APUSH – 3/17/16

• Agenda:

– 1950s Culture – Part 2

– Top Ten TV Shows

• HW:

– 1920s vs. 1950s

THE 1950s: PART 2

A time of peace and affluence!

Affluence and Its Anxieties

• More science and technology

– Invention of transistor = revolution in electronics

– 1st computers – massive machines with miles of wiring

– Later - miniaturization and speedy

– International Business Machines (IBM) – computers, “high tech” corporation in information age

– Transformed business practices, printing, telecommunications

• Aerospace industries – Passenger airlines

– 1957 – Boeing 707 jet

– 1959 – Air Force One (Boeing Jet) – Ike first one

Affluence and Its Anxieties

• White-collar workers outnumber blue-collar workers

– Organized labor down after 1954 – already empowered workers and ensured economic justice

– Opportunities for women – 30 mil of 40 mil new jobs were in clerical and service work (“pink-collar” jobs)

– Worker + mother = questions about family life and gender roles

• Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963) – feminine protest literature, launched women’s mvt – Was against the “Cult of Domesticity”

– Boredom of suburban housewifery, not satisfied

– The home is like a concentration camp!

– Working is not “unfeminine”

– National Organization for Women (NOW) – created to stop sexual discrimination in the workplace

• Jonas Salk – first vaccination for polio

Consumer Culture in the 50s

• New lifestyle of leisure and wealth – Diner’s Club introduced credit card

– McDonald’s hamburger stand in California (1948)

– Disneyland (1955)

• Television – Novelty in the 40s, 7 mil sets sold in 1951

– 1960 – every home had one

– Less movies, increased advertising and commercials

– Critics – TV degraded public’s social, moral, political, educational standards

– Televangelists – Billy Graham

– Professional sports

• Most in “cult of domesticity” – glorified in 50s culture – Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver –working dad, mom

at home, 2 kids = ideal

The Culture of the Car Car registrations: 1945 25,000,000

1960 60,000,000

2-family cars doubles from 1951-1958

1956 Interstate Highway Act largest public works project in American history!

Å Cost $27 billion.

Å 42,000 miles of new highways built.

1959 Chevy Corvette 1958 Pink Cadillac

Consumer Culture in the 50s

• Sports – shift from NE to S and W – Why? – NY Giants – San Francisco

– Brooklyn Dodgers – LA

– Expansion of major sports leagues

• Music – Elvis Presley – Fused black rhythm and blues w/ white bluegrass and country

styles = rock and roll

– Crossed over races

• Marilyn Monroe – Why an icon? – new standard of sexuality

– Playboy Magazine

• Alfred Kinsey – “the sex doctor” – Published works on sexual experiences

– Americans more open to talking about sex

• Critics of this lifestyle – we are a pack of conformists – David Riesman – The Lonely Crowd

– William H. Whyte Jr. –The Organization Man

– Sloan Wilson – The Man in the Gray Suit

– John Kenneth Galbraith – The Affluent Society – should be spending money on social issues, not material things

A Changing Workplace New Corporate Culture: “The Company Man”

1956 Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

The Culture of the Car

First McDonald’s (1955)

America became a more homogeneous nation because of the automobile.

Drive-In Movies

Howard Johnson’s

The Culture of the Car

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

Television – The Western Davy Crockett

King of the Wild Frontier

The Lone Ranger (and his faithful sidekick, Tonto): Who is that masked man??

Sheriff Matt Dillon, Gunsmoke

Television - Family Shows

I Love Lucy The Honeymooners

Glossy view of mostly middle-class suburban life.

But...

Social Winners?... AND… Losers?

Religious Revival Hollywood: apex of the biblical epics.

It’s un-American to be un-religious! -- The Christian Century, 1954

The Robe The Ten Commandments Ben Hur 1953 1956 1959

Well-Defined Gender Roles

The ideal modern woman married, cooked and cared for her family, and kept herself busy by joining the local PTA and leading a troop of Campfire Girls. She entertained guests in her family’s suburban house and worked out on the trampoline to keep her size 12 figure. -- Life magazine, 1956

Marilyn Monroe

The ideal 1950s man was the provider, protector, and the boss of the house. -- Life magazine, 1955

1956 William H. Whyte, Jr. The Organization Man

A a middle-class, white suburban male is the ideal.

Well-Defined Gender Roles Changing Sexual Behavior: Alfred Kinsey: 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female

Premarital sex was common.

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

Progress Through Science

UFO Sightings skyrocketed in the 1950s.

War of the Worlds

James Dean

Progress Through Science

Atomic Anxieties:

“Duck-and-Cover

Generation”

Atomic Testing:

1946-1962 U. S. exploded 217 nuclear weapons over the Pacific and in Nevada.

Joseph McCarthy

• Wisconsin Republican Senator and anti-communist crusader

• 1950- accused Sec of State Dean Acheson of knowingly employing 205 communists – McCarthy later said it was only 57 he could prove

– Rep way of attacking Dems?

• Denounced Gen. George Marshall – former army chief of staff and ex-Sec of State

• McCarthy flourished in the Cold War atmosphere of suspicion and fear

• Very ruthless – did most damage to American tradition and freedom of speech – Named authors, actors, officials

– America approved of crusade

Joseph McCarthy

• Eisenhower privately loathed him but tried to stay

out of his way – Appeasement?

– Purged Asian specialists – could have helped in Vietnam policy??

• When he attacked the US Army – too far – Military men fought back in 35 days of televised hearings

– 20 mil tuned it to watch

– Showed his meanness

• Senate condemned him for “conduct unbecoming a member”

• 3 yrs later – died of chronic alcoholism

• McCarthyism = destructive forces of unfairness and fear

Desegregating American Society

• 1950 – 15 mil blacks (2/3 still in S)

• Still Jim Crow laws – Away from whites, economically inferior, politically

powerless

– Schools, drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, etc

– Trains and buses with whites only sections

• 20% of eligible blacks don’t vote (5% in Deep S)

• 1955 – Emmett Till murder – 14 yr old boy – Killed in Mississippi after supposedly flirting with a white

woman

– Beat, eye gouged out, shot in head, thrown in river, 70pd cotton gin fan tied around neck with barbed wire

– Open casket to show brutality

– Killers acquitted, when protected by double jeopardy, they admitted to killing Till

• Better in the North – More states granted equal access to public places

– Wendell Wilkie’s One World – postwar universalism

– Gunnar Mydral’s An American Dilemma – US is hypocritical, creed of progress, liberty, equality but treat blacks horribly

Desegregating American Society

• Rosa Parks – sat in “whites only” section on a bus in Montgomery, AL – refused to move (1955) – Arrested for violating Jim Crow laws

– Yearlong bus boycott

• Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – pastor at Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL – Family was prosperous, educated in N, sheltered from

cruelties against blacks

– Great oratory skills, biblical and constitutional concepts of justice, Gandhi’s nonviolence

Seeds of the Civil Rights

Revolution

• Ike showed no interest in the race issue

– From all white town, career in segregated army

• Supreme Court took the lead in civil rights

• Chief Justice Earl Warren – active intervention in previously taboo issues

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

• Little Rock, Arkansas (1957) – Gov. Orval Faubus mobilized National Guard to stop 9 black students from enrolling in High School – Ike forced to act due to challenge to federal authority –

sent troops to escort children to classes

• Civil Rights Act (1957) – set up a Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights, authorized federal injunctions to protect voting rights

Seeds of the Civil Rights

Revolution

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC) – MLK Jr. – aimed to mobilize power of black churches on behalf of black rights

• Greensboro sit-in (NC, 1960) – 4 black college freshmen demanded service at a whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s – Kept seats, returned next day with 19 classmates, 1000

after a week

– Black waitress refused to serve them – made “the race look bad”

– Sit-in movement spread across S

• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – formed by black students in S (1960) – Eventually lost patience and turned more violent

Eisenhower Republicanism

• Platform was “dynamic conservatism” in economy/govt – Middle-of-the-road course – small government

• Balance federal budget and guard against creeping socialism – Put brakes on Truman’s military buildup

– Defense spending still 10% of GNP

– Transferred federal control of offshore oil fields to states

– Tried to curb TVA – encouraged private companies

– Condemned free distribution of anti-polio vaccine

• Operation Wetback – roundup of illegal Mexican immigrants – 1 mil returned to Mexico in 1954

• Tried to terminate Indian New Deal – terminate tribes and revert back to assimilationist Dawes Act – Indians resisted = JFK abandoned try in 1961

• Interstate Highway Act of 1956 - $27 bil to build 42,000 miles – Created jobs, more suburbs

– Benefits to trucking, automobile, oil, travel industries

– Hurt RR’s, problems of air quality and energy consumption, hurt cities

Labor • Teamster chief “Dave” Beck was sent to

prison for embezzlement

• Jimmy Hoffa- President of Teamsters -

expelled out of the AFL-CIO

– Hoffa was later jailed for jury tampering, mail

fraud, bribery

– Millions stolen from pension fund

– Pardoned by Nixon after 4 years

– Disappeared - allegedly murdered by some

gangsters that he had crossed

• Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) - bring labor

leaders to book for financial shenanigans

and prevent bullying tactics.

Alaska and Hawaii • Became states in 1959

A Cultural Renaissance • NY becomes art capital of the world

• Jackson Pollock – abstract expressionism

• Andy Warhol – “pop” artist

• Architecture – modern “international style” – Steel and glass skyscraper

The Postwar Mind

• Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

• The Beat Movement – anti-conformity and consumerism – Riotous and unruly – experiment with life!

– Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

– Allen Ginsberg’s poem – “Howl”

• Prose: – Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – satire on bureaucracy, no

win-situation

– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr’s Slaughterhouse Five

– Sylvia Plath – “The Bell Jar”

• New mobility and affluence: – John Updike’s Rabbit, Run -escape constraints

– Gore Vidal’s historical novels and weird works • Myra Breckinridge – reincarnated transsexual –cultural assault

• Poets – critical of conformity – Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke (land poems), Robert

Lowell (Puritan past)

– Anne Sexton – autobiographical poems – suicide

– John Berryman - suicide

The Postwar Mind

• Plays: – Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on

a Hot Tin Roof – psychological misfits

– Arthur Miller – The Crucible, Death of a Salesman

• Authors: – Richard Wright’s Native Son – black Chicago killer

– Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man- Af. American quest for personal identity

• Southern Renaissance – Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men- immortalized

Huey Long

– Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

• Jewish novelists: – J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye – adolescent

angst, alienation, and rebellion

– Bernard Malamud’s The Natural - baseball

Analyze the extent to which the

1920s and 1950s were similar in the

following areas.

• New technology

• Intolerant attitudes

• Literary developments

**Write a thesis statement!

1920s 1950s

New technology

Intolerant

attitudes

Literary

developments