History Answers 5 parts
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Learning Objectives
11 The Affluent and Anxious Society
Levittown Public Library/Associated Press
Levittown, New York, a mass‐produced suburb, was the first of its kind in the United States. Middle‐class Americans flocked to the suburbs in
an attempt to attain the American Dream.
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By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain how mass consumerism affected American lifestyles in the 1950s.
Discuss Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism.
Explain the direction and methods of the emerging civil rights movement.
Describe the different ways that the economy and culture of the 1950s affected working‐class and middle‐class Americans.
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Underwood Photo Archives/SuperStock
Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus ignited the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the earliest major protests of the civil rights movement.
American Lives: Rosa Parks On December 1, 1955, after a long day’s work, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As in most southern states, regulation demanded that African Americans occupy the rear third of seats on public transportation. Parks took a seat in the center of the bus, in a so‐ called no man’s land open to African American passengers so long as seats in the front rows reserved for White riders remained open. As the bus filled with men and women, the Whites‐only section quickly filled, and a White man was left standing in the aisle. A city ordinance required that Parks and three other African American passengers move to the rear of the bus, but Parks refused to give up her seat. The bus driver called the police and Parks was arrested.
Following her arrest, African Americans began the yearlong boycott of Montgomery city busses. The Montgomery Bus Boycott quickly became one of the most well‐known and symbolic protests of the emerging civil rights movement. At first, the protesters asked only for a more humane seating policy, but before long they demanded full desegregation of city busses. Within a few weeks of Parks’s arrest, scores of Montgomery’s 20,000 African American residents walked or carpooled to work.
As the largest ridership on the bus line, African Americans’ boycott thrust the city into an economic deficit and angered White residents. Montgomery’s White Citizens’ Council, which grew in opposition to the boycott, often goaded or physically attacked African Americans as they walked on sidewalks or in roadways. African Americans’ defiance of White authority upset the racial status quo and angry White citizens sought to restore the conventional social order.
Despite threats and violence, the Montgomery boycotters persisted. In the case of Browder v. Gayle, a federal court ruled that Alabama’s bus segregation violated residents’ rights to equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. W. A. Gayle was Montgomery’s mayor and Browder an African American housewife. Although both the state and the city appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s finding. The boycott ended on December 20, 1956, after a new city ordinance banned segregated seating. White backlash continued, however, and several riders were injured in the ensuing weeks and five African American churches were burned, likely in retaliation (Burns, 1997).
Born February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Louise McCauley trained as a schoolteacher before marrying Raymond Parks in 1932. From her youth Parks, along with her husband, engaged in civil rights activism. Parks also continued to work after her marriage, first as a nurse’s assistant, then as a secretary on a military base. In 1943 she joined the NAACP and worked on voter registration drives and plans to desegregate public transportation.
By 1955 she was well known among the Alabama activist community and willing to put herself at risk of arrest. She later recalled, “I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people” (as cited in U.S. Congress, 2010, p. 136). Her quiet protest inspired the movement that followed.
Soon after the boycott ended, Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she continued her activism and worked on the staff of Democratic representative John Conyers until 1988. Remembered as the “mother of the civil rights movement,” Parks made countless public appearances through the 1990s. President Bill Clinton awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and 3 years later she was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal.
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Parks died her Detroit home in October 2005, and her body lay in honor at the U.S. Capitol, where thousands came to pay their respects. She was the first woman and only the second African American to be so honored. Her single act of protest against the South’s Jim Crow segregation stands as a symbol of the importance of every American in fighting for dignity and equality.
For further thought: 1. How does the Montgomery Bus Boycott reflect the desire for equal rights in the 1950s? 2. How did Parks’s singular act of protest help spark the civil rights movement?
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George Karger/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
The Sears catalog, along with
11.1 Consumer Society and Its Discontents The 1950s was an era of social, cultural, and economic change. Americans, profoundly influenced by the experience of the Great Depression and World War II, had little desire to return to more traditional ways of life. Those living through the 1950s, especially the expanding White middle class, carved out a new way of life and shaped an America distinct from that of the prewar era. As the Cold War expanded, federal spending on the military–industrial complex—the term for the relationship between congressional monetary and policy committees and the military—helped the United States lead the world in economic growth. The decade witnessed a rapid expansion in consumer spending, a “baby boom” made up of tens of millions of newborns, and the relocation of many families to the suburbs, thanks in part to GI Bill–sponsored low‐interest loans. Spurred by these and other government and social programs, and despite several short recessions, the nation’s economy surged forward. At the decade’s end, consumer spending stood strong and unemployment remained low.
As Rosa Parks’s example suggests, however, not all Americans benefited from suburbanization or participated widely in consumerism. The decade produced both a growing consumer culture and rising demands among the discontented still seeking a place at the nation’s table.
As middle‐class families moved to the suburbs, the working class and people of color remained in the cities. This process of “White flight” created racially segregated neighborhoods in cities across America. There neighborhoods and schools became increasingly African American or Latino, and services shrank with a reduced tax base. The incomes of those remaining were often not enough to support street repair and school improvements. Businesses such as grocery stores and other retail outlets followed the more affluent, relocating in suburban strip malls and leaving city residents with little access to the new consumer goods in their neighborhoods.
The Postwar Boom and a Consumer Nation Many Americans in the postwar era experienced a renewed quality of life, as measured by consumption of material goods. The domestic demand for new products expanded dramatically, and the United States also pumped consumer goods into the recovery of Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. Following the deprivation and penny‐pinching years of the Depression and World War II, consumers responded to sophisticated advertisements for new technological wonders, automobiles, and appliances.
Department store credit made it easy for Americans to purchase on time through an installment plan and with freedom of choice. By the end of the 1950s the first consumer credit cards, Diners Club and American Express, allowed cardholders to purchase on credit from multiple vendors. Consumer credit, and especially credit cards, also reinforced the gender bias of postwar society. Although many women worked outside the home, and in many cases headed households, the new credit cards were available only to men. Legislation in the 1960s opened the door for women to obtain some limited credit, especially if they had a male cosigner, but it was not until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act that women gained equal access to credit.
Sears department store issued millions of credit cards by the decade’s end, becoming the nation’s leading extender of short‐term credit. Sears operated both retail stores and a mail order catalog, and it drove new fashion trends aimed at the nation’s middle‐class families. Mass production reduced prices and helped fashion and clothing production become one of the nation’s largest industries. Fashion expert Dorothy Shaver described 1950s clothing styles as an
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others from the era, promoted fashion and household trends to support the suburban lifestyle.
Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Showcasing the modern conveniences available to middle‐class American families, the model American kitchen contrasted starkly with the sparse
expression of a particular way of life, the expression of a free people, a happy people, a prosperous people, a young people . . . to the rest of the civilized world, American fashions are a symbol of our democracy, proof that here one need not be rich to be well dressed.
(as cited in Olian, 2002, p. vii)
Clothing trended toward casual and brightly colored fabrics. For teenage girls the sweater and poodle skirt became a ubiquitous style. The full, swinging skirts were so named because each had the image of a poodle embossed near the hem. For young men the “preppy” look popularized cardigan sweaters and madras plaid shirts. The 1950s also gave life to the two‐piece bikini, which became popular among young women.
Through retail outlets and catalogs, Americans accessed the latest trends for their new suburban lifestyles. Women found capri pants, frilly aprons, and sweaters that promoted a happy housewife image, as they were freed from the expectation of always wearing a dress. Men’s offerings included sport coats, shirts, and corduroy pants. Widespread advertising helped consumers determine the appropriate attire for the postwar era.
Business leaders and politicians came to understand that consumption, not production, drove the nation’s economy. Through popular publications such as Look and Life magazines, readers learned that American economic success depended on their purchases of new houses and durable goods to put in them. Shiny new family sedans and the latest kitchen appliances symbolized the material success of a rapidly growing middle class. Mass consumption was celebrated as a feature of postwar society that held potential to bring universal prosperity and full employment to all Americans.
In the era of the Cold War, material prosperity soon became associated with patriotism. This notion was reinforced during the 1959 Kitchen Debate between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. At an exhibit of American material goods and technology in Moscow, the two world leaders engaged in a series of unplanned exchanges in which Nixon extolled the virtues of the American way of life and the Soviet leader upheld the superiority of communism.
Recorded and later televised, the leaders “debated” in the kitchen of a model house filled with the latest modern conveniences and recreational devices, which any American family could supposedly afford. Nixon argued that the suburban home and the distinct family gender roles within it represented the essence of American freedom. In the United States women did not have to be hardworking, because their husbands provided them with the latest in labor‐saving conveniences. American women were therefore able to spend time on cultivating good looks and charm.
The Soviet leader responded that, since many Soviet women lived in communal situations where meal preparation and housekeeping was handled by the collective, they were released from the drudgery of housework altogether and were instead independent and self‐supporting.
In addition to demonstrating the disparities between capitalism and communism, the exchange also exposed the leaders’ insensitivity to their female constituents. The interchange perpetuated the stereotype of the attractive American housewife and the plain, work‐worn, and unfeminine Soviet woman. Nixon also implied that being self‐ supporting was somehow un‐American. In the Cold War culture of the 1950s, American housewives enjoying all of the modern conveniences of the suburban home became a powerful symbol of the success of capitalism and the ideal American way of life (May, 2008). That vision held little room
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furnishings in the apartments of most Soviet citizens.
AP Photo/Levittown Public Library
Homes in Levittown originally sold for $6,990 and had four bedrooms, steel kitchen cabinets, a washer, a refrigerator, and an electric range.
for independent working women or those who chose another lifestyle.
Life in the Suburbs and the Baby Boom The modern ranch‐style home with its convenient appliances featured in the Kitchen Debate represented the affluent lifestyle to which many Americans aspired. In the suburbs communism and class conflict seemed distant concerns. The invisible walls of these growing postwar communities enveloped many White working‐ class and middle‐class families. Other working‐class families aspired to move to the suburbs as soon as they were able, but minority families often found those invisible walls formed real barriers.
By the end of the 1950s almost half of the American population lived in the suburbs. Suburban communities were often called Levittowns, after William and Alfred Levitt, who built their first suburban subdivision on Long Island, outside New York City, in 1947. Levittown’s developers assembled more than 10,000 houses from prefabricated parts, creating affordable housing for American families. The new neighborhood housed 40,000 people when it was completed in 1951. Similar construction across the United States saw the number of houses double by the decade’s end. Like many suburban divisions, Levittowns excluded African Americans from purchasing homes until federal courts forced the issue.
Construction of interstate highways, begun in the late 1950s, spurred the growth of suburbs. The wide concrete highways fundamentally altered community development in the United States, transporting people to and from the suburbs, but also bisecting or destroying established neighborhoods under the guise of urban renewal. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, the construction of Interstate 59 required razing many houses in the predominately African American Tuxedo neighborhood. When complete, the interstate divided the small remaining Tuxedo neighborhood from the growing, largely White suburb to the south of the highway. The construction established a pattern of racial segregation that persists even today (Connerly, 2005).
Expanding families also pushed many Americans into the suburbs. Birthrates had declined during the Great Depression as couples postponed marriage, but they rebounded after World War II. The nation’s demographics radically altered
with the record births of more than 75 million babies between 1946 and 1964. This baby boom swelled the nation’s population from 153 million in 1950 to 170 million in 1960, the greatest ever 10‐year increase. During the 1950s foreign visitors often remarked on the amazing number of pregnant women all across the United States. The population growth contributed to the need for new home and school construction and created a new youth culture by the 1960s (Monhollan, 2010).
Historian Lizabeth Cohen represents the generation of suburban children making up the postwar baby boom. When she was born in 1952, her parents had just moved from an apartment to a new ranch‐style house in the suburb of Paramus, New Jersey. As a World War II veteran, Cohen’s father qualified for 4.5% mortgage subsidized through the GI Bill. Four years later the family moved to an even larger and more expensive house in Westchester County, New York, where all the residents were affluent and the schools nationally recognized as outstanding.
While the neighborhood in Paramus included a diverse mix of working‐ and middle‐class families, as well as Protestants, Jews, and Catholics, in her new neighborhood there were few blue‐collar families. Cohen describes
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her family’s upward mobility as measured “through their serial acquisition of more expensive homes in communities of ever higher socioeconomic profiles” (Cohen, 2008, p. 6). As it did for the Cohens, this sort of suburbanization often resulted in de facto segregation, in which upwardly mobile families became separated from the working class and often from African Americans or other minorities.
Whose Good Life? Not all Americans enjoyed the affluence of upward mobility in the 1950s. As the middle class deserted cities for the suburbs, those left behind, many of them people of color and the working poor whose jobs gave them limited access to the new affluence, struggled. As businesses and services moved from the cities to suburbs, city residents had to deal with vacant buildings, deteriorating neighborhoods, and increased crime. Cities with declining populations lost their tax bases and found it difficult to maintain quality schools and municipal services.
A widely read 1962 study by political scientist Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, revealed the widening divide between the affluent and the poor, as well as the consequences of the new de facto segregation that suburbanization created. Harrington revealed that as many as 1 in 4 Americans lived in poverty. He argued, “The American poor are pessimistic and defeated, and they are victimized by mental suffering to a degree unknown in Suburbia” (Harrington, 1997, p. 2).
In many cities the federal government stepped in, subsidizing the construction of public housing units and funneling money to redevelopment agencies to demolish old buildings in abandoned neighborhoods. This era of urban renewal aimed to revitalize downtown areas and construct better housing for the urban working class. In reality, results were mixed.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, revitalized its Triangle area with sports stadiums and other attractions that pulled residents downtown, and Boston’s Government Center thrived, but in other cities urban renewal simply shifted low‐cost housing from one part of the city to another. Building contractors and landlords profited from a common form of urban renewal that often replaced working‐class housing with more attractive and more expensive homes or apartments. Those displaced could rarely afford to move back to their old neighborhoods.
Minorities who could afford to move out of the declining cities often found their options limited through racially restrictive covenants attached to property deeds. Applying to houses in designated neighborhoods, restrictive covenants prohibited owners from selling their property to members of specific ethnic groups, such as African Americans or Jews. In the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled the covenants legally unenforceable but did not stop their use. Realtors and neighborhood leaders continued to informally intimidate both minorities and homeowners to keep neighborhoods racially and ethnically segregated.
Jewish immigrant Richard Ornstein discovered the informal power of restrictive covenants when he contracted to purchase a home in the affluent Sand Point Country Club area of Seattle, Washington, in 1952. Neither he nor the home’s owner were aware of a restriction banning non‐Whites and Jews from purchasing homes in the neighborhood. Although the covenant could not be legally enforced, the head of the country club association told Ornstein’s realtor that the community would not stand for a Jewish resident.
The association head intimidated Ornstein with threats of ways the neighbors would make him and his family unwelcome if they proceeded with the sale, telling his prospective neighbor that his driveway could be blocked, his utilities turned off, or his children hassled. Ornstein backed out of the sale, declining to move his family into an unwelcoming neighborhood (Silva, 2009).
A Segregated Society Although racial segregation and restrictive covenants kept even affluent African American families from moving
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George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Many of those living in the Appalachians endured extreme poverty. This family of seven lived in a shack with holes in the wall and a leaky roof.
into developing suburban communities in the North and West, in the South the African American middle class experienced its own unique community growth. New construction on the fringes of such cities as New Orleans, Miami, and Atlanta housed growing numbers of middle‐class African American families by 1960.
White and African American civic leaders collaborated to meet the postwar housing demands through the creation of new Black‐only developments. Motives for these new communities differed. Whites were most concerned with maintaining racial segregation, and African Americans compromised because it meant building better housing and neighborhoods outside the declining city centers. These communities created a separate space for self‐expression, independence, and cultural celebration. Like the White‐only suburbs, these subdivisions removed middle‐class African Americans spatially from the urban working class and redefined their social and economic status (Wiese, 2004).
Selling Free Enterprise Some, such as Michael Harrington, came to believe that the rise of suburbia and expanding consumerism undermined traditional American values of thrift and moderation. John Kenneth Galbraith declared that the nation had become a great salesroom under the manipulation of corporations. The Harvard economist outlined his critique in one of the decade’s best‐selling nonfiction books, The Affluent Society (Galbraith, 1958). While acknowledging that much of the nation experienced financial gain, Galbraith contended it did so at the expense of a rising cultural materialism, and he worried at the increasing contrast between private wealth and public austerity.
He outlined a plan calling for greater spending on public education, price controls to curb outrageous profits, and a national sales tax to fund needed social services. Although Galbraith and other critics enjoyed a wide audience, their ideas brought little change. Americans did become more materialistic in the 1950s, but important traditional values such as a strong work ethic and competing for personal and national advancement were as evident as ever and were not limited to the suburbs (Patterson, 1996).
American Experience: Hillbilly Highway, Appalachian Outmigration
While the suburbs drew the middle class out of the cities and into newly constructed housing developments, other factors pushed millions of Americans from the mountain South, or Appalachia, into urban areas. Between 1940 and 1970 as many as 3 million Americans traveled northward on the newly constructed highways, leaving communities in Appalachia for temporary or permanent residence in northern industrial cities. In these urban settings they faced their own segregated situations.
Residents of the Appalachian region, which encompasses all of West Virginia and the mountainous areas of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, relied on farming and extractive industries such as coal mining and timbering. Postwar mechanization, especially in coal mining, pushed many Appalachians toward industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, where they found jobs in meatpacking, auto manufacturing, and the steel industry. There they often moved into
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Exploring History through Film: Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll: At the Crossroads of Black and
declining neighborhoods, filling vacancies created by the departing middle class.
Mountain people were viewed as alternately hardworking and culturally backward, or as “hillbillies.” Most of the migrants were White, but 1 in 10 were African American. Like other ethnic groups before them, Appalachians faced occupational and housing discrimination and residential segregation.
Sarah and Thurman Dotson had a common experience when they migrated from West Virginia to Chicago in 1957. It was the first time Sarah had been out of their home county, but Thurman’s intermittent work in the coal mines drove them to seek a better life. The Dotsons chose Chicago because several of Thurman’s cousins had already made the journey and could offer a place to stay and leads on jobs. They both quickly found jobs, Thurman in a steel mill and Sarah at the Continental Can Company, but other migrants with fewer connections remained unemployed.
The Dotsons settled in the Uptown neighborhood already becoming known as “Hillbilly Heaven” because of the heavy concentration of southerners. At the highpoint of migration, the neighborhood housed as many as 70,000 southern migrants. Most Appalachians in the city lived there rather than face discrimination in other urban neighborhoods.
As southern Whites came in ever‐larger numbers, negative media portrayals reinforced stereotypes of Appalachians as shifty, dirty, and criminal. As was also true in the city’s African American neighborhoods, the authorities kept close watch on the mountain migrants. In the Dotsons’ Chicago neighborhood, police enforced curfews and loitering laws, treating southerners as a lower class of people. Sarah’s son Kenny recalled being harassed by police: “You weren’t allowed to stand on the corner. Three or four of us would meet up talking on the street, you weren’t allowed to do that. They’d say, scatter or we’ll haul you in” (as cited in Guy, 2007, p. 68).
Despite the stereotypes, employers found most Appalachian migrants to be hardworking and reliable. Former coal miners and timber workers brought significant knowledge and experience that readily transferred to urban industry. Many industrial employers found them valuable assets as heavy equipment operators, carpenters, electricians, and construction workers. Those with more education found work as business managers, teachers, and social workers. Some migrants returned to the mountain South after only months or a few years in the city. Hundreds of thousands remain and still count themselves as urban Appalachians, today an almost invisible minority. Many celebrate their Appalachian culture through festivals and organizations throughout the United States.
For further reading, see:
Edwards, G. T., Asbury, J. A., & Cox, R. L. (2006). A handbook to Appalachia: An introduction to the region. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Guy, R. (2007). From diversity to unity: Southern and Appalachian migrants in uptown Chicago, 1950– 1970. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Mass Culture and Its Alternatives A distinct mass culture emerged as a companion to the growing consumerism of the postwar era. Popular forms of entertainment shifted along with new technologies such as
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White Culture Elvis Presley is perhaps the most important figure in U.S. pop music. Presley took traditionally "Black" music, and synthesized it with existing forms of "White" music. Put another way, Presley served as a bridge to "Black" music for White audiences, leading to the mainstreaming of soul, rock, and R&B in U.S. culture.
Critical Thinking Questions Would the mixture of “Black” and “White” music have been possible without the presence of a White artist, such as Elvis? Why? What might have music looked like without such a crossroads?
television and with the ability of more Americans to own automobiles. Earlier in the 20th century, mass popular culture often centered on public events and venues. City streetcar lines carried middle‐ and working‐ class families to baseball and amusement parks. After World War II, leisure activities followed the middle class to the suburbs, where every household had a television and where movie theaters, shopping malls, and new theme parks left little reason to travel into the declining cities.
TV Land A novel technology when network programming began in 1948, few Americans had ever seen a television program. Instead, most listened to programming on one of the nation’s 1,600 radio stations. By 1955 there were 32 million televisions in use, and by 1960 some 90% of U.S. households owned at least one set. White, middle‐class individuals and families were the first to adopt the new technology and incorporate it into their leisure activities.
At first, programming copied popular radio shows, but the medium soon developed its own unique flare. Early stars, including comedians Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball, entered American homes each week, and families stopped what they were doing to watch. In 1954 frozen TV dinners, a new modern convenience, supplemented the nation’s fascination with the new medium. By 1956 the Swanson Company sold 13 million TV dinners annually, and it was common to find entire families eating in front of the television set (Smith & Kraig, 2013).
Television reinforced the retreat to the suburbs and the privatization of the American family. Although early shows depicted the lives of working‐class Americans—such as Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners about a New York City bus driver and his family—situation comedies, dramas, and westerns that blurred the line of class and ethnicity soon dominated.
One of the most enduring was Father Knows Best, which depicted the Anderson family inhabiting the new world of suburban respectability in the fictional town of Springfield. The show aimed to reproduce the “reality” of family life. Patriarch Jim Anderson (Robert Young) worked as an insurance executive, made no political or controversial statements, and ruled his family with benevolence. His wife (Jane Wyatt) managed a spotless and orderly home for her husband and three children. Their oldest daughter, a high‐achieving high school student played by Elinor Donahue, bore the nickname Princess. Middle son Bud (Billy Gray) and precocious younger daughter Kathy (Lauren Chapin) rounded out the family.
The producers peppered the show’s 203 episodes with moral lessons. Father Knows Best hardly reflected reality, but Americans craved the inward‐looking, egalitarian world the Andersons inhabited and tuned in weekly to see
Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll: At the Crossroads ... From Title: Elvis Presley: Memphis Flash (Unauthorized)
© Films Media Group. All Rights Reserved. Length: 2:01
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© John Springer Collection/Corbis
The cast of the television show Father Knows Best depicted the ideal modern American family. Although most Americans did not live in such tidy and affluent circumstances, the show was one of the most watched of the era.
© Bettmann/Corbis
One beatnik reads a poem while another
its portrayal of the ideal modern family life (Newcomb, 2004).
Theme Parks: Disney and the Baby Boom Amusement parks such as New York’s Coney Island and Youngstown, Ohio’s Idora Park once served as inexpensive and accessible forms of entertainment. Peaking in the 1920s, attendance lagged during the Great Depression and further declined in the era of suburbanization. In the postwar era a new movement linked middle‐class baby boomer families to theme parks, which quickly became “regarded as the essential vacation, one’s childhood pilgrimage” (Jackson & West, 2011). The most successful and prestigious of these, Disneyland, opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955.
Capitalizing on the popularity of television, creator Walt Disney debuted a weekly show, Disneyland, a year before the park’s opening. It showcased the park’s themes and rides, and it used Disney’s large archive of classic animated films and new materials to whet Americans’ appetite for such beloved characters as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Just after the park’s opening, The Mickey Mouse Club television show began a successful 5‐year run. This variety show for children featured musical talent, a newsreel, and cartoons starring familiar Disney characters, all of which created links to the park as a place to celebrate those characters and stories. Disneyland offered the middle class a safe, clean, and morally upright amusement park suitable for the entire family. The park also reflected the move toward suburbanization and residential segregation in the postwar era. Visitors to the park walked through a perfect American town, Main Street USA, to reach the other amusements. Disney’s theme park strategies grew increasingly popular and made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Many competing parks followed suit, but none was as successful.
The Beat Generation The homogenized culture of television and the suburbs dominated America during the postwar era, but there were some challenges to mass modern culture. Beginning in New York City in the 1940s and expanding in the 1950s, the Beat literary movement mocked the values of mainstream America through poetry and literature. Led by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers, the Beats raged against suburban complacency in the face of the Cold War’s potential nuclear annihilation. What good were a good job and a nice house with a picket fence if one had to dig a fallout shelter in the backyard?
Beat poets glorified African Americans, especially jazz musicians, and the art of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, and they incorporated these styles in their writing. Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), a novel tracing his travels across the country with several friends, stands as the seminal
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provides musical accompaniment in a café in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1959. Those who embraced Beat culture rejected the postwar era’s materialism.
publication of the Beat and counterculture movement. Portraying key writers of the Beat movement in fictional form, the novel follows their lives filled with jazz, poetry, and illegal drug use. The New York Times and Time magazine hailed the novel as one of the best of the 20th century.
Always a minority, the Beats gained notoriety and sparked controversy through their “beatnik” style of dressing in all black, with men wearing goatees and women severe ponytails, and their expression of ideals contrary to the emerging mainstream. Many believed Beat literature implicitly endorsed a wide variety of controversial behavior, including race mixing, homosexuality, and alternative lifestyles. National media, including Life and Esquire magazines, compared the Beat movement to juvenile delinquency and derided its followers as threats to Western civilization. Ironically, several of the Beat authors later enjoyed established academic careers and won honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for their writing (Lawlor, 2005).
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11.2 The Modern Republican Era While some segments of society were attracted to beatnik counterculture, the nation’s political leaders during this era were decidedly traditional. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in more than 2 decades, led the United States through a series of cultural and social changes that defined the Cold War at home and abroad. His fatherly appearance (he was 62 when first elected) seemed fitting and comforting to American voters, and his traditional politics, at least in the domestic realm, suited the nation’s mood. The Eisenhower era proved to be a much‐needed interlude between the conflicts of the Truman presidency and the military struggles and social upheaval of the 1960s. Even organized labor and business managed to make peace, negotiating an accord that aligned with the prosperity of the decade.
The Eisenhower Years Eisenhower appointed prominent business leaders to important cabinet posts, including making former General Motors head Charles Wilson defense secretary. Ike, as Eisenhower was affectionately known, supported the business community and a cautious spending agenda. As a fiscal conservative he worked to scale back government spending, including military spending.
Some conservative Republicans viewed his presidency as an opportunity to roll back the social contract of the New Deal, but he was not willing to make major cuts in social programs, and his Modern Republicanism actually strengthened some hallmarks of the Depression era. To the chagrin of ultraconservatives, Eisenhower argued that government should provide additional benefits to American citizens.
Fearing the nation still blamed the Republicans for failing to respond to the Depression, Eisenhower believed in a new direction for the party. Preserving individual freedom and the market economy was essential, but so was providing aid to the unemployed and senior citizens (Miller Center, 2013). Although he had campaigned against Truman’s Fair Deal during the 1952 election, during his first term he expanded Social Security, increased the federal minimum wage and created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to protect the health of citizens and to oversee essential human services.
Ike also increased funding for infrastructure projects, including the St. Lawrence Seaway, which improved transportation from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, and 41,000 miles of interstate highways (see Chapter 10). He viewed infrastructure improvement as being as vital to a modern America as expanding the social support network. Making highways a priority in his 1955 State of the Union message to Congress, Eisenhower declared, “A modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our grown population, our expanding economy, and our national security” (as cited in U.S. Department of Transportation, 2013).
Labor and the Social Contract Despite the conservative nature of politics, in the postwar era more Americans belonged to labor unions than at any time in the nation’s history. Despite the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act, which stymied union drives in the southern states (see Chapter 10), unionized workers in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions formed a powerful political block. Rising wages for union‐protected factory and mill work helped blur the income division between blue‐ and white‐collar workers, and many working‐class men and women were able to move their families into suburban communities.
Despite the rising numbers of organized workers, several factors pushed union leaders into a less confrontational relationship with management. McCarthyism and its attack on labor leaders left Americans suspicious of unions. Labor leaders also found that their former confrontational methods had little impact in the 1950s. Instead, in exchange for a promise not to strike until a contract’s expiration, union leaders negotiated a wealth of higher wages and benefits. Known as the labor–management accord, or the “social contract,” the agreement guaranteed high wages to union members and protected the members of leading unions from
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corporate assault. Major businesses found that curbing costly strikes that curtailed production was in the best interest of both parties.
The accord included two important elements. Corporations within a single industry agreed to avoid competition over wages and other labor costs. Once a leading firm, such as Goodyear in the tire industry, reached an agreement with its union, others adopted the same terms. Second, a guaranteed cost of living adjustment (COLA) ensured workers’ wages kept pace with inflation.
The United Automobile Workers was the first union to secure a contract providing for a COLA in addition to wage increases and retirement pensions. By the end of the Eisenhower era, more than half of all union contracts included similar wage and benefit structures. Employers in nonunion industries were also influenced to provide competitive pay and benefit packages in their anxiety to keep unions out (Boris & Lichtenstein, 2003).
Labor’s economic gains came with a price, as both union activism and democracy within the workplace declined. Professional labor leaders replaced union stewards and officers who worked on the factory floor, and policing the contract, rather than managing the workplace, became a major function of the union. For the quarter century after 1950, most negotiations and occasional strikes aimed at winning higher wage and benefit packages but not at changing the power structure within the workplace.
In a move to further guarantee the power of organized labor, the rival American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955 to form one large union. Once the main organization protecting the rights of skilled workers, the AFL had competed frequently with the CIO since the latter’s inception in 1935. As more and more industries adopted the labor–management accord, the two groups realized they would be stronger and more effective as a single organization. The new union, the AFL–CIO, continues to fight for workers’ rights today.
Ike’s Second Term and the Democratic Challenge In his first term Ike ended the Korean War, and many Americans enjoyed a renewed economic prosperity. Ike enjoyed considerable support and respect from working‐class unionists as well as more conservative citizens. His popularity ensured that he easily won reelection in 1956 over Adlai E. Stevenson, the same Democratic challenger he had faced in 1952. His second term proved more challenging. An economic recession struck in 1958, and Democrats substantially increased their numbers on Capitol Hill during that year’s midterm elections.
Although the incumbent president’s party often loses seats in a midterm election, 1958 was a landslide for Democrats. In the Senate, Democrats gained 16 seats to enjoy a 65 to 35 majority, and in the House, Democrats similarly boosted their control when the Republicans lost 48 districts. Democrats demanded recession relief in the form of expanded federal spending on public works and a general tax cut. The most liberal, including Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, demanded more progress on social legislation, including a national system of health insurance and government assistance to specified depressed areas.
Overall, the demands of liberal Democrats remained off the table. Instead, more moderate voices set the agenda for the upcoming 1960 presidential election. Democratic representative Sam Rayburn and Democratic senator Lyndon Johnson, both of Texas, set their sights on a Democratic victory and led the party through a waiting period that brought little challenge to Eisenhower’s popularity. As a result, as Ike’s presidency wound to a close, no liberal bills of any significance succeeded, and liberals remained frustrated as the new election approached (Patterson, 1996).
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11.3 The Freedom Movement Begins Eisenhower’s handling of the emerging civil rights movement proved to be the greatest failure of his presidency and clearly frustrated liberals in the Democratic Party. The president did not like meddling in racial issues, but a growing push for equal rights and protection under federal law forced his hand.
In a compelling opening to his acclaimed book The Struggle for Black Equality, historian Harvard Sitkoff wrote, “Nourished by anger, revolutions are born of hope” (Sitkoff, 1995, p. 3). Like the polarity of affluence and anxiety in the 1950s, Sitkoff’s statement about the civil rights movement in this decade alludes to the opposites of anger and hope. Though these emotions rarely come together to establish and sustain a social movement of change, remarkably, they did for African Americans in their hopeful struggle during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Both World War II and the Cold War significantly influenced the timing and direction of the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. The war created a climate of rising expectations among African Americans, especially those who served overseas during the conflict. Traveling beyond the borders of the United States, they witnessed people of color in other cultures and learned that discrimination and segregation were not universal conditions. Abroad they recognized the incongruity of fighting for the freedom and rights of people overseas while not enjoying those rights themselves. Returning to demand their own place at the American table, many veterans were unwilling to wait for their rights.
The Cold War made racial discrimination an international concern. As European empires in Africa and Asia began to slip and independence movements rose, both the United States and Soviet Union competed for influence. The Soviets portrayed the Americans as racist and decried treatment of African Americans as second‐ class citizens. In this Cold War climate, where communism was to be contained at all costs, racial segregation in America became an embarrassment and political liability.
Well before the 1950s, a group of African American lawyers decided that the legal system offered the best way to combat segregation. One of these was Charles Houston, the dean of the law school at Howard University, an historically African American university in Washington, D.C. Houston began his mission in the 1920s and assembled promising African American lawyers to coordinate what he knew would be a long legal fight. The integrated NAACP, with its ability to organize at both the local and national levels and to count on some White cooperation, was essential to this plan. Houston called it the “crystallizing force” (as cited in Hine, 2003, p. 211).
As Houston searched for African American scholars for his law program, he discovered future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who became his most promising student. While some advocated immediate change, Marshall argued that the path to equality would be a slow one that should be fought in the courts and not the streets. After law school, Marshall went to work for the NAACP, where he reinforced his commitment to American values and the ideal of its justice system. He wrote, “Oh, we’re going to have our setbacks, we’re bound to have them, but it’ll work. You’ll never find a better Constitution than this one” (as cited in Tushnet, 1994, p. 5).
Slowly, over the course of 2 decades (from the 1930s to the 1940s), Marshall made several small gains in the court system, most notably the Smith v. Allright case in 1944, which ended segregation in the Texas state primary. But his most famous case came a decade later and shook the segregated nation to its foundation.
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas School segregation, whether legal or customary, plagued many states and localities in the United States and affected all levels of education and multiple races and ethnicities. Some states voluntarily ended segregation, but for most the practice ended only after legal challenges.
In 1945 Mexican American parents challenged the segregation of their children in the Orange County, California,
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© Bettmann/Corbis
Victorious in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, attorneys George Hayes of Washington, D.C. (left); Thurgood Marshall, special council for the NAACP (center); and James Nabrit, Howard University law professor (right), celebrate on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling paved the way for legal segregation to be overturned.
schools. In an early victory for desegregation, a federal appeals court ruled in Mendez v. Westminster that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students in separate schools was unconstitutional. In 1947 New Jersey banned school segregation through a constitutional amendment, and 2 years later an Illinois law withheld funds from school districts that remained segregated.
A number of other states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Kansas, began to dismantle local school segregation policies at the community level (Klarman, 2004). In other localities, such as the city of Boston, however, segregation persisted a decade or more after it was abolished in southern states. Although desegregation seemed to proceed without federal intervention in some northern and western states, in the southern states, where race relations showed little improvement, codified school segregation was persistent and was only overturned after an intense legal and social battle by civil rights activists and their allies.
The Supreme Court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) paved the way for dismantling school segregation. The Brown case, a class‐action suit that combined five challenges to legalized segregation in public schools, named Topeka, Kansas, as its lead target.
The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a well‐respected member of Topeka’s African American community. He worked as a welder and was a lay pastor at his church. Local NAACP lawyers convinced Brown to join the suit on behalf of his daughter Linda, a third‐grade student. Linda’s daily journey to the segregated Monroe Elementary School required walking six blocks to board a school bus that took her another mile or so to the school. A Whites‐only elementary school was a mere seven blocks from the Brown home.
In the fall of 1950, Oliver Brown and several other African American parents tried unsuccessfully to enroll their children at the all‐White Sumner Elementary. The case wound its way through the legal system to the U.S. Supreme Court, with Thurgood Marshall serving as one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys. Chief Justice Earl Warren presented the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (as cited in Russo, 2008, p. 128). Warren argued that even if African Americans and Whites had access to schools of identical quality, the very act of separating students by race created inequality.
The ruling overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that justified legal separation of the races in public accommodations, including schools. The federal backing for separate but equal facilities for Whites and African Americans was now removed. The Brown decision called into question hundreds of state and local laws designating separate public facilities like drinking fountains, restrooms, and schools throughout the South. Even courthouses used separate Bibles to swear in White and African American witnesses. Overturning Plessy v. Ferguson paved the way for a full‐fledged civil rights movement, but also for a wave of massive resistance as southern Whites fought to maintain the social status quo.
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Brown II: With All Deliberate Speed Initially, civil rights activists celebrated the Brown ruling, believing the end to segregation was near. However, the decision included no provision for the actual enactment of desegregation in resistant areas. While some communities continued the process of desegregation begun before the Supreme Court ruling, southern proponents of racial separation refused to budge. Southern states filed suit, asking for exemption from desegregation, and this case reached the nation’s highest court in 1955.
In a decision known as Brown II, the justices offered a mixed message. Upholding that “racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional” and that “all provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1955), the court also gave southern states an escape. The court placed the responsibility for enacting desegregation in the hands of local school boards and ambiguously decreed that the process of desegregation should be carried out with “all deliberate speed” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1955). This confusing statement led to much delay, and few African American students entered desegregated schools before the 1960s (Klarman, 2004).
Eisenhower refused to publicly offer his opinion either for or against the Brown decision. To reporters he said, “I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it” (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 394). However, he did give some indication of his feelings on the matter when he told one of his speech writers:
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Exploring History through Film: "...the Emmett Till Generation"
Even after World War I, the South was a place of danger for African Americans. They were politically and socially disenfranchised in the
I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least 15 years. . . . It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. . . . We can’t demand perfection in these moral things. . . . And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by FORCE is NUTS. (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 394)
Broadening the Agenda The slow enforcement of the Brown decision did not stop African Americans from gaining inspiration from its language. The NAACP urged African Americans to petition school boards and to try to enroll their students at White schools, actions that would never have happened in the deepest areas of the South before the Supreme Court ruling. Brown also inspired legal challenges to segregation outside the education system.
Just a few days after the ruling, Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened a boycott of city buses unless segregation on them ended. Although there was no direct relationship between the Supreme Court decision and the events unfolding in Montgomery, the ruling was of symbolic importance. One African American newspaper expressed the widely held sentiment that the decision marked “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation” (as cited in Klarman, 2004, p. 369) that was the beginning of the end of the institution of slavery.
The Brown ruling marked the start of the activist phase of the movement for civil rights. Leaders emerged from the African American church, the NAACP, and local organizations to push the civil rights movement forward. A movement culture began to emerge that included the tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, Christianity, freedom songs, and writings. An emphasis on interracial organization marked the first phase of the movement, but the strongest leaders to emerge came from within the African American community, and especially the African American church.
Another driving force behind the movement was righteous anger and the desire to stop violence against African Americans. Throughout the civil rights movement a tension existed between the anger African Americans felt in the face of social injustice and the need to convince mainstream America that their cause was just and worthy.
The Emergence of King as a Leader The bus boycott coincided with a new grassroots leadership within the African American community. The emerging civil rights movement brought women such as Robinson and Rosa Parks together with ministers from several African American denominations. The movement relied on leaders from multiple segments of the African American community, but one emerged as a national symbol.
Baptist clergyman Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery in 1954, where, at age 25, he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King grew up in Atlanta, and then earned a doctoral degree in theology at Boston University. At the onset of the protest, he was elected head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, newly created to manage the events. A powerful and charismatic speaker, he soon gained national attention as the leading spokesperson for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Ministers historically formed the core of leadership with the African American community, but King proved to be especially effective in mobilizing support for the boycott and future civil rights actions.
The Murder of Emmett Till As King emerged as an early movement leader in Alabama, in Mississippi the outrageous murder of a 14‐year‐old African American boy mobilized the civil rights community and
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region, and Whites often enforced these disenfranchisements with violence. In 1955, Emmitt Till was beaten to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman. This act of violence would help influence the Civil Rights Movement.
Critical Thinking Questions Think about the photo of Till’s killers shown in the video. How is the fate of Emmett Till the result of systemized racism? How is it a result of the failure of Reconstruction? The limitations of the justice system?
brought the horrors of lynching to national attention. Emmett Till was born and raised in Chicago, and in the summer of 1955 went to visit relatives in Mississippi. He unknowingly violated southern conventions when he crossed the color line to interact with a 21‐ year‐old White woman, the wife of a local grocery store owner. Believing Till acted inappropriately, the storeowner, Roy Bryant and another man pulled Till from his great uncle’s house a few nights later. The pair beat the boy, gouged out his eye, and finally shot him in the head and left his body in a nearby river.
When the body was discovered and returned to Chicago, Till’s mother insisted on a public funeral service so the world might see what had befallen her son. Thousands attended the service, and images of his mutilated body were published in the African American press and seen by millions of Americans. When the two men responsible were acquitted of wrongdoing in the case and later bragged to Look magazine that they had committed the crime, many expressed outrage. Emmett Till soon became a symbol of the urgent need for racial equality and justice in America. His murder also galvanized activists across the nation, with many realizing that the civil rights struggle was not limited to the U.S. South.
Nonviolence and Civil Disobedience After the Brown decision, southern White resistance to desegregation crystalized and after Till’s murder, tension between the races escalated. King and other protest leaders urged boycotters not to respond to violent confrontation at all costs. A philosophy of nonviolence characterized King’s leadership throughout the civil rights movement. Inspired by the teachings of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, he believed that spontaneous and planned acts of civil disobedience, or the active refusal to obey unjust laws, would ultimately win support for African American rights. Like Gandhi, who led the Indian independence movement, King also attracted attention from the international community, which eventually added pressure for change. King’s highly publicized arrest and nonviolent leadership gained significant attention for the civil rights movement.
Following his plan, Montgomery residents avoided physical violence as best they could during the long year of the boycott. Meanwhile, King was regularly harassed and received threatening phone calls, and in late January 1956 someone in an angry White mob threw a bomb into his home. The following month a rally of some 10,000 Whites cheered the city commissioners for resisting bus desegregation, and in the spring King and others were arrested under a little known Alabama boycott conspiracy law. Although convicted, he paid a fine to avoid long‐ term incarceration.
In February 1957, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s ultimate success, Martin Luther King appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which featured a lengthy story on the events in Alabama. The yearlong struggle marked
"...the Emmett Till Generation" From Title: The Photographic Age (19351959)
© Films Media Group. All Rights Reserved. Length: 1:79
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Gene Herrick/Associated Press
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife greets him as he leaves court in Montgomery, Alabama. King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city busses, but a judge suspended his sentence pending appeal.
the beginning of the freedom movement. It also established King as the nation’s most recognizable civil rights leader.
The Little Rock Nine Montgomery demonstrated that the struggle for civil rights would be long and hard. By the third anniversary of the Brown decision in May 1957 public schools in most southern states remained segregated. During his reelection campaign, Eisenhower said little about civil rights. Once elected president, he did support the Civil Rights Act of 1957, especially the voting rights provision and signed it into law. A weak bill aiming to circumvent poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory voter registration rules, the act also demonstrated Congress’s divided support for the Brown decision. Georgia senator Richard Russell, a Democrat, was among those opposing the bill, fearing that one section would aid in school desegregation. The bill passed only after that section, Title III, was removed (Nichols, 2007).
Nevertheless, the bill was the first federal civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era and most, but not all, southern congressional delegates strongly opposed it. South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, the staunch segregationist who led the splintering of the Democratic Party during Truman’s presidency, single‐handedly sustained a filibuster against the bill for more than 24 hours. Democratic senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, also a southerner, supported the bill and carefully negotiated its passage over the objections of Thurmond, Russell, and others. He received kudos from civil rights activists for his effort, but in its final watered‐down state it offered few protections for African Americans.
Eisenhower’s tepid support for this bill and for civil rights in general stemmed from his belief that equality could not be forced on an unwilling nation. He urged moderation and made it clear that he did not support federal military intervention to enforce desegregation, as some impatient civil rights activists desired. Specifically seeking to reassure anxious southerners, in July 1957 he declared:
I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops into any area to enforce the orders of a federal court, because I believe that [the] common sense of America will never require it. (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 412).
Before long, however, Ike changed his mind. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus vehemently opposed the Brown decision, and when the Little Rock school board and the city’s mayor planned to comply with the court’s ruling, he reacted. Learning of the plan to enroll nine African Americans in Central High School that fall, he assembled the Arkansas National Guard to prevent their entry. On the day before school was set to begin, 270 National Guardsmen set up barricades around the school, purportedly to maintain law and order.
On September 4 Elizabeth Eckford walked alone toward the school. She had missed a call and did not know that the other eight African American students planned to arrive together and with escorts from the African American community. As she turned the corner toward Central High School, Elizabeth was suddenly confronted by an angry mob of White women and men and armed National Guard troops. As the crowd surrounded her, she continued to walk toward the school door, but a soldier turned her away. She heard middle‐class housewives shouting, “Two, four, six eight, we ain’t going to integrate!” (as cited in Little Rock Nine, 2010).
Eckford gave up on attending school, sat down on the curb, and waiting desperately for the bus that would take her home. She remembered:
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Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
On September 4, 1957, an Arkansas National Guardsman blocks Elizabeth Eckford’s entrance to Central High School.
I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob—someone who maybe would help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me. (as cited in Little Rock Nine, 2010)
Over the next 3 weeks, television cameras broadcast images of taunting and cursing crowds, armed soldiers, and the Little Rock Nine, (as the students came to be known) and their escorts standing passively but daily denied entry to the high school. Eisenhower tried desperately for more than 2 weeks to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The students finally entered the school through a back door on September 23 after a federal court order removed the troops. Upon learning that the students managed to get inside the school, an angry White mob gathered outside threatening violence. The Little Rock mayor sent an urgent message to the White House asking Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops (Patterson, 1996).
Although he still believed it the wrong course, in order to keep order and prevent a riot, Eisenhower sent paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking them out of the governor’s control. With personal military escorts throughout the school day, the nine students were finally able to attend school. Eight of them, including Elizabeth Eckford, finished the year at Central High, and one, Ernest Green, graduated and moved on to attend Michigan State University.
Proving that White supremacy remained strong despite federal intervention, Arkansans gladly reelected Faubus in 1958. The following year he closed all public high schools in Little Rock rather than allow integration. In what became known as the “lost year,” high school teachers tended empty classrooms in the public high schools, but eventually private schools opened to educate the displaced White students.
White students attended private academies rather than integrate their school systems in other states across the South as well. Virginia closed a portion of schools in four counties in 1958. In 1960 Louisiana Whites boycotted desegregation in New Orleans public schools. The resistance spread to higher education. In 1961 the University of Georgia refused admittance to two African American students, acquiescing only after a federal ruling ordered their admission.
More famously, James Meredith challenged the segregated policy of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Riots and violence erupted when he tried to attend classes. Two were killed, and the unrest continued until 31,000 federalized National Guardsmen restored order. Meredith became the first African American student to integrate a Mississippi educational institution since the 1954 Brown ruling declared segregation unconstitutional. The struggle for integration and for civil rights continued into the 1960s, and the active movement lasted through two more presidential administrations.
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Summary and Resources
Chapter Summary The decade following World War II proved to be a mixture of economic prosperity, cultural change, and underlying anxiety. Mass culture defined American success as the accumulation of material wealth, and many families did prosper during the 1950s. Televisions became ubiquitous conduits of homogeneous culture. In many industries wages rose, and working‐ and middle‐class families were often able to move their growing families to newly constructed suburbs. At the same time, the less fortunate were left behind in decaying city neighborhoods where urban renewal often meant moving the working poor from one part of the city to another. The 1950s also saw the beginnings of the civil rights movement, sparked in part by changes in racial attitudes. Early struggles in the movement focused on bringing legal challenge to Jim Crow segregation in schools and public accommodations, and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nation’s most visible champion of freedom. The decade’s politics did little to support civil rights, but the moderate Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration was welcomed by a majority of Americans. As the 1960s approached, however, both the political and social landscape was changing, and the nation was about to enter a turbulent era.
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Critical Thinking Questions 1. Discuss the role of rising consumerism in the 1950s. 2. How did the growth of suburbs affect the racial division of society? 3. What was the social contract between labor and management, and how did it benefit both sides? 4. What factors contributed to the growing civil rights movement in the 1950s? 5. What was the significance of the election of 1960?
Additional Resources National Interstate and Defense Highways Act
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=88 (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? flash=true&doc=88)
This federal law authorized the construction of thousands of miles of interstate highways.
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
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http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=87&page=transcript (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? doc=87&page=transcript)
This landmark Supreme Court decision declared that school segregation was unconstitutional.
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90 (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90)
In his final address to Congress, Eisenhower reflected on the challenges and triumphs of his presidency.
Key Terms
The Affluent Society The 1958 book by economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticizing the rising cultural materialism of the United States.
baby boom The postwar population growth that stretched from 1946 to 1964 and recorded the birth of 75 million babies.
Beat literary movement A social and literary movement that expressed alienation from mass culture and conventional society through bland dress, poetry, writings, and art.
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas The 1954 Supreme Court decision ruling school segregation unconstitutional.
civil disobedience The active refusal to obey unjust laws.
cost of living adjustment (COLA) An increase in income that ensured wages kept pace with inflation.
Kitchen Debate In 1959 U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev debated the differences between capitalism and communism in the kitchen of a model home erected at an exhibit of America goods in Moscow.
labor–management accord Also known as the social contract, this agreement between the major labor unions and employers protected employers from unexpected strikes and workers from corporate assault on their benefits.
Levittowns Planned suburban communities quickly constructed of prefabricated housing.
Little Rock Nine The nine students who, despite threat of violence and intimidation, were the first African Americans to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
mass culture A set of ideas and values that emerged from the shared exposure to the same media, including television, music, and news.
Modern Republicanism
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Eisenhower’s brand of politics favoring a moderate rather than conservative approach to political concerns and the needs of society.
Montgomery Bus Boycott The yearlong boycott of public busses in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1955 to 1956 was the first mass protest of the emerging civil rights movement.
nonviolence At the urging of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders, many civil rights activists avoided violence at all cost.
racially restrictive covenants When attached to property deeds, these covenants prohibited owners from selling their property to members of specific ethnic group such as African Americans or Jews.
suburbs Planned housing developments constructed after World War II to house growing families, suburbs served to shift the population out of cities.
urban renewal A program of land redevelopment in cities requiring the relocation of businesses and population and aiming (not always successfully) to revitalize downtown areas and construct better housing.
