CHAPTER 24 An Affluent Society, 1953–1960
This chapter concentrates on the 1950s, its economic prosperity, its conformity and cultural critics, and the civil
rights movement. Opening with the Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debate in 1959, the chapter sets up the
theme of the suburban material bliss of the 1950s. The golden age of the 1950s is discussed, identifying a new
meaning of freedom for the American people in consumerism and the freedom of consumer choice. The Cold War
fueled industrial production and promoted a redistribution of the nation’s population and economic resources.
Likewise, the Cold War also shaped a new role for women and the family. Excluded from this economic prosperity
and growing suburbia were blacks and ethnic minorities who found themselves left in the inner cities. Before
segueing into the Eisenhower administration, the chapter defines libertarian conservatives and new conservatives;
however, Dwight D. Eisenhower did not consider himself to be either. Calling his policies modern Republicanism,
Eisenhower did not roll back the New Deal but instead extended the core New Deal programs. Labor, too, benefited
from the prosperity of the decade. In foreign policy, Eisenhower adopted the policy of massive retaliation to fight
the Cold War and used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in various Third World countries to counter
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
II. The Golden Age
1. After the war, the American economy enjoyed remarkable growth.
2. Numerous innovations came into widespread use during these years, transforming Americans’ daily
lives.
3. The reduction in home inequality stemmed from federal tax policy that placed a 70 percent tax rate on
the richest Americans. Today it is 43 percent, though tax loopholes lower this rate considerably.
A. A Changing Economy
1. The Cold War fueled industrial production and promoted a redistribution of the nation’s population and
economic resources.
B. A Suburban Nation
1. The main engines of economic growth during the 1950s were residential construction and spending on
consumer goods.
2. The dream of homeownership came within reach of most Americans.
a. Levittown
b. Shopping mall
C. The Growth of the West
1. California became the most prominent symbol of the postwar suburban boom.
2. Western cities were decentralized clusters of single-family homes and businesses united by a web of
highways.
D. A Consumer Culture
1. In a consumer culture, the measure of freedom became the ability to gratify market desires.
2. Americans became comfortable living in never-ending debt, once seen as a loss of economic freedom.
3. Consumer culture demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life over communism.
E. The TV World
1. Television replaced newspapers as the most common source of information about public events and
provided Americans of all regions and backgrounds with a common cultural experience.
Cold War.
F. A New Ford
1. Along with a home and television set, the car became part of what sociologists called “the standard
consumer package” of the 1950s.
G. Women at Work and at Home
1. After 1945, women lost most of the industrial jobs they had performed during the war.
2. By the mid-1950s women were working again, but the nature and aims of women’s work had changed.
H. A Segregated Landscape
1. The suburbs remained segregated communities.
2. During the postwar suburban boom, federal agencies continued to insure mortgages that barred resale of
houses to nonwhites, thereby financing housing segregation.
I. Public Housing and Urban Renewal
2. Suburbanization hardened the racial lines of division in American life.
a. Seven million whites left the cities for the suburbs while 3 million blacks moved into the cities.
b. Puerto Ricans
J. The Divided Society
1. The process of racial exclusion became self-reinforcing.
2. Suburban homeownership long remained a white entitlement.
K. Religion and Anticommunism
1. To many observers in the 1950s it seemed that the ills of American society had been solved.
a. If problems remained, their solutions required technical adjustments, not structural change or
aggressive political intervention.
Catholicism in the wake of World War II.
a. Secularization
L. Selling Free Enterprise
2. The selling of free enterprise became a major industry.
a. The Advertising Council
M. People’s Capitalism
1. Until well into the twentieth century, most ordinary Americans had been deeply suspicious of big
business.
2. Large-scale production was not only necessary to fight the Cold War but enhanced freedom by
multiplying consumer goods.
a. Stock market
N. The Libertarian Conservatives
2. These ideas had great appeal in the rapidly growing South and West.
3. Milton Friedman identified the free market as the necessary foundation for individual liberty.
O. The New Conservatism
1. The new conservatism became increasingly prominent in the 1950s.
2. The new conservatives insisted that toleration of difference offered no substitute for the search for
absolute truth.
III. The Eisenhower Era
A. Ike and Nixon
1. General Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952.
2. Richard Nixon ran as his vice president.
a. Nixon gained a reputation for opportunism and dishonesty.
B. The 1952 Campaign
2. Eisenhower’s popularity and promises to end the Korean conflict brought him victory in 1952.
3. During the 1950s, voters at home and abroad seemed to find reassurance in selecting familiar, elderly
leaders to govern them.
C. Modern Republicanism
2. Modern Republicanism aimed to sever the Republican Party’s identification in the minds of many
3. Government spending was used to promote productivity and boost employment.
a. Interstate Highway Act
b. National Defense Education Act
D. The Social Contract
1. The 1950s witnessed an easing of the labor conflict of the two previous decades.
2. Unionized workers shared fully in the prosperity of the 1950s.
E. Massive Retaliation
1. Ike took office at a time when the Cold War had entered an extremely dangerous phase.
F. Ike and the Russians
1. Eisenhower came to believe that the Soviets were reasonable and could be dealt with in conventional
diplomatic terms.
3. In 1958, the two superpowers agreed to a voluntary halt on the testing of nuclear weapons.
G. The Emergence of the Third World
1. The Bandung Conference was attended by twenty-nine Asian and African nations.
H. The Cold War in the Third World
1. The Cold War became the determining factor in American relations with the Third World.
2. The Suez Crisis in 1956 led to the Eisenhower Doctrine.
I. Origins of the Vietnam War
1. Anticommunism led the United States into deeper and deeper involvement in Vietnam.
J. Mass Society and Its Critics
1. Some intellectuals wondered whether the celebration of affluence and the either-or mentality of the
Cold War obscured the extent to which the United States itself fell short of the ideal of freedom.
a. C. Wright Mills
2. One strand of social analysis in the 1950s contended that Americans did not enjoy genuine freedom.
a. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd
K. Rebels without a Cause
1. The emergence of a popular culture geared to the emerging youth market suggested that significant
generational tensions lay beneath the bland surface of 1950s life.
2. Cultural life during the 1950s seemed far more daring than politics.
a. Rock and roll
b. Playboy
L. The Beats
1. The Beats were a small group of poets and writers who railed against mainstream culture.
IV. The Freedom Movement
A. Origins of the Movement
1. The causes of the civil rights movement were many.
B. The Legal Assault on Segregation
1. It fell to the courts to confront the problem of racial segregation.
2. For years, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), under the
C. The Brown Case
2. Marshall argued that segregation did lifelong damage to black children, undermining their self-esteem.
4. The black press hailed the Brown decision as a “second Emancipation Proclamation.”
D. The Montgomery Bus Boycott
1. Brown ensured that when the movement resumed after waning in the early 1950s, it would have the
backing of the federal courts.
a. Rosa Parks
b. Bus boycott
E. The Daybreak of Freedom
1. The Montgomery Bus Boycott marked a turning point in postwar American history.
2. From the beginning, the language of freedom pervaded the black movement.
F. The Leadership of King
1. In King’s soaring oratory, the protesters’ understandings of freedom fused into a coherent whole.
2. A master at appealing to the deep sense of injustice among blacks and to the conscience of white
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) showcases part of King’s bus boycott speech
in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
G. Massive Resistance
1. In 1956, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
3. Voices of Freedom entry includes part of the Southern Manifesto (1956).
H. Eisenhower and Civil Rights
2. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered
a. Eisenhower
I. The World Views the United States
1. Since the start of the Cold War, American leaders had worried about the impact of segregation on the
country’s international reputation.
3. However, the slow pace of change led to criticism from abroad.
V. The Election of 1960
A. Kennedy and Nixon
1. The presidential campaign of 1960 turned out to be one of the closest in American history.
3. Both Kennedy and Nixon were ardent Cold Warriors.
a. Missile gap
b. Television debate
B. The End of the 1950s
1. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address warned against the drumbeat of calls for a new military buildup.
a. Military-industrial complex
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Describe how Bill Levitt and the GI Bill provided the opportunity for many Americans to buy the American
Dream.
• Discuss the role of the family and specifically the role of women both during the Cold War and as part of a new
definition of freedom centered on consumerism.
• How did the automobile change American life in the 1950s?
• Explain residential segregation. How and why did cities become mostly black and suburbs mostly white? What
were the consequences of such demographic patterns? What role did the Supreme Court play?
• What did freedom mean to libertarian conservatives? How did the new conservatives define freedom?
• Discuss modern Republicanism. Why, as the first Republican president since Hoover, didn’t Eisenhower
dismantle the New Deal? How did Eisenhower expand the reach and role of the federal government?
• How did Eisenhower continue the policy of containment set during the Truman administration when fighting
the Cold War? How was his policy the same as Truman’s? How was it different?
• In Protestant Catholic Jew (1955), Will Herberg argued that religion in the 1950s was a group activity of
assimilation, rather than an individual activity of spiritual awakening. Can you find other examples from the
decade that seem to emphasize conformity and the group rather than divergence and the individual? Why do
• Explain the significance of the 1960 presidential election.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Little Rock Nine
https://www.loc.gov/folklife/civilrights/survey/view_collection.php?coll_id741
This Library of Congress site houses the Little Rock Central High crisis collection and includes documents, oral interviews,
and other primary sources about the event. Links take you to information on the National Historical Site.
Lynching
https://withoutsanctuary.org/
This site provides images, documents, and articles regarding the history of lynching in the United States.
Martin Luther King Jr.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/
This helpful site, produced by Stanford University, focuses on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. It includes multimedia features.
The Murder of Emmett Till
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/
This PBS American Experience series film is a documentary about the murder of Emmett Till. The website also includes a
teaching guide and other useful teaching materials.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Adams, Valerie. Eisenhower’s Fine Group of Fellows: Crafting a National Security Policy to Uphold the “Great Equation.”
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Divine, Robert. The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite. New York: Oxford University Press,
1993.
Fisher, Mark. Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation. New York: Random House, 2007.
Fraser, Cary. “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign
Policy.” Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (2000): 233–264.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard, 1993.
Pells, Richard. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2009.
Romano, Renee. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
1. Analyzing Advertisements
Ask the students to write an advertisement to be placed in a popular women’s magazine of the 1950s for any consumer good of
2. Understanding Public Protest: the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott
Divide the class into groups of five to eight students and ask them to decide the role of the boycott as a form of public protest.
Black Montgomerians could have staged other forms of public protest but they chose the boycott. Why? Was this an unusual
form of protest? What significance does the boycott have today as a form of protest? Have students pretend that they are a