Fifties, The

Fifties, The. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated American life in the 1950s.The Korean War (1950–1953), a conflict formally fought under the flag of the United Nations, represented America's resolve to contain Soviet expansion, but it also revealed the tensions dividing American society.

Anticommunism and Religion in Cold War America

. While the Korean conflict was arguably America's last “good war,” in which citizens rallied to support agreed‐upon military and political objectives, the war coincided with a campaign to rid the country of domestic subversives. This wrenching process has been labeled “McCarthyism” in reference to its single most visible proponent Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, but it was not limited to the senator and his supporters. The search for subversives in the early 1950s, and its attendant anticommunist loyalty oaths, affected a large segment of society, ranging from labor unionists and government bureaucrats to university professors and Hollywood writers. And while post–Cold War archival research uncovered evidence that some of these targets did indeed spy for the Soviets, the entire movement represented a form of national insecurity. Many saw the Soviet Union's success in building an atomic bomb and testing it in 1949 as proof of leaks in American security. Two highly publicized spy cases at the start of the decade confirmed this fear for many Americans. The Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases, in which American citizens were accused of conducting espionage for the Soviets, only increased the nation's worries about the enemy within.

The Cold War ideological climate, perhaps abetted by suburbanization and nuclear anxieties, also contributed to an upsurge of religious activity in the 1950s. Church‐attendance rates increased and in 1955 Congress added “In God We Trust” to the nation's currency and coins. Evangelist Billy Graham conducted revivals that attracted millions worldwide. Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen became a television celebrity, and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale attracted a vast following with such therapeutic books as The Power of Positive Thinking (1952).

An Era of Prosperity and Domesticity

. One of the many ironies of the 1950s is that this national self‐doubt came at a time of great economic prosperity for many Americans, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith documented in The Affluent Society (1958). With jobs plentiful and salaries rising, many families could afford an increasing array of consumer goods. The spread of suburban shopping centers and malls facilitated the mass marketing of this array of new products.

The economic growth of the 1950s arose partially from the increased ability of American corporations to export their wares, an ability aided by America's postwar political dominance as well as the reduced industrial capacity of other nations owing to war damage. Another important cause of the economic growth was heavy government defense spending, a further by‐product of the Cold War. Even the prosperity enjoyed by individuals was filtered through the lens of the Cold War. The success of women during World War II in entering the workforce partly dissolved in the face of renewed emphasis on the traditional family, with the devoted mother expected to use her many appliances to keep the home running efficiently. Much of the popular culture of the period linked the defense of American values at home with the struggle against communism abroad. The nuclear family would repel any insidious foreign influences or doctrines. The ideal of conformity was both espoused and criticized in many of the books and films of the period, ranging from intellectual concern with the “organization man” (the title of a 1956 book by William H. Whyte) to movies about the menace of alien influences, such as the paranoid thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Increased Civil Rights Activism

. Not everyone shared in the decade's prosperity. Many older Americans, rural people in Appalachia, and Hispanic migrant farm workers or urban manual laborers remained mired in poverty. Perhaps no group was as cut off from the mainstream of American life in the 1950s as African Americans. At the start of the decade, southern racial segregation laws and less formal—but no less powerful—forms of discrimination in the North excluded most African Americans from the economic opportunities and prosperity enjoyed by most white citizens. But in the middle part of the decade this situation began to change. The most visible event was the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declaring racially segregated school systems unconstitutional. The Brown ruling initiated a series of struggles over racial integration that pitted the federal government and civil rights workers against southern segregationists and state governments. To focus exclusively on the legal strategies that succeeded in the Brown case would be a mistake, however, as African Americans also had been working on more political strategies well before 1954. Efforts by African American labor and religious leaders in the 1930s and 1940s to press for political rights, for example, led to the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. This facet of the African American movement for civil rights gripped the popular consciousness in the 1956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by a youthful Martin Luther King Jr. In both legal and political realms, the 1950s saw an important phase of the movement by African Americans to gain equality, a movement that would culminate in the civil rights legislation of the mid‐1960s.

The gains made by African Americans in the 1950s triggered a reaction by some whites in both the North and the South. In the South, this reaction produced a climate of violence that would set the stage for civil rights battles in the 1960s. It also contributed to a major change in the political culture of the region, where the lily‐white electorate (most blacks were disenfranchised until the 1960s) had voted solidly Democratic since the end of Reconstruction. As southern whites began to see the Democratic party as a supporter of integration, they started a slow, decades‐long exodus to the Republican party. In the North and West, some urban whites followed the same path and identified the Democratic party's liberalism and commitment to an activist federal government with attempts to integrate local schools and neighborhoods that were segregated in fact if not by law. Although the urban North did not see the massive shift to the Republican from the Democratic party that occurred in the South, the more progressive wing of the Democratic party in the North lost out to a more moderate and restrained version of liberalism. In the West and especially the Southwest, voters did turn to the Republican party in large numbers. Throughout the nation, the 1950s battles over civil rights set the stage for the political transformation of the 1970s and 1980s: the end of the “New Deal Order” and the ascendancy of conservatism.

Consensus Politics and Underlying Tensions

. On the surface, however, the politics of the 1950s seemed characterized by consensus rather than conflict. The Democratic and Republican parties were united in both their responses to the Cold War and their approaches to the New Deal welfare state. The Democratic party purged many of its more radical supporters in its anticommunist fervor while supporting military expansion. At the same time, many Democrats moved from an emphasis on economic issues in the 1930s and 1940s to a tentative focus on race relations, leading to a defense of the New Deal rather than any extension of its programs. Among Republicans, Dwight D. Eisenhower's defeat of the party's isolationist wing eliminated any dissent on the issue of the Cold War. Under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the Eisenhower administration initiated a series of regional military pacts aimed at the Soviet Union; financed and planned coups that overthrew left‐leaning regimes in Iran, Chile, and elsewhere; and became more deeply involved in resisting a communist‐led nationalist movement in Vietnam. At the same time the success of Eisenhower's “modern republicanism” against more strident forms of small‐government conservatism represented an acceptance by the GOP of the New Deal state.

The deceptive sense of placid homogeneity was reinforced by television, which spread like wildfire in this decade to become the dominant new mass medium. TV advertising spread the message of consumer abundance, while television programming especially domestic comedies such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Nelson Family focused mainly on the nation's white, affluent, middle‐class suburbs where traditional gender roles prevailed.

The surface calm of the 1950s, however, obscured more fundamental disagreements over the nation's future direction. Although the Cold War and its economic prosperity provided an adhesive that seemed to bind the country together, America in the 1950s was a nation divided between incommensurable positions on race, women's roles, labor unions, nuclear testing, and foreign policy. As the decade wore on, the quickening tempo of black activism and a grassroots campaign to halt nuclear testing (a campaign rooted in well‐founded fears of radioactive fallout and endorsed in 1956 by the 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson), coupled in the cultural realm with the rise of rock and roll; Elvis Presley's erotic gyrations and songs of sexual longing; the Beat movement in literature led by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and movies like Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando, and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), all signaled that the fragile conformity of the decade was about to dissolve.
See also Amusement Parks and Theme Parks; Anticommunism; Business Cycle; Civil Rights Movement; Consumer Culture; Containment; Family; Film; Foreign Relations; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Literature: Since World War I; Music: Popular Music; Nuclear Weapons; Segregation, Racial.

Bibliography

Harvard Sitkoff , The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980, 1981.
William Chafe , The Unfinished Journey, 1986.
Elaine Tyler May , Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, 1988.
John Diggins , The Proud Decades, 1941–1960, 1989.
Numan Bartley , The New South, 1945–1980, 1995.

Charles Romney