Life In The 1950's

The changes and challenges of the 1950s made for a monumental impact on decades to come. The 1950’s were an era of prosperity, growth, and chaos in the United States; men were returning from World War 2 and many new babies were born. Consumer goods played an important role in middle-class life during the postwar era. The economy of the 1950’s saw major changes, which in turn transformed the lives of the American people. Significant movements, inventions, and discoveries changed American lives for the better. The social, economic, and cultural impact of these years helped to create a widespread sense of stability, contentment and consensus in the United States.
The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was a defining element
of the 1950s. Following the end of World War II, America became almost superstitious of communism, thus beginning the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had “expansive tendencies.” They believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or “subversives,” could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. As a result, communism needed to be “contained,” by threats or by force. This idea shaped American foreign policy for decades. It shaped domestic policy as well. The economy had rebounded during World War II. The country now had to train, educate, and employ two million men and 300,000 women returning from the war. Many of the service people married after the war with crucial needs for jobs, homes, and cars. The U.S. created the GI bill to benefit the soldiers with medical care, ability to go to college, and buy homes. A main goal of the Eisenhower administration was to reshape the cities of America. Run-down housing complexes were bulldozed and replaced with new apartments, sports facilities and luxurious office places. Although temporarily renewed, these revitalized and renewed cities would prove to be major trouble spots in the years to come. Nearly every different minority group was affected by Congresses need to renew and revitalize urban cities. Congress, at the time, was unaware of what problem could arise out of this. Another problem was to restore the war manufacturing companies to manufacture what they were prior to the war. The government did help some of them do that. War armament manufacturers had to adjust to the reduced orders. Military equipment and planes, ships, and boats had to be recycled or reused in the Korean War. Women had to give up their war jobs and readjust to that as well. The economy continued to transform and grow until the 1970s.
Historians use the word “boom” to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called “baby boom.” The baby boom was a period after the Second World War where the growth in population soared.
Soldiers came back wanting to start a family, have a nice peaceful life, and forget about war. This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies–3.4 million–were born in the United States. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million “baby boomers,” making up almost 40 percent of the nation’s population. The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. By 1960, suburban baby boomers and their parents comprised one-third of the population of the United States. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass-production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract houses there. The G.I. Bill subsidized low-cost mortgages for returning soldiers, which meant that it was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city. Many people in the postwar era looked forward to having children because they were confident that the future would be one of comfort and prosperity. In many ways, they were right: Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product more than doubled, growing from $200 billion to more than $500 billion. Corporations grew larger and more profitable, labor unions promised generous wages and benefits to their members, and consumer goods were more plentiful and affordable than ever before. As rates of unemployment and inflation were low and wages high, middle-class people had more money to spend than ever. Because of the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy. As a result, many Americans felt certain that
they could give their families all the material things that they themselves had done without, eagerly using new-fangled credit cards and charge accounts to buy things like televisions, hi-fi systems and new cars. Family life was transformed by the economy. Children were able to finish schooling and the roles of women saw change. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women. Television programs of the time represented what the different roles women played and how the ideal family functioned. Advice books and magazine articles urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers. The idea that a woman’s most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women who yearned for a more fulfilling life. This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s. After a few years, family survival came to depend upon two salaries once again; women no longer stayed home as the socially acceptable housewife. “The number of employed women reached new highs. By 1960, nearly 35 percent of all women held jobs, including 7.5 million mothers with children under 17.” (Goldstein, pg 887) Women and their roles at home and in the workplace varied multiple tismes. During the Second World War they had filled the position of their brave men who had went to war, only to be kicked out of the workplace when they returned. They then made a comeback when the family life started to depend upon two salaries once again. The post war world was a thriving and life altering one.
The 1950s was a decade full of new inventions and beginnings. While there is still no actual cure for Polio, thanks to inventor Dr. Jonas Salk there is a way to prevent it. Polio attacks the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, which can cause paralysis or even death. Before Salk invented the vaccine for Polio, America was forced to live in fear of the infectious viral disease that put Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair. After working successfully on a sample group that included Salk, his wife and their three sons, a nationwide testing of the vaccine was launched in April 1954. The impact was dramatic: in 1955 there were 28,985 cases of polio in the U.S. and by 1957 that number had decreased to 5,894. In order for the polio vaccine to be easily accessible, Dr. Jonas Salk opted not to patent his invention. Because of his dedication, cases of polio are extremely rare in America today. For centuries, people have fought for social, economic and political equality and justice for many disadvantaged and excluded groups. A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries. During the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that “separate educational facilities” for black children were “inherently unequal.” Many Southern whites resisted the Brown ruling. They withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white “segregation academies,” and they used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights. In 1956, more than 100 Southern congressmen even signed a “Southern Manifesto” declaring that they would do all they could to defend segregation. Despite these efforts, a new movement was born. In December 1955, a Montgomery activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked a 13-month boycott of the city’s buses by its black citizens, which only ended when the bus companies stopped discriminating against African American passengers. Acts of “nonviolent resistance” like the boycott helped shape the civil rights movement of the next decade.
The economy of the 1950’s saw major changes, which in turn transformed the lives of the American people. Some lives were changed for the better, and some weren’t. As the economy was booming again, for the first time in almost 30 years, new forms of marketing promoted the already growing consumerist society. The booming economy, creation of credit cards, and technological advances all caused daily life was transformed. America saw many changes including what the appropriate roles were for each gender, with television programs heavily influencing the ideal role that women should play in the home. Family life and the role of women also underwent substantial changes as women joined the workforce and contributed to their family’s income. Urban cities also saw change with so called renewed cities. They were remodeled, often sparking unrest among minority groups, later on being areas of crises. Almost every area of American life was altered by the prosperous economy.