Essay

Chapter 25 After the Second World War, the United States experienced an uneasy and troubled transition to peace.

Although the unemployment and higher education benefits of the GI Bill were intended, in part, to ease

this transition by allowing veterans to be eased into civilian employment, those benefits did not affect the

skyrocketing inflation rate and did not prevent a rash of strikes. Despite the fact that the Truman

administration’s handling of those problems led to widespread public discontent and to Republican

victory in the 1946 congressional elections, to the surprise of most analysts, Truman won the presidential

election of 1948. Furthermore, even though the transition to a peacetime economy was rocky at first, the

economy quickly recovered and, as a result of consumer spending, increased agricultural productivity,

and government programs, the United States entered an era of sustained economic growth and prosperity.

One of the consequences of this prosperity was the “baby boom,” which fueled more economic growth.

During the 1950s, white Americans increasingly fled from the cities to the suburbs. Drawn to the suburbs

by many factors, life in suburbia was often made possible by government policies that extended economic

aid to families making such a move. Unfortunately, these federal policies did not benefit all Americans

equally. As a result, nonwhites were often denied the opportunities offered to white Americans. Federal,

state, and local expenditures on highway construction also spurred the growth of suburbia by allowing

workers to live farther from their jobs in central cities. Although suburbia had its critics, most Americans

seemed to prefer the lifestyle it offered.

During Truman’s first elected term (1949–1953), he and the American people had to contend with the

domestic consequences of the Korean War. Although the war brought prosperity, it also brought inflation

and increased defense spending at the expense of the domestic programs of Truman’s Fair Deal.

Furthermore, both the nature and length of the Korean War led to disillusionment and discontent on the

part of many Americans. These factors, coupled with reports of influence peddling in the Truman

administration, caused the President’s approval rating to plummet and led to a Republican triumph in the

presidential and congressional elections of 1952.

Upon coming to the presidency in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, decided against

attempting to dismantle New Deal and Fair Deal programs and adopted the philosophy of “dynamic

conservatism.” Eisenhower meant by this that he was “conservative when it comes to money and liberal

when it comes to human beings.” While Eisenhower’s expansion of the Social Security System was on

the liberal side of this philosophy, the increased government funding for education during his

administration was, as pointed out by the authors of the text, more a reaction to Cold War pressures than

from a liberal frame of reference. The pro-business nature of the Eisenhower administration and

Eisenhower’s belief that government should actively promote economic development may be seen in the

president’s tax reform program and the Atomic Energy Act. Despite Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism,

the administration’s activist foreign policy and three domestic economic recessions caused increased

federal expenditures, decreased tax revenues, and deficit spending. As a result, Eisenhower oversaw only

three balanced budgets during his eight years in office.

During this “age of consensus”—a period in which Americans agreed on their stance against communism

and their faith in economic progress—many people, believing in the rightness of the American system,

viewed reform and reformers in a negative light and saw conflict as the product of psychologically

disturbed individuals, not as the product of societal ills. It is within this “consensus” context that, during

the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States witnessed a wave of anti-Communist hysteria. The

tracing of events from the "Venona project” to Truman’s loyalty probe to the “Hollywood Ten,” supports

the view that fear of communism, long present in American society, intensified during the postwar years.

Within this climate of fear and suspicion, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his demagogic anticommunist

crusade and, in the process, lent his name to a state of mind that existed before he entered the scene.

McCarthyism was further sustained by events, and as Americans pointed accusing fingers at each other,

public figures found it difficult to stand against McCarthy’s tactics. As a result, liberals and conservatives

shared an anticommunist stance, as can be seen in the passage of the Internal Security Act and the

Communist Control Act. Moreover, since respected public figures such as President Eisenhower chose to

avoid direct confrontation with Senator McCarthy, McCarthy continued to add more victims to his list of

alleged subversives, and continued to jeopardize freedom of speech and expression. Ultimately,

McCarthyism declined, with McCarthy himself being largely responsible for his own demise.

One group that challenged the consensus mood of the age was African Americans. In 1946, President

Truman established the President's Committee on Civil Rights. Through the committee's report, To Secure These Rights, and through the committee's recommendations, the federal government, for the first

time since Reconstruction, accepted responsibility for guaranteeing equality under the law—civil rights—

to African Americans. Furthermore, work by the NAACP and decisions by the Supreme Court resulted in

the slow erosion of the separate-but-equal doctrine and of black disfranchisement in the South. Then the

Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka gave African Americans reason to believe that their long struggle against racism was beginning to pay off. However, white

southerners reacted with hostility to that decision and actively resisted Court-ordered desegregation. This

resistance led to the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, a crisis in which Eisenhower felt compelled to use

federal troops to prevent violence in the desegregation of the city’s public schools. But the Little Rock

crisis was merely the tip of an emerging civil rights movement, as can be seen through the discussion of

the Montgomery bus boycott, the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and

criticism concerning the ineffectiveness of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

As many white middle-class Americans made more money, bought more goods, and created more waste,

they also continued a mass migration to the Sunbelt that had begun during the war. In addition, a national,

middle-class culture began to emerge, and many who were part of this culture were instructed in what

behaviors were proper and expected of them through the national mass media, especially television. As

Americans sought pleasure through the materialistic values of the era, they were also, paradoxically,

drawn to organized religion in unprecedented numbers.

The postwar economic boom also affected the family. The changes it brought included the influence of

Dr. Benjamin Spock on the parent-child relationship and the conflicting and changing roles of women as

more entered the labor market. While society continued to stress the importance of “proper” female roles,

attention was also directed to the “crisis of masculinity,” and, therefore, to the plight of the American

male.

After a discussion of the influence of the pioneering work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s and early

1950s on American attitudes toward sexual behavior, we look at the emergence of a distinctive youth

culture, the birth of rock ’n’ roll, the fads of the era, and the critiques of American society offered by

those who criticized the conformity of the age.

Economic growth, inspired by government defense spending and by the growth of a more affluent

population demanding more consumer goods and larger quantities of agricultural products, had a negative

impact on the environment. Automobiles and factories polluted the air. Human and industrial waste polluted rivers, lakes, and streams. Pesticides endangered wildlife and humans alike, as did the waste

from nuclear processing plants. Disposable products marketed as conveniences made America a “throw-

away society.”

Prosperity did not bring about a meaningful redistribution of income in American society during the

period under study. Therefore, many Americans (about 25 percent in 1962) lived in poverty. As before,

the poor congregated in urban areas. African Americans, poor whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans,

and Native Americans continued their movement to low-income inner-city housing, while the more

affluent city residents—mostly whites—continued their exodus to the suburbs. Although low-interest

government housing loans made life in suburbia possible for many middle-class whites, government

programs such as “urban renewal” often hurt the urban poor. Furthermore, the trend toward bigness in

American agriculture continued, and presented more of a threat than ever to the family farm. The growth

of agribusiness pushed many small farmers and tenant farmers off the land, which in turn swelled the

ranks of the urban poor. Unfortunately, the burgeoning middle class often turned a blind eye to the

poverty around them.