Chapter 37
The Eisenhower Era,
1952–1960
I. Affluence and Its Anxieties
• Prosperity boom
– Housing:
• A fabulous surge in home construction
• One of every four homes were built in the 1950s
• 83 percent of those new houses were in suburbia
– Science and technology:
• Invention of transistor in 1948 sparked a revolution in
electronics, especially in computers
• The first electronic computers were massive
machines
• Computer giant International Business Machine (IBM)
prototype of the “high-tech” corporation
I. Affluence and Its Anxieties
(cont.)
• The coming “information age”
• Computers transformed business practices
– Aerospace industries:
• Connection between military and civilian aircraft
production
• The Seattle-based Boeing Company (1957)—the first
large passenger jet, the “707”
• First presidential jet (Eisenhower) “Air Force One”
– Nature of the work force was changing:
• “White collar” workers outnumbered “blue collar”
• Passage from an industrial to a postindustrial or
service-based economy
I. Affluence and Its Anxieties
(cont.)
• Union membership peaked about 35 percent in 1954
and then steady decline (see p. 769)
– Women and industry:
• Surge in white-collar employment opened special
opportunities for women (see Table 37.1)
• A “cult of domesticity” emerged in popular culture to
celebrate those eternal feminine functions
• 40 million new jobs were created from 1950-1980
• 30 million jobs in clerical and service work
• “Pink-collar ghetto” were occupations that were
dominated by women (see Figure 37.1)
I. Affluence and Its Anxieties
(cont.)
• Urban age and women:
• Women’s new dual role: both workers and
homemakers raised urgent questions:
– About family,
– And traditional definitions of gender differences.
• Feminist Betty Friedan:
– The Feminine Mystique (1963): a classic of feminist protest
literature that launched the modern women’s movement.
Table 37-1 p861
Figure 37-1 p862
II. Consumer Culture in the Fifties
– 1950s expansion of the middle class and
blossoming of a consumer culture:
• Dinner’s Club introduced the plastic credit card (1949)
• 1948 first “fast-food” style McDonald’s opened in San
Bernardino, California
• 1955 Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California
• Manufacturers, retailers, and advertisers spread
American-style consumer capitalism to rest of the
world.
• Especially critical was the development of the
television (see Figure 37.2)
II. Consumer Culture in the Fifties
(cont.)
• Attendance at movies sank:
– Entertainment industry changed from silver screen to the
picture tube
– $10 billion was spent on advertising on television in mid-50s
– Critics fumed that the popular new mass medium was
degrading the public’s aesthetic, social, moral, political, and
educational standards
• Religion:
– Capitalized on the powerful new electronic pulpit
– Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Fulton J. Sheen took to the
airwaves to spread the Christian gospel
• Catalyzed the commercialization of sports
– Once numbered in the stadium-capacity thousands; could
now be counted in the couch-potato millions
II. Consumer Culture in the Fifties
(cont.)
– Sports reflected the shift in population toward the West and
South
– Creating the westward and southward sports franchises
– Led to expansion of major baseball leagues, football and
basketball leagues followed
• Popular music dramatically transformed in the 50s:
– Chief revolutionary was Elvis Presley:
» He fused black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass
and country styles
» Creating rock ‘n’ roll.
• Marilyn Monroe helped to popularize and commercialize new standards of sensuous sexuality, as did
Playboy magazine
II. Consumer Culture in the Fifties
(cont.)
– As the 1950s closed:
• Americans were on their way to becoming freespending consumers of mass-produced, standardized
products
• Critics lamented the implications of this new consumerist lifestyle:
– David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, portrayed the postwar
generation as a pack of conformists
– As did William H. Whyte, The Organization Man
– Similar theme in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) by
Sloan Wilson
– John Kenneth Galbraith questioned the relation between
private wealth and public goods in The Affluent Society
(1958)
p863
Figure 37-2 p863
III. The Advent of Eisenhower
• Election of 1952:
– Democrats
• Nominated a reluctant Adlai E. Stevenson
– Republicans
• Enthusiastically chose war hero General Dwight D.
Eisenhower on the first ballot
• “Ike’s” running mate was Richard M. Nixon, who
gained notoriety as the red-hunter
• Nixon was the campaigner with the bare-knuckle style
of political combat.
III. The Advent of Eisenhower
(cont.)
– Politics and television:
• Nixon, accused of taking illegal donations, appealed in
a speech denying such on television—the Checkers
Speech
– Television was now a formidable political tool
– Later Eisenhower used it in short, tightly scripted televised
“spots”
– These foreshadowed the future of political advertising
• Television used for political purposes:
– Vastly oversimplified complicated economic and social
issues
– Eventually turned to the standards of show business and
commercialism
III. The Advent of Eisenhower
(cont.)
– Results of the 1952 presidential election:
• Eisenhower pledged to go personally to Korea to end
the war if elected:
– 33,936,234 votes to Stevenson’s 27,314,992
– 442 electoral votes to 89 (see Map 37.1)
– Ike was able to bring in Republicans to gain GOP control of
the new Congress.
• Eisenhower’s presidential term:
– He fulfilled his pledge and went for a three day
visit to Korea
• It took him, after threats of atomic weapons, seven
months to sign a treaty.
III. The Advent of Eisenhower
(cont.)
– Korean situation:
•
•
•
•
Last three years
54,000 Americans lay dead
Perhaps a million Chinese
More than a million North Koreans and South
Koreans were dead
• Tens of billions American dollars had been poured in
• The war bought only a return to the conditions of
1950
• Korea remained divided at the thirty-eighth parallel.
III. The Advent of Eisenhower
(cont.)
• Eisenhower himself
– Military commander:
• A leadership style that self-consciously projected an
image of sincerity, fairness, and optimism
• In World War II known as an “unmilitary” general
– President:
• Struck the pose of an “unpolitical” president
• Serenely above the petty partisan fray
• His greatest “asset” was his enjoyment of the
“affection and respect of our citizenry”
– Critics charged he hoarded the “asset” of his immense
popularity, rather then spend it for a good cause.
Map 37-1 p865
p865
IV. The Rise and Fall of Joseph
McCarthy
• First problem for Eisenhower was McCarthy
– Joseph R. McCarthy was an obstreperous
anticommunist crusader:
• In February 1950, he accused Secretary of State Dean
Acheson of knowingly employing 205 Communists
• His rhetoric grew bolder and so did his accusations
after the 1952 election
• He saw the red hand of Moscow everywhere
• McCarthyism flourished in the seething Cold War
atmosphere of suspicion and fear.
IV. The Rise and Fall of Joseph
McCarthy (cont.)
• He was the most ruthless and did the most damage to
American traditions of fair play and free speech
• Careers of countless officials, writers, and actors were
ruined by “Low-Blow Joe”
• Eisenhower privately loathed McCarthy but publicly
tried to stay out of his way
• Eisenhower allowed him to control personnel policy
in the State Department
– Which resulted in severe damage to the morale and
effectiveness of the professional foreign service
– It deprived the government of a number of specialists
– Damaged America’s international reputation for fair and
open democracy when it was necessary.
IV. The Rise and Fall of Joseph
McCarthy (cont.)
– He bent too far when he attacked the U.S. army
• The embattled military men fought back in 35 days of
televised hearings in the spring of 1954
• Army-McCarthy hearings:
– Showed the political power of the new broadcast medium
– Up to 20 million watched the hearings
– McCarthy publicly cut his own throat by parading his
essential meanness and irresponsibility
• The Senate formally condemned him for “conduct
unbecoming a member”
• Three years later McCarthy died of chronic alcoholism
• “McCarthyism” a label for the dangerous forces of
unfairness/fear, unleashed by a democracy society
V. Desegregating American Society
• America’s black community in 1950s
– African Americans:
• 15 million citizens in 1950
• Two-thirds of whom made their homes in the South
• Jim Crow laws:
– A rigid set of laws which governed all aspects of their existence
– Dealing with a bizarre array of separate social arrangements
» That kept them insulated from whites, economically
inferior, and politically powerless
» Had to have everything separated
» Only about 20% eligible to vote
V. Desegregating American Society
(cont.)
– Where the law proved insufficient to enforce this regime,
vigilante violence did the job:
» Six black war veterans, claiming the rights for which
they had fought overseas, were murdered in the
summer of 1946
» A Mississippi mob lynched black fourteen-year-old
Emmett Till in 1955 for allegedly leering at a white
woman
– Segregation tarnished America’s international
image
• African American entertainers Paul Robeson and
Josephine Baker toured the world recounting the
horrors of Jim Crow
V. Desegregating American Society
(cont.)
• Gunnar Myrdal book: An American Dilemma exposing
the scandalous contradiction between
» “The American Creed”—allegiance to the values of
“progress, liberty, equality, and humanitarianism”
» And the nation’s shameful treatment of black citizens.
– International pressure with grassroots and legal
activism
• Propelled some racial progress in the North after
World War II
• They fought for and won equal access to public
accommodations
• Jackie Robinson cracked baseball’s color barrier when
the Brooklyn Dodgers signed him in 1947
V. Desegregating American Society
(cont.)
– The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP):
• Pushed the Supreme Court in 1950 to rule in Sweatt
v. Painter that separate professional schools for blacks
failed to meet the test of equality
– Black suffering still continued, especially in the
South:
• Increasingly African Americans refused to suffer in
silence (see pp. 870-871)
• On December 1955 Rosa Parks made history in
Montgomery, Alabama, when she boarded a bus and
took a seat in the “whites only” section and refused
to give it up
V. Desegregating American Society
(cont.)
» Her arrest for violating the city’s Jim Crow statutes
sparked a year-long black boycott of city buses
» And served notice throughout the South that blacks
would no longer submit meekly to the absurdities and
indignities of segregation.
– The Montgomery bus boycott:
• The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.:
– Unlikely champion of the downtrodden and disfranchised
– He had been sheltered from the grossest cruelties of
segregation
– But his oratorical skill, his passionate devotion to biblical
and constitutional conceptions of justice, and his devotion
to nonviolent principles of India’s Mohandas Gandhi were
destined to push him to the forefront of black revolution.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution
• President Truman and blacks
– Commissioned a report called “To Secure These
Rights”:
• He ended segregation in the federal civil service in
1948
• Ordered “equality of treatment and opportunity” in
the armed forces
– Congress resisted passing civil rights legislation
– Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, showed no
interest in racial issues.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
• Supreme Court and civil rights:
– The court assumed political leadership in the
civil rights struggle
– Chief Justice Earl Warren:
• Active judicial intervention in previously taboo social
issues
• Courageously led the Court to address urgent issues
that Congress and the President preferred to avoid
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas:
– Segregation in the public schools was “inherently unequal”
and thus unconstitutional.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
– It reversed the Court’s rule of 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson
(see p. 496) that “separate but equal” facilities were
allowable under the Constitution
• Desegregation must go ahead with “all deliberate
speed”
– Border States made reasonable efforts to comply
– Deep South organized “massive resistance”
– Southern congressional members signed the “Declaration of
Constitutional Principles” in 1956
» Pledging their unyielding resistance to desegregation
– Some states diverted public funds to start private schools
– Ten years later only 2% of the eligible blacks in the Deep
South were sitting in classrooms with whites.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
• President Eisenhower remained reluctant to
promote integration
– Wanted to educate white Americans about the
need for racial justice
– Felt that the recent Court’s ruling upset “the
customs and convictions of at least two generations of Americans”
– He steadily refused to issue a public statement
endorsing the Court’s conclusion.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
– In September, Ike was forced to act:
• Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, mobilized the
National Guard to prevent 9 black students from
enrolling in Little Rock’s Central High School
» Ike sent troops to escort the children to their classes
– Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since
Reconstruction
• It set up a permanent Civil Rights Commission to
investigate violations of civil rights
• And authorized federal injunctions to protect voting
rights.
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
• Blacks and civil rights movement:
– Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957
• Aimed to mobilize the vast power of black churches
on behalf of black rights
• Churches were the largest and best-organized black
institutions
– Black “sit-in” movement launched February 1,
1960
• By four black college freshmen in Greensboro, NC
• They demanded service at a whites-only Woolworth’s
lunch counter
VI. Seeds of the Civil Rights
Revolution (cont.)
• Sit-ins swelled into wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins to
compel equal treatment
• April, 1960 southern black students formed the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC):
– Pronounced “snick”
– To give more focus and force to these efforts
– Young and impassioned, SNCC members would:
» Lose patience with the more stately tactics of the SCLC
» And the even more deliberate legalism of the NAACP.
p869
p872
VII. Eisenhower Republicanism at
Home
• Eisenhower in 1953
– Administration of “dynamic conservatism”
• Dealing with people: “Be liberal, be human”
• “People’s money, or their economy, or their form of
government, be conservative”
• A balanced, middle-of-the-road course
• Strove to balance the federal budget:
– Guard the Republic from what he called “creeping
socialism”
– Supported the transfer of control over offshore oil fields
from the federal government to the states
VII. Eisenhower Republicanism at
Home (cont.)
– Tried to curb the TVA (see p. 766) by encouraging a private
power company to build a generating plant to compete with
the massive public utility
– Eisenhower’s secretary of health, education, and welfare
condemned the free distribution of the Salk antipolio
vaccine as “socialized medicine”
• Eisenhower responded to the Mexican government
concern about illegal Mexican immigrants (see p. 803)
– Operation Wetback—1 million Mexicans were apprehended
and returned to Mexico in 1954
• Eisenhower sought to cancel the tribal preservation
policies of the “Indian New Deal” (see p. 765)
VII. Eisenhower Republicanism at
Home (cont.)
– He proposed to “terminate” the tribes as legal entities
– And to revert to the assimilationist goals of the Dawes
Severalty Act of 1887 (see p. 581)
– Most Indians resisted termination, and the policy was
abandoned in 1961
• Ike backed the Federal Highway Act of 1956:
– a $27 billion plant to build forty-two thousand miles of
sleek, fast motorways
– Essential to the national defense
– Created countless construction jobs
– Sped the suburbanization of America
– The Highway Act offered juicy benefits to the trucking,
automobile, oil, and travel industries
– While robbing the railroads, especially passenger trains, of
business
VII. Eisenhower Republicanism at
Home (cont.)
– The act exacerbated problems of air quality and energy
consumption
– Had disastrous consequences for cities.
p872
VIII. A “New Look” in Foreign
Policy
• 1952 Republican platform called for a “new
look” at foreign policy
– Condemned “containment”
– John Foster Dulles, secretary of state:
• Wanted to “roll back” gains of the red tides and
“liberate captive peoples”
• Same time promised to balance the budget by cutting
military spending
• Dulles announced a policy of boldness 1954:
– Eisenhower would relegate the army and navy to the
backseat and build up an airfleet of superbombers (called
the Strategic Air Command, SAC)
VIII. A “New Look” in Foreign
Policy (cont.)
– They would be equipped with city-flattening weapons
» Inflict “massive retaliation” on the enemies
» Advantage: paralyzing nuclear impact and cheaper
price tag
– Sought a thaw in the Cold War:
• Through negotiations with the new Social leaders
• In the end the “new look” proved illusory
• Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet leader, rejected Ike’s call for
an “open skies” mutual inspection program
• U.S. refused aid to the Hungarians in their 1956
uprising
• The Hungarian uprising revealed America’s nuclear
weapon was ineffective in relatively minor crisis
VII. A “New Look” in Foreign
Policy (cont.)
• The “massive retaliation” doctrine:
– Was starkly exposed
– Eisenhower discovered that the aerial and atomic hardware
necessary for “massive retaliation” was staggeringly
expensive.
IX. The Vietnam Nightmare
• Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh:
– Nationalist movement sought to throw off the
French colonial rule
– Minh appealed to Wilson for self-determination
– Cold War events damped anticolonial Asian
people’s dreams:
• Their leaders became increasingly communists while
the United States became increasingly
anticommunists
• 1954 America was paying 80% of the costs in
Indochina
• It amounted to about $1 billion
IX. The Vietnam Nightmare
(cont.)
• French continued to crumble under Ho Chin Minh’s
nationalist guerrilla forces—called Viet Minh
• French garrison was trapped in fortress of Dien Bien
Phu
• The new “policy of boldness” was now to be tested
• Some favored intervention with American bombers
• Eisenhower, correctly fearing British nonsupport, held
back.
– The Battle of Dien Bien Phu:
• Proved a victory for the nationalists
• A multination conference in Geneva halved Vietnam
at the seventeenth parallel (see Map 37.2)
IX. The Vietnam Nightmare
(cont.)
• Ho Chi Minh in the north consented to the
arrangement on the assurance Vietnam-wide
elections would be held within two years
• South: a pro Western government under Ngo Dinh
Diem was entrenched at Saigon
• The Vietnamese never held the promised elections
• Eisenhower promised economic and military aid to
the autocratic Diem regime, for social reforms
• The Americans had evidently backed a losing horse
but could see no easy way to call off their bet.
37-2 p875
X. Cold War Crises in Europe and the
Middle East
• Postwar Germany:
• The Germans were welcomed into NATO 1955
• With an expected contribution of half a million troops
• Eastern Europe countries and the Soviets created the
Warsaw Pact to the newly NATO forces
– The Cold War was thawing a bit in 1955:
• Soviets agreed to end their occupation of Austria
• Summer conference in Geneva produced little
• Hope increased when Soviet Communist boss
Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin’s bloody
excesses
X. Cold War Crises in Europe and
the Middle East (cont.)
– Violent events in 1956 ended the post-Geneva
lull:
• Hungarian revolt was overpowered by Soviet tanks
• Fear that the Soviets would penetrate the oil-rich
Middle East
• The government of Iran resisted the Western powers
• The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
helped engineer a coup in 1953 that installed
Mohammed Reza Pahlevi
• The American intervention left a bitter legacy of
resentment among the Iranians
• Two years later they took revenge on the shah and his
American allies (see pp. 936-938).
X. Cold War Crises in Europe and
the Middle East (cont.)
• The Suez crisis:
– President Nasser of Egypt was seeking funds to
build a dam on the upper Nile:
• America and Britain tentatively offered financial help
• When Nasser began to deal with the communists,
Secretary of State Dulles withdrew the dam offer
– Nasser regained face by nationalizing the Suez Canal, owned
chiefly by British and French stockholders
– Britain and France, with help from Israel, staged an assault
on Egypt late October 1956 thinking that they would get
help from the United States
– A furious Eisenhower refused to release emergency oil
supplies.
X. Cold War Crises in Europe and
the Middle East (cont.)
• The Suez crisis was the last time the United
States could use their “oil weapon.”
– 1940 U.S. produced two-thirds of the world’s oil,
with 5% coming from the Middle East
– By 1948 the U.S. had become a major importer.
• The Eisenhower Doctrine (1957):
– Pledging military and economic aid to Middle
Eastern nations threatened by communists
– The real threat was not communism, but
nationalism
X. Cold War Crises in Europe and
the Middle East (cont.)
– Nationalists attempted to rid themselves of
Western companies pumping out their oil
– In 1960 the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) was formed:
• Member nations: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran,
joined with Venezuela
• Within two decade, OPEC’s stranglehold on the
Western economic would tighten.
XI. Round Two for Ike
• Election of 1956:
– President Eisenhower was pitted against Adlai
Stevenson
• Hard for Democrats to find issues to use against Ike
• Voters still liked Ike
• Election returns:
–
–
–
–
–
–
35,590,472 for Eisenhower; 26,022,752 for Stevenson
Electoral College count 457 for Republicans, 73 Democrats
Eisenhower made deep roads into the once-solid South
Louisiana went Republican; first time since 1876
Eisenhower failed to win either house of Congress
The first time since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
IX. Round Two for Ike
(cont.)
• His administration:
– First half part-time president; rallied the last
few years.
•
Labor legislation:
–
–
–
American unions fraud and other tactics:
AF L-CIO expelled James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa
» Convicted of jury tampering, served part of his
sentence before disappearing without a trace
Eisenhower persuaded Congress to pass Landrum-Griffin
Act (1959):
» Designed to bring labor leaders to book for financial
shenanigans and bullying tactics
» It expanded some antilabor strictures of the earlier
Taft-Hartley Act (see p. 830).
IX. Round Two for Ike
(cont.)
• Soviet launched Sputnik I and Sputnik II into space
• “Rocket fever” swept the nation:
– Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA)
– Vanguard blew up on national television
– By the end of the decade, several satellites had been
launched and the U.S. successfully tested its own ICBMs
– Sputnik spurred changes in the educational system
– Late 1958 the National Defense and Education Act (NDEA)
authorized $887 million in loans to needy college students
– Grants for the improvement of teaching the sciences and
languages.
p877
XII. The Continuing Cold War
– 1958 under the Eisenhower Doctrine:
• Several thousand troops were sent to Lebanon
• Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to Washington 1959
– Khrushchev at the UN resurrected the ancient Soviet
proposal of complete disarmament
– Khrushchev met with Eisenhower at Camp David
» He said that his ultimatum for the evacuation of Berlin
would be extended indefinitely
– By the Paris “summit conference” Moscow and Washington
had each taken a firm stand on the burning Berlin issue
– On the eve of the conference an American U-2 plane was
shot down deep into Russia
– “Honest Ike” took full personal responsibility
– This ended the Paris conference.
XIII. Cuba’s Castroism Spells
Communism
• Uncle Sam and Latin America:
– Latin Americans bitterly resented the meager
millions in aid
– Chafed America for its continuing habit of intervening in Latin American affairs
– Washington continued to support dictators who
claimed to be combating communists
– Communist beachhead in Cuba:
• Fulgencio Batista had encouraged huge investments
of American capital, Washington gave some support
• Early 1959 Fidel Castro engineered a revolution to
oust Batista
XIII. Cuba’s Castroism Spells
Communism (cont.)
– Castro:
• Denounced the Yankee imperialists
• Began to expropriate valuable American properties in
pursuing a land-distribution program
• Washington released Cuba from “imperialistic
slavery” by cutting off the heavy U.S. imports of
Cuban sugar
• Castro retaliated by confiscating Yankee property and
made his dictatorship an economic and military
satellite of Moscow
• Anti-Castro Cubans headed for the United States,
especially Florida
XIII. Cuba’s Castroism Spells
(cont.)
• Washington broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in
1961
• Imposed a strict embargo on trade with Cuba
– The Helms-Burton Act of 1996:
» The embargo has remained in place, even since Castro’s
departure from power in 2008.
– The Soviets set up a communist base only 90
miles from American shores.
XIV. Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the
Presidency
• Election of 1960
– Republicans:
• The “new” Nixon was represented as a mature,
seasoned statesman
• He gained notice in the kitchen debate with
Khrushchev in Moscow 1959 where Nixon extolled
the virtues of American consumerism over Soviet
economic planning
• The next year he won the Republican nomination
• His running mate was Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
XIV. Kennedy Challenges Nixon for
the Presidency (cont.)
– Democrats:
• John F. Kennedy won impressive victories in the
primaries
• He scored a first-ballot over Senator Lyndon B.
Johnson, the Senate majority leader from Texas
• Kennedy’s challenging acceptance speech called the
New Frontier
• Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to be
nominated since Al Smith in 1929
• Kennedy challenged the Catholic questions
• His Catholicism aroused misgivings in the Protestant
Bible Belt South, which was ordinarily Democratic
XIV. Kennedy Challenges Nixon for
the Presidency (cont.)
• The religious issue largely canceled itself out
• Kennedy charged that the Soviets with their Sputniks
had gained on America in prestige and power.
– Television may have tipped the scales:
• Nixon agreed to meet Kennedy in four debates
• Kennedy held his own
• Kennedy did not suffer by comparison with the more
“experienced” Nixon
• Viewers found Kennedy far more appealing than
Nixon’s tired and pallid appearance.
XIV. Kennedy Challenges Nixon on
the Presidency (cont.)
• Elections results:
– Kennedy—303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon
– Kennedy’s popular vote margin only 118,574
votes out of over 68 millions cast (see Map 37.3)
– First Roman Catholic and youngest person
elected to the presidency
– Kennedy ran well in industrial centers
– Democrats swept both houses of Congress by
wide margins.
XV. An Old General Fades Away
– President Eisenhower continued to enjoy
extraordinary popularity to the final curtain:
• He was universally admired, respected for his dignity,
decency, sincerity, goodwill and moderation
• Pessimists had predicted he would be a seriously
crippled “lame duck” during his second term:
– By the barrier against reelection erected by the 22th
Amendment ratified in 1951 (See the Appendix)
– He displayed more vigor, more political know-how, more
aggressive leadership during his last two years as president
than ever before.
XV. An Old General Fades Away
(cont.)
– Congress 1955 to 1961 controlled by Democrats:
• Eisenhower exerted unusual control over the
legislative branch
– Wielded the veto 169 times
– Only twice was his nay overridden by the required twothirds vote.
– America during his terms as President:
• Was fabulously prosperous
• The vast St. Lawrence waterway was completed 1959
• “Old Glory” could now proudly display 50 states
– Alaska and Hawaii attained statehood 1959.
XV. An Old General Fades Away
(cont.)
– Eisenhower mounted no moral crusade for civil
rights
• This perhaps was his greatest failure
• As Republican president:
– He had further woven the reforms of the Democratic New
Deal and Fair Deal into the fabric of national life
– Exercised wise restraint in his use of military power
– Soberly guided foreign policy away from countless threats
to peace
– He left office crestfallen at his failure to end the arms race
with the Soviets
– As the decades lengthened, appreciation of him grew.
Map 37-3 p880
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
• U.S. power in post-World War II decades
were matched by international ascendancy
in the arts
– Art:
• Americans supported countless painters, sculptors
• Using the open and tradition-free American environment became the experimental mood
• Jackson Pollock pioneered abstract expressionism
– Pollock and Willem de Kooning created spontaneous
“action paintings” that expressed the painter’s individuality
and made the viewer a participant
– Mark Rothko and his fellow “color field” painters enveloped
whole canvases with bold, shimmering swaths of color
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• “Pop” (short for popular) artists:
– Andy Warhol canonized on canvas mundane items of
consumer culture
– Roy Lichtenstein parodied old-fashioned comic strips
– Claes Oldenburg made exotic versions of everyday objects
– Architecture:
• Residential building boom erected look-alike, rangestyle houses across suburban landscape
• Ultra-modern skyscrapers arose in the nation’s urban
centers
• “International Style”—modernist, massive corporate
high-rises were essentially giant steel boxes wrapped
in glass
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Examples of these “curtain-wall” designs: United
Nations headquarters (1952), the Seagram Building
(1957), the Sears Tower (1974), and the John Hancock
Tower (1976)
• Frank Lloyd Wright produced original designs: the
round-walled Guggenheim Museum (1959)
• Louis Kahn employed plain geometric forms and basic
building materials—bricks, concrete, Salk Institute
• Eero Saarinen, Finnish immigrant, TWA Flight Center
(1962), Gateway Arch (1965)
• I. M. Pei, East Wing of the National Gallery of Art
(1978), John F. Kennedy Library (1979).
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
– Literature:
• Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Travels with
Charley (1962) for which he received the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1962, the seventh American to be
honored
• World War II literature—searing realism:
– Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
– James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1956)
– World War II literature—war in fantastic and
psychedelic prose
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22 dealt with improbable antics
and anguish of American airmen in the wartime
Mediterranean (1961)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five, the dark
comedy war tale (1969)
• Counterculture “Beat” writers rejected modern
American life outright, seeking romantic selfexpression in stridently nonconformist lifestyles (see
pp. 884-885)
• John Updike:
– Rabbit, Run celebrated the feats and failings of ordinary
small-town America in sensual detail (1960)
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
– Couples explicitly addressed suburban, middle-class
infidelity (1968)
• John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
chronicled suburban manners and morals in short
stories
• Gore Vidal: Myra Breckinridge (1968), he wrote some
intriguing historical novels.
– Poets:
• Were highly critical, even deeply despairing about the
conformist character of midcentury America
• Experimented with a frank “confessional” style,
revealing personal experiences with sex, drugs, and
madness.
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Robert Lowell:
– Life Studies (1959) helped inaugurate this trend with his
psychologically intense story
– For the Union Dead (1964) sought to apply the wisdom of
the Puritan past to the perplexing present in allegorical
poems
• Sylvia Plath:
– Ariel (published posthumously in 1966)
– The Bell Jar (1963) is a disturbing autobiographical novel
• Anne Sexton: To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
brooding autobiographical poems
– Writing poetry seemed to be a dangerous pursuit in modern
America
– The life of the poet began in sadness and ended in madness.
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
– Playwrights:
• Were acute observers of postwar American social
mores
• Tennessee Williams
– Wrote a series of blistering dramas about psychological
misfits struggling to hold themselves together amid the
disintegrating forces of modern life
– Noteworthy: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955) each delivered powerful critiques of the
contemporary restrictions placed on women’s lives
• Arthur Miller
– Brought to the stage searching probes of American values
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
– Death of a Salesman (1949), a tragic indictment of the
American drama of material success
– The Crucible (1953), which treated the Salem witch trials as
a dark parable warning against the dangers of McCarthyism
• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959) offered
an affecting, realistic portrait of African American life
• Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
exposed the rapacious underside of middle-class life
– Novelists:
• The novel was the preferred genre for chroniclers of
the postwar literary scene
• A number of authors set out to produce “the great
American novel”
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby
– These took the form of a tale chronicling the education and
maturation of a young protagonist
• J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye painted an
unforgettable portrait of adolescent angst, alienation,
and rebellion
• Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) depicted the
African American’s often tortured quest for personal
identity
• Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
concocted a more readily recognizable Everyman
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) tells of racial
injustice and the loss of youthful innocence
– Harlem Renaissance
• Richard Wright:
– Native Son (1940), chilling portrait of a black Chicago killer
– Black Boy (1945), semi-autographical
• James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, sensitive
reflections on the racial question
• Black nationalist LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman (1964),
changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, crafted
powerful plays
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
– Southern Renaissance:
• Led by William Faulkner, a Nobel recipient in 1950
• They distanced themselves from an earlier “Lost
Cause” literature that had glorified the antebellum
South
• Writers brought a new critical appreciation to the
region’s burdens of history, racism, and conservatism
• Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946)
immortalized Louisiana politico Huey Long
• Walker Percy, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor:
– Perceptively tracked the changes reshaping the postwar
South, while also exploring universal themes of yearning,
failure, success, and sorrow.
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
confronted the harsh history of his home state,
Virginia, in a controversial fictional representation of
an 1831 slave rebellion
– Jewish novelists:
• Found their favorite subject matter in the experience
of lower- and middle-class Jewish immigrants
• Bernard Malamud:
– The Assistant (1957) rendered a touching portrait of a family
of New York Jewish shopkeepers
– The Natural (1952) explored the mythic qualities of the
culture of baseball.
XVI. A Cultural Renaissance
(cont.)
• Philip Roth:
– Goodbye, Columbus (1959) written comically about young
New Jersey suburbanites
– Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) penned an uproarious account
of a sexually obsessed middle-aged New Yorker
• Saul Bellow:
– Wrote masterful sketches of Jewish urban and literary life
– His landmark achievements Augie March and Herzog (1962)
– Won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, becoming the
eighth American so honored in the previous half-century.
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