Alan Brinkley

The following is an excerpt from an essay written for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History by Alan Brinkley (b. 1949), a professor of American history at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Franklin D. Roosevelt (2009), John F. Kennedy (2012), and Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982), which received the National Book Award for History.

The Affluent Society

The performance of the American economy in the decades after World War II appeared to many contemporaries to be, as one historian wrote at the time, “the crossing of a great divide in the history of humanity.” It was often described as an “economic miracle.” The GNP was growing fourteen times as fast as the population and seven times the rate of inflation. The average family income grew as much in the ten years after World War II as it had grown in the previous fifty years combined. Between 1940 and 1965, average income grew from about $2,200 per family per year to just under $8,000; when adjusted for inflation, that means average family incomes almost tripled.

These years also saw a significant decrease in (although not a disappearance of) poverty in America. The percentage of families below the official poverty line in 1950 was 30 percent. By 1960 it had dropped to 22 percent and by the 1960s, it had dropped to under 14 percent. Between 1950 and 1970, in other words, poverty declined by over 60 percent.

There were many claims at the time that not only was America becoming wealthier, but that it was becoming more “equal,” that wealth was being redistributed at the same time it was increasing. That was not true. There was no significant redistribution of wealth in the 1950s and 1960s, up or down, simply an increase in the total amount of wealth. But significantly—and in sharp contrast to the period since the mid-1970s—while there was no downward redistribution of wealth, neither was there an upward distribution of wealth. Distribution patterns, in other words, remained unchanged—the wealthy and the poor experienced roughly the same rates of growth. The gap between them remained the same.

What caused this remarkable growth? One important cause was government spending, which was clearly the major factor in ending the Depression in the early 1940s. Government expenditures in 1929 were 1 percent of GNP; in 1955, they were 17 percent. The bulk of this increase in the early 1950s came from military spending until the end of the Korean War. After that, highway and home construction picked up much of the slack. Veterans’ benefits (mortgage and education assistance), government-sponsored research (military and space), and other sources of growth helped fuel the economy. Another cause of postwar economic growth was population growth: the tremendous increase in the birth rate in the decade after World War II (“postwar baby boom”). Population grew in the 1940s and 1950s at twice the rate it had grown in the 1930s. Increased population was also responsible for increased demand and increased consumption, a spur to economic growth.

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The growth of suburbs after World War II was one of the great population movements in American history. Eighteen million people—10 percent of the population—moved to suburbs in the 1950s. The American population as a whole grew 19 percent in the 1950s; suburban population grew 47 percent. Suburbs created a vast new market and provided an important boost to several of the most important sectors of the economy: the housing industry, the automobile industry, highway construction, and a wide range of consumer industries. And another element of growth was the transformation in labor relations. The growing power of unions allowed workers to receive better wages and benefits.

The cumulative economic effect of all these changes was a radical change in American life—the birth of an economy (and thus a society) in which many Americans came to consider affluence a norm; in which the ability not just to subsist, but greatly to enhance the quality of one’s life came to seem a basic right; in which material abundance became one of the ways in which many, probably most, Americans defined their world.

Economic growth affected both popular and elite ideas about capitalism. Gradually it became possible to believe that there were few limits to economic growth. Capitalism, many Americans came to believe, was capable of much greater feats than most Americans had once believed possible.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous Harvard economist, hardly an uncritical defender of capitalism, published a small book in 1952 entitled American Capitalism. In it, he expressed some of the wonder and enthusiasm of this new discovery. About capitalism, he wrote simply: “It works!” And he went on to say:

The growth of affluence also provided an opportunity to improve the lives of Americans and to meet social needs. Galbraith urged a major increase in public spending on such things as schools, parks, hospitals, urban renewal, and scientific research. The 1957 launching of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite that was the first to be launched into orbit (before the United States had managed to do so), was a tremendous event in American politics and culture. It too persuaded many Americans, and the government, to ask for massive social investment in an effort to catch up—particularly in science, technology, and education.

Fifties Society

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Many Americans in the 1950s considered their era as a time of affluence, community, and unity. Today—a half century later—many people still see those years as a golden era that has now been lost. Even the most sophisticated chroniclers of its time believed in the great successes of the 1950s. The renowned historian Richard Hofstadter wrote at the time:

The French writer Simone de Beauvoir said of America in the 1950s:

Many middle-class Americans in these years believed in the idea that the American people, for all their diversity, were becoming more and more alike—and could expect to continue to do so in the future. Few ideas became more pervasive in popular culture than the sense that America was becoming a middle-class nation—a society in which everyone was either already part of the middle class, soon to become part of it, or aspiring to become part of it. And there was some evidence for this powerful idea.

There was rapid growth in the number of people able to afford what the government defined as a “middle-class” standard of living—60 percent of the American people. Home ownership rose from 40 percent in 1945 to 60 percent in 1960. By 1960, 75 percent of all families owned cars; 87 percent owned televisions; 75 percent owned washing machines. But these figures also show the survival of a substantial minority (25 to 40 percent) that remained outside the middle class. More than 23 percent of Americans still lived in poverty, and African American poverty was far higher.

American politics in the 1950s was dominated by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who emerged from the war as the military man with the most political appeal, largely because of his personality. There were other generals who had performed with at least equal brilliance and effectiveness. But none of them had Eisenhower’s personal qualities: his public warmth and friendliness and geniality; his dazzling, highly photogenic smile, which became his political trademark; his comforting, unthreatening public image. It helped him become president in 1953, and it helped him remain popular until he left the White House in 1961.

But Eisenhower was also appealing because he seemed to embody the stability and the desire for unity that characterized so many other areas of American culture in the 1950s. Eisenhower’s approach to leadership was based on two fairly simple assumptions. He had a deep aversion to conflict and confrontation. He leaned instinctively toward consensus and conciliation; and he tried to avoid doing anything that would disrupt the harmony that he liked to believe prevailed in American society. And he was deeply committed to capitalism, and to capitalists; a champion of free enterprise; a cheerleader for the business community in this hour of its great economic triumph. Eisenhower’s presidency was an embodiment of the middle-class yearning for stability and consensus.

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Eisenhower became, in effect, the cautious, prudent, conciliatory paternal figure presiding over the heyday of middle-class dominance of American life. He seemed to embody the era’s apparent stability and unity and homogeneity. He epitomized the American middle class’s idealized image of itself. And not incidentally, he presided over an era of almost unbroken prosperity and unbroken peace that reinforced the power of the stable, consensual public culture of the time.

(2012)