1. Chapter 37 The Eisenhower Era

2. Changes in Economy During the 1950s, science and technology drove economic growth. The first electronic computers were assembled in the 1940s and were massive. The invention of transistors and printed circuits allowed computer to become smaller. International Business Machine (IBM) was the leader of this technology. Revolutionized areas of inventory, billing, airline scheduling, high-speed printing, and telecommunications. In 1957, Boeing unveiled the first large passenger jet. 2 years later it delivered the first “Air Force One” to Eisenhower. The economy passed from an industrial-based economy to one based on service. White collar jobs soared and union membership declined.

3. An Early Computer, ca. 1950 Just a few decades later, technological improvements would bring the computing power of this bulky behemoth to the user’s desktop.

4. Women’s Changing Roles The “cult of domesticity” emerged in popular culture to celebrate the traditional role of wife and mother. TV shows like “Leave it to Beaver” depicted idyllic suburban life with a working father, 2 children, and a mother that stayed at home. Much of white, middle-class America did live that way but as the 50’s progressed, many women went back to work. Women filled most of the 30 million clerical and service jobs created in the 1950s. Women’s new dual role of worker and homemaker brought up many questions about family life and gender roles. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique which helped to ignite the women’s movement. She wrote of the stifling boredom of suburban housewives which hit home with many American women.

5. Women in the Labor Force, 1900–2005 Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States and Statistical Abstract of the United States, relevant years.

6. The Booming Service Sector Services displaced manufacturing as the most dynamic area of the economy in the post–World War II era, and women made up a majority of new workers in the nation’s offices and classrooms and on sales floors and hospital wards.

7. Culture of Consumers McDonald’s “fast-food” restaurant opened in 1948 and the first plastic credit card was introduced in 1949. 1955 Disneyland opened in California. These and other “brands” would spread throughout the US and eventually to other countries. TV’s brought entertainment and advertisements into most American homes by 1960. “Televangelists” like Billy Graham became popular during the 1950s. Professional sports also gained popularity. Sports franchises grew and moved both west and south. Movie theatre attendance fell and studios began to focus on the small screen.

8. The Original Golden Arches, 1955 Maurice and Richard McDonald replaced their original drive-in hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, with this double-arched design in 1953. McDonald’s soon became one of the largest franchised restaurant chains in the world and a global symbol of American consumerism.

9. Households with Television Sets, 1946–2009

10. Cultural Revolution Elvis Presley blended black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass and country styles to create a new genre of music known as “rock ‘n’ roll”. Elvis was shown on tv only from the waist up because of his scandalous dance moves. Many conservatives condemned this new type of music that blended black and white traditions. Marilyn Monroe helped to set new standards for beauty and sexuality when she appeared on the cover of the first Playboy magazine in 1953. Americans became free-spending consumers of mass-produced, standardized products that were advertised on their TVs. Many economists warned against this type of spending.

11. The King With his fleshy face, pouting lips, and antic, sexually suggestive gyrations, Elvis Presley became the high priest of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, to the chagrin of parents every where. Bloated by fame, fortune, and drugs, he died in 1977 at the age of forty-two.

12. “I Like Ike” 1952 Dwight Eisenhower was nominated for president by the Republican party. Richard Nixon would be his running mate. During the campaign, Nixon gave his famous “Checkers Speech” which saved his place on the ticket. He had been accused of taking illegal campaign donations but he said the only gift he had taken was the family pet, a cocker spaniel named Checkers. Eisenhower had vowed to end the Korean War which helped give him 83% of the electoral vote. The Korean War armistice was finally signed 7 months into his term. 54,000 American soldiers died along with more than a million Chinese and Korean soldiers. Although the shooting had ended, the Cold War raged on.

13. The Republicans’ Choice, 1952 Nominee Eisenhower and his vice- presidential running mate, Nixon, greet the delegates.

14. Presidential Election of 1952 (with electoral vote by state) A Democrat quipped that “if the voters liked the Republicans the way they liked Ike, the two-party system would be in bad shape.” Fortunately for Democrats, Eisenhower scored a personal, not a party, victory. Republicans won minuscule majorities in Congress, which disappeared in the congressional elections two years later.

15. Korean War Scene A grief-stricken American soldier whose buddy has been killed is being comforted, while a medical corpsman fills out casualty tags.

16. A Popular President “Ike” exuded grandfatherly graciousness and goodwill.

17. Joseph McCarthy One of the first problems Eisenhower faced was the growing popularity of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy accused many of the Democratic party of being communists or friendly to the Soviet Union. He accused George Marshall of being part of a huge communist conspiracy. McCarthy’s antics ruined the lives of those he accused, removed the state department of many experts on areas such as Vietnam, and hurt the reputation of the US around the world. McCarthy’s popularity declined when he attacked the US Army. Army-McCarthy Hearings were televised in 1954 and many Americans turned against McCarthy. He was condemned by the Senate for his behavior and died an alcoholic in 1957.

18. Senator McCarthy Extinguishes the Torch of Liberty While preaching patriotism, McCarthy irresponsibly menaced American traditions of civil liberties.

19. Desegregating the South In 1950, 15 million African Americans lived the US and 2/3 of them lived in the South. Jim Crow laws governed all aspects of life in Southern America. Jim Crow laws segregated and discriminated against Blacks. Only 20% of blacks were registered to vote and in deep south states like Mississippi and Alabama it was as low as 5%. Vigilante justice kept African Americans afraid to protest the system. This system hurt the reputation of the US as being the beacon of freedom during the Cold War. After WWII, blacks in the North were slowly winning some important victories. Jackie Robinson integrated professional baseball in 1947 and the NAACP was taking many segregation cases to court. Truman integrated civil service and the military in 1948.

20. The Face of Segregation These women in the segregated South of the 1950s were compelled to enter the movie theater through the “Colored Entrance.” Once inside, they were restricted to a separate seating section, usually in the rear of the theater.

21. The Migration of the Negro, by Jacob Lawrence, 1940–1941 Artist Jacob Lawrence depicted the migration of southern blacks to the North during and after World War II in a series of paintings. The first panel of the series bears the description “During the World War there was a great migration north by southern Negroes.”

22. The Home Front Though often confronted by prejudice and discrimination, many African American migrants from the rural South found their first industrial jobs in wartime defense plants during World War II.

23. Detroit Race Riot, 1943 A black passenger is dragged from a streetcar.

24. Montgomery Bus Boycott and Brown v. BOE December 1955, seamstress and NAACP member Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. She was arrested for violating the segregation law. The African American community was outraged and began a year long boycott of the Montgomery buses. The people of Montgomery chose a local pastor to be the spokesperson of the boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was raised in a prosperous black family in Atlanta, focused on Christian principles and the Constitution, and studied the non- violent protest techniques of Ghandi. Brown v. BOE was decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. It stated segregation was “unconstitutional” and it reversed the decision of the Plessy v. Ferguson. Southern schools, however, refused to desegregate.

25. Integration at Little Rock, 1957 While white mobs jeered at the first black students entering Central High School, federal troops, with bayonets fixed, enforced the law.

26. Integration at Little Rock, 1957 While white mobs jeered at the first black students entering Central High School, federal troops, with bayonets fixed, enforced the law.

27. SCLC and SNCC Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed in 1957 and led by MLK. SCLC wanted to mobilize black churches to push and protest for civil rights. They believed in a non-violent strategy and encouraged speeches, marches, boycotts, and civil disobedience. Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was formed by college students who had started the “sit-in” movement. Students would “sit-in” at segregated lunch counters or restaurants until they were served. Many faced violent mobs, humiliation, and arrest. SNCC focused on non-violent strategies like SCLC but also registered voters in rural Southern states.

28. Martin Luther King, Jr., and His Wife, Coretta, Arrested King and his wife were arrested for the first time in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 while organizing the bus boycott.

29. Cold War Crises Eisenhower felt it was more cost effective to build up the US nuclear arsenal to threaten the Soviets and Chinese. In 1956, the US failed to support a Hungarian uprising against the Soviets because it seemed to minor a cause for nuclear war. Southeast Asia was becoming a hot bed for communism. Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh were trying to overthrow the French rule. The US spent over $1 billion trying to support the doomed French troops. In 1954, French troops became trapped at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnamese nationalists were victorious. Vietnam was then divided in two. The North backed by Ho Chi Minh and the South backed by a pro-western government. Fighting continued between the two sides and the US would become more and more involved.

30. Drive-in Movie Theater, Utah, 1958 Going to the movies became one more thing Americans could do in their cars in the 1950s. Here moviegoers watch Charlton Heston as Moses in the Academy Award– winning motion picture The Ten Commandments. It was the last film made by famed director Cecil B. DeMille.

31. Hungarian Uprising, October 26, 1956 Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Budapest to crush an anticommunist uprising against the Soviets, who had controlled Hungary since World War II. This demonstration of brute force against a grassroots democratic movement turned many communist sympathizers in the West definitively against the Soviet Union.

33. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1954 Shown here greeting exuberant supporters after his election as the first president of the new Egyptian republic, Nasser was long a thorn in the flesh of American and European policymakers anxious to protect the precious oil resources of the Middle East. “Nassarism,” his version of pan-Arabism, won a great following in the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s.

34. Ike Wins Again Eisenhower wins the 1956 election in another landslide. He focused on labor legislation after much corruption and fraud had been revealed in labor unions, especially the Teamsters. Teamster leader, Jimmy Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and then vanished without a trace. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I into space and a month later launched Sputnik II. This shocked many Americans and “rocket fever” swept over the US. Eisenhower established NASA and poured billions of dollars into the Space Race and intercontinental ballistic missiles research. The Sputnik issue led to a critical comparison of the education system of the US with that of the Soviets. American schools began to focus more on math and science and sending students to college.

35. The Helicopter Era, 1957 President Eisenhower was routinely criticized by liberals, as in this Herblock cartoon in the Washington Post, for his apparent indifference to many seething social problems of the day. His failure to employ his vast prestige on behalf of civil rights was especially conspicuous.

36. Cold War Continues Stalin died in 1953 and was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1958, both the US and the Soviets halted testing of nuclear weapons. Eisenhower and Khrushchev met at Camp David and talked of complete disarmament. May 1960 a US U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia and the relationship between the two again fell apart. In 1959, Fidel Castro led an uprising in Cuba against the US backed government of Fulgencio Batista. Cuba became a “satellite” of the Soviet Union and the US placed an embargo on Cuba that still remains today. Soviet Union threatened the US with missiles if they tried to attack Cuba after some leaders wanted to invoke the Monroe Doctrine.

37. What’s So Funny? 1960 Premier Khrushchev gloats over Ike’s spying discomfiture.

38. Election of 1960 Republicans chose VP Richard Nixon and Democrats chose the young Senator from MA, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s Catholicism would become the hot topic of the campaign. TV helped tip the scales in favor of Kennedy. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were viewed by more than 60 million Americans. Many Americans were influenced by Kennedy’s good looks and youth. He won with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. He was the first Roman Catholic and the youngest person ever to be elected president.

39. John F. Kennedy Campaigning for the Presidency, 1960 At right is his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy.

40. Presidential Election of 1960 (with electoral vote by state) Kennedy owed his hairbreadth triumph to his victories in twenty-six of the forty largest cities—and to Lyndon Johnson’s strenuous campaigning in the South, where Kennedy’s Catholicism may have been a hotter issue than his stand on civil rights.

41. The Shopping Mall as New Town Square, 1960

42. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) Celebrated both for his writing and his colorful, swashbuckling lifestyle, Hemingway poses here with a dead leopard in 1953.

43. Death of a Salesman First performed in 1949, Arthur Miller’s play probed the psychic costs of failure in a society that held out the promise of “success” to all. The play especially resonated with audiences in the booming 1950s and quickly took its place as an American classic. This scene from the original Broadway production shows Arthur Kennedy as Biff Loman (left) confronting his father, Willy, played by Lee J. Cobb (seated), while his brother, Happy, portrayed by Cameron Mitchell, looks on. Not shown here is Willy’s compassionate wife, Linda, brilliantly acted by Mildred Dunnock.