The Second World War ended the Great Depression in the United States, bringing about a great economic boom. By the end of the war, the United States had the strongest economy and held several advantages over its past commercial rivals: its industry and infrastructure had not been damaged by war. In the first decades following the war, U.S. manufactured goods saturated markets around the world.

Postwar America experienced a genuine social revolution as well: after a long struggle African Americans began to experience major victories against the deeply entrenched system of segregation and discrimination. In 1954 the NAACP won a landmark decision in the Supreme Court, which ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) challenged inequality by using Gandhian methods of nonviolent peaceful resistance.

With African American support in key Northern states, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the 1964 presidential election. Johnson secured enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in public services and on the job, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting. In the mid-1960s President Johnson began an “unconditional war on poverty” that promised the kind of fundamental social reform that had succeeded in western Europe after the Second World War.