The Postwar Years at Home

1
The Postwar Years at Home

• Chapter 27

2
Businesses Reorganize

• Per capita income up
• GNP doubles
• Economic growth
• Conglomerates Large corporations that owns
  smaller ones (ATT)
• Franchises right to open business under parent
  company
• Ray Kroc mass produces hamburgers rise of
  fast food industry!

3
Technology Transforms Life

• Television
• ABC, CBS, and NBC
• I Love Lucy, Mickey Mouse Club
• Computers developed during war
• Transistor circuit device
• Reduced size of machines
• Nuclear Power - electricity
• Advances in Medicine
• Polio vaccine Jonas Salk
• Antibiotics - bacteria
• Surgery new techniques

4
Workforce, Suburbs, Highways

• White collar jobs switch service industries
• Baby boom
• Moving to the Suburbs
• GI Bill College low interest loans for houses
• Levittowns suburban cloned homes
• Cars and Highways
• Interstate Highway Act 1956
• Credit Cards status symbol consumer goods again

5
The Mood of the 1950s

• Comfort and Security
• Youth Culture silent generation carefree
• A Resurgence of Religion
• Response to godless communism
• Billy Graham
• Women support role, raise children, in suburbia
  w/new ovens
• Men work and support the family
• Dr. Benjamin Spock child rearing importance of
  Mother
• Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique
  challenged roles

6
Challenges to Conformity

• Rock and Roll Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill
  Haley
• Elvis Presley
• Beatniks rebelled against conformity
  rebellious
• Jack Kerouac

7
Domestic Politics and Policy

• Truman
• People wanted goods, wage hikes
• Took steps against labor
• Taft-Hartley Act 80 day cooling off period
• Fair Deal extension of New Deal p. 780
• Reelected in 1948
• Ike 1952 K1,C2 (Korea, Communism, Corruption)
• Nixon VP cut spending, reduce gov., reduce
  taxes, modern republicanism
• Checkers speech

8
Demands for Civil Rights

• Truman active in civil rights, banned
  discrimination in hiring met opposition
• Jackie Robinson
• Brown v. Board of Ed. 1954
• Montgomery bus boycott Rosa Parks
• Little Rock Gov. Faubus posted national guard
  troops at school to prevent integration
• Eisenhower places them under federal control.