America in the 1950-70
Suburbanization,Television,
and the Baby Boom
Suburbanization
Moving to the Suburbs
Consumerism
Freeways and Levittowns
The Baby Boom
Automobile-mania
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Ike & Interstate Highway Act
Impact of the Automobile
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New Products
Buy Now/Pay later
Advertising
Pop Culture
A. Impact of Television
B. Rock N’ Roll
C. The Emergence of the Teenager
The Civil Rights Struggle
• Segregation: Dejure and Defacto was the
American way after WWII.
• In the South separate fountain, lunch
counters, waiting rooms, rest rooms,
transportation was labeled “White” and
“Colored”
Civil Rights Timeline
1947- Jackie Robinson
1954 Brown vs. Board of Ed
1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott
1957-58 Little Rock School desegregation
1960- Civil disobedience (Lunch counters, etc…)
1961-62 Freedom Rides
1963 “I have a dream…”
1964 “Mississippi Burning Case
1965-
Voting Rights Act
Malcolm X Assassinated (Black Muslims to the Panthers)
Civil Rights Negroes vs. Black Revolutionaries
1970- USC 42 Alabama 21
Urban Unrest 1965-70
“ No way to delay
That trouble comin’ every day”
Frank Zappa
1965 Watts, LA
1967- Detroit, Newark
The Urban Crisis:
White Flight
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New highway systems made travel to and from
work easier
Whites ( and a growing black middle class)
began to settle in the suburbs and the cities felt
the effect
Tax revenues in cities shrank, there was a
decay in infrastructure, and growing racial fears
developed
White Flight left the cities to the poor blacks
and the middle class whites moved to the
suburbs.
Two separate America’s developed
1) White suburban society
2) Inner city populated by blacks and Latinos
The 1960’s
The 50’s and 60’s
Overrated or what?
The Election of 1960
Kennedy Campaign
• Youth vs. the Establishment
• Personality more than issues or
platform
• New Frontier politics focused on
“getting America moving again”
• Nixon/Kennedy TV Debates
• http://youtu.be/_RMSb-tS_OM
Election of 1960
Electoral irregularities in IL. TX and other states
Kennedy & the Cold War
• Proposed a policy of flexible response:
• Designed to deter direct attacks
• Not every incident deserves the same response
• Insisted on expanding the military –industrial complex &
increase spending
• Also adopted a new military doctrine of
counterinsurgency
• Green Berets (Special Forces) trained to repel and win
guerrilla warfare
• Would first be tested in Vietnam
• Other Cold War Tactics
• Peace Corps & Alliance for Progress
Building the Berlin Wall
(1961)
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
Cuban Missile Crisis
October 1962
10/13/62
10/22/62
10/23/62
10/24/62
Missiles discovered in Cuba
JFK speaks to American people
Soviet ships stopped
Khrushchev refuses to remove
missiles
10/28/62 Khrushchev agrees to remove
missiles
The Kennedy Assassination
• On November 22, 1963,
in Dallas, Texas,
President Kennedy was
assassinated by Lee
Harvey Oswald
• Lyndon Johnson was
sworn in as president
• Sense that Americans
had been robbed of a
promising leader
• The aura of “Camelot”
over shadows Kennedy’s
mixed record of
accomplishments
Lyndon B. Johnson
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Won the 1964 election against Barry Goldwater in a
landslide, and used his energy and genius for compromise to
bring to fruition many of Kennedy’s stalled programs
Johnson’s “Great Society”- fulfilled and surpassed the New
Deal liberal agenda of the 1930’s
He promptly pushed the passage of civil rights to appeal to a
broad national audience
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Often times used the “Johnson Treatment” to get his
programs passed
LBJ and his Domestic Agenda:
“The Great Society”
• A New Deal liberal agenda -huge
expansion of the federal government
• Pushed through some of JFK’s stalled
programs and then began his own
agenda
• Included a variety of areas including:
– Poverty
– Urban renewal
– Discrimination
Advocacy
- Environment
- Education
- Consumer
The Great Society & Civil Rights
• Johnson believed that reforms in Civil Rights were way overdue.
• Began to push for the passage of a number of civil rights acts and
was successful in passing:
• Civil Rights Act of 1964 – forced desegregation of public
facilities throughout the south
• Title VII – outlawed discrimination in employment based upon the
basis of sex, religion, national origin or race.
• Voting Rights Act of 1965 – suspended literacy tests and
other measures used by southern states to prevent blacks
from registering to vote
• Twenty-fourth Amendment – outlawed federal poll tax
The Great Society & the
“War on Poverty”
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Wanted to put “an end to poverty in our time”
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Expanded social programs and welfare programs including such
things as food stamps
Part of his plan for urban renewal
Created Office of Economic Opportunity (Economic Opportunity Act 1964) and created such programs as:
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Head Start
Job Corps
Volunteers in Service to America
Community Action Program
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Elementary & Secondary Education Act of 1965 –
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Higher Education Act –
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Federal health Insurance
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National Endowment for the Arts & Humanities
Immigration Act of 1965- abandoned the quota system of the 1920’s
• $1 billion in federal funds to help impoverished inner-city kids
• first federal scholarships for college students
• Medicaid (poor) & Medicare (elderly)
Vietnam War
1954- 1975
Early History of Vietnam
• French colony 1800’s -1954
• Michelin
• Ho Chi Minh emerges as a
communist leader Indo-China
• 1941 Ho Chi Minh returns to IndoChina under the support of
communist China & the Soviet
Union
• French refuse to give up their
claim and attempt to move back
in after WWII
Truman, Eisenhower, & the
Southeast Asian Problem
• US Supports French sphere of influence in
Indo-China
• Ike stated that if the French did not regain
control of Vietnam, communism would control
it and would run wild over Southeast Asia
• 1954 Geneva Accords.
– Ho Chi Minh – North – capital Hanoi
– Ngo Dinh Diem – South –capital Saigon
• Ike agreed to military support of Diem, in
exchange for a stable government
• Didn’t work out so well with the formation of
2 things
• A) Ho Chi Minh Trail
• B) Vietcong
Nationwide elections never held
Kennedy & Vietnam
• US supports
Diem- sends
advisors to SE
Asia-17,000 by
1964
• 11/1/1963 –
Kennedy & the
US supported an
attempted
military coup of
Diems
President Johnson’s War:
Escalation in Vietnam 1963-1968
• August 1964 a North Vietnamese gunboat, in a foggy
area known as the Gulf of Tonkin “fired” upon a
destroyer, the USS Maddox.
• Johnson, extremely angry, went to Congress and the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed – gave Johnson:
“all necessary measures to repel any armed attack
against the forces of the United States and prevent
further aggression”
• The Result: Operation Rolling Thunder –
• a massive bombing campaign
• Underestimated the N. Vietnamese willingness to fight
• By 1968 more than 536,000 American soldiers were in
Vietnam
Figure 28.2 U.S. Troops in Vietnam, 1960–1973 This figure graphically tracks
America's involvement in Vietnam. After Lyndon Johnson decided on escalation in
1964, troop levels jumped from 23,300 to a peak of 543,000 personnel in 1968. Under
Richard Nixon's Vietnamization program, beginning in the summer of 1969, levels
drastically declined; the last U.S. military forces left South Vietnam on March 29,
1973.
The Type of War
• A. Living Room War
• Coffins coming home
• Walter Cronkite & Credibility Gap
• B. A Jungle War
• C. A War of Attrition
• General William Westmoreland
• D. Un-Winnable???
1968: A Year of Tragedy in
Vietnam
January 30, 1968 – Tet Offensive
Massive failure by N Vietnamportrayed as a VC victory by the
American press
1968:
A Year of Tragedy & Political Conflict at
Home
Tragedy:
• Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – April 4th
• Assassination of Robert Kennedy – June 5th
Political Turmoil:
• March 31st Johnson stuns nation announcing he
would not seek reelection, but would search for
peace before leaving office.
• Yippies disrupt the Dem Convention in Chicagocops bust heads
• Dems eventually nominate Hubert Humphrey
whose platform supported continuing to fight in
Vietnam
• Richard Nixon (political reincarnation) get the
Rep. majority stating that he had a secret plan to
end the war
Election of 1968:
Impact: a divided country
Democrats
Hubert Humphrey (P)
Edmund Muskie (VP)
Platform: continue
fighting in Vietnam; it
can be won
Republicans
Richard Nixon (P)
Spiro Agnew (VP)
Platform: “a secret plan
to end the war” (not
really)
Results: 42.7% of vote
Results: 43.4% of vote
Public Opinion on Vietnam
Early Indications:
• Television & Credibility Gap exposure
• Cost of war began to rise , federal deficit grew,
inflation out of control, Great Society greatly
suffering.
Student Activism draws attention
• 1962- Port Huron Statement
• 1963- Free Speech Movement Univ. of California (Berkeley) –
public protests, sit-ins, taking over admin buildings when protests
are banned
• (SDS) Students for Democratic Society reject Cold War Ideology
• New Left vs. Old Left
• Many protests were against the draft
The Counterculture
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Overly romanticized in American history
“hippie” is born – youthful movement that glorified liberation
from social structure (easier when Mom and Dad are paying
the bills).
Protest ideas and liberation became mixed up with a) music
b) drugs c) sex
Students dropped out of school and “followed the way”
Birth of the “flower children
• Summer of Love (1967)
» “turn on, tune in, & drop out “
» 100,000 young people converged on
San Francisco, creating a phenomenon
of cultural and political rebellion
• Woodstock 1969
NIXON’S WAR
• 1969- The US bombed neutral Cambodia, through
which North Vietnam had been transporting supplies
and reinforcements, to convince them the US was
serious about mutual troop withdrawal
• Vietnamization- Nixon and Kissinger’s policy to
replace American troops with South Vietnamese
forces
• Antiwar demonstrators believed the new policy
protected American lives at the expense of the
Vietnamese
• After a large antiwar demonstration Nixon
labeled the demonstrators as “bums;” and states
“North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the
US. Only Americans can do that.”
• 1970- American incursion into Cambodia to destroy
enemy havens there
Protest: Kent State
• During an antiwar demonstration at Kent State
University, National Guardsmen fired into the crowd
killing 4 and wounding 11
• 450 colleges closed in protest
Nixon’s War, Continued
• 1971- as American troops withdrew,
Communist forces stepped up their
attacks on Laos, Cambodia, and South
Vietnam
• Nixon stepped up military actions with
the “Christmas bombings”
• The Paris Peace Accords were signed
on January 27, 1973
• The South Vietnamese government
soon fell to Communist forces, as
Congress pulled support for S. April 29,
1975,