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

• Quickly adopted into other fields

• Systems thinking popular in 1950s and 1960s

• H.T. Odum applies systems to ecology, 1950s

• Science of energy flows through ecosytems

• Flow charts

Rising prosperity

• 1945-60: 250% growth in economy

• GDP/person 1950-1973: 2.5%

• Rise of big multinational corporations, R&D budgets, data processing

• GI Bill fuels education & housing boom

• Baby boom and creation of a youth culture

• Church boom: record church attendance

• Cars, commuting, and suburban sprawl

• Shopping centers, malls, drive-in movies, drive-in dining, fast food

• 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

• Television: classic era

• 1949 1m sets; 1952 15m; 1960 46m

• Decline in movies, radio, sports, dining out

• Live coverage of politics, hearings, sports

• Suburban ideal

• Popularity of TV and movie Westerns

• Modern advertising

• 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

• “Juvenile delinquency”

• 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

• The “Rat Pack” image: booze and broads

Rock and Roll

• The shock of Elvis Presley, 1956

• Driven by cheap 45s & “top 40” radio

The Civil Rights Movement

• Effects of World War II & the Cold War

• Truman desegregates the military

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954

• “All deliberate speed”

• Montgomery bus boycott, 1955

• Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Nonviolence: SCLC

• Gov. Faubus, Little Rock, Ark., 1957

• Forces Eisenhower to send army

Postwar politics

• Inflation, wave of strikes hurt Democrats

• Truman unpopular; Republicans wait for 1948

• Truman renominated: “Fair Deal”

• New Deal for prosperous society

• Health insurance, education, housing for poor

• Democrats split: Strom Thurmond & Henry Wallace

• Republicans: NY Gov. Thomas Dewey

• Truman’s surprise victory

Red Scare

• Republicans make issue of spies with atomic secrets, 1946-early 1950s

• House Unamerican Activities Committee investigates

• Richard Nixon emerges

McCarthyism

• Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin

• 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

• War hero: Republican nominee, 1952

• Eisenhower’s “dynamic conservatism”

• 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

• Communists take Cuba, 1959

• “Missile gap”?

• Recession

• Eisenhower’s farewell address:  “Military-industrial complex”