lecture_art_chapter36

Affluence and Its Anxieties

  • Prosperity Boom:

    • Housing surge with 25% of homes in 1960 built in the 1950s, 83% in suburbia.

    • Transistor invention in 1948: Revolutionized electronics and computers.

    • IBM as prototype of "high-tech" corporation in the information age.

  • Computers: They transformed business practices.

  • Aerospace Industries:

    • Connection between military and civilian aircraft production.

    • Boeing's 707 (1957): First large passenger jet, based on the B-52 bomber.

  • Work Force Changes:

  • "White collar" outnumbered "blue collar" workers.

  • Transition from industrial to postindustrial, service-based economy.

Union membership peaked at 35% in 1954, followed by decline.

  • Women and Industry:

    • White-collar surge opened opportunities for women.

    • Post-WWII “cult of domesticity” emerged.

    • Of 40 million new jobs (1950-1980), 30 million+ in clerical and service work.

    • "Pink-collar ghetto": Occupations dominated by women.

  • Urban Age and Women:

    • Women's dual role as worker and homemaker raised questions about family and gender roles.

    • Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963): Launched modern women's movement, criticized suburban housewifery boredom.

Consumer Culture in the Fifties

  • 1950s Expansion: Middle class expansion and consumer culture defined lifestyle.

    • 1949: Diner's Club introduced the plastic credit card.

    • 1948: McDonald's opened, pioneering the "fast-food" style.

    • 1955: Disneyland opened.

    • Easy credit, fast food, and new leisure forms marked consumption culture.

    • Television was especially critical.

  • Entertainment:

    • Movie attendance declined; entertainment shifted to television.

    • Mid-1950s: 10910^{9} spent on TV advertising.

    • Critics claimed TV degraded aesthetic, social, moral, political, and educational standards.

  • Religion:

    • Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Fulton J. Sheen used TV to spread the Christian gospel.

  • Commercialization of Sports:

    • Viewers shifted from stadium crowds to couch-potato millions.

    • Sports reflected population shift to West and South.

    • 1958: NY Giants moved to San Francisco; Brooklyn Dodgers to LA.

    • Expansions occurred in major league baseball, football, and basketball.

  • Popular Music Transformation:

    • Elvis Presley fused black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass and country, creating rock 'n' roll.

    • Marilyn Monroe popularized sensuous sexuality, as did Playboy magazine (1953).

  • Late 1950s:

    • Americans became free-spending consumers of standardized products.

    • Critics lamented consumerism:

      • David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950): Postwar generation as conformists.

      • William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956).

      • Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955).

      • John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958): Private opulence amidst public squalor; call for public investment ignored.

The Advent of Eisenhower

  • Election of 1952:

    • Democrats nominated Adlai E. Stevenson.

    • Republicans chose Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    • Richard M. Nixon was Ike's running mate.

    • Nixon defended himself in the Checkers Speech against illegal donation accusations.

    • Eisenhower won with 33,936,234 votes to Stevenson's 27,314,992, 442 electoral votes to 89.

    • Republicans gained control of Congress.

  • Eisenhower's Presidential Term:

    • Fulfilled pledge with Korea visit, armistice signed after seven months.

    • Korean War (1950-1953) resulted in over 30,000 American deaths, one million+ Chinese, North Koreans, South Koreans deaths, and tens of billions in American dollars spent.

    • Korea remained divided at the 38th parallel.

    • Cold War continued.

  • Eisenhower as Leader:

    • Projected sincerity, fairness, and optimism.

    • Presidential pose of being “unpolitical”.

    • His greatest asset was “affection and respect of our citizenry”.

    • Critics charged he hoarded popularity rather than spend it for civil rights.

    • Ike failed to stand up to McCarthyist demagoguery in GOP.

Desegregating American Society

  • Black Community in 1950s:

    • 15 million African Americans, two-thirds in South.

    • Jim Crow laws governed black life, keeping blacks economically inferior and politically powerless.

    • 20% of eligible blacks registered to vote; fewer than 5% in Deep South.

    • Vigilante violence enforced the regime.

  • Segregation's Image:

    • Segregation tarnished America's international image.

    • Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker recounted Jim Crow's horrors.

    • Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma exposed contradiction between "American Creed" and treatment of black citizens.

  • Progress:

    • International pressure combined with grassroots and legal activism.

    • Racial progress in North during and after WWII.

    • Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947.

    • NAACP pushed Supreme Court to rule in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) that separate professional schools failed equality test.

  • Black Refusal to Suffer:

    • Blacks refused to suffer silently.

    • December 1955, Rosa Parks' arrest sparked Montgomery bus boycott.

  • Montgomery Bus Boycott:

    • Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. led the boycott.

    • King's oratorical skill, strategic savvy, and devotion to nonviolence propelled him to the forefront of the black revolution.

Seeds of the Civil Rights Revolution

  • President Truman:

    • Horrified by murder of black war veterans in 1946.

    • Commissioned report “To Secure These Rights”.

    • Ended segregation in federal civil service and armed forces (1948).

    • Congress resisted civil rights legislation.

  • Eisenhower's Stance:

    • Eisenhower showed no interest in racial issues.

  • Supreme Court and Civil Rights:

    • Assumed political leadership in civil rights struggle.

    • Chief Justice Earl Warren led Court to address urgent issues.

    • Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954): Segregation in public schools deemed "inherently unequal" and unconstitutional; reversed Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

  • Desegregation's Implementation:

    • Desegregation must go ahead with "all deliberate speed”.

    • Border States complied reasonably; Deep South organized "massive resistance”.

    • Southern members of Congress signed "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" in 1956.

    • Ten years later, fewer than 2% of eligible blacks in Deep South in classrooms with whites.

  • Eisenhower's Reluctance:

    • Eisenhower reluctant to promote integration.

    • Felt Court's ruling upset “customs and convictions of at least two generations of Americans”.

    • Refused to issue public statement endorsing Court's conclusion.

    • September 1957, Ike forced to act: Orval Faubus (Arkansas governor) used National Guard to prevent 9 black students from enrolling in Little Rock's Central High School; Ike sent troops to escort children to classes.

  • Legislative Actions:

    • Congress passed first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction.

    • Set up permanent Civil Rights Commission.

    • Authorized federal injunctions to protect voting rights.

    • Martin Luther King formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to mobilize black churches for black rights.

  • Black "Sit-In" Movement:

    • Launched Feb. 1, 1960, by four black college freshmen in Greensboro, NC.

    • Demanded service at whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter, leading to wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins.

    • April 1960: Southern black students formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Eisenhower Republicanism at Home

  • Dynamic Conservatism:

    • Eisenhower pledged “dynamic conservatism”.

    • Liberal with people, conservative with money, economy, and government.

    • Balanced, middle-of-the-road course.

    • No rollback of New Deal, halted government expansion, balanced federal budget.

    • Supported transfer of offshore oil fields control to states.

  • Domestic Issues:

    • Tried to curb TVA.

    • Operation Wetback: One million Mexicans apprehended and returned to Mexico in 1954.

    • Sought to cancel tribal preservation policies of “Indian New Deal”.

    • Proposed to “terminate” tribes (abandoned in 1961).

  • Federal Highway Act of 1956:

    • $27 billion plan for 42,000 miles of motorways.

    • Essential for national defense, created construction jobs, sped suburbanization, benefited trucking, automobile, oil, and travel industries.

    • Robbed railroads of business, exacerbated air quality and energy consumption issues, disastrous for cities.

A “New Look” in Foreign Policy

  • 1952 Republican Platform:

    • Condemned “containment” and called for “new look”.

    • John Foster Dulles promised to “roll back” red tide and “liberate captive peoples”.

    • Ike promised to balance the budget by cutting military spending.

  • Policy of Boldness (1954):

    • Relegated army and navy to backseat; built up Strategic Air Command's superbombers.

    • Inflict “massive retaliation” on Soviets or Chinese.

  • Effectiveness:

    • Advantage: Nuclear intimidation with a cheaper price tag.

    • Ike sought thaw in Cold War after Stalin's death but the "new look” proved illusory when Nikita Khrushchev rejected Ike's call for “open skies”.

    • Ike refused aid to Hungarian uprising (1956), exposing strategic limitations of “massive retaliation”.

The Vietnam Nightmare

  • Vietnam:

    • Nationalists sought to end French colonial rule.

    • Ho Chi Minh appealed to Wilson for self-determination in 1919.

    • Cold War damped dreams of anticolonial Asians.

  • American Involvement:

    • By 1954, America paid 80% of war costs in Indochina ($1 billion a year) to get French approval for rearmed W. Germany.

    • W. Germany entered NATO in 1955.

  • French Rule Crumbling:

    • French rule crumbled under Ho's guerillas (Viet Minh).

    • French garrison trapped in Dien Bien Phu resulting in nationalists' victory and Geneva conference halving Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel.

  • Division of Vietnam:

    • Ho consented to arrangement on assurance of Vietnam-wide elections.

    • South: pro-Western government under Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold elections.

    • U.S.A. aided Diem.

    • Diem faced growing communist guerrillas; Americans backed a losing horse.

Cold War Crises in the Middle East

  • Middle East Tensions:

    • Fears that Soviets would penetrate oil-rich Middle East heightened Cold War tensions.

  • Iran:

    • CIA helped engineer coup in 1953 installing Mohammed Reza Pahlevi as dictator, creating resentment among Iranians leading to revenge on shah and allies two decades later.

  • Suez Crisis:

    • Egypt's Nasser sought funds to build dam on Nile.

    • America offered help, but withdrew when Nasser dealt with communists.

    • Nasser nationalized Suez Canal, prompting assault by Britain, France, and Israel.

    • Eisenhower refused to release emergency oil supplies and U.N. force sent in after invaders withdrew.

  • Oil Weapon:

    • Suez crisis last time U.S.A. could use “oil weapon”.

    • 1940: U.S.A. produced 2/3 of world's oil; by 1948, U.S.A. became net oil importer.

    • Arab nations attempted to keep more profit from oil exports.

    • 1960: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) formed.

    • OPEC member nations: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela.

Round Two for Ike

  • Election of 1956:

    • Eisenhower pitted against Adlai Stevenson: Eisenhower won and made deep roads into the Democratic South but failed to win either house of Congress for GOP.

  • Unions:

    • Fraud and gangsterism tarnished unions.

    • AFL-CIO expelled James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa, who was convicted of jury tampering, served part of sentence before disappearing.

    • Eisenhower persuaded Congress to pass Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).

  • Sputnik:

    • Soviets launched Sputnik I and II into space (1957), shocking Americans.

    • Eisenhower created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

    • U.S.A. successfully tested its own ICBMs by the end of the decade.

    • Sputnik spurred changes in U.S. educational system.

    • 1958: National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) promoted research and teaching in sciences, engineering, and foreign languages.

The Continuing Cold War

  • Arms Race:

    • Nuclear arms race and tensions over Berlin continued.

    • Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to Washington 1959, leading to a meeting at Camp David, but optimism evaporated prior to Paris “summit” of 1960 when an American U-2 plane was shot down over USSR.

  • Latin America:

    • Latin Americans resented meager U.S. aid and America's intervention, as Washington supported dictators.

  • Cuba:

    • Dictator Fulgencio Batista encouraged American capital investments.

    • 1959: Fidel Castro engineered revolution, denouncing Yankee imperialists.

    • Castro expropriated American properties.

    • Washington cut off U.S. imports of Cuban sugar, leading Castro to confiscate Yankee property and become a satellite of Moscow.

    • Anti-Castro Cubans headed for United States.

    • Washington broke diplomatic relations with Cuba (1961) and imposed strict embargo.

Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency

  • Election of 1960:

    • Republicans: Nixon presented himself as mature statesman during a kitchen debate with Khrushchev.

    • Democrats: John F. Kennedy won primaries, with Senator Lyndon B. Johnson as VP. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic nominee since Al Smith in 1928.

  • Role of Television:

    • Television played a crucial role in Kennedy’s win.

  • Results:

    • Kennedy—303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon.

    • Kennedy's popular vote margin only 118,574 votes out of over 68 million cast.

  • Eisenhower's Legacy:

    • Eisenhower continued to enjoy extraordinary popularity until the final curtain.

    • Admired for his decency, goodwill, and moderation, contributed to United States economic and geographic growth.

    • Alaska and Hawaii attained statehood in 1959.

A Cultural Renaissance

  • Post-WWII Arts:

    • U.S. ascended in arts internationally, supporting countless painters and sculptors.

  • Abstract Expressionism:

    • Jackson Pollock pioneered abstract expressionism with spontaneous “action paintings”.

    • Mark Rothko created paintings with bold, shimmering swaths of color.

  • Pop Art:

    • Andy Warhol canonized mundane items on canvas.

    • Roy Lichtenstein parodied comic strips.

  • Architecture:

    • Residential building boom erected ranch-style houses in suburbs.

    • Ultra-modern skyscrapers.

    • Examples:

      • U.N. headquarters in NYC (1952)

      • Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum (1959)

      • Louis Kahn's Salk Institute (1965)

      • I. M. Pei's East Wing of National Gallery of Art (1978) and JFK Library (1979).

  • Literature Styles:

    • Initial World War II literature showcased searing realism.

      • Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

      • James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1956)

    • Later literature viewed war in fantastic and psychedelic prose.

      • Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

      • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five (1969).

    • Counterculture "Beat" writers rejected modern life.

      • Jack Kerouac, On The Road (1957)

    • Poets experienced with “confessional” style.

      • Robert Lowell.

      • Sylvia Plath.

    • Playwrights emerged to challenge social norms:

      • Tennesse Williams -A Streetcar Named Desire(1947)

      • Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman(1949), The Crucible(1953)

      • Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

      • Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

      • Novelists:

        • J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

        • Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952)

        • Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

        • Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

New Cultural Voices

  • Black authors:

    • Richard Wright: Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945).

    • James Baldwin's: The Fire Next Time.

    • LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): Dutchman (1964).

  • Southern Renaissance:

    • Distanced themselves from “Lost Cause” literature.

    • William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor.

  • Jewish Novelists:

    • Bernard Malamud: The Assistant (1957).

    • Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Portnoy's Complaint (1969).

Kennedy's "New Frontier" Spirit

  • John F. Kennedy:

    • Pledged to “get the country moving again”.

    • Youngest president, assembled a young cabinet.

    • Recast FBI priorities toward organized crime and civil rights.

  • Inner Circle:

    • Confident and sophisticated advisors, e.g., Robert S. McNamara.

  • * Peace Corps offered aid to undeveloped countries.

  • Congressional Opposition:

    • Republicans and southern Democrats opposed New Frontier proposals.

    • Key medical and education bills stalled, and Congress rejected tax cuts.