A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (134 page)

Nineteen fifties Americans received the benefit of the largest one-generation jump in educational achievement in the nation’s history; they had learned the importance of work, yet had worked less outside the home than any other group; and as a generation they had an uncanny knack for backing the winning candidate in every single major election. As adults, they won two thirds of all Nobel prizes ever won by Americans, including all fourteen prizes in economics. Supported in some of their affluence by grateful taxpayers, they received housing subsidies through mortgage interest deductions on taxes, and through the Veterans Administration, they received guaranteed mortgage loans to purchase houses. This group of adults also effectively changed the debate about racial segregation, with black intellectuals like Ralph Ellison (
Invisible Man
) arguing that segregation not only was morally wrong, but also economically inefficient. By 1965,
Look
magazine would say—speaking mainly of the adults in society—“Americans today bear themselves like victory-addicted champions…. They are accustomed to meeting, and beating, tests.”
⁶¹

This optimism hid a spiritual emptiness that characterized many of this generation, the efforts of preachers such as Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and Oral Roberts notwithstanding. Later surveys would show the 1950s generation to be in many ways one of the least religious groups in American history, and this may in part account for why their success—while genuine and admirable in many cases—was fleeting. Sooner or later, a sandy foundation of civic virtue, unsupported by deeper spiritual commitments, would crumble.

What is amazing about all this is that the 1950s still had plenty of structure. Marriage and motherhood were considered the main destiny of young women—with teaching and nursing considered their only “acceptable” careers—and magazines such as
Seventeen
or
Mademoiselle
or popular books such as Mary McGee Williams’s
On Becoming a Woman
all operated under this assumption. “It’s Not Too Soon to Dream of Marriage” ran a typical chapter title in Williams’s book. Yet at the same time, the prominent female movie stars were the sexy Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, and Brigitte Bardot. Alfred Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, which appeared in 1953, even if tainted by flawed data still indicated that women were having sex before marriage in large numbers, perhaps—if Kinsey’s statistics were to be believed—up to half of the six thousand women he had interviewed. Certainly men thought about sex all the time, or at least that was the premise behind the launch of Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy
magazine in 1953, wherein photos of nude women were legitimized for viewing by middle-class men by packaging them with interviews, fiction, and “serious reporting.” The standard joke of the day was that a male, when caught in possession of a
Playboy
, would claim to read it “just for the articles.” As if to follow Hefner’s lead, in 1957 the Searle pharmaceutical company brought out the birth-control pill, which proved instrumental in delinking sexual intercourse from childbearing or, put another way, in separating consequences from actions.

Before the Pill, in the early 1950s, young adults, especially those married in the late 1940s, produced the largest boom in childbirths ever witnessed in the United States. Aptly labeled baby boomers, these children grew up in unprecedented affluence by the standards of the day. Adult expectations were that the boomers stood “on the fringe of a golden era” and would “lay out blight proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write
finis
to poverty and war.”
⁶²
New foods developed specifically for babies had experienced slow growth before the boomers began consuming boxcars full of Frank Gerber’s baby products and pediatrics “reached its height of physical aggressiveness: No generation of kids got more shots or operations.”
⁶³

Clothes designers targeted babies and children as distinct consumer groups rather than viewing them as little adults. Manufacturers made clothes tailored for babies’ and children’s bodies, for play, and for, well…accidents. Barbie dolls, Hula-Hoops, Davy Crockett coonskin caps, and other toys aimed at children appeared on the market, and other toys invented earlier, like Tinkertoys and Lionel trains, saw their sales soar. In short, the baby boomers in general wanted for no material thing.

In addition to growing up in abundance, the boom generation also was raised on the theories of the best-selling baby book of all time, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s
Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
(1946). Spock, thoroughly steeped in psychoanalysis and Freudianism, had been a Coolidge Republican in early adulthood, but along with his wife had moved steadily leftward, advocating positions that would have made Coolidge quiver. He advised parents to refrain from disciplining their children and to let children determine when and where everything took place, from bathroom habits to education. American homes overnight became child centered, whereas spanking and other physical discipline was viewed as psychologically unhealthy. The dangerous combination of material comfort and loose control made for a generation that lacked toughness, one that literally fell apart under the pressures of civil rights, the Vietnam War, and economic stagnation. Not surprisingly, boomers turned to drugs and sex in record numbers, and divorce among the generation skyrocketed.

Along with the permissiveness at home came an unparalleled freedom of travel and movement. Some of this movement was permanent relocation for jobs or better living conditions, including climate. Most of it was from north and east to south and west: between 1947 and 1960, a quarter of a million Americans left the Great Lakes region and the mid-Atlantic/New England areas for the far West, Southwest, and Southeast. At the same time, only twenty-one thousand—virtually all black—left the South for higher wages and greater social freedom in the North. Thus, the Sun Belt regions netted a huge population gain in just over a decade, dramatically shifting both the economy and political balance of the country.

Central cities saw their rate of growth slow as suburbs appeared around all the major metropolitan areas. Levittown, New York—built by William Levitt in 1947—created such a demand that by the time it was finished in 1951, it covered 1,200 acres with more than 17,000 homes, most of them owned by young families. Levittown quickly acquired the nickname Fertility Valley. Levitt’s basic house consisted of a 720-square-foot Cape Cod, constructed on a concrete slab, including a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bath, a living room with fireplace, and an attic with the potential for conversion into two more bedrooms. Basic models sold for just under $7,000, whereas larger versions went for $10,000.

Many communities like Levittown were planned cities that sought to control the types of businesses, architecture, and developments that were permitted in an attempt to beautify the environment.
⁶⁴
Oversight by professionals in city planning represented the culmination of the dreams of the Progressives who had once thought that central cities would evolve into what the suburbs, in fact, became. Yet once the planned communities arose, criticism of them from academics and urban advocates sprang up almost as fast: the “soulless” suburbs, it was said, were draining away the talent and wealth from the inner cities. Instead of praising lower crime rates in the suburbs, critics blamed the suburbanites for abandoning the core city.
⁶⁵
They failed to understand the basic human desire for security, privacy, and property.

Travel for business and pleasure also expanded at geometric rates, thanks to the widespread availability of the family automobile. Autos had started to permeate American culture in the 1920s, but the expansion of auto travel slowed during the Depression and war. After 1946, however, people had several years’ worth of wartime savings to spend, and General Motors and Ford, the giants, began to offer their own financing programs, making it still easier to acquire dependable transportation. A feedback loop—a self-reinforcing cycle—occurred as it had in the 1920s: as more people obtained autos, they demanded better roads, which state governments started to provide; and as more roads were laid, reaching more towns and cities, more people wanted cars. The Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) dominated the market, but many other small companies remained competitive, such as Jeep, Rambler, Nash, Checker, Willys, and the short-lived (but high-selling) Kaiser-Frazer cars. In the 1950s, U.S. auto production exceeded that of Great Britain, France, Japan, Sweden, and all other nations
put together several times over,
and Ford and GM—both of which produced their 50 millionth vehicles in the 1950s—posted healthy profits.

Even before the 1956 National Highway Act was passed, building 41,000 miles of interstates, 60 percent of all American households owned a car, but most trips were local. The nation’s more than 40 million cars traveled on some 1.6 million miles of surfaced highways, testifying to the fact that auto ownership had become common. Average annual highway driving rose 400 percent after the act, making interstate travel commonplace. But on the negative side, the fuel taxes remained in place long after the highway construction ended, and nearly fifty years later, almost half of the price of a gallon of gasoline consisted of federal, state, and local taxes. Indeed, the leftist notion that roads use tax dollars to subsidize auto travel fails to confront the reality that gasoline taxes ensured that the people who used the highways would, in fact, pay for them—even as they were also paying for the mass transit systems that the “experts” promoted. The unbridled liberty of the automobile irks those enamored of planning and control, those who see government-dominated mass transit systems as an ordered and structured alternative.

Air travel also entered a new democratic age. While still expensive, passenger flights became increasingly more available to more people. Air carriers, such as Trans World Airlines, American, Pan Am, and others, flew enough routes at low enough prices that by the late 1950s average American families could consider taking an airplane flight to a vacation site or to see relatives. Juan Trippe’s Pan American World Airways, which had flown directly to England by the 1930s and had mapped South American routes for security purposes during the war, emerged as a leading overseas carrier. Howard Hughes, who owned enough of Trans World Airlines (TWA) to assume hands-on management, started designing his own giant passenger aircraft even before the war, resulting in the Lockheed Constellation, which set an “industry standard for size, comfort, and range.”
⁶⁶
New technology converged with a glut of war-trained pilots who came on the market after 1945, producing lower fares. Eastern, American, and TWA offered coach-class tickets that made air travel competitive with rail travel, resulting in a doubling of airplane passengers between 1951 and 1958. The ease with which people traveled by air was, ironically, symbolized by the first air traffic jam over New York City in 1954, when three hundred airliners lined up in holding patterns in the airspace around the metropolis, involving forty-five thousand passengers in delays.

After Pan Am introduced a new transatlantic airliner designed specifically for passengers, the Douglas DC-7, Boeing matched it with the famous 707 jetliner, providing competition in passenger-aircraft production that drove down prices. The frequency of air travel even produced a new term in the language, a physical and mental malady called jet lag.

It goes without saying that Americans could fly and drive because their paychecks purchased more than ever before. In 1955 the average income for all industries, excluding farm labor, topped $4,220 per year, and by 1959 that had increased by another 10 percent. A New Orleans salesman with a high school education earned $400 per month; a Chicago private secretary pulled in about the same; and a Charlotte housekeeper received about $140 a month. Marilyn Monroe could command $100,000 a picture—just a little more than the $90,000 annual income earned by
Peanuts
cartoonist Charles Schulz.
⁶⁷
Such high wages bought a lot of potatoes at $.51 per pound, or rice at $.19 per pound, and even new electronics gadgets like movie projectors were within reach at $89. Chevrolet’s Corvette—arguably the hottest car of the 1950s—had a sticker price of $3,670, or below the average annual salary in America.

Cookie-Cutter America?

The newfound freedom on the highways and airways held a threat as well as a promise, for although people could break the restraints of their geography, social class, background, and family more easily than ever, they also were exposed to new and unfamiliar, often uncomfortable social settings and customs. People responded by seeking a balance, embracing similar—almost uniform—housing on the one hand and enjoying their visits to other parts of the country on the other. The popularity of the famous Levittown subdivisions, where all houses were almost identical, have led some historians to mistake this need for order, and the cost advantages resulting from economics of scale, for an overarching quest for conformity. It was no such thing at all. Just as the adventurous pilot scans the landscape for a familiar topography every now and then, so too did Americans embrace individualism while they retained some sense of order.

To see this, all one has to do is examine American travel patterns to observe how people eagerly entered into parts of the country that were in many ways foreign to them, even threatening. Yankees heading to Florida’s vacation spots for the first time crossed through the redneck backwoods of the Old South. Easterners visiting California often encountered Asians for the first time; and midwesterners taking new jobs in the Southwest were exposed to Indian or Mexican cultures and probably ate their first taco or tasted their first salsa. Even such things as housing—in Arizona few multilevel homes were built because of the heat—food, and beverages differed greatly from place to place. Southern iced tea, for example, was always presweetened, and so-called Mexican food in Texas hardly resembled Mexican food in California. Midwesterners, who battled snows and rains all winter and spring, had trouble relating to water politics in the West, where titanic struggles over the Colorado River consumed lawmakers and citizens.