Postwar America: 1950 to 1969 (Handbook to Life in America, Vol VIII)

305 Pages·2009·12.38 MB·English

by  Rodney P. Carlisle

Volume VIII
Postwar America
1950 to 1969
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Volume VIII
Postwar America
1950 to 1969
Rodney P. Carlisle

general editor
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Handbook to Life in America: Postwar America, 1950 to 1969
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbooks to life in America / Rodney P. Carlisle, general editor.
v. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The colonial and revolutionary era, beginnings to 1783—v. 2. The early
national period and expansion, 1783 to 1859—v. 3. The Civil War and Reconstruction,
1860 to 1876—v. 4. The Gilded Age, 1870 to 1900—v. 5. Age of reform, 1890 to 1920—v.
6. The roaring twenties, 1920 to 1929—v. 7. The Great Depression and World War II,
1929 to 1949—v. 8. Postwar America, 1950 to 1969—v. 9. Contemporary America, 1970
to present.
ISBN 978-0-8160-7785-4 (set : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7174-6 (v. 1 : hc : alk.
paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7175-3 (v. 2 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7176-0 (v. 3 :
hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7177-7 (v. 4 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7178-
4 (v. 5 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7179-1 (v. 6 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-
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978-0-8160-7182-1 (v. 9 : hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-2699-9 (e-book) 1. United
States—Civilization—Juvenile literature. 2. United States—History—Juvenile literature. 3.
National characteristics, American—Juvenile literature. I. Carlisle, Rodney P.
E169.1.H2644 2008
973—dc22
2008012630
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Contents
Volume VIII
Postwar America
1950 to 1969
preface vii
1 IntroductIon 1
2 FamIly and daIly lIFe 21
3 materIal culture 37
4 SocIal attItudeS 53
5 cItIeS and urban lIFe 67
6 rural lIFe 81
7 relIgIon 97
8 educatIon 109
9 ScIence and technology 123
10 entertaInment and SportS 141
11 crIme and VIolence 157
12 labor and employment 175
13 mIlItary and WarS 193
14 populatIon trendS and mIgratIon 213
15 tranSportatIon 227
16 publIc health, medIcIne,
and nutrItIon 241
INDeX 255
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Preface
“. . . the greatest tragedy of this period . . . was not the strident clamor of
the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
the FlaVor oF daily life in previous eras is usually only vaguely conveyed by
examining the documents of state and the politics of the era. What people ate,
how they spent their time, what entertainment they enjoyed, and how they
related to one another in family, church, and employment, constituted the
actual life of people, rather than the distant affairs of state. While governance,
diplomacy, war, and to an extent, the intellectual life of every era tends to
be well-documented, the way people lived is sometimes difficult to tease out
from the surviving paper records and literary productions of the past.
For this reason in recent decades, cultural and social historians have turned
to other types of physical documentation, such as illustrations, surviving ar-
tifacts, tools, furnishings, utensils, and structures. Statistical information can
shed light on other aspects of life. Through examination of these and other
kinds of evidence, a wholly different set of questions can be asked and tenta-
tively answered.
This series of handbooks looks at the questions of daily life from the per-
spective of social and cultural history, going well beyond the affairs of gov-
ernment to examine the fabric and texture of what people in the American
past experienced in their homes and their families, in their workplaces and
schools. Their places of worship, the ways they moved from place to place,
the nature of law and order and military service all varied from period to
period. As science and technology advanced, the American contributions to
those fields became greater and contributed to a different feel of life. Some
of this story may be familiar, as historians have for generations commented
vii
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viii Postwar America
on the disparity between rural and city life, on the impact of technologies
such as the cotton gin, the railroad and the steamboat, and on life on the
advancing frontier. However in recent decades, historians have turned to dif-
ferent sources. In an approach called Nearby History, academic historians
have increasingly worked with the hosts of professionals who operate local
historical societies, keepers of historic homes, and custodians of local records
to pull together a deeper understanding of local life. Housed in thousands of
small and large museums and preserved homes across America, rich collec-
tions of furniture, utensils, farm implements, tools, and other artifacts tell a
very different story than that found in the letters and journals of legislators,
governors, presidents, and statesmen.
FreSh dIScoVerIeS
Another approach to the fabric of daily life first flourished in Europe, through
which historians plowed through local customs and tax records, birth and
death records, marriage records, and other numerical data, learning a great
deal about the actual fabric of daily life through a statistical approach. Aided
by computer methods of storing and studying such data, historians have
developed fresh discoveries about such basic questions as health, diet, life-
expectancy, family patterns, and gender values in past eras. Combined with a
fresh look at the relationship between men and women, and at the values of
masculinity and femininity in past eras, recent social history has provided a
whole new window on the past.
By dividing American history into nine periods, we have sought to pro-
vide views of this newly enriched understanding of the actual daily life of
ordinary people. Some of the patterns developed in early eras persisted into
later eras. And of course, many physical traces of the past remain, in the form
of buildings, seaports, roads and canals, artifacts, divisions of real estate,
and later structures such as railroads, airports, dams, and superhighways.
For these reasons, our own physical environment is made up of overlapping
layers inherited from the past, sometimes deeply buried, and at other times
lightly papered over with the trappings of the present. Knowing more about
the many layers from different periods of American history makes every trip
through an American city or suburb or rural place a much richer experi-
ence, as the visitor sees not only the present, but the accumulated heritage
of the past, silently providing echoes of history.
Thus in our modern era, as we move among the shadowy remnants of a
distant past, we may be unconsciously receiving silent messages that tell us:
this building is what a home should look like; this stone wall constitutes the
definition of a piece of farmland; this street is where a town begins and ends.
The sources of our present lie not only in the actions of politicians, generals,
princes, and potentates, but also in the patterns of life, child-rearing, educa-
tion, religion, work, and play lived out by ordinary people.
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Preface ix
Volume VIII: poStWar amerIca
The two decades from 1950 to 1969 saw the burgeoning of the Cold War
between the United States and its allies on the one side and the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics and its satellite nations on the other side. Overseas,
Americans fought in Korea (1950–53) and increasingly in Vietnam, from 1964
on through the period. A massive arms race with the Soviet Union led to the
development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weap-
ons, neither ever deployed in combat in the 20th century. In fact, the stand-
off in terrible weapons of mass destruction was widely credited with keeping
the two nations and their allies at peace, with the only conflicts fought in the
“proxy” wars in Korea and Vietnam, and in low-level insurgencies and civil
wars in Africa and Latin America. The two decades were a period of increas-
ing prosperity, further technological change, and a society marked by wide-
spread upheavals that left the country profoundly changed.
A Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Topeka, in 1954 brought an end to the
court’s support for the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had been used to
justify racial segregation in schools and in other public facilities since 1896.
However, since state and federal legislation had not outlawed such practices,
to overthrow racial segregation required that court cases be fought, one by
one, to ensure integration in such facilities. The result was the “Civil Rights
revolution” through the decade 1954–64, in which advocates of racial jus-
tice, both black and white, risked arrest or violence by violating local rules,
laws, and customs that enforced racial segregation. Finally, in 1964 and 1965,
federal legislation outlawed segregation in public facilities, prohibited racial
discrimination in employment and housing, and ensured the right to vote.
Over the next decade, the forces of the federal government could be brought
to bear to work toward more equal treatment.
As part of the backlash against racial integration, many white communi-
ties, both in the South and the North, sought to establish private schools that
would be open to white pupils only. Christian academies flourished, but at the
same time, racial segregation by neighborhood and community meant that
many public schools, while technically open to all races, were in point of fact
nearly all-white or all-black in student population. To overcome this segrega-
tion by housing pattern, some districts initiated school busing programs to
move black students to formerly all-white schools, such as a program initi-
ated in Milwaukee in 1958. As other communities followed suit, and as courts
sometimes ordered integration through school-busing programs, these ef-
forts became extremely controversial in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The generation of activists who had fought for the gains in racial equality
soon turned to other causes, and the mid and late 1960s saw the rise of unrest
on college campuses over governance of the institutions and over the mili-
tary draft. The younger generation of Baby Boomers born after World War II
first began to come into adulthood in the 1960s, and unlike their parents, this
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