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 consumer-
ism 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.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
II. The Golden Age
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
2. Since the 1950s, the American economy has shifted away from manufacturing.
3. The number of farms has declined since the 1950s, but farm production has increased.
a. The center of gravity of American farming shifted decisively to Texas, Arizona, and especially California.
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.
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.
3. Consumer culture demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life over communism.
E. The TV World
2. TV avoided controversy and projected a bland image of middle-class life.
4. A defining feature of American identity, mass consumption was promoted as a patriotic act to win the Cold War.
F. A New Ford
2. Auto manufacturers and oil companies vaulted to the top ranks of corporate America.
3. The automobile transformed the nation’s daily life.
G. Women at Work and at Home
1. After 1945, women lost most of the industrial jobs they had performed during the war.
3. Women were expected to get married, have kids, and stay at home.
a. Baby boom
4. The family also became a weapon in the Cold War.
a. Feminism seemed to have disappeared from American life.
H. A Segregated Landscape
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
1. A housing act passed by Congress in 1949 authorized the construction of over 800,000 units of public housing in order to
provide a “decent home for every American family.”
2. Suburbanization hardened the racial lines of division in American life.
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.
2. Americans celebrated religiosity as opposed to “godless” communism and affirmed the nation’s faith with amendments to
its Pledge of Allegiance and its coinage.
4. The idea of a unified Judeo-Christian tradition reflected the decline of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism in the wake of
World War II.
a. Secularization
L. Selling Free Enterprise
1. More than political democracy or freedom of speech, an economic system resting on private ownership united the nations
of the Free World.
2. The selling of free enterprise became a major industry.
a. The Advertising Council
M. People’s Capitalism
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
1. To libertarian conservatives, freedom meant individual autonomy, limited government, and unregulated capitalism.
3. Milton Friedman identified the free market as the necessary foundation for individual liberty.
O. The New Conservatism
2. The new conservatives insisted that toleration of difference offered no substitute for the search for absolute truth.
4. The conservative movement was divided between libertarians and new conservatives.
5. Two powerful enemies became focal points for the conservative revival.
III. The Eisenhower Era
A. Ike and Nixon
2. Richard Nixon ran as his vice president.
a. Nixon gained a reputation for opportunism and dishonesty.
B. The 1952 Campaign
1. Nixon’s Checkers speech rescued his political career.
a. Illustrated the importance of TV in politics
3. During the 1950s, voters at home and abroad seemed to find reassurance in selecting familiar, elderly leaders to govern
them.
C. Modern Republicanism
1. Wealthy businessmen dominated Eisenhower’s cabinet.
a. Eisenhower refused to roll back the New Deal.
2. Modern Republicanism aimed to sever the Republican Party’s identification in the minds of many Americans with
3. Government spending was used to promote productivity and boost employment.
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.
3. Critics called the doctrine brinksmanship.
F. Ike and the Russians
2. Khrushchev’s call for peaceful coexistence with the United States raised the possibility of an easing of the Cold War.
G. The Emergence of the Third World
1. The Bandung Conference was attended by twenty–nine Asian and African nations.
3. Decolonization presented the United States with a complex set of choices.
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.
3. Events in Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam, considered great successes at the time by American policymakers, cast a long
shadow over American foreign relations.
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
2. One strand of social analysis in the 1950s contended that Americans did not enjoy genuine freedom.
a. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd
3. Some commentators feared that the Russians had demonstrated a greater ability to sacrifice for common public goals
than had Americans.
K. Rebels without a Cause
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
2. The United States in the 1950s was still a segregated and unequal society.
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 leadership of attorney
C. The Brown Case
1. Marshall brought the NAACP’s support to local cases that had arisen when black parents challenged unfair school
policies.
3. Earl Warren managed to create unanimity in a divided court, some of whose members disliked segregation but feared that
a decision to outlaw it would spark widespread violence.
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.
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
2. A master at appealing to the deep sense of injustice among blacks and to the conscience of white America, King
presented the case for black rights in a vocabulary that merged the black experience with that of the nation.
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 integration of Little
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.
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 free-
dom 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 conse-
quences 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?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Little Rock Nine
Lynching
Martin Luther King Jr.
The Murder of Emmett Till
President Eisenhower
Separate Is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education
Sputnik
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Adams, Valerie. Eisenhower’s Fine Group of Fellows: Crafting a National Security Policy to Uphold the “Great Equation.” Lanham, MD: Lexing-
ton 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.
Hodgson, Godfrey. America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon—What Happened and Why. New York: Vintage, 1976.
Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Klein, Jennifer. For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking Press, 2011.
Marling, Karal Ann. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Post-War Mass Culture, 1946–1958.” Journal of American History 79, no.
4 (1993): 1455–1482.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
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 their choice. Before
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 Montgomeri-
ans could have staged other forms of public protest but they chose the boycott. Why? Was this an unusual form of protest? What significance does