CHAPTER 19: POSTWAR BOOM

Journal 4/16

•What choices do you have when you graduate high school? What are your plans?

Section 1: Postwar America

Readjustment and Recovery• GI Bill of Rights – loans for

houses and education• Suburbs – solve the

housing crisis

What about women?

•How do you think women react to their husbands coming home from war? How did women’s roles change during the war?

What about the economy? •Defense industries close•Office of Price Administration (OPA) no

longer controls prices of goods•Congress has to reestablish controls on

prices, wages, rents•What new jobs do you think will be

created? •People had saved during the war and

bought war bonds -> leads to a new demand for cars + houses

Social Unrest• 1946 - Truman asks

Congress to pass anti-lynching laws, a ban on the poll tax, and a permanent civil rights commission

• Congress does not pass them so Truman issues an executive order to integrate the armed forces and no discrimination when hiring govt. employees

Election of 1952

•Truman decides not to run for reelection after Korean War and

McCarthyism •Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican) wins•Democrats had been in power for 20 years•Eisenhower did not believe the federal

govt. should be involved with desegregation

•1954 – Brown v. Board of Education

Questions

•1. How did the Truman administration respond to millions of veterans not having a job?

•2. What was done to help the severe housing shortage?

•3. How did Truman and Congress try to solve the problem of high inflation?

•4. How did Truman try to stop discrimination and racial violence?

•5. What was the Fair Deal?

Section 3: Popular Culture

Journal

Compare music/entertainment from the 1950s with modern music.

•http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc92MbyO7wE

•http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OkZrvSLcM

Mass Media and Television

Mass Media and Television

Movies and Radios

•1954 – color and smell-o-vision

A Subculture Emerges

The beat movement – those who go against the suburban/white view of life portrayed in mass media

Nonconformist, no regular work, tried to experience a higher consciousness through Zen Buddhism, music, drugs

Rock ‘n’ Roll

•A form of American popular music that evolved in the 1950s out of rhythm and blues, country, jazz, gospel and pop

•Adults hated it and tried to ban it •600 million records are sold in 1960

Jazz

Nat King Cole

Questions

•Page 657 #3 and #4

Section 4: The Other America

The Urban Poor • Prosperity only for some

Americans• White flight – millions of

whites moved into suburbs• 5 million African

Americans move from rural south to northern cities

• Cities lost people, business, and income tax

• Poverty increased in the inner cities -> cannot pay for good housing, diet, and doctors

Urban Renewal • National Housing Act

(1949) – rundown neighborhoods were torn down and low-income houses were built

• Poor people were moved from one ghetto to the next as shopping center and stadiums were built

Poverty Leads to Activism for Mexican Americans• Shortage of agricultural

workers during WWII• Hundreds of thousands of

Mexican braceros (hired hands) were allowed entrance into U.S.

• Many stay due to poor economy back in Mexico

• Longoria incident – family of Mexican American war hero denied a funeral service in Texas – leads to the organization of the G.I. Forum

Native Americans • Federal government moves

away from assimilation and financial assistance with 1934 Indian Reorganization Act

• National Congress of American Indians helps N. Americans retain their own customs on reservations

• Termination policy – individual Native Americans gain control of tribal lands

• Bureau of Indian Affairs provides job training in the cities