David Farber teaches history at the University of New Mexico and is the author of Chicago '68 and co-author, with Beth Bailey, of The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii.

The Age of Great Dreams

America in the 1960sBy David Farber

Hill and Wang

Copyright © 1994 David Farber
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809015672
The Age of Great Dreams
1.GOOD TIMESTHREE HUNDRED THOUSAND Americans stood shoulder to shoulder. They had been waiting in the cold for hours. Liquor was passed from hand to hand, but the crowd remained good-natured. At last the countdown began: 10 ... 9 ... 8 ... High above Times Square the illuminated globe began its descent. 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... The crowd roared. The 1960s had begun.Throughout the nation, millions watched the scene on American-made television sets. They sang along with Guy Lombardo: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot ..." They drank, kissed, and banged on pots and pans, a rite whose meaning few knew: the noise was meant to scare off evil spirits.President Dwight D. Eisenhower, member of the West Point class of 1915, made no public statement to welcome the new decade. The general celebrated the New Year privately at his favorite retreat, the whites-only, men-only Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. There he laughed at the "nigger jokes" commonly told at places like that. One might imagine that the way the President celebrated the New Year spoke louder than any official words he might have uttered, but few Americans were looking to the President as the clock struck midnight and ended the 1950s.Francis Cardinal Spellman, the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church in America, was out of the country when the 1950s came to a close. He was touring U.S. military bases in the Middle East, and took advantage of the opportunity to broadcast a New Year's message over Radio Free Europe to the hundreds of millions of people who lived behind the Iron Curtain. "By yourfortitude in a dark and desperate time," he told them, "you are cautioning the lukewarm of the free world not to take liberty for granted." The nation's leading theologians, like its politicians, saw the world cast in terms of the Cold War.The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who had recently given up his pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, to concentrate on the growing but still unfocused civil rights movement, spent New Year's Day leading a march on the state capitol in Richmond, Virginia. The Virginia government had elected to close down the entire public school system in Prince Edward County rather than obey federal court orders to integrate the schools. King's actions in Richmond went unnoticed by the mass media, the White House, and the overwhelming majority of Americans.Most Americans celebrated the new decade very simply, taking the day off from work, sleeping late, watching TV, doing some work around the house, sharing a meal with family or friends. It is true that the fate of the nation was unclear, the changes of the past fifteen years immense. But it is also true that tens of millions of Americans, on New Year's Day 1960, did not expect or desire anything fundamental to change in the decade to come. Many believed they were living the American dream; they saw their lives swirling with possibilities. Some, far fewer in number, had already begun to nourish the seeds of change.In 1960, most Americans old enough to remember looked back at the fifteen years since World War II with a sense of amazement. Given the Depression before that war, America had an extraordinary postwar era. Between 1946 and 1960 every indicator of national wealth and prosperity had soared. The stock market entered the new year more than twenty times higher than it had been in the Depression year of 1932. The gross national product had increased about 250 percent since the end of World War II, and the median family income, adjusted for inflation, had almost doubled. What those numbers meant for a majority of Americans was a material life, in world-historical terms, of incredible abundance. In 1960, America was the richest nation the world had ever seen. Americans, though not without some doubts, expected that boom times would just keep on rolling. Economic wealth--coupledwith the faith that economic growth would continue and the fact that for many years it did--shaped the 1960s like no other single factor.In 1960, in a nation of fewer than 50 million families almost 60 million automobiles were registered; big, flashy cars with powerful engines, chrome grilles, fabulous tail fins. The fact that between 1930 and 1948 the number of Americans who owned cars had not increased and that as late as 1950 most working-class families did not own a car made the new "auto-mania" a powerful indicator of 1950s prosperity. And in another sign of prosperity, by 1960 an overwhelming majority of Americans could sit back in their own homes and "push a button" (as ad after commercial after billboard accurately reminded them) and watch America's greatest entertainers on television, listen to a hi-fi record, or use any one of an arsenal of electrical appliances that few in the world could command. Few adult Americans who had weathered the Great Depression expected such luxury, much less expected it to become nationwide. But by 1960, telephones, televisions, refrigerators, and the electricity to power them were accepted as an American birthright, and fast cars and cheap gas were markers of the American way of life.The locus of this new American affluence was undoubtedly suburbia. Well-to-do Americans had been living in suburbs for generations, but it was only after World War II that relatively inexpensive suburban housing boomed. The ranch-house bonanza was fostered by government subsidies and policies, builders' clever use of mass-production techniques, and middle-class prospective homeowners' faith in continued economic prosperity. Most of all, the postwar suburban boom was driven by the pent-up demand of millions of Americans whose dreams of owning a home had been frustrated by the economic turmoil and the social dislocations of the Great Depression and then World War II. As late as 1947, before new housing could catch up with demand, 6 million American families had lived doubled up with friends or family.Between 1948 and 1958, 13 million homes were constructed; 11 million of them were built in the suburbs. By 1960, as many people lived in the suburbs as in America's central cities. These newsuburban developments--in places like Glenview, Illinois; Beechwood, Ohio; and Levittown, New York--were often lambasted by contemporary critics for their "ticky-tacky" houses and their general ambience of bland conformity. The great urbanist Lewis Mumford wrote in 1961: "The archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold." Mumford's sharp words about suburban conformity were not inaccurate but they hid as much as they revealed about Americans' love affair with the tract home subdivision.The new suburbs were in many ways a conformist's dream--but the 1950s conformists were of a new breed and represented a major change in the American social landscape. In the new suburbs, the "melting pot" was being reinvented. By 1960, massive legal immigration to the United States had been shut down for almost forty years. In the 1950s and into the 1960s the children of European-born immigrants--many of whom had grown up in relatively parochial and exclusive...