1945-1975 Ideological, social, regional and ethnic divisions: McCarthyism; civil rights; youth culture; protest and the mass media Flashcards
To what extent did the lifestyle of Americans change in the 1940s and 195052
This period saw the media, including the growing television network, applauding the nucleas fadily as the American ideal. It often deered women simply as homemakers and excluded ethnic groups except as stereotypes. This was slow to change. There were lots of young people — “baby boomers’ - and a market reflecting their interests began to develop.
What was the position of women like post WWII?
The Second World War had mixed results for the position of women. They had shown they could do jobs that traditionally had been male-dominated. Four US states made equal pay for women compulsory, while other states tried to protect women from discrimination in their jobs. In 1940, women made up 19 per cent of the workforce. This had risen to 28.8 per cent ten years later. Nevertheless, at the end of the war the majority of women willingly gave up their wartime jobs and returned to their role as mothers and wives and their traditional female jobs.
How influential was sterotyping on women?
The media appeared to both create and develop the stereotype of women as homemakers. Commentators cite the many periodicals aimed at women such as Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s, which were full of articles on cooking, fashion, homecare and how to keep your husband happy. Dr Spock, whose hugely influential books on childcare sold over a million copies every year throughout the 1950s, emphasised the need for a mother’s presence and love.
Adverts focused on the woman as housewife and mother. As with TV, the image the media portrayed was usually of white and middle-class women; working-class and ethnic minority women did not feature significantly. Many women’s magazines featured articles that emphasised the domestic role of women, although not all would go so far as Mrs Dale Carnegie, who asserted in McCall’s magazine in 1954 that there is simply no room for split-level thinking - or doing - when Mr and Mrs set their sights on a happy home, a host of friends and a bright future through success in HIS job.
The reality behind the stereotype may be more complex. While periodicals may have promoted a particular message, we have little idea how effectively they informed actual relationships. Writing in 2000, historian Nancy Walker has shown that even the persuasive view of the periodicals is simplistic.
Ladies’ Home Journal, for example, ran a series of articles How America lives, which did show the wide ethnic and class mix. She argues that the periodicals reflected the complexities of life more than they reinforced stereotypes. The magazine Redbook, for example, ran a $500 prize competition in 1960 inviting readers to write on ‘Why You Feel Trapped’. They received 24,000 entries.
While many women may have accepted a largely domestic role, many others either did not or felt frustrated and unfulfilled by it; the seeds were being sown here for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s.
What was work like for Women post-WWII?
Feminist Betty Friedan conducted research into the subsequent careers of former students of the exclusive all-female Smith College in 1957 and found that 89 per cent were homemakers. However, we should remember that her well-educated, wealthy respondents were hardly typical of women in the USA. Despite the stereotype of women staying in the home, the percentage of women in the labour force did increase in the 1950s from 33.8 per cent in 1950 to 37.8 per cent by the end of the decade. Opportunities for jobs with career advancement prospects had not noticeably increased. Unions did not generally favour women in the workforce - although they did support a campaign for better working conditions for waitresses.
The biggest increase of women in work was among those who were married - from 36 per cent in 1940 to 60 per cent by 1960. This may have been necessary to help make ends meet. Many commentators have shown that the consumer culture always left people wanting more - the latest model, the newest gadget - and advertising was so persuasive that luxury items became, in many people’s view, necessities. Writing in 1996, historian James I. Patterson has concluded that many women in the 1950s sought jobs more than careers, in order to supplement the family income. Clearly, however, this does not negate the effort many were prepared to make to rise in the profession of their choice.
However, women who went out to work instead of getting married were treated with great suspicion by the rest of society. Indeed, one very influential book, Modern Woman: the Lost Sex, actually blamed many of the social problems of the 1950s, such as teenage drinking and delinquency, on career women.
In the 1950s, growing numbers of women, especially from middle-class backgrounds, began to challenge their traditional role as they became increasingly frustrated with life as a housewife. There was more to life than bringing up children and looking after their husbands. Many female teenagers were strongly influenced by the greater freedom of the swinging sixties’ which, in turn, encouraged them to challenge traditional attitudes and roles.
Women were now much better educated so they could have a professional career. In 1950, there were 721,000 women at university. By 1960, this had reached 1.3 million. However, many of these had a very limited choice of career because, once they married, they were expected to devote their energies to their husband and children. Many became increasingly bored and frustrated with life as a suburban housewife.
How did Cinemas change post WWII?
Popular culture in the USA of the second half of the twentieth century was greatly influenced by the cinema and the increasing popularity of television.
The cinema
The cinema remained popular but less so than the inter-war years because of the influence of television. Average weekly cinema attendances fell from 90 million a week in 1946 to 47 million ten years later. However, the drive-in cinema, first opened in the 1930s, became very popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in rural areas, with some 4,000 drive-ins spreading across the United States. Among its advantages was the fact that a family with a baby could take care of their child while watching a movie, while teenagers with access to autos found drive-ins ideal for dates. In the 1950s, the greater privacy afforded to patrons gave drive-ins a reputation as immoral, and they were labelled ‘passion pits’ in the media.
In the period following the Second World War, young people wanted new and exciting symbols of rebellion. Hollywood responded to audience demands - the late 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of the anti-hero, with stars like newcomers James Dean, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando replacing more ‘proper actors like Tyrone Power, Van Johnson and Robert Taylor.
To what extent did television grow?
In 1954, water officials in the city of Toledo, Ohio began to investigate why there seemed to be huge upsurges in demand during random three-minute periods each evening. They solved the mystery when they correlated the mass flushing of toilets with commercial breaks on TV. By this time television was a national phenomenon. The number of sets had risen from 60,000 in 1947 to 37 million by 1955; three million were sold in just the first six months of 1950. By 1956, Americans spent $15.6 billion on the sale and repair of TV sets. The IV was the lynchpin of the home. 1954 saw the arrival of TV dinners so the family need not waste precious viewing time eating around the table.
What Programmes were popular?
Popular programmes were viewed by millions. By 1960, it is estimated that watching TV was the favourite leisure activity of half the population. It is estimated, too, that half the population saw Mary Martin take to the air as Peter Pan in a 1955 spectacular. A regular audience of 50 million watched I Love Lucy. Comedienne Lucille Ball broke the stereotypical mould of passive females, being both performer and producer. In 1953, she was awarded an $8 million contract. The irony was I Love Lucy itself was about a dizzy blonde who created comic mayhem wherever she went.
Many sitcoms celebrated the American family as the heart of the USA - Leave it to Beaver, for example, showed the boy Beaver learning that mum and dad were always right and life for those outside a family group was uncertain and unpleasant. In this sense, family values and the position of the sexes was always reinforced with mum as the homemaker and dad going out to work - such as the Donna Reed Show where housewife Donna always saved the day with her good sense and quiet manner.
Television became a huge factor in popular culture not only in the USA but throughout the world. Studios grew large and impressive, rivalling those of film, and major actors such as Loretta Young and Ray Milland were recruited to TV.
How did Youth culture change?
In 1950, 41.6 per cent of the population was under 24 and, in 1960, 44.5 per cent. Teenagers were increasingly seen as a discrete group with common interests and concerns. As a market developed to cater for their interests, they seemed to look and act differently to their parents.
These changes were due to several factors:
Young people in the 1950s had far more money to spend than any previous generation of teenagers had had and companies responded with new products specifically targeted towards them. In 1957, it was estimated that the average teenager had between $10 and $15 a week to spend, compared with 1-2 dollars in the 1940s. Teenagers’ annual spending power climbed from $10 billion in 1950 to $25 billion in 1959.
Many teenagers were influenced by the youth films of the 1950s. Rebel Without a Cause was the first film to appeal specifically to a teenage audience. As such, it was also the first film to address the issue of a generation gap. The film made a cult hero of James Dean, the more so as he was killed in a car accident in 1955 aged only 24. Dean plays a character who rebels against his parents, even coming to blows with his father, and gets in trouble with the local police for drunkenness.
The establishment of rock and roll music was a crucial development, for it gave teenagers music of their own to listen to, instead of having to listen to their parents’ type of music. The more parents disliked the new music, the more popular it was with teenagers. In 1956, Elvis Presley erupted onto the pop music scene, singing songs that broke all sales records, such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog. He was a phenomenal success with teenagers, while their parents and teachers deplored his sensual style of performing, his tight jeans and his permanent sneer.
The increasing popularity of television also opened teenagers up to a new world that they didn’t know about. These new experiences that teenagers were having made them realise that they were their own person, and they could do their own thing if they wanted. They didn’t have to follow the same path as their parents.
To what extent was there a teenage rebellion?
However, there were increasing concerns that young people were out of control. Evidence was presented of gang fights, teenage drunkenness and disrespectful behaviour toward adults. In 1956, the number of murders carried out by teenagers in New York rose by 26 per cent over the previous year. So-called experts from various academic disciplines, particularly psychology, argued that aberrant behaviour could be cured once the problem was recognised. They offered various explanations of delinquency.
In 1954, psychologist Frederic Wertham published The Seduction of the Innocent, which exposed the violence and brutality of comic books that sold in their millions. After this, in fact, the content of comics was moderated but not before thirteen states passed laws regulating their publication, distribution and sale.
Some experts offered the explanation of poor role models, particularly the depiction of rebellious behaviour in movies such as Laszlo Benedek’s The Wild One (1954) and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The former is about a motorcycle gang who terrorise a sleepy town. When asked what he is rebelling against, their leader, played by Marlon Brando, answers, ‘What you got?’ It was argued that there was a link between violence and rebellion on the screen and in real life.
Others argued there were too many latch-key kids’ whose parents were always out at work so exercised little control. The Senate was so concerned that it held hearings on delinquent behaviour throughout the decade.
Although teenagers in the first half of the 1950s may have had more money than their predecessors - the teenage market was reported to be worth $10 billion per year by 1955 - most were just as conservative and deferential.
It should be remembered, too, that one-half of male teenagers during the course of the 1950s were drafted into the armed forces where discipline and traditional values were vigorously reinforced. Meanwhile the average age of marriage, young in itself in 1940 at 21.5 years, reduced even lower to 20.3 years; comparatively young women became housewives and mothers. While teenage rebellion was to become a much wider phenomenon as the decade progressed, there were in the early years of the 1950s few real signs of its stirrings - certainly not in middle-class white America.
Why was there a growing fear of Communism in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s?
In the years following the Second World War there was growing rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union due partly to the American fear of the spread of Communism. The USA felt vulnerable against Communist influence at home too. The US Communist Party had never attracted more than 100,000 supporters and far fewer actual members. There was, however, a fear that if such supporters were in influential positions they could do untold damage within the USA.
How did External developments lead to the Red Scare?
Developments outside the USA increased the fear of Communism. The fall of China to the Communists in 1949 was unexpected and some felt the State Department could have done more to prevent it. This led to the creation of a powerful ‘China lobby’, which campaigned for action against the new Communist regime and also a detailed investigation to discover how the USA had come to let it fall. Pat McCarran, a Democratic Senator from Nevada, was a key figure in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that tried to persuade people that China had fallen to Communism as a result of the work of secret Communist infiltrators within the State Department.
In addition, the development of the Cold War in Europe in the years after 1945 and increasing US involvement in Asia, particularly the Korean War, intensified the fear of the spread of Communism to the USA.
How did developments in the USA lead to the Red Scare?
There was a series of spy scandals in Britain, Canada and the USA that scared the Americans. A British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, was convicted of giving nuclear secrets to the USSR. One of his associates, Harry Gold, was arrested on the same charge in the USA. It was felt the USSR had been able to develop its own nuclear weapons so quickly through the infiltration of Soviet agents into the Manhattan Project. Scientists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for giving away atomic secrets. One Soviet official wrote that they acquired the necessary information about how the atomic bombs were made in the USA and what they were made of in Britain. There was no doubt that Communists had infiltrated many branches of US government during the war; the Soviets later claimed that they had 221 operatives spying in the various branches of government. It was, however, the trial of Alger Hiss that really caught the public imagination.
What was the Alger Hiss trial?
A former Communist, Whittaker Chambers was now editor of Time magazine, which was particularly anti-Communist. He accused Hiss of being a Communist during his time at the State Department, which he had joined in 1936. Hiss had been an important official who had been a key figure at the Yalta Conference. When Hiss sued Chambers, the latter was able to produce evidence that suggested Hiss had in fact handed over copies of secret documents to the Soviets in 1938. While Hiss’s alleged treason had been too far in the past for him to be prosecuted for it, he was nevertheless found guilty of perjury for lying to the court and sentenced to five years imprisonment.
How did the Alger Hiss trial lead toa widespread accusations of communism in high places in the USA?
The case led to widespread accusations of Communism in high places in the USA.
In 1947, President Truman appeared to fuel these charges by introducing the Loyalty Review Board to check up on government employees. Any found to be sympathetic to ‘subversive organisations’ could be fired. Within four years at least 1,200 had been dismissed and a further 6,000 resigned. Over 150 organisations were banned, of which 110 were accused of supporting Communism. Eleven leaders of the Communist Party were prosecuted under the 1940 Smith Act and sentenced to up to five years in prison. It was argued that their beliefs suggested they would try to overthrow the government in the USA; they had not actually done anything.
In 1949, the USSR exploded their first nuclear weapon. The USA had therefore lost its monopoly on atomic weapons. President Truman said the USA would seek to develop a hydrogen bomb, with as much as a thousand times the power of an atomic bomb. When this weapon was finally tested in 1954, both sides were entering into an arms race and developing weapons of mass destruction that could, if used, have led to the end of the world.
What was Mcarthyism?
Joseph McCarthy was the hard-drinking and previously insignificant junior Senator for Wisconsin. On 9 February 1950, he made a speech in which he said the State Department was infested with spies. Although he hadn’t a shred of evidence to back up his claims, many listened and believed him.
The speech saw the inauguration of a witch-hunt against members of the State Department, other public servants, and finally the army. In 1953, McCarthy was subsequently given control of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its subcommittee on Investigations. His team included the future Senator, Bobby Kennedy.
At first McCarthy was highly successful. No one in the public eye seemed safe from his accusations and McCarthy became one of the most popular men in the USA. He gained support from such diverse groups as the American Legion and Christian fundamentalists. Much of his support was also derived from the less well-educated and less affluent members of society; those of whom, it is often alleged, would be more prepared to believe simplistic conspiracy theories.
These were also the groups that had supported the attacks against the well-off members of the State Department.
Many argued that New Deal measures were Communist inspired and these now came under renewed attack. Those advocating civil rights measures, support for the United Nations and any redistribution of wealth could all be accused of having Communist sympathies. Indeed, the fear of Communism gripped the USA to almost ridiculous proportions. One school librarian in Indiana banned books about Robin Hood because she said in robbing the rich to give to the poor, his story promoted Communism. Many books including classics were reexamined for subversive content.
What was Mcarthys downfall?
However, it was McCarthy’s manner and accusations that saw his downfall.
Not only did he condemn such highly respected figures as General George Marshall, who had introduced Marshall Aid, but in 1954 he also began to investigate the army as hiding a possible nest of Communists. In so doing, he appeared to criticise an institution until recently embroiled in a full-scale war against Communism in Korea: the very thing he was accusing its members of supporting.
Millions saw the hearings on the new medium of television in December 1954 where they turned against the bullying tactics of McCarthy, who also appeared at times to be drunk. Children mocked his manner at school and in the streets; but generally his audiences saw he was completely bereft of any hard evidence to support his accusations. The army’s attorney, Joseph Welch, stood up to McCarthy when he accused a junior member of Welch’s team of having belonged to an organisation that he claimed had been pro-Communist, while at college. He accused McCarthy of attacking people without a shred of evidence in support. President Eisenhower, a former military commander, was critical of McCarthy’s investigation of the army. However, the tables appeared to turn in particular when McCarthy himself was accused of seeking preferential treatment for one of his aides who had been drafted into the army. He was censured by the Senate and returned to obscurity until his death from alcoholism in 1957. The ‘Red Scare, which he had done so much to exaggerate, gradually died away.
To what extent did the lives of Native Americans change, 1945-60?
During the war, 25,000 Native Americans served in the armed forces and a further 40,000 worked in war production. This meant many left the reservations to live in the same way as other groups in the cities and production centres. Meanwhile, there were concerns that the reservations were no longer viable, that too many Native Americans were living in poverty, and this was no longer acceptable in a wealthy society. Indian Commissioner John Collier had suggested as early as 1941 that reservation life would not be able to accommodate returning servicemen and their families in adequate living standards. The following year he began to hint at a return to assimilation.
What was Termination?
In 1944, the Indian Claims Commission was set up to offer financial compensation to Native Americans for claims for lost lands - but not to return the lands themselves. The idea was to compensate Native Americans for past exploitation as a prelude to their taking their place as American citizens. As President Truman said, ‘With the final settlement of all outstanding claims which this measure ensures, Indians can take their place without special handicaps or special advantages in the economic life of our nation and share fully in its progress.
However, it was under the administration of President Eisenhower that termination really developed apace. In August 1953, a House Concurrent Resolution, Number 108, announced the termination policy: that the reservations should be broken up and Native Americans encouraged to move to urban areas to live like other American citizens. Native Americans weren’t consulted. The idea was effectively that federal government would absolve itself of any responsibility for Native Americans as a separate group. Their lands would be sold off and the profits distributed among tribal members who would go to urban areas to find work and live as normal US citizens.
Termination began with the sale of valuable lands belonging to the Menominee and Klamath tribes in Wisconsin and Oregon respectively. The whole policy of termination was a disaster from the start. It was a case of federal government ridding itself of its responsibilities in an attempt to save money, of cutting Native Americans loose without any real effort to acclimatise them to urban lite.
Many who left the reservations drifted into unemployment and alcoholism and gradually began to move back. By 1960, only 13,000 out of 400,000 Native Americans had moved permanently and only three per cent of reservation land had been lost. The policy was abandoned but it left a lasting ill-feeling that would develop in the 1960s into Red Power and more militant Native American action. Hispanics, too, were to develop more militant strategies to combat exploitation in the 1960s, but the 1950s saw a more passive stance.
