CHAPTER 26 Triumph of the Middle Class 1945 1963 I. Postwar Prosperity and the A. Economy: From Recovery to Dominance 1. The Bretton Woods System -1944 Created World Bank to provide loans for reconstruction of war-torn Europe and former colonies; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) set up to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark; in 1947, first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established practices for nations participating in overseas trade; A. Economy: From Recovery to Dominance 2. The Military-Industrial Complex -1961; Eisenhower warned against this defense industry gaining too much political influence; the sprawling Pentagon became a massive bureaucracy; businesses entered into contracts with the Defense Department with large shares of profits coming from the government; defense spending now represented 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); military spending limited resources for social programs. A. Economy: From Recovery to Dominance (cont.) 3. Corporate Power -Consolidation of economic power into corporations increased after World War II; expansion into foreign markets increased; from 1947 to 1975, worker productivity more than doubled. A. Economy: From Recovery to Dominance (cont.) 4. The Economic Record -Annual GDP jumped from $213 billion in 1945 to more than $500 billion in 1960; by 1970, it exceeded $1 trillion; new prosperity meant a rise in personal income with low inflation;
however, conditions at the bottom got worse, as tenacious poverty accompanied the economic boom (ex: The Other America (1962) by Michael Harrington) B. A Nation of Consumers 1. The GI Bill -More than 50% of college students postwar were veterans; universities expanded to meet the demand; increased home ownership 2. Trade Unions -Collective bargaining was embraced by workers through World War II and after; unions demanded increased wages but wanted to be able to afford the products they were producing; Treaty of Detroit: workers accepted the use of collective bargaining as the primary method of setting employment terms. B. A Nation of Consumers (cont.) 3. Houses, Cars, and Children -Consumption for the home drove postwar American economy, including appliances and automobiles; children also encouraged consumption (e.g., baby products/toys, children s products, teen products); teenagers were new consumers to target B. A Nation of Consumers (cont.) 4. Television -by 1960, 87% of American homes had at least one television set; television became the principal link between consumer and market; by the early 1960s, companies were creating advertising campaigns with visual narratives; sales of advertised products rose dramatically; TV shows narrowly portrayed middle-class life (ex: Father Knows Best, The Honeymooners) C. Youth Culture 1. Rock n Roll
-Youth culture was definite by its music; the teenager emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s and was identified as a market by advertisers; teens rejected the ballads of the 1940s and celebrated music inspired by African American rhythm and blues (ex: Elvis Presley); many adults viewed it as invitation to rebel against social norms C. Youth Culture 2. Cultural Dissenters - bebop : improvisational jazz form by black musicians, enjoyed by black youth and white Beats; Beats: a group of writers and poets centered in New York and San Francisco who disdained middle-class materialism and glorified spontaneity, sexual adventure, drug use, and spirituality (ex: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg). D. Religion and the Middle Class 1. Billy Graham -Americans wanted a reaffirmation of faith in an age of anxiety about nuclear annihilation and the spread of godless communism ; church membership increased; Graham used TV, radio, and advertising to spread his evangelical Protestant message; the California-based Robert Schuller told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life D. Religion and the Middle Class 2. Under God -The phrase under God was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954; U.S. coins carried the words In God We Trust after 1956; these religious initiatives struck a moderate tone but were reflective of the concerns some Americans voiced regarding Communist atheism A. The Baby Boom 1. Improving Health and Education -postwar marriages were stable and included several children; age at marriage fell; 1950s families averaged 3.2 children; boom peaked 1957 but remained high to early 1960s; penicillin
and other seemingly miracle drugs changed the way doctors dealt with illness and quality of life; university systems grew to meet new demands of baby boom generation. A. The Baby Boom 2. Dr. Benjamin Spock -Spock s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) sold one million copies every year after publication; his expert advice on child rearing used a commonsense approach but was not reassuring for mothers who had to work outside the home B. Women, Work, and Family 1. Middle-class domestic ideal -Women were expected to raise children, attend to home, and devote themselves to their husbands happiness; psychologists equation of motherhood with normal created tensions in the minds of the many women who had to work outside of the home; economic needs put women outside of the home as producer, while the domestic ideal claimed her major contribution was as consumer B. Women, Work, and Family 2. The job market -More than 80 percent of women did stereotypical women s work : clerks, health-care technicians, waitresses, stewardesses, domestic servants, receptionists, telephone operators, and secretaries; in 1960, 97 percent of nurses were women, but only 6 percent of physicians were women; in 1963, women s pay averaged 60 percent of men s; women s work helped families to reach the middle class
C. Challenging Middle-Class Morality 1. Alfred Kinsey -American men and women were expected to channel all sexual energy toward marriage; Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953); took a scientific approach to sexual practices; broke taboos on masturbation, orgasms, homosexuality, and marital infidelity; studies provided evidence that a sexual revolution had already begun in U.S.; hotter than the Kinsey report became a national figure of speech; C. Challenging Middle-Class Morality 2. The Homophile Movement -Kinsey s research found that 37% men and 13% women had engaged in homosexual activity by early adulthood; claimed that 10% of American men were exclusively homosexual; homophiles : gay and lesbian activists organized in the Mattachine Society (1951) and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955); homophile organizations advocated equal rights and cultivated a respectable image, encouraging members to avoid bars and clubs and to dress conservatively; C. Challenging Middle-Class Morality 3. Media and Morality -Challenges to traditional morality received national media attention, and media themselves became a controversial source of those challenges; U.S. Senate held televised hearings into violence and sex in comic books; Playboy magazine was founded in 1953 and created a countermorality to domesticity. A. The Postwar Housing Boom 1. William J. Levitt and the FHA -Levitt applied mass-production techniques to home-building project on Long Island in New York; Levittowns were built in NY, PA, and NJ; Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) offered mortgages; enforced regulations about lawns and outdoor hanging of laundry, with restrictive covenants that kept out all who were not white; NAACP and other groups challenged; in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants but little changed until the Fair Housing Act (1968).
A. The Postwar Housing Boom 2. Interstate Highways -Oil consumption tripled with the massive increase of cars on the road; National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956) provided $26 billion over a ten-year period for construction of national highways; broad highways would ease evacuation in case of nuclear attack A. The Postwar Housing Boom 3. Fast Food and Shopping Malls -Developers of shopping malls built new structures as today s village green that became shopping destinations for suburban people; brought the products to where the people lived (ex: Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald s into the largest chain in the world). B. Rise of the Sunbelt 1. California -Defense industry jobs brought people to California; by the end of the twentieth century, California s economy was among the top ten largest in the world. 2. Sunbelt suburbs -Sunbelt suburbanization was best exemplified by Orange County, California; new facilities were built for the military, which brought developers to build houses and shops for the men s families; C. Two Societies: Urban and Suburban 1. The Urban Crisis -In the 1950s, the nation s twelve largest cities lost 3.6 million whites while gaining 4.5 million nonwhites; builders wanted to keep the middle class from leaving and marketed new housing to them, not the black residents; urban renewal demolished parts of cities and relocated residents to federal housing projects (ex: the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago) C. Two Societies: Urban and Suburban 2. Urban Immigrants
-Displaced Persons Act (1948) let in 415,000 refugees (many Jewish) from Europe; Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943; McCarran-Walter Act ended exclusion of Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian immigrants; Puerto Rican migration increased; Cuban refugee community grew in Miami