Chapter 28: Quest for Consensus, 1952-1960

1. The Best of Times
   1. Suburban and Consumer Culture
      1. People wanted to live in the suburbs, and all levels of government made it possible.
         1. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 provided $32 billion over thirteen years to build a national highway system.
         2. Shopping centers lured stores and businesses away to areas where parking was not a problem.
         3. As Americans sought the pleasant life in suburbia, the urban core deteriorated at an accelerating rate.
      2. The automobile industry benefited from and contributed to the development of both roads and suburbs.
         1. By 1960, 75 percent of Americans had at least one car, which increased the pressure on governments and businesses to consider the needs of automobile owners.
         2. Stores had to include parking lots and easy access to roads and highways as part of their planning, and new industries arose to service the needs of automobile owners.
      3. The suburban market was a result of expanding purchasing power made possible by higher wages and readily expanding credit.
         1. The Diner’s Club credit card made its debut, and American Express soon followed.
         2. Credit purchases leaped from $8.4 billion in 1946 to over $44 billion in 1958.
         3. To enjoy the "good life," Americans were buying not only necessities but luxury items such as record players, records, and recreational equipment.
         4. Many of these nonessential items, and even some of the basic goods, incorporated a new dimension of marketing - planned obsolescence, in which a product is designed to be discarded and replaced by a newer model within a short period of time.
         5. To sell products, Madison Avenue continued to use images of youth, glamour, sex appeal, and sophistication.
   2. Family Culture
      1. With or without Madison Avenue ads, many Americans were sure that they were living in the best of all possible times.
         1. At the center of those feelings lay the economy, the home, the family, and the church.
         2. Religion, with an emphasis on family life, enjoyed a new popularity in the 1950s, reflecting Eisenhower’s view that "everybody should have a religious faith."
      2. Religious leaders were rated as the most important members of society, and no leaders were more esteemed than the Reverends Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale and Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
      3. After the disruptions of depression and war, family took on a renewed importance: the divorce rate slowed and the number of marriages and births climbed as the baby boom continued.
         1. The home was the center of "togetherness" and was reinforced by the portrayal of happy families in popular television shows.
         2. Reality, however, rarely matched television’s images.
   3. Another View of Suburbia
      1. Unlike the wives shown on television, more and more women were working, many even though they had young children.
         1. Some desired careers, but the majority worked to ensure their families’ existing standard of living.
      2. Not all homemakers were happy, and men also showed signs of being less than satisfied with the popular role of suburban dad.
      3. Sociologist David Riesman argued in The Lonely Crowdthat postwar Americans were "outer-directed" and less sure of their values and morals, and William Whyte’s Organization Mandiscussed the same lack of individuality and independence.
         1. Both authors urged readers to resist being packaged like cake mixes and reassert their individuality.
         2. Serious literature also highlighted a sense of alienation from the conformist society, as exemplified by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
         3. More extreme were the Beats, a group of often controversial artists, poets, and writers.
   4. The Trouble with Kids
      1. Juvenile delinquency was not new to American society, but in the 1950s some perceived an alarming new style of delinquency among white, middle-class, suburban teens.
         1. One study of middle-class delinquency concluded that the automobile not only allowed teens to escape adult controls but also provided a private lounge for drinking and for petting or sex episodes.
      2. The problem with kids also seemed wedded to rock ‘n’ roll music.
2. Politics of Consensus
   1. The Middle Path
      1. Eisenhower called himself a modern Republican and labeled his approach "dynamic conservatism: conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings."
      2. By July 1953, Eisenhower’s atomic diplomacy had worked in ending the Korean conflict and left the Asian nation divided by a demilitarized zone (DMZ). This allowed the president to cut the military budget.
      3. This "middle path" produced budget cuts and reduced federal involvement.
      4. Following the launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik I(1957), Eisenhower quoted national security needs to support spending more federal money on education.
         1. American schools, many critics argued, stressed soft subjects and social adjustment rather than hard subjects: science, languages, mathematics.
   2. The Problem with McCarthy
      1. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Senator Joseph McCarthy had taken a prominent role in attacking Democrats as being soft on Communism.
         1. With Ike in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, many Republicans hoped that McCarthy would quietly disappear.
      2. Charging that he was trying to blackmail the U.S. Army, the Senate investigated McCarthy and voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy’s "unbecoming conduct."
3. Seeking Civil Rights
   1. The BrownDecision
      1. In 1954, the Supreme Court accepted NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall’s argument that "separate but equal" was inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education,Topeka, Kansas.
         1. He stressed that segregated educational facilities, even if physically similar, could never yield equal products.
         2. This decision raised a loud cry of protest from white southerners, who vowed to resist segregation by using all means possible, including violence.
      2. While both political parties were carefully dancing around civil rights, blacks made it increasingly difficult for politicians to avoid the issue.
         1. Eisenhower was forced to face the issue in the effort to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
         2. Ike nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched one thousand troops to uphold the law and restore order.
      3. But, in many communities, meaningful integration was still years away as many white students fled the integrated public schools to attend private ones that were beyond the reach of federal courts.
   2. The Montgomery Bus Boycott
      1. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus so that a white man could sit and was arrested.
         1. African-American community leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a boycott of the buses to begin on the day of her court appearance.
      2. The boycott was 90 percent effective and stretched into days, weeks, and months.
         1. Even in the face of personal attack and growing white hostility, King remained calm, reminding supporters to avoid violence and maintain the boycott.
         2. As the boycott approached its anniversary, Gayle et al. v. Browserstated that the city’s and bus company’s policy of segregation was unconstitutional.
         3. A pattern of nonviolent resistance had been initiated, and a new civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was formed.
   3. Ike and Civil Rights
      1. Personally, Eisenhower believed that the government, especially the executive branch, had little role in integration.
      2. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 provided for the formation of a Civil Rights Commission and opened the possibility of using federal suits to ensure voter rights.
         1. In 1960, Congress passed a voting rights act that mandated the use of the courts to guarantee enforcement.
4. Eisenhower and a Hostile World
   1. The New Look
      1. This foreign policy relied on cheaper nuclear deterrence, an enhanced arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and the threat of massive retaliation to protect American national interests.
         1. This policy drew the label of brinksmanship because it required the administration to take the nation to the verge of war and trust that the opposition would back down.
         2. To make the idea of "going nuclear" and the possibility of World War III less frightening, the administration introduced efforts related to surviving atomic war such as fallout shelters.
         3. Seeking ways to avoid a nuclear solution to international problems, Eisenhower and Dulles emphasized alliances and covert operations.
      2. To prevent social change in developing countries from "coming out red," Eisenhower relied on economic and political pressures and the Central Intelligence Agency.
   2. Turmoil in the Middle East
      1. Eisenhower was especially concerned about the Middle East, where Arab nationalism fired by anti-Israeli and anti-Western attitudes posed a serious threat to American interests.
         1. Egypt and Iran offered the greatest challenges, and the CIA helped overthrow the Iranian government when it appeared to be "seeing red."
      2. The Eisenhower Doctrine provided $200 million in military and economic aid to improve military defenses in the nations of the Middle East.
   3. A Protective Neighbor
      1. Eisenhower offered anti-Communist Latin American governments - including dictatorships - economic, political, and military support.
         1. He was most concerned about Guatemala and eventually used the CIA to remove Jocobo Arbenz and replace him with CIA-supplied Carlos Castillo Armas in 1954.
      2. As Nixon toured Latin America, Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista was warding off a rebellion led by Fidel Castro.
         1. Castro triumphed, but many of his economic and social reforms seemed to endanger American investments and interests, and the administration began planning his overthrow.
   4. The New Look in Asia
      1. The Geneva Agreement "temporarily" partitioned Vietnam along the 17th Parallel and created the neutral states of Cambodia and Laos.
         1. The two Vietnams were to hold elections to unify the nation within two years.
         2. Neither was to enter into military alliances or allow foreign bases on their territory.
   5. The Soviets and Cold War Politics
      1. Eisenhower feared and opposed the spread of Communist influence throughout the world but realized that deterrence was only one tactic to limit Soviet power and avoid nuclear confrontation.
         1. A second way to improve Soviet-American relations was to reduce the expanding arms race and limit points of conflict.
      2. After the Soviet takeover of Hungary in 1956, however, the spirit of cooperation between the two superpowers faded.
      3. On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and its pilot was captured.
         1. Eisenhower took full responsibility but refused to apologize.
         2. Khrushchev withdrew from the Five Power Summit and Eisenhower canceled his trip to the Soviet Union.
      4. In 1960, turning the Republicans’ own tactics of 1952 against them, Democrats cheerfully accused their opponents of endangering the United States by being too soft on Communism.