1950s Essay: Were the 1950s a decade of prosperity or hardship?
Directions:
Reading the attached article, and based on the information we have been discussing
in class you will chose which side you believe in.: Were the 1950s a decade of
prosperity or hardship? You will write 2 page, 5 paragraph, 5 pieces of evidence
minimum essay to this questions backing up your claims with evidence from the
article below. Cite your sources WITHIN the text.
The 1950s: A Decade of Prosperity or Hardship?
“10 Amazing Years, 1947-1957: A Decade of Miracles”
U.S. News & World Report, Volume 43 December 27, 1957
The last year of an amazing decade is about
to end [1947-1957]. These 10 years have been a
time of change and accomplishment unmatched
in the history of America, or of any other nation.
In one brief, 10-year period, America’s face
was remade. Vast suburban areas sprang up to
receive millions of Americans pressing out from
cities. Ribbons of superhighways were laid
across the country. A huge expansion of air
facilities helped tie the nation into a compact
unity….
Look back 10 years, and you see how far
America has come, how fast changes can occur
at this period in history.
As 1947 was ending, the nation contained
144 million people, not the 172 million of today.
Television was in its infancy. The four-engine
plane was only beginning to appear on civilian
airlines. Toll highways were a rarity. The
superhighway was little more than a gleam in
planners’ eyes. Supermarkets had just begun to
dot the landscape. The ranch-type house had
hardly made a dent in the building market, and
split-levels were all but unknown. The modern
“kitchen” lacked many of the appliances that are
standard today.
Food packing was primitive by modern
standards. Nobody had heard of the heat-andserve dinner. Passenger cars, with few
exceptions, lacked automatic transmissions,
power steering, power brakes and tubeless tires.
Most had only six-cylinder engines. Air
conditioning was the exception in average stores
and homes. Polio had not been licked. Today’s
wide ranges of antibiotics and hormones were
not available. The company pension was more
the exception than the rule. So was hospital
insurance. So was the long vacation.
In the 10 years that followed, amazing
changes came over America…. The things that
people enjoy increased immensely in number
and volume….
People quickly accepted new products and
new inventions. TV sets, only a curiosity 10
years ago, were inquired by most American
families during the decade. High-fidelity
phonographs were developed and sold in huge
numbers. So were filtered cigarettes of many
kinds. Housewives took to detergents. FM
radios caught on. Lawn work was made easier
with a wide variety of power mowers. People
began to buy tape recorders, boats of glass fiber,
instant foods, long-playing records….
People, more prosperous than ever before,
spend record amounts on travel and recreation.
More than 8 million civilians traveled abroad. In
addition, Americans flocked in record numbers
to resorts in the U.S., bought bombs, built
summer cottages, went to dude ranches, built
their own swimming pools, took up fishing and
other forms of recreation – spending about 113
billion dollars on these activities in the process.
Recreation became big business. People
bought 4 million power boats, 500,000 sailboats.
More than 15 million hunters bought guns and
licenses, while 4 million took to golf and 18
million bought tackle and went fishing….
At the same time, the big cities began
gigantic rebuilding plans during the decade.
Billions were poured into these projects. They
involved the expressways to clear new routes for
commuters, shoppers and freight. They have
included huge new civic centers, modern office
buildings, new apartment developments, parks
and public auditoriums. Belt roads also were
begun by many cities to speed service, help
heavy industries escape from downtown….
Jobs became more technical, less routine.
Demand increased rapidly for engineers,
technicians, skilled workers in many fields. The
number of jobs created by the technological
revolution rose, with 8.3 million more
Americans working at paid jobs at the decade’s
end than at its beginning.
Education took on more importance, as a
result. Never had such a high percentage of U.S.
youths gone on to higher schooling. In this 10-
year period, 12.3 million youths acquired highschool diplomas, while 3.2 million went on to
get college degrees….
All told, the decade just ending has been a
real age of miracles, and unprecedented era of
change and expansion, of jet planes, and color
TV, of great alterations in the face of America,
coupled with a technological revolution that
promises even greater miracles in the decade that
now lies ahead.
The 1950s: A Decade of Prosperity or Hardship?
Excerpt from The Other America: Poverty in the United States
By Michael Harrington
There is a familiar America. It is celebrated in
speeches and advertised on television and in the
magazines. It has the highest mass standard of living
the world has ever known.
In the 1950’s this America worried about itself,
yet even its anxieties were products of abundance.
The title of a brilliant book was widely
misinterpreted, and the familiar America began to
call itself “the affluent society”. There was
introspection about Madison Avenue and tail fins;
there was discussion of the emotional suffering
taking place in the suburbs. In all this, there was an
implicit assumption that the basic grinding economic
problems had been solved in the United States. In
this theory the nation’s problems were no longer a
matter of basic human needs, of food, shelter, and
clothing. Now they were seen as qualitative, a
question of learning to live decently amid luxury.
While this discussion was carried on, there
existed another America. In it dwelt somewhere
between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this
land. They were poor. They still are….
This book is a description of the world in which
these people live; it is about the other America. Her
are the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers,
the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in
the economic underworld of American life…The
millions who are poor in the United States tend to
become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of
people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will
even to see them….
If the middle class never did like ugliness and
poverty, it was at least aware of them. “Across the
tracks” was not a very long way to go. There were
forays into the slums at Christmas time; there were
charitable organizations that brought contact with the
poor. Occasionally, almost everyone passed through
the Negro ghetto or the blocks of tenements, if only
to get downtown to work or to entertainment.
Now the American city has been transformed.
The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the
central areas, but they are increasingly isolated from
contact with, or sight of, anybody else. Middle-class
women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip may
catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the
way to an evening at the theater, but their children are
segregated in suburban schools. The business or
professional man may drive along the fringes of
slums in a car or bus, but it is not an important
experience to him. The failures, the unskilled, the
disabled, the aged, and the minorities are right there,
across the tracks, where they have always been. But
hardly anyone else is.
In short, the very development of the American
city has removed poverty from the living, emotional
experience of millions upon millions of middle-class
Americans. Living out in the suburbs, it is easy to
assume that ours is, indeed, an affluent society….
A good many concerned and sympathetic
Americans are aware that there is much discussion of
ban renewal. Suddenly, driving through the city, they
notice that a familiar slum has been torn down and
that there are towering, modern buildings where once
there had been tenements or hovels. There is a warm
feeling of satisfaction, of pride in the way things are
working out: the poor, it is obvious, are being taken
care of.
The irony in this…is that the truth is nearly the
exact opposite to the impression. The total impact of
the various housing programs in postwar America has
been to squeeze more and more people into existing
slums.
Clothes make the poor invisible too: America has
the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.
For a variety of reasons, the benefits of mass
production have been spread much more evenly in
this area than in many other. It is much easier in the
United States to be decently dressed than it is to be
decently housed, fed, or doctored. Even people with
terribly depressed incomes can look prosperous….
And finally, the poor are politically invisible. It is
one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advance
countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of
society are unable to speak for themselves. The
people of the other America do not, by far and large,
belong to unions, to fraternal organizations, or to
political parties. They are without lobbies of their
own; they put forward no legislative program. As a
group, they are atomized. They have no face; they
have no voice….
That the poor are invisible is one of the most
important things about them. They are not simply
neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of
reform; what is much worse, they are not seen….
The 1950s: The Decade of Prosperity or Hardship?
Excerpt from “Growing Pains of a Brand-New City”
By Craig Thompson Saturday Evening Post August 7, 1954
It takes people as well as buildings to make a city,
and this is a story about the people of Levittown,
Pennsylvania. In a sense, it is another interim report
on that generation of Americans who came of age
while fighting history’s biggest war, then returned to
its classrooms to give dubious educators an eyepopping lesson in earnest scholarship while,
simultaneously, it began raising bumper baby
crops….
It was in July of 1951 that William J. Levitt –
president and principal executive of Levitt and Sons
– publicly affirmed his intention to construct 16,000
dwellings in lower Bucks County adjacent to U.S.
Steel’s new Fairless works near Morrisville,
Pennsylvania. Presently, several sample houses went
up and Levitt advertised that, beginning December
eighth, he would take orders for thousands like them
as yet unbuilt….
By mid-1954 at prices ranging from $8990 to
$16,500, some 9000 houses had been built, sold and
occupied. Barring unpredictable delays, the 16,000th
will be finished by the end of 1955, and what, four
years before, had been 5500 acres of farmland, scrub
woods and swamp will be a city of 70,000 people….
Within Levittown, many residents say, the
atmosphere is more tolerant and neighborly than any
other place they ever lived. However, Levittowners
collectively have not yet come to grips with one
problem that could give rise to a really tense
situation. This is the problem of Negro exclusion.
The Levitts do not sell their houses to Negroes.
This, as William Levitt explains it, is not a matter of
prejudice, but one of business.
“The Negroes in America,” he says, “are trying to
do in four hundred years what the Jews in the world
have not wholly accomplished in six thousand. As a
Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial
prejudice. But, by various means, I have come to
know that if we sell one house to a Negro family,
then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white
customers will not buy into the community. That is
their attitude, not ours. We did not create it, and
cannot cure it. As a company, our position is simply
this: we can solve a housing problem, or we can try
to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the
two.”
Over the years, Levitt has been the butt of much
sharp criticism on this subject, which he has learned
to take philosophically, although it rankles him at
times to know that this most vigorous critics are those
who refuse to accept what he regards as the realities
of his position. But there is another reality involved
that many people have not understood. Once the title
to a Levitt house passes from the builder to the buyer,
that buyer is free to sell it to anyone. Because of this
fact, Friends [Service] Association Chairman [Paul]
Blanshard confidently predicts that a day will come
when a Negro family will move into Levittown. And
Levitt replies, “If that should happen, there is nothing
I can, or would, do about it.”…
…125 Levittown houses have been resold by the
original purchasers, but no Negro family has yet
bought one.
As of this writing, the Negro question seems to
have caused more conversation and concern outside
of Levittown than in it…
The 1950s: The Decade of Prosperity or Hardship?
“Views of Fifties Culture”
“Building a Go-Cart”
Cover Art
By Thornton Utz
Saturday Evening Post, Volume 231
October 18, 1958
“Split-level Living”
By Herbert Block
Washington Post
March 9, 1960
The 1950s: The Decade of Prosperity or Hardship?
Project: Creating a Visual Representation of the 1950s Economy
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