What fueled the prosperity of the 1950s?

Printed Page 817

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Figure false: Hotpoint Air Conditioner Ad, 1955
Figure false: In 1902, Willis Haviland Carrier, a twenty-six-year-old American engineer, designed the first system to control temperature and humidity and installed it in a Brooklyn printing plant. Room air conditioners began to appear in the 1930s and spread rapidly in the 1950s, making possible the industrial and population explosion in the Sun Belt. While this ad promised consumers clean as well as cool air inside the house, it failed to note that air conditioning consumed large amounts of energy and contributed to outdoor air pollution. Hotpoint/General Electric Company.

STIMULATED BY COLD WAR spending and by technological advances, economic productivity increased enormously in the 1950s. A multitude of new items came on the market, and consumption became the order of the day. Millions of Americans enjoyed new homes in the suburbs, and higher education enrollments skyrocketed. Although every section of the nation enjoyed the new abundance, the Southwest and the South — the Sun Belt — especially boomed in production, commerce, and population.

Work itself was changing. Fewer people labored on farms, service-sector employment overtook manufacturing jobs, women’s employment grew, and union membership soared. Not all Americans benefited from these changes; forty million lived in poverty. Most Americans, however, enjoyed a higher standard of living, prompting economist John Kenneth Galbraith to call the United States “the affluent society.”

CHRONOLOGY

1954

  • – Operation Wetback is launched.
  • – Hernandez v. Texas.

1960

  • – One-quarter of Americans live in suburbs.
  • – Women hold nearly one-third of all jobs.