How Was America Changed After World War 2

Conclusion: Post-War America

The post-World War Two The states went through a menses of unprecedented economic prosperity for many white Americans that coincided with black Americans' intensifying the struggle for civil rights and economic justice.

Learning Objectives

Summarize the changes in U.Due south. society in the years following World War Two

Central Takeaways

Key Points

• Following World War II, the United states emerged equally i of the two dominant superpowers, turning away from its traditional isolationism and toward increased international involvement.
• The The states became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. The unprecedented growth of the U.S. economy translated into prosperity that resulted in millions of role and factory workers being lifted into a growing middle class that moved to the suburbs and embraced consumer appurtenances.
• The part of women in U.S. society became an outcome of particular interest in the post-war years, with wedlock and feminine domesticity depicted as the master goal for the American woman. The mail service-war baby boom embraced the role of women every bit caretakers and homemakers.
• The mail-Earth War Two prosperity did not extend to everyone. Many Americans continued to live in poverty throughout the 1950s, especially older people and African Americans.
• Voting rights discrimination remained widespread in the due south through the 1950s. Although both parties pledged progress in 1948, the only major development before 1954 was integration of the military.
• In the early on days of the Ceremonious Rights Movement, litigation and lobbying were the focus of integration efforts. The U.South. Supreme Court decisions inBrown v. Board of Education (1954) and other critical cases led to a shift in tactics, and from 1955 to 1965, "straight action" was the strategy—primarily motorbus boycotts, sit-ins, liberty rides, and social movements.

Central Terms

• Ceremonious Rights Movement: A term used to encompass social movements in the U.s.a. whose goals were to terminate racial segregation and bigotry against African Americans and secure legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law.
• infant boom: Whatsoever period marked by a profoundly increased fertility rate. This demographic miracle is usually ascribed inside certain geographical bounds. In the U.s., the mail service-World State of war 2 period was marked by this phenomenon.
• Space Race: A 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals—the Soviet Union and the United States—for supremacy in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the missile based nuclear arms race between the 2 nations that followed World War 2, enabled by captured German language rocket technology and personnel. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority. It spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned space probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon.
• Suburbia: Residential areas or mixed-use areas, either existing as role of a city or urban area or as a separate residential community within commuting distance of a metropolis. In nearly English speaking regions, these areas are defined in contrast to central or inner-city areas. Their rapid growth was an important component of the post-World War II economic boom in the United states of america.

Political Background

Following World War Ii, the Usa emerged as one of the two ascendant superpowers, forth with the the Soviet Wedlock. The U.S. Senate in a bipartisan vote approved U.S. participation in the United nations (Un), which marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the United States and toward increased international interest. In 1949, the U.s., rejecting the long-continuing policy of no military alliances in peacetime, formed the N Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) brotherhood, which continues into the 21st century. In response, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of communist states.

In August 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, thereby escalating the chance of warfare. Indeed, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented both powers from going besides far, and resulted in proxy wars, most notably in Korea and Vietnam, in which the two sides did not straight confront each other. Within the The states, the Common cold War prompted concerns virtually Communist influence. The unexpected leapfrogging of U.S. engineering by the Soviets in 1957 with Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, began the Space Race, won by the Americans as Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon in 1969. The angst about the weaknesses of U.S. education led to large-scale federal support for science education and research.

Economic Prosperity

In the decades following World State of war II, the U.s. became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. Showtime in the 1950s, heart-class culture became obsessed with consumer goods. Increasing numbers of workers enjoyed high wages, larger houses, ameliorate schools, and more cars and household technology. The U.S. economy grew dramatically in the post-war period, expanding at an almanac rate of 3.5%. The substantial increase in average family income within a generation resulted in millions of office and factory workers being lifted into a growing middle form, enabling them to sustain a standard of living in one case considered reserved for the wealthy. As noted by scholar Deone Zell, associates line work paid well, while unionized manufacturing plant job served as "stepping-stones to the center class." By the stop of the 1950s, 87% of all U.S. families owned at to the lowest degree 1 television, 75% owned cars, and 60% owned their homes. By 1960, blue-collar workers had become the biggest buyers of many luxury appurtenances and services.

The period from 1946 to 1960 also witnessed a meaning increase in the paid leisure time of working people. The 40-hour workweek established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in covered industries became the actual schedule in most workplaces by 1960. The bulk of workers also enjoyed paid vacations and industries catering to leisure activities blossomed.

American family watching TV in 1958, photograph by Evert F. Baumgardner for National Athenaeum and Records Administration.: The 1950s witnessed the explosion of a consumer goods economy. By the stop of the 1950s, 87% of all U.S. families owned at least one television, 75% owned cars, and lx% owned their homes. Images of prosperous white middle-class families in their suburban homes symbolized the pop narrative of economic stability and traditional family unit values.

Educational outlays were also greater than in other countries while a college proportion of immature people were graduating from high schools and universities than elsewhere in the world, every bit hundreds of new colleges and universities opened every year. At the advanced level, U.S. scientific discipline, engineering, and medicine were world-famous.

In regard to social welfare, the postwar era saw a considerable improvement in insurance for workers and their dependents against the risks of disease, as private insurance programs like Blue Cantankerous and Blue Shield expanded. With the notable exception of farm and domestic workers, nearly all members of the labor force were covered by Social Security. In 1959, well-nigh 2-thirds of manufacturing plant workers and three-fourths of role workers were provided with supplemental private pension plans.

Many urban center dwellers gave up cramped urban apartments for a suburban lifestyle centered on children and housewives, with the male breadwinner commuting to work. By 1960, suburbia encompassed a third of the nation'due south population. The growth of suburbs was not only a effect of postwar prosperity, but innovations of the single-family housing market with low interest rates on 20- and 30-year mortgages, and low down payments, particularly for veterans. William Levitt began a national trend with his use of mass-production techniques to construct a large "Levittown" housing development on Long Isle. Meanwhile, the suburban population swelled considering of the baby boom; a dramatic increase in fertility in the catamenia of 1942–1957.

Women

The role of women in U.S. guild became an upshot of particular interest in the mail-state of war years, with marriage and feminine domesticity depicted as the chief goal for the American woman. Every bit women had been forced out of the labor market place by men returning from the military service, many chafed at the social expectations of being an idle stay-at-home housewife who cooked, cleaned, shopped, and tended to the children. Marriage rates rose sharply in the 1940s and reached all-fourth dimension highs. Americans began to marry at a younger historic period and marriage immediately after loftier school was becoming commonplace. Women were increasingly under tremendous force per unit area to ally by the age of 20. The stereotype developed that women were going to college to earn their 1000.R.S. (Mrs.) degree.

In 1963, Betty Friedan publisher her book The Feminine Mystique, which strongly criticized the function of women during the postwar years and was a bestseller and a major goad of the new wave of women'south liberation movement.

Baby Boom

In 1946, live births in the United States surged from 222,721 in Jan to 339,499 in October. By the terminate of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 meg in the 1930s. Sylvia Porter, a New York Mail service columnist, outset used the term "boom" to refer to the phenomenon of increased births in the post-war United states in May 1951. Annual births first topped four million in 1954 and did not drop below that figure until 1965, by which time four out of ten Americans were under age 20.

Many factors contributed to the babe boom. In the postal service-war years, couples that could not afford families during the Slap-up Depression made up for lost fourth dimension. The mood was now optimistic. Unemployment ended and the economy greatly expanded. Millions of veterans returned habitation and were forced to reintegrate into order. To facilitate the integration process, Congress passed the G.I. Neb of Rights, which encouraged home buying and investment in higher education through the distribution of loans to veterans at depression or zilch involvement rates. The Grand.I. Pecker enabled tape numbers of people to finish loftier school and attend college. This led to an increase in stock of skills and yielded higher incomes to families.

Poverty and Disenfranchisement

The postal service-World State of war 2 prosperity did not extend to everyone. Many Americans continued to live in poverty throughout the 1950s, especially older people and African Americans, the latter of whom continued to earn far less on boilerplate than their white counterparts. Immediately later the state of war, 12 million returning veterans were in need of work, and in many cases could non detect it. In add-on, labor strikes rocked the nation, in some cases exacerbated by racial tensions due to African Americans having taken jobs during the state of war and now being faced with irate returning veterans who demanded that they step aside. The huge number of women employed in the workforce in the state of war were besides rapidly cleared out to make room for men. Many blue-collar workers continued to alive in poverty, with 30% of those employed in industry. Racial differences were staggering. In 1947, sixty% of black families lived beneath the poverty level (defined in one written report as below $3000 in 1968), compared with 23% of white families. In 1968, 23% of black families lived below the poverty level, compared with 9% of white families.

Voting rights bigotry remained widespread in the south through the 1950s. Fewer than ten% voted in the Deep South, although a larger proportion voted in the border states, and black Americans were being organized into Democratic machines in the northern cities. Although both parties pledged progress in 1948, the only major development before 1954 was integration of the military machine.

In the early days of the Ceremonious Rights Movement, litigation and lobbying were the focus of integration efforts. The Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Pedagogy (1954) and other critical cases led to a shift in tactics, and from 1955 to 1965, "directly action" was the strategy—primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and social movements. Brown was a landmark case that explicitly outlawed segregation of public education facilities for black and white Americans, ruling then on the grounds that the doctrine of "divide but equal" public teaching could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to forbid schoolhouse integration at Footling Rock Primal High School in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized state forces and sent in the U.S. Ground forces to enforce federal courtroom orders. Governors Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama physically blocked school doorways at their respective states' universities. Birmingham's public safe commissioner Eugene T. "Bull" Connor advocated violence confronting liberty riders and ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators during the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade. Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, loosed his deputies during the "Bloody Sunday" issue of the Selma to Montgomery march, injuring many of the marchers and personally menacing other protesters. Constabulary all beyond the south arrested civil rights activists on trumped-up charges.

The 1963 March on Washington, photograph by Rowland Scherman for USIA – U.South. National Archives and Records Assistants.: The intensification of the black struggle for civil rights and economic justice was i of the about important developments in the post-World State of war 2 United States. The fate of African Americans did not friction match the overall sense of optimism and excitement that many white Americans experienced as a result of the postal service war economic boom.

Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/conclusion-post-war-america/

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