources;

lowered federal support for farm prices; removed last limited wage and price controls; opposed the creation of new social service program; reduced federal expenditures; balance the budget.

The Survival of the Welfare State• President resisted to dismantle welfare policies of

the New Deal.

Cont. • Federal Highway Act of 1956

o The largest public works project in American history.

o It vastly accelerated the growth of suburbia.

• In 1956, Eisenhower ran for a second term, and received nearly 57 percent of the popular vote and 457 electroal votes to Stevenson's 73.

The Decline of

• By 1954, the crusade against subversion was beginning to produce significant popular opposition >> anticommunist passion was beginning to abate.

• Signal: political demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

• Army-McCarthy Hearings.• McCarthy died as a victim of complications

arising from alcoholism.

Dulles and "Massive Retaliation"• Dulles argued that the United States

should pursue an active program of "liberation," which should lead to a "rollback" of communist expansion.

• Dulles was incredibly anticommunist and wanted to stop communist expansion through the process of “massive retaliation”, which was the use of nuclear weaponry.

• The motivation was partially economic because many people thought nuclear warfare would be cheaper than traditional weaponry.

John Foster Dulles

France, America, and Vietnam

•Frances fall in Dien Bien Phu further pushed France out of Vietnam, and pulled America towards it.

•America's alliance with Israel caused strife with the Middle East. The CIA and Iranian military leaders worked to elevate the Shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlevi to a high position. He ruled closely to the United States.

•America had less luck with Egypt. Dulles withdrew American aid when Egypt formed a trade alliance with the Soviet Union. When Israel attacked Egypt Eisenhower encouraged a truce for fear of another world war.

Cold War Crisis

• The Eisenhower administration confronted were a series of crises in the Middle East, a region in which the US had been little involved until after WWII.

• Israel proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948• American policy was less effective in dealing with the nationalist government

of Egypt, under the leadership of General Gamal Abdel Nasser, which began to develop a trade relationship with the Soviet Union.

• Cold War concerns affected the American relations in Latin America as well when the Eisenhower administration ordered the CIA to help topple the new leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, a regime that Dulles argued was potentially communist.

• In 1957 resistance to Batista, Cuba’s leader, began to gather strength under the leadership of Fidel Castro. Castro created a new government and cemented an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Europe and the Soviet Union

• The direct relationship with the Soviet Union and the effort to resist communist expansion in Europe remained the principal concerns of the Eisenhower administration.

• Relations between the Soviet Union and the West soured further in 1956 in response to the Hungarian Revolution. o Hungarian dissidents had launched a popular uprising in

November to demand democratic reforms.

Images of the Hungarian Revolution

The U-2 Crisis

• On November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev renewed the demands of the predecessors that the NATO powers abandon West Berlin.

• Only days before it had the scheduled begining of the Paris meeting, however, the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down an American U-2, a high -altitude spy plane over Russian territory.

Eisenhower Leaves

• After eight years in office Eisenhower failed to resolve the tensions between the US and the Soviet Union.

• In his farewell address in January 1961 he warned of the "unwarranted influence" of a vast "military-industrial complex".