Affluent Society Flashcards
1944 GI Bill
Gives veterans cheap mortgages and college education
Stops post-war recession fears. MIddle class can buy houses.
Baby-boomers
140-200 million born 45-67
Where do they spend all the surplus wealth?
Disneyland 1955 for all the new kids, Las Vegas for the parents
Transportation
Eisenhower builds interstate highways, air travel displaces railroads
Suburbs
Levittown, Long Island - 17,500 houses built there in 1947. They all look pretty much the same, so people have to BUY shit to change them, make them their own. Assembly line construction
Housewives are miserable, lonely. No one knows anyone else.
American Culture
No longer looking to Europe, they start setting trends with Art from Warhol, Books by Arthur Miller and Ralph Ellison
Coca-Cola, Pepsi
Levi’s Jeans, GM, Ford, Exxon, Kodak
How does TV impact?
McCarthy Hearings in 1954, Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960, Vietnam coverage of Tet Offensive in 68, Apollo Landing 69
Outline Civil Rights Movement
Jackie Robinson first black player in MLB 1947
Truman integrates US Army 1948
Brown vs. Board of Education 1954 finds inherent inequality in black schools, but “all deliberate speed” order is so vague no one does anything
MLK
Reverend Dr. King 1929-68
Dexter Church in Montgomery Alabama
Gandhi non-violence
Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC
Rosa Parks
Won’t get up for white person on bus in 1955, arrested and fined. Bus Boycott organized.
March on Washington
August 27 1963. They want jobs and freedom. Influenced Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. up to 300k attended at the Lincoln Memorial
How did the South keep blacks from voting?
Publish registered voters, then KKK pays a visit, literacy tests, poll taxes, etc
