1950S American Suburbia

1950s American Suburbia

THE 1950S

“America at this moment,” said the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945, “stands at the summit of the world.” During the 1950s, it was easy to see what Churchill meant. The United States was the world’s strongest military power. Its economy was booming, and the fruits of this prosperity–new cars, suburban houses and other consumer goods–were available to more people than ever before. However, the 1950s were also an era of great conflict. For example, the nascent civil rights movement and the crusade against communism at home and abroad exposed the underlying divisions in American society.

THE POSTWAR BOOMS

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.” 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.”

DID YOU KNOW?

When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

After World War II ended, many Americans were eager to have children because they were confident that the future held nothing but peace 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. Much of this increase came from government spending: The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans’ benefits and most of all the increase in military spending–on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers–all contributed to the decade’s economic growth. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Middle-class people had more money to spend than ever–and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy.

MOVING TO THE SUBURBS

The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt (whose “Levittowns” in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most famous symbols of suburban life in the 1950s) 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.

These houses were perfect for young families–they had informal “family rooms,” open floor plans and backyards–and so suburban developments earned nicknames like “Fertility Valley” and “The Rabbit Hutch.” However, they were often not so perfect for the women who lived in them. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women. Advice books and magazine articles (“Don’t Be Afraid to Marry Young,” “Cooking To Me Is Poetry,” “Femininity Begins At Home”) 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. (In her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” women’s rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were “burying women alive.”) This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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.” This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow’s coffin.

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 COLD WAR

The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had what one American diplomat called “expansive tendencies”; moreover, they believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. As a result, communism needed to be “contained”–by diplomacy, by threats or by force. This idea shaped American foreign policy for decades.

It shaped domestic policy as well. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or “subversives,” could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. Between 1945 and 1952, Congress held 84 hearings designed to put an end to “un-American activities” in the federal government, in universities and public schools and even in Hollywood. These hearings did not uncover many treasonous activities–or even many communists–but it did not matter: Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, as well as their families and friends, in the anti-communist “Red Scare” of the 1950s.

SHAPING THE ’60S The booming prosperity of the 1950s helped to create a widespread sense of stability, contentment and consensus in the United States. However, that consensus was a fragile one, and it splintered for good during the tumultuous 1960s.

Adapted from http://www.history.com/topics/1950s Suburbia in the 1950s

Family Life in an Age of Anxiety

Peter Filene

In 1959, a builder of bomb shelters staged an interesting event. The builder invited newly married Melvin Mininson and his bride to enjoy an unusual kind of honeymoon. For fourteen days, which allegedly was “the crucial period of fallout danger,” the Mininsons would live in an eight- by fourteen-foot shelter twelve feet underground. Life magazine published a story about the event, complete with photographs of the Mininsons (in tuxedo and white wedding dress) happily kissing as they lowered themselves into the shelter. [August 10, 1959] I mention this story as a kind of parable for understanding post-World War Two America. The Cold War was not only taking place “out there,” beyond the shoreline. It was shaping events at home. It took the form of the Red Scare that we associate with Senator Joe McCarthy. But it hit even closer to home. The Cold War was infiltrating family life. Overtly there were the bomb shelters buried under backyards, and brothers or husbands being drafted to fight in the Korean War. Covertly, it lurked under the mental surface, in Americans’ subconscious, as a chronic anxiety.

1. SUBURBAN PARADISE

Back in World War Two, Rosie the Riveter seemed to be forecasting a women's movement for equal rights in the workplace. But when the war ended, the script for gender roles changed abruptly. Men wanted their jobs back. And women wanted to go home, or at least they were told they should go home. They had good reasons for doing so. They had endured ten years of the Great Depression, then four years of war, when they couldn’t easily afford to marry or have children. Now it was time to catch up with lost pleasures. First came a marriage boom. During 1945-55, the proportion of Americans who were married rose to unprecedented size.

Love and marriage and then, predictably, the baby carriage. Lots of carriages. For a century and a half the birth rate had been declining. In the 1940s it rose, and in the 1950s it rose even more steeply. This was an unprecedented baby boom. In 1945, 31percent of white women thought the ideal # of kids was four. In 1955, 41 percent. "Ray and I are just crazy about new little babies, and I love being pregnant." Just as predictably, a housing boom took place. Thirteen million new homes were built in 1950s to shelter these new families. Eleven million of them were built in the suburbs.

As early as 1950, one-third of Americans were living in a Cape Cod-style house among hundreds of other, almost identical houses. The most famous example was Levittown on Long Island outside New York City. Mr. Levitt built the largest housing development ever put up by a single builder. Before the first 600 houses were finished, customers were standing in line.

Within a few years, Levittown included 17,000 families, each living in a 750-square-foot house: living room, two bedrooms, and an unfinished attic waiting for the baby number three or four. These houses marked the growing prosperity of middle-class Americans in the postwar years. These were white families, I should note. Levittown, like most of the new suburban developments, banned blacks from living there (but they could work as maids or gardeners). It’s easy to be scornful of suburban life and values. Social critics then and since have objected to the conformity of suburban life. See The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which became a popular movie with Gregory Peck. Read the stories of John Cheever, or look at the cartoons in the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post. But the truth is more complicated. Listen to what suburbanites themselves had to say.

Here’s what a man told a sociologist about the lifestyle he and his wife found after moving out of the city into a suburban community. "We have learned not to be so introverted. Before we came here we used to live pretty much to ourselves. On Sundays, for instance, we used to stay in bed until around maybe two o'clock, reading the paper and listening to the symphony on the radio. Now we stop around and visit with people or they visit with us. I really think the experience has broadened us." [Wm. Chafe, UNFINISHED JOURNEY, 120]

A second critique focused specifically on suburban women. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, based on her interviews with college-educated housewives. She reported that these women tried to be content, pretended to be content, but in fact were unhappy for reasons they couldn’t identify. Friedan argued that housewives needed to escape from their “comfortable concentration camp” and enter the labor force where they would find self-fulfillment.

But again, if we listen to the women themselves, the truth is more complicated. For one thing, an unprecedented number of middle-class wives were already employed outside the home. Typically they were in part-time jobs, earning money to help pay for the mortgage or junior’s college education. Pollsters asked them: "What are some of the things you do which make you feel useful or important?” Only 60 percent of the employed wives found selfesteem in their jobs. What would they do if given a windfall of money? Women would use it NOT to travel, but to improve their homes.

Listen to Jane Hill’s letter to the Ladies' Home Journal:

“In late 1949 we led both our college classes in infant productivity. We think we still hold the title. Candy Terry and Debby—7, 5 and 4—and Brian, born last July. These are our kids, plus a pet duck and one turtle. “Of course we think we have the most wonderful daddy in all the world. Lately, he has been made captain of the Westminster National Guard Unit, and his duties have taken up much of his free time. his regular position is plant engineer at Congoleum, Inc. “I make all the kids' clothes, most of my own, and pajamas and neckties for Raymond, on my new sewing machine. “It's been fun telling you this. We live by you and your every helpful editors. My devoted passion for the Ladies' Home Journal is, I believe, just a natural woman's love for something womanly.”

What about the children of these seemingly contented suburban parents? If anyone in the family would be restless or rebellious amid this bland domestic environment, one would expect youth to be. But teenagers mimicked the values of their elders. Like their parents, they chose security over adventure. As the Ladies’ Home Journal reported in 1949, "every high school student must be prepared to fit into a pattern in which popularity, social acceptance and emotional security are often determined by the single question: do you go steady?"

A 1959 poll found that 57 percent of American teens had gone or were going steady. As a sign of her status, the girl wore her boy friend’s class ring or letter sweater or identity bracelet. She took on his identity! In rural Iowa, boy and girl wore matching corduroy jackets, merging. In other words, teenagers were auditioning for adulthood, enacting a premarital version of “togetherness.” As Nat King Cole sang in his hit song of the 1950s, “They tried to tell us we’re too young, too young to really be in love.”

[Beth Bailey, "Rebels without a Cause? Teenagers in the 1950s," History Today, 40 (Feb. 1990), 25- 31, reprinted in The American Record: Images of the Nation's Past, since 1941, ed. Wm. Graebner and Jacqueline Swansinger, 66-72.]

So far I’ve argued that, contrary to social critics at the time and since, suburban families were enjoying their lives. At least so the family members said. But now let me give the plot line another twist. Beneath the surface of prosperity, conformity and security, there was a fault line. Something wasn’t right.

In Cleveland in 1952, Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press, sat down at his typewriter and wrote an editorial. “What is wrong with us? It is in the air we breathe. The things we do. The things we say. Our books. Our papers. Out theater. Our movies. Our radio and television. The way we behave. The interests we have. The values we fix. “We have everything. We abound with all the things that make us comfortable. We are, on the average, rich beyond the dreams of the kinds of old.

Yet something is not there that should be—something we once had. “Are we our own worst enemies? Should we fear what is happening among us more than what is happening elsewhere? No one seems to know to do to meet it. But everybody worries.”

For days afterwards, Louis Seltzer’s life was a madhouse. Phone calls and letters flooded his office. Strangers stopped him on the street to wring his hand and tell him he sure had hit it right. Forty-one publications throughout the U.S. reprinted the editorial. [Eric Goldman, Crucial Decade, 218] Seltzer didn’t define what he had in mind. But in retrospect we can detect symptoms of an insidious anxiety. I’ll focus on four symptoms, one having to do with teenagers, another with women, a third with men, and the last with families.

1. YOUTH

During the early 1950s, Americans went through a panic about "juvenile delinquency." The FBI reported huge increases in juvenile crime. Boy Scouts, Elks, and church groups organized local anti- delinquency projects. Congressional committees held hearings on delinquency. Listen to Mrs. Louis Weber as she testified before a Senate subcommittee: "I am a mother of a teenage boy—a juvenile delinquent, to be exact. The cause is what they see on the screen in movies, on TV, reading those foul comic books that are sold in every drugstore, bookstore, or the corner news stand." Hollywood made sixty movies featuring juvenile delinquency. Among the better ones were:

• The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando

♣ Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Glen Ford and Sidney Poitier

It featured Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock" as the first rock-music score for a movie. The American Legion, Boy Scouts, and teacher organizations denounced the movie. Memphis banned it. ♣ Rebel without a Cause (1956) with James Dean.

But there were countless other grade-B movies that exploited the panic. For example, Rock All Night and Dragstrip Girl.

After watching these movies, a woman told the Senate subcommittee: "Isn't it a form of brainwashing? Brainwashing the minds of the people and especially the youth of our nation in filth and sadistic violence. What enemy technique could better lower patriotism and national morale than the constant presentation of crime and horror?" (Gilbert, 155) Listen to that last sentence again. What enemy technique could better lower patriotism and national morale. The panic about juvenile crime was a symptom of the fears about Communists. I call it a panic because the public alarm exaggerated the facts. In reality, crime rates and drug use by youth didn’t rise dramatically in the Fifties. But many Americans were ready to believe the worst because they were feeling anxious during the Cold War. A fallout shelter was supposed to make Mr. and Mrs. Mininson and the readers of Life magazine feel secure. But paradoxically, in so doing it also reminded them of reasons to feel insecure.

2. WOMEN

One of every three prescriptions was for a tranquilizer, esp. the newly invented Valium. And the great majority of those prescriptions were given to women. Betty Friedan was right. Evidently the readers of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping were not as contented as they claimed to be. [Wm. Leuchtenburg, Troubled Feast, 778]

3. MEN

Likewise, we find symptoms of discontent among men.

In 1953 a new magazine hit the newsstands and quickly attracted a large readership among men. The magazine was Playboy. As editor Hugh Hefner announced in the inaugural issue, Playboy offered men “a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” The magazine featured photos of naked large breasted women, ads for high-end consumer products, and articles about living a sophisticated bachelor ‘s lifestyle.

Alongside this urbane version of masculinity, a more traditional version also regained popularity. The western. More than 10 percent of all novels published in the 1950s were westerns. Eight of the top ten television shows were “horse operas.” Fifty-four western feature films were produced in 1958 alone. And who was the man that American men most admired in the Fifties and Sixties? John Wayne. [Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, 252-55]

If suburban wives wanted to be tranquilized, their husbands wanted to be energized. The organization men wanted to wriggle out of their gray flannel suits, at least in fantasy. No wonder parents were afraid that teenagers were running amok! They themselves were vicarious rebels without a cause.

4. FAMILIES So how would middle-class families resolve this internal conflict? They turned to religion. In the 1950s there was a religious boom. A greater proportion of Americans attended church than at any time in American history.

They sought a particular kind of spiritual answer. As the ads in buses said: "Bring your troubles to church and leave them there.” "The family that prays together stays together." The church would be a kind of fallout shelter protecting Americans against doubts and anxieties.

Religion would provide The Power of Positive Thinking. That was the title of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling book. "Flush out all depressing, negative and tired thoughts,” he wrote. “Start thinking faith, enthusiasm and joy." The Power of Positive Thinking was second on the best- seller list for two years in a row. Number one for both years was the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Religion also became government policy. In 1954, Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. A year later, it made "In God We Trust” mandatory on all U.S. currency. During the Cold War against godless Communism, the government was rallying Americans to trust in God…. but also to build bomb shelters in their back yards.

Conclusion

We need to look beneath the usual characterization of suburbia in the postwar era. Contrary to “Leave It to Beaver” and “Happy Days,” middle-class white Americans were struggling with anxiety. Outside their suburban refuge lurked the threat of Communism and war. Inside their minds lurked doubts about how they were living their lives. For the moment these discontents remained dormant or disguised.

They would erupt into social protest after 1960, after African Americans in the south launched their protests against segregation. Then the children of white suburbia would bring out in the open the discontents of their parents.

Adapted from http://www.dlt.ncssm.edu/lmtm/docs/suburbia/script.pdf