Cold War America
Nature and Americans
Spacious nation
Agriculture
•
28 million live on farms
•
15% of the work force
•
Average size: 200 acres
•
Little pesticide use yet
Electronics and communication
Computers:
ENIAC and UNIVAC
Computer science develops
•
Norbert Wiener invents cybernetics, 1948
•
Self-regulating mechanisms
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Quickly adopted into other fields
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Systems thinking popular in 1950s and 1960s
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H.T. Odum applies systems to ecology, 1950s
•
Science of energy flows through ecosytems
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Flow charts
Rising prosperity
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1945-60: 250% growth in economy
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GDP/person 1950-1973: 2.5%
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Rise of big multinational corporations, R&D budgets, data
processing
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GI Bill fuels education & housing boom
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Baby boom and creation of a youth culture
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Church boom: record church attendance
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Cars, commuting, and suburban sprawl
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Shopping centers, malls, drive-in movies, drive-in dining, fast
food
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Interstate highway system, 1956
•
Mass transit declines or disappears
Inexpensive window
air-conditioner makes possible the rise of the Sunbelt
Celebration of the Modern
Abstract Expressionism
Blacks: 10% of population
in 1950
Whites: 87%
Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers, 1947
Popular culture
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Television: classic era
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1949 1m sets; 1952 15m; 1960 46m
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Decline in movies, radio, sports, dining out
•
Live coverage of politics, hearings, sports
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Suburban ideal
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Popularity of TV and movie Westerns
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Modern advertising
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The Marlboro man, 1955
Teaching conformity
Serious discontent
•
Careerism: the “organization man”
•
Serious lives in a serious world
•
Conformity, rules, morality
•
Critics: shallow consumers in a rootless, materialistic world of
identical suburbs
Rebels
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“Juvenile delinquency”
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Vogue of Folk Music
•
“Beatniks”: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg
The serious subject of sex
•
Publicly a very puritanical era
•
Moral panic over sex, “deviance”
•
On the other hand:
•
Playboy founded 1953
•
Popularity of James Bond books and movies
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The “Rat Pack” image: booze and broads
Rock and Roll
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The shock of Elvis Presley, 1956
•
Driven by cheap 45s & “top 40” radio
The Civil Rights Movement
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Effects of World War II & the Cold War
•
Truman desegregates the military
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
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“All deliberate speed”
•
Montgomery bus boycott, 1955
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Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Nonviolence: SCLC
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Gov. Faubus, Little Rock, Ark., 1957
•
Forces Eisenhower to send army
Postwar politics
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Inflation, wave of strikes hurt Democrats
•
Truman unpopular; Republicans wait for 1948
•
Truman renominated: “Fair Deal”
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New Deal for prosperous society
•
Health insurance, education, housing for poor
•
Democrats split: Strom Thurmond & Henry Wallace
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Republicans: NY Gov. Thomas Dewey
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Truman’s surprise victory
Red Scare
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Republicans make issue of spies with atomic secrets, 1946-early
1950s
•
House Unamerican Activities Committee investigates
•
Richard Nixon emerges
McCarthyism
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Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin
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1950 speech: list of 200 names
•
Fear of being called “soft on Communism”
•
Republicans let him attack Democrats, 1953
•
1954 Army hearings
•
Tactics seen on national TV
•
Senate finally condemns McCarthy 67-22
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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War hero: Republican nominee, 1952
•
Eisenhower’s “dynamic conservatism”
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Accept New Deal, no new programs
•
Foreign policy: John Foster Dulles
•
“Massive retaliation”
•
Intervention: Iran 1953; Guatemala 1954
Worried mood of the late
1950s
•
Sputnik, October 4, 1957
•
Shock: Russia’s scientific advances, technological achievement,
military threat
•
NASA, 1958: civilian, not military
•
Push for science in education
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Communists take Cuba, 1959
•
“Missile gap”?
•
Recession
•
Eisenhower’s farewell address: “Military-industrial complex”