Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (10 page)

Nowhere was this faith in progress more clear than in the area of education. Public schools, of course, had long been celebrated as central to the American dream. But there had always been a good deal of idle lip service to this ideal, and it is striking to recall the more prosaic reality of American education in the early 1940s. According to the 1940 census, only one-third of the 74.8 million Americans who were 25 years of age or older at that time had gone beyond the eighth grade. Only one-fourth were high school graduates; one-twentieth had graduated from four-year colleges or universities.
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Teenagers by that time were staying in school much longer than their elders had, but still only 49 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school. Class and racial distinctions remained sharp. Most black children in the South struggled to learn in segregated and poorly financed institutions, taking instruction from teachers who commonly earned less than $600 per year.

The war did not improve things much, if at all. Thanks to wartime interruptions, a slightly smaller percentage of 17-year-olds (47.4 percent) graduated from high school in 1946 than had done so before the war. Some 350,000 teachers had left their jobs for the service or better jobs. Advocates of better schools complained that teachers earned less on the average than truck drivers, garbage collectors, or bartenders.
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The United States spent a smaller percentage of its national income on schools than did either Great Britain or the Soviet Union. By 1945 teacher morale was reported to have hit an all-time low, and by 1946 teachers' strikes, heretofore scarcely imaginable, were beginning to break out.
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Some of this improved—and suddenly—after the war. A key to the change was passage of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944.
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This was a remarkably broad piece of legislation, which not only offered veterans aid in purchasing housing, and loans to start businesses, but also provided monthly stipends for veterans who wanted help with educational costs. These stipends were not huge: $65 per month at first for single veterans, $90 for those with dependents, and a maximum of $500 per year for tuition and books. But they were a real inducement, especially for veterans with savings, and millions jumped at the opportunity. By 1956, when the programs ended, 7.8 million veterans, approximately 50 percent of all who had served, had taken part. A total of 2.2 million (97.1 percent of them men) went to colleges, 3.5 million to technical schools below the college level, and 700,000 to agricultural instruction on farms. The GI Bill spent $14.5 billion, a huge sum in those years, for educational benefits between 1944 and 1956.
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The GI Bill indeed promoted an educational boom. Colleges and universities were nearly swamped by the change; almost 497,000 Americans (329,000 of them men) received university degrees in the academic year 1949–50, compared to 216,500 in 1940. The influx jolted faculty and administrators, who had to reach out beyond the predominantly upper-middle-class young people whom they previously had served, to deal with older students, to offer married housing, to accelerate instruction, and to provide a range of more practical, career-oriented courses. The GI Bill was almost certainly worth it economically, helping millions of Americans to acquire skills and technical training, to move ahead in life, and therefore to return in income taxes the money advanced to them by the government. It was the most significant development in the modern history of American education.

Predictably there were voices that dissented from the chorus of hosannas about educational progress. A few universities swelled to previously unimaginable size: as early as 1948, ten of them enrolled 20,000 students or more. These were no longer "villages with priests" but impersonal and bureaucratic "multi-versities."
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Some of the science faculties at leading universities such as MIT and Stanford relied so heavily on military funding that it was fair to speak of them as part of a "military-industrial-academic complex."
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Time
magazine asked in 1946, "Is the military about to take over U. S. science lock, stock, and barrel, calling the tune for U.S. universities and signing up the best scientists for work fundamentally aimed at military results?"
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Critics also decried changes at the secondary level, especially what they thought was the anti-intellectual focus on non-academic "life adjustment" courses pushed by "progressive" educators. In Denver, Colorado, high school students took part in a unit on "What is expected of a boy on a date?" It dealt with matters such as "Do girls want to pet?" In Des Moines, Iowa, teachers presented "correct social usage" as part of a course in "Developing an Effective Personality." Advocates of such courses maintained that they taught socially acceptable behavior. Critics, who grew louder in the 1950s, retorted that schools were abandoning rigorous academic standards and "dumbing down" the curricula.
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It is hard to determine whether criticisms such as these applied to the majority of public schools in the 1940s. There has always been an extraordinary amount of uninformed opinion about what actually goes on in the widely varying classrooms of American public schools. Critics, however, were on target in complaining about educational inequality: educational spending, which depended mainly on local property taxes, varied enormously. Middle-class and upper-middle-class school districts spent much more money per student than did working-class or lower-class districts. Black communities, especially in the South, received far less money than white areas. Liberal interest groups such as the National Education Association stepped up pressure for federal aid that would reduce such inequalities, but they ran into a number of obstacles—ideological, fiscal, racial, and otherwise—in Congress. No such bill passed until the 1960s.

These were valid complaints that rang true decades later. But more optimistic voices dominated public discussion about education in the early postwar years. Contemporary news stories rejoiced over the extraordinary growth in higher education and over the apparently broader popular support for schools. Per pupil spending for public education more than doubled between 1944 and 1950. Optimists were also happy about the steady rise in the number and percentage of teenagers who completed high school (up to 57.4 percent in 1950). They predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that these trends would continue: by 1970, 75.6 percent of 17-year-olds were graduating from high school, and nearly 48 percent of 18-year-olds were enrolled in some kind of college or university. If these optimists confused quantitative growth with qualitative improvement, that was understandable. Americans tend to do that. But their optimism was catching. The astonishing growth of education in the late 1940s (and thereafter) seemed yet another sign that the American dream was alive and well.

T
HESE WERE ABOVE ALL
years of nearly unimaginable consumption of goods. As the historian Fred Siegel pointed out, "A good deal of what had once seemed science fiction became everyday life." In the five years after the war Americans were presented with such new items as the automatic car transmission, the electric clothes dryer, the long-playing record, the Polaroid camera, and the automatic garbage disposal unit. Rising numbers of people were buying vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric ranges, and freezers. Millions bought frozen foods, which were marketed widely for the first time. It was a booming new age of "wonder" fibers and plastics: nylon for clothing, cheap food wraps, light new Styrofoam containers, inexpensive vinyl floor coverings, and a wide array of plastic toys.
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Between 1939 and 1948 clothing sales jumped three-fold, furniture four-fold, jewelry four-fold, liquor five-fold, household appliances, including TV, five-fold.

The postwar years were an automobile age on an unprecedented scale. New car sales in 1945 totaled 69,500. In 1946 they leaped to 2.1 million, in 1949 to 5.1 million, a figure that broke the record of 4.5 million set in 1929. Sales kept going up, to 6.7 million in 1950 and to 7.9 million in 1955. Very few of these cars (only 16,336 in 1950) were foreign-made, just 300 of them Volkswagens. Americans instead liked big, roomy automobiles with powerful eight-cylinder, 100-horsepower engines, sealed-beam headlights, radios, and heaters. Most of these came from the Big Three: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Their cars were not cheap, considering family incomes. New Chevrolets and Fords started at around $1,300, around two-fifths of median family income at the time.
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The buying nonetheless went on, with most Americans purchasing new cars at full list prices. Many buyers slipped extra cash to dealers in hopes of assuring prompt delivery. By 1950 there were 40.3 million cars registered to 39.9 million families.
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By then the boom in automobiles was threatening the financial health of downtown retail districts and hotels, reducing ridership of buses and urban mass transit, and badly damaging the already fragile railroad industry. It was doing wonders, however, for the oil business, gasoline stations, roadside hotels and restaurants, the trucking industry, and highway departments, which received massive federal aid by the late 1950s. The boom also started the runaway spread of suburban shopping centers; there were eight of these in 1946, and more than 4,000 by the late 1950s.
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As in the 1920s, but on a much larger scale, automobiles not only hastened the adoption of new patterns of living; they also did much to stimulate the remarkable economic growth of the era.

The amazing growth of the automobile industry helped drive another powerful engine of economic growth: construction. Some of this building was in cities, especially on the rapidly growing West Coast, where millions of servicemen and their families had discovered the blessings of warm-weather living. Some was construction of apartment or urban public housing for the poor, which received a modest boost from congressional subsidization in 1949. Much of the building, however, was of single-family homes in suburbs. The number of new single-family homes started in 1944 had been 114,000. This rose to 937,000 in 1946 and to nearly 1.7 million in 1950.
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Some 15 million housing units were constructed in the United States between 1945 and 1955, leading to historic highs in home-owning. By 1960, 60 percent of American families owned their own homes, compared to slightly fewer than 50 percent in 1945.
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The government had much to do with this boom. Congress authorized increased spending for home loans by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA). The terms that these agencies offered were extraordinarily generous, especially by contrast to the policies of private bankers before the war. Then, prospective home-buyers had often had to put down substantial down payments, of 50 percent or more, and to pay off mortgages in a short time, often ten years. The FHA and VA revolutionized the old system, offering mortgages of up to 90 percent of the value of the home and allowing up to thirty years to pay them off. Interest rates on the mortgages were normally around 4 to 4.5 percent. The VA permitted many veterans to purchase homes with virtually no down payment. By 1950 these two agencies were insuring 36 percent of all new non-farm mortgages; by 1955 they were handling 41 percent.
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Private builders tried eagerly to meet the apparently insatiable demand for new housing. Some had vast ambitions, as did the developers of Park Forest outside of Chicago: it was a planned city for 30,000 people. But no builders were more renowned than William Levitt, an enterprising salesman, and his brother Alfred, an architect. They had been small-scale builders until World War II, when they witnessed the fantastic gains in productivity associated with assembly line techniques. After the war they applied their expertise to the mass production of suburban housing. Their lumber came from forests they had purchased; they also made their own nails and cement. They hired non-union workers so as avoid strikes and paid them well above prevailing wage scales. The Levitts formed these workers into as many as twenty-seven teams, each with a carefully defined task. At peak the teams, using pre-assembled materials, including plumbing systems, could put up a house in sixteen minutes. Their first "Levit-town" sprang up on onetime potato fields thirty miles from New York City near Hempstead, Long Island. This was then—and remained fifty years later—the largest single housing development erected at one time by an American builder. It had 17,000 homes, which accommodated more than 80,000 residents. The Long Island Levittown also featured seven village greens and shopping centers, fourteen playgrounds, nine swimming pools, two bowling alleys, and a town hall. The Levitts sold land at cost for schools and donated space for churches and fire stations. Other Levittowns, the biggest of which were near Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Willingboro, New Jersey, were almost as vast.
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Levittowners got the buy of the century. The Levitts' early basic model (slightly larger and more expensive by the late 1940s) cost $7,990. This was a little more than two and one-half times the median family income at the time and $1,500 or so less than buyers would have had to pay elsewhere for comparable housing. Purchasers using the FHA or the VA had little problem making down payments, which tended to be around $90, or managing payments, which were in the range of $58 per month for twenty-five years. When houses were placed on sale, people lined up in advance the night before, as if waiting for World Series tickets. What they acquired for their patience was first of all a 60' by 100' lot on which were planted small fruit trees or evergreens. Lot sizes were nearly twice as big as those in most turn-of-the-century "streetcar suburbs.
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Buyers also got a four-and-one-half-room, two-story house 25' by 30' in dimension and Cape Cod in style: kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, bathroom, and expandable attic. Later models had a carport. The houses were well constructed and generous for that time in their amenities. The Levitts laid the houses on concrete slabs, from which copper coils provided radiant central heating, and included built-in bookcases, closets, and eight-inch Bendix television sets, as well as refrigerators, stoves, fireplaces, and washing machines.