Question

The 1950s was a time of great change in the United States. Write an essay of at least three paragraphs describing some of these changes. Be sure to include cultural, political, and economic changes.
I do not need you to write the three paragraphs but if you could help me come up with some idea's I would greatly appreciate it. I know the Korean war happened during the 50's..

Answer 1

This how I answered the Question Hopefully I did ok.

The 1950's was the time after the war. WWII helped drastically in helping get our economy back on track. WWII ended in 1945, so in the 1950's the economy was still booming in the United states. Which is different from before hand when we were going through the great depression. The same can not be said for teh rest of teh world. At this time they were still struggling.

There were still some political problems in the 1950's. The Cold war was under way. There was no actual physical fighting but there was fighting over Territory basically. There was also always a threat of Atomic warfare which kept everyone on their toes. one half of the world against the other.

here was also a big cultural change during the 1950's. Soldiers where coming home. This lead to the baby boom. A time period when a lot of baby's were born at one time. Which forever changed Americas society.

Answer 2

This is very correct.

Answer 3

Cultural: the Second Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West begain during the war, in part because of labor shortages in the big industrial cities, and continued after the war throughout the 50s. There is the time during which the center of Northeastern and Midwester cities became associated with being substantially black, and when the perception of black culture as "urban" culture began to take hold.

One interesting side effect (among many others) of this is that black music -- blues, jazz and gospel -- became much more widely known among urban whites, and led to the formation, in the 1950s, of the curious fusion of white country and black jazz and gospel known as rock 'n' roll. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Political: the decade began with a bang, with the astonishing (to Western observers) explosion by the USSR of its first atomic bomb, in 1949, which turned the threat of nuclear war from a distant worry to a very pressing and immediate concern, particularly given Allied differences over occupied Germany (the Berlin blockade and airlift occured in 1949) and the apparent success of the "international" communism, represented by the victory of the Communist rebellion in China in 1949, the intervention of the Red Army to suppress anti-communist unrest in Hungary in 1956 (in which perhaps as many as 10-20,000 people were killed), and most of all the invasion of South Korea by Communist North Korea in 1950, which touched off the Korean War.

It was a decade of profound anxiety and even a sense of betrayal. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had died to liberate Europe -- and yet half of it remained occupied, merely exchanging the Nazi boot for that of Joe Stalin and the Red Army. Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain" in a speech in 1946, to refer to Stalin's reneging on wartime promises to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. (East Germany was still occupied, of course, and Yugoslavia seemed genuinely independent under Tito.) The Greeks and Turks seemed teetering on the edge of communist revolution, and so on. It was discovered, both secretly (through the Venona project) and publically (through the confessions of Whittaker Chambers and David Greenglass, among others) that there had been and probably still were Soviet spies at some of the highest levels of American government. This led diectly to the formation of the famous House Un-American Activities Committee, and the ascendance of Senators Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon as anti-Communist Cold Warriors. McCarthy would go on to destroy himself through drink and excess, but Nixon became popular enough, in no small erason because of his anti-Communism, to become Vice-President in 1953-1960 and, narrowly losing the Presidency in 1960, President in 1968. (The election of 1964 was a strange one because of the assasination of JFK in 1963.)

Certainly the threat of nuclear war hung heavily over the decade:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUqJ8XYYliA&

It increased steeply throughout the decade, with the explosion of the H-bomb by the United States in 1952 and by the USSR in 1955, and by the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could deliver them in minutes instead of hours, first successfully tested by the USSR in 1957 and by the US in 1958. The number of deployed nuclear weapons soared, from maybe 400 in 1950 to something like 22,000 in 1960.

Meanwhile, the electorate became fed up with Harry Truman and the Democrats, who seemed unable to unwilling to do something about all this -- unable even to decisively win the Korean War. Republican control returned to Congress in 1946, and while Truman squeaked out an election in 1948, he was sufficiently unpopular by 1952 that he lost the first primaries and withdrew from the race. General Eisenhower was elected, and presided over general Republican control for the rest of the decade.

Economic: after a brief period of inflation following the removal of wartime price and wage controls, and a brief recession in 1948 perhaps a result of a massive shift in economic resources from wartime to peacetime uses (accompanied by an enormous cut in government spending), the economy grew strongly, leading to the highest growth in US economic wealth ever. At least some of this can be traced to the fact that European industries were in shambles, literally, and demand for American products for rebuilding was very strong.

On average everyone got much wealthier -- it was in this era that it becames a matter of assumption that the average middle-class man could support a nonworking wife and children, and own his own home, on his salary. That was not a general expectation before that time, and has, since the 1970s, largely disappeared again.

There was, however, a great deal of strife over the typical uneven disitribution of wealth, and there was considerable labor unrest -- e.g. strikes -- in the early part of the decade. The enormous expansion of car ownership made possible by the new wealth also transformed the nation, as it began its 60 year love affair with the automobile and suburban living.

Answer 4

Thanks!