The American way of life in the fifties

Résumé du document

Between 1947 and 1960, the average real income for American workers increased by as much as it had in the previous half-century. Over the same period, the GDP soared 220%. Consumption of personal services increased by 3 times. In 1960, per capita income was 35% higher than even the boom year 1945. The GI Bill contributed to the building boom of the late 1940's and 1950's, thanks to the loans granted to veterans. The technological breakthrough increased productivity. R&D emerged as a major industry in its own right. In the mid-1950's, the American economy crossed the line from an industrial to a post-industrial state, with white-collar workers outnumbering blue-collar workers. And the vitality of the Labor movement was no doubt affected by that. Huge corporations created a new managerial personality which was called the Organization Man. It was as much involved in mastering the art of interpersonal relationship as in accomplishing its professional task.

Extraits

[...] Bounds of identity and collective commitment could counterbalance the pressure to make it, that rat race. Suburbia showed a frantic effort to find a sense of belonging which some perceived as artificial but it did not show a real attempt at developing forms of communal solidarity where they did not exist as a result as a common ethnic and regional tradition. ii) family life and sex roles The baby-boom became a large growth industry in the post-war America. The "New Family" was run by children. [...]

[...] One typical example of the new policy was about offshore oil fields which were removed from federal control and returned to the state where they could be more easily made available to oil companies. Yet Dwight D. Eisenhower also consolidated the social welfare programs of the New Deal, through the expansion of social security and unemployment compensations. He increased the minimum wage and established the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). The National Defence Educational Act, after USSR launched Spoutnik (1957) in outer space, injected federal dollars into the educational establishment. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a sense of instinctive compromise. [...]

[...] The cult of consensus which seemed to prevail in the 1960's upset many critics. Hofstadter said: "liberals are beginning to find it both natural and expedient to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of Conservatism. They find themselves far more conscious of those things they would like to preserve than they are of those things they would like to change". Some people worried that blandness and thinness of Dwight D. Eisenhower's style were extending to the whole culture. According to a student, Henry Steele Commajor, "the new loyalty was above all conformity; it is the uncritical acceptance of America as it is". [...]

[...] Between 1950 and million people moved to the suburbs. of the population lived in such areas by 1960. A famous social and architectural critic named Louis Mumford, who was very much concerned by man and his environment, described suburbia in those terms : multitude of uniformed and unidentifiable houses lined up inflexibly at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal wasteland, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group". Unprecedented mobility was another character of that period, with commuters in their cars, getting to the trains, going to their workplaces and back. [...]

[...] In 1960, per capita income was 35% higher than even the boom year 1945. The GI Bill contributed to the building boom of the late 1940's and 1950's, thanks to the loans granted to veterans. The technological breakthrough increased productivity. R&D emerged as a major industry in its own right. In the mid-1950's, the American economy crossed the line from an industrial to a post-industrial state, with white- collar workers outnumbering blue-collar workers. And the vitality of the Labour movement was no doubt affected by that. [...]