1950s Life in America

Living in the 50s Baby Boom In 1957 there was one baby born every 7 seconds

Living in the 50s Suburban Living “The American Dream” By 1960 1/3 of the US population lived in suburbs

Living in the 50s Consumerism Businesses create franchises like McDonald’s Everything is the same/mass produced America becomes more HOMOGENOUS

Living in the 50s Car ownership more than doubles 1956 – Interstate Highway Act – largest public works project in US history! 41,000 miles of new highways built

Working in the 50s Men Women Children Corporate culture, factory work decreasing Women Children

The Trouble With Women

Living in the 50s Culture Television – from 7,000 to 50,000 TV sets in the US in less than 5 years

Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley Beatniks – counterculture (be different)

Howl, by Allen Ginsberg I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull ...

Politics in the 50s Fear of spies Hydrogen Bomb Smith Act and McCarran Act made Communism illegal Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg accused of spying Hydrogen Bomb

Politics in the 50s Joseph McCarthy HUAC