By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
The Second World War bore witness to a dramatic redistribution of income throughout the American society. Good wages, full employment, and generous veterans’ benefits contributed to a transformation of everyday life.
The Affluent Society
The title of economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s book gave a name to the era: The Affluent Society. America sprawled in the 1950s and became, incomparably, the wealthiest society in the entire history of the world. How?
Achieving ‘Social Balance’?
In America, high incomes and widespread possession of cars among working people enabled them to buy houses in the proliferating new suburbs, which grew very rapidly in this period. The high birth rate created the baby boom, while consumer goods manufacturers and advertisers took advantage of steady rises in available discretionary income.
Anxiety about the Cold War peril was offset by domestic luxury, and a sense of almost boundless technologically enhanced possibilities for the future.
In addition, the Soviet Union’s surprise victory in the space race in 1957 led to a new American dedication to education in science and technology.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
A New Depression?
Meanwhile, Galbraith reminded Americans that they’d not yet achieved ‘social balance’ in the expenditure of their newfound wealth.
It stemmed from the fear during the war, that, just as depression conditions seemed to be permanent in the 1930s, maybe the Depression would come back again as soon as the war had ended and demand sank. That, however, didn’t happen.
Far more people were prosperous than ever before. Of course, there were still poor people in America but poverty was becoming the aberration.
When it came to education, the GI Bill, passed unanimously by Congress in 1944, enabled war veterans to gain low-cost education, and very favorable terms on mortgages to buy their own homes. Eight million veterans took advantage of its provisions to go to college.
About five million took advantage of the low-interest loans to buy their own homes. The combined effect of these was to dramatically raise the number of Americans graduating from college every year, from about 160,000 per year in the 1930s to 500,000 per year, half a million college graduates, by 1950.
Levittown: A Prefabricated Suburban Community
Along with the education was this new pattern of residence. New suburbs sprawled across the American landscape. One of the most famous was Levittown, a mass-produced suburban community, prefabricated and then built at very, very high speed.
William Levitt did the same kind of innovations in the housing business that Henry Kaiser had done in building the Liberty Ships. That is, standardizing the models, prefabricating the components, and then erecting them much more quickly than ever before.
Suburban Communities Lacked Individuality
In 1947, Levittown was built and opened, 17,500 new houses, a sort of instant city. It was a great achievement to suddenly build this new town. The great complaint of dwellers in new suburban communities was that very often, their houses lacked individuality.
They were too similar to one another. Of course, though, it wasn’t long before the individual dwellers in these houses did everything they could to find ways to vary them.
Tom Wolfe wrote, about 30 years later, about the way in which the first-generation American suburbanites decorated their own homes. He said:
They added gaslight-style front porch lamps, and mailboxes set up on lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity. The more cute and antique-y touches, the better. And they loaded these houses with drapes such as baffled all description, and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in. And they put barbecue pits and fishponds in, with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back. And they had Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.
Automobiles and Air Conditioning
Tom was getting to the heart of something. Many areas of America were growing rapidly, especially the area that is now called the Sunbelt. That is cities like San Diego and Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas, Atlanta, and Miami. These are low-population cities; cities built with the automobile in mind right from the beginning.
Rather than having concentrated downtowns like the old industrial cities had had, these are places where the governing assumption is people will use automobiles to get around, and so everybody can have a little patch of land on which their house will be built, and it’ll all be spread out.
Thus, the car had made living in the Sunbelt possible, but so had the perfection of air conditioning, which is also one of the goods at first a luxury, quickly becoming a necessity, which spread very rapidly in the 1950s and early 1960s. It made life in the South much more bearable than it ever had been previously, and contributed to a population rise.
Common Questions about America in the 1950s
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose book The Affluent Society gave a name to the era, reminded Americans that they’d not yet achieved ‘social balance’ in the expenditure of their newfound wealth.
William Levitt did the same kind of innovations in the housing business that Henry Kaiser had done in building the Liberty Ships. That is, standardizing the models, prefabricating the components, and then erecting them much more quickly than ever before.
The car had made living in the Sunbelt possible, but so had the perfection of air conditioning, which is also one of the goods at first a luxury, quickly becoming a necessity, which spread very rapidly in the 1950s and early 1960s.
