Unit 21: 1950s

• Unit 8 1950s


  • Consumerism
  • The Culture of the Car
  • Levittown track homes of the 1950s
  • Suburbia
  • Television
  • Teen Culture
  • Religious Revival
  • Well-Defined Gender Roles
  • The Baby Boom
  • Household products marketed to women
  • Connection to Cold War ideologies
  • Changing Sexual Behavior
  • Progress Through Science
• Consumerism


  1950s Trivia
• The Culture of the Car

  • Car registrations: 1945 🡪 25,000,000, 1960 �� 60,000,000
  • 2-family cars doubles from 1951-1958
  • 1956 🡪 Interstate Highway Act, largest public works project in American history! Cost $32 billion, 41,000 miles of new highways built
  • 1959 Chevy Corvette
  • 1958 Pink Cadillac
  • First McDonald's (1955)
  • America became a more homogeneous nation because of the automobile
  • Drive-In Movies
  • Howard Johnson's
• The U. S. population was on the move in the 1950s
• NE & Mid-W


  S & SW ("Sunbelt" states)
• 1955 🡪 Disneyland opened in Southern California. (40% of the guests came from outside California, most by car)
• Levittown track homes of the 1950s

  • G.I. Bill
  • Mass-produced, affordable homes, $7,990 or $60/month with no down payment
  • Great Migration and "white flight"
  • Little Boxes lyrics, What is the message about society?
  • Racism in Levittown, PA
• Suburbia


  • Glossy view of mostly middle-class suburban life
  • Social Winners?...AND...Losers?
• Television


  • 1946 🡪 7,000 TV sets in the U. S., 1950 🡪 50,000,000 TV sets in the U. S.
  • Mass Audience 🡪 TV celebrated traditional American values
  • Television is a vast wasteland. 🡪 Newton Minnow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, 1961
  • Truth, Justice, and the American Way!
  • Family Togetherness
  • Reinforce and challenge conformity, status and materialism
• Television - The Western

  • Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier
  • The Lone Ranger (and his faithful sidekick, Tonto): Who is that masked man??
  • Sheriff Matt Dillon, Gunsmoke
• Television - Family Shows

  • I Love Lucy
  • The Honeymooners
• A photo of the Cleaver family from Leave it to Beaver, a popular TV show in the 1950s-60s
• Teenager


  • The word "teenager" entered the American language in the 1950s
  • By 1956 🡪 13 million teens w $7 billion to spend/year
• Rock 'n' Roll


  • 1951 🡪 "race music" 🡪 "ROCK 'N ROLL" (Alan Freed)
  • Elvis Presley 🡪 "The King"
  • Radio now a music-dominated medium
  • Established record companies offered toned-down white "cover" versions that frequently outsold the originals
  • Chuck Berry
• Juvenile Delinquency


  • Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953)
  • James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
  • 1951 🡪 J. D. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye
  • Psychologists and popular writers began to address "teen" issues and advised parents on how to raise teenagers
  • Some linked rock 'n' roll to juvenile delinquency
• The "Beat" Generation


  • Jack Kerouac 🡪 On The Road
  • Allen Ginsberg 🡪 poem, "Howl"
  • Neal Cassady
  • William S. Burroughs
  • "Beatnik"
  • "Clean" Teen
  • Articulated some of the sharpest dissents from conformity, celebrating spontaneity, jazz, open sexuality, drug use, and American outcasts
• Behavioral Rules of the 1950s

  • Obey Authority
  • Control Your Emotions
  • Don't Make Waves 🡪 Fit in with the Group
  • Don't Even Think About Sex!!!
• Ironically, teenagers were torn between their identification with youth culture and the desire to become adults as quickly as possible
• 1950s Slang
• Religious Revival


  • Today in the U. S., the Christian faith is back in the center of things. -- Time magazine, 1954
  • Church membership: 1940 🡪 64,000,000, 1960 🡪 114,000,000
  • Television Preachers: 1. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 🡪 "Life is Worth Living", 2. Methodist Minister Norman Vincent Peale 🡪 The Power of Positive Thinking, 3. Reverend Billy Graham 🡪 ecumenical message; warned against the evils of Communism
• Hollywood


  • Apex of the biblical epics
  • It's un-American to be un-religious! - The Christian Century, 1954
  • The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur
• Well-Defined Gender Roles


  • The ideal modern woman married, cooked and cared for her family, and kept herself busy by joining the local PTA and leading a troop of Campfire Girls. She entertained guests in her family's suburban house and worked out on the trampoline to keep her size 12 figure. - Life magazine, 1956
  • Marilyn Monroe
  • The ideal 1950s man was the provider, protector, and the boss of the house. - Life magazine, 1955
  • 1956 🡪 William H. Whyte, Jr. 🡪 The Organization Man, a middle-class, white suburban male is the ideal
  • Dating Dos and Donts
• The Baby Boom


  • 1957 🡪 1 baby born every 7 seconds
  • Photograph, 1955 HOW TO BE A GOOD HOUSEWIFE, How is this an ideal image of domestic life for American women?
• Household products marketed to women

  • A 1950s ad for an electric iron
  • A 1950s ad for a cleaning product
• Compare the graphs in Document F and Document I

  Write a statement linking the two graphs
• Documents F and I

  Write a statement connecting the two documents
• Harper's Weekly article, 1953: How do women feel about domestic life?
• The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan: How have women changed over the past 20+ years?
• Connection to Cold War ideologies

  • To support of larger families and high rates of consumer spending, a growing number of married, middle-class women sought employment
  • But this destroyed the traditional family (linked to the threat of communism)
  • High-profile experts weighed in with popular books and articles about the dangers of women who abandoned their housewife roles
  • Conservative trend was also evident in declining numbers of woman college graduates
• Men and women often worked side by side in the Soviet Union, where 75% of women were working full time jobs by the 1950s
• Changing Sexual Behavior


  • Alfred Kinsey: 1948 🡪 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1953 🡪 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
  • Premarital sex was common
  • Extramarital affairs were frequent among married couples
  • Kinsey's results are an assault on the family as a basic unit of society, a negation of moral law, and a celebration of licentiousness. - Life magazine, early 1950s
• Progress Through Science


  • 1951 -- First IBM Mainframe Computer
  • 1952 -- Hydrogen Bomb Test
  • 1953 -- DNA Structure Discovered
  • 1954 -- Salk Vaccine Tested for Polio
  • 1957 -- First Commercial U. S. Nuclear Power Plant
  • 1958 -- NASA Created
  • 1959 -- Press Conference of the First 7 American Astronauts
• 1957 🡪 Russians launch SPUTNIK I
• 1958 🡪 National Defense Education Act
• UFO Sightings


  • Skyrocketed in the 1950s
  • Hollywood used aliens as a metaphor for whom??
• Atomic Anxieties


  • Duck-and-Cover Generation
  • Duck and Cover (1951)
  • Atomic Testing: 1946-1962 🡪 U.S. exploded 217 nuclear weapons over the Pacific and in Nevada
• The postwar era witnessed tremendous economic growth and rising social contentment and conformity. Yet in the midst of such increasing affluence and comfortable domesticity, social critics expressed
• First IBM Mainframe Computer

  1951
• Hydrogen Bomb Test


  1952
• DNA Structure Discovered


  1953