Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (155 page)

68.
Gaddis,
Strategies of Containment
, 194–95.

69.
Chang, "Absence of War."

70.
Divine,
Eisenhower
, 65; Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 385.

71.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 218.

72.
Richard Rovere,
The Eisenhower Years: Affairs of State
(New York, 1956), 277, 285.

73.
Divine,
Eisenhower
, 120.

74.
Ibid., 121.

75.
David Patterson, "The Legacy of President Eisenhower's Arms Control Policies," in Gregg Walker et al., eds.,
The Military-Industrial Complex: Eisenhower's Warning Three Decades Later
(New York, 1992), 217–36; Gaddis,
Strategies of Containment
, 189–96.

76.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 219; Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 390–94.

77.
Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 400–405.

78.
Kefauver bested Senator John F. Kennedy for the vice-presidential nomination in a closely contested open convention vote.

79.
Robert Divine,
Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960
(New York, 1978).

80.
Michael Beschloss,
The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev
, 1961–1963 (New York, 1991), 301.

81.
Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates,
The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 82–85.

82.
Charles Alexander,
Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961
(Bloomington, Ind., 1975), 172–78; Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 421–22, 424–26, 430–33; Diane Kunz,
The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis
(Chapel Hill, 1991).

83.
Divine,
Eisenhower
, 85; Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 427.

84.
Hughes,
Ordeal
, 222–23; Divine,
Eisenhower
, 87; Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 431–35.

85.
See
chapter 14
.

86.
Ambrose,
Eisenhower
, 422–24; Alexander,
Holding the Line
, 178–81; Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Waging Peace
, 1956–1963 (Garden City, N.Y, 1965), 62–69.

87.
Diggins,
Proud Decades
, 302.

88.
Kenneth Kitts and Betty Glad, "Presidential Personality and Improvisational Decision-Making: Eisenhower and the 1956 Hungarian Crisis," in Shirley Anne Warshaw, ed.,
Reexamining the Eisenhower Presidency
(Westport, Conn., 1993), 183–208.

89.
Steven Lawson,
Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South
, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976), 256–57; Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 17.

1.
See John Updike,
Newsweek
, Jan. 4, 1994; J. Ronald Oakley,
God's Country: America in the Fifties
(New York, 1986), 428. There were other, less happy new words and phrases, such as apartheid, countdown, fallout, blast-off, hard-sell, junk mail, joint, shook up, and stoned.

2.
See
chapter 3
for "booms" in the 1940s. Many writers stress the affluence of the 1950s and the special glow of the mid-1950s; book titles reveal their point of view. Among them are William O'Neill,
American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960
(New York, 1986); John Diggins,
The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace
, 1941–1960 (New York, 1988); and Thomas Hine,
Populuxe
(New York, 1986). David Halberstam, whose book is simply titled
The Fifties
(New York, 1993), called these years "an age of astonishing material affluence" (jacket). See also Harold Vatter,
The American Economy in the
1950s (New York, 1963); and David Potter,
People of Plenty
(Chicago, 1954), a thoughtful evaluation of the role of affluence in United States history.

3.
Save in this paragraph, most statistics in this chapter—and there are many—will be in footnotes. The source for most of them is
Statistical History of the United States, from Colonial Times to the Present
(New York, 1976). Compare
chapter 3
for statistics on socioeconomic developments in the 1940s.

4.
The GNP grew from $227.2 billion in 1940 to $355.3 billion in 1950, an increase of 56.3 percent, but all of that occurred between 1940 and 1945; the GNP in 1950 was $355.3 billion, almost exactly what it had been in 1945. Growth in the 1960s, building heavily on technological advances in the 1940s and 1950s, turned out to be especially impressive: the GNP in 1970 was $722.5 billion, or 48.1 percent higher than it had been in 1960. Per capita GNP was $1,720 in 1940, $2,342 in 1950, $2,699 in 1960, and $3,555 in 1970. All figures here are in constant 1958 dollars.

5.
The basic three-cent stamp had been in place since 1932. It rose to four cents in 1958 and to five cents between 1963 and 1968. Thereafter it jumped more quickly, up to thirty-two cents in 1995.

6.
Average daily attendance in schools rose from 22.3 million in 1950 to 32.3 million in 1960, and the number of teachers (and other non-supervisory staff) from 914,000 to 1.4 million (two-thirds of them women). The percentage of 17-year-olds who graduated from high school rose from 57.4 to 63.4 percent during these years (and to 75.6 percent in 1970). The total number of degree-seeking college and university students increased from 2.3 million in 1950 (14.2 percent of people aged 18 to 24) to 3.6 million (22.2 percent) in 1960 (and to 7.9 million, 32.1 percent, in 1970).

7.
Richard Easterlin,
Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
(New York, 1980), 21. For criticisms of education at the time, see Diane Ravitch,
The Troubled Crusade: American Education
, 1945–1980 (New York, 1983), 43–80.

8.
Alfred Chandler, Jr., "The Competitive Performance of U.S. Industrial Enterprise Since the Second World War,"
Business History Review
, 68 (Spring 1994), 1–72; John Brooks,
The Great Leap: The Past Twenty-Five Years in America
(New York, 1966); Stephen Ambrose,
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
(New York, 1990), 490.

9.
Kirkpatrick Sale,
Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment
(New York, 1975), 29–35.

10.
A society with large numbers of children has to direct resources at people who—not being in the labor force—are not producers. In this sense, children (like many of the elderly) can be a "burden" to an economy. Still, the baby boom children were a large market for goods. See
chapter 3
.

11.
The decade after 1900 featured record-high immigration and a population growth from 76.1 to 92.4 million, or of 21.4 percent. Between 1940 and 1950 population had grown from 132.1 million to 151.6 million, or 14.7 percent; between 1960 and 1970 it grew from 180.6 million to 204.8 million, or 13.5 percent.

12.
These figures measure private, non-corporate debt. Private debt including corporate debt rose from $246.4 billion in 1950 to $566.1 billion in 1960. Figures here are in current dollars; the increase was a little more modest in constant dollars.

13.
Expansion, plus mismanagement and the spread of television, badly hurt the minor leagues. Desegregation of baseball helped to kill the Negro leagues.

14.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 250.

15.
Kroc bought the business in 1961 from the McDonald brothers in California. Harvey Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
(New York, 1993), 227–30. By 1992 there were 8,600 McDonald's franchises in the United States.

16.
John Keats,
The Insolent Chariots
(Philadelphia, 1958).

17.
Halberstam,
Fifties
, 124–27, 478–95; Stephen Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War
(Baltimore, 1991), 74.

18.
Hine,
Populuxe
, 3–5, 87–88, 160–68; Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty
, 114; Elaine Tyler May, "Cold War—Warm Hearth: Politics and the Family in Postwar America," in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds.,
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order
, 1930–1980 (Princeton, 1989), 157–58.

19.
Michael Smith, "Advertising the Atom," in Michael Lacey, ed.,
Government and Environmental Politics: Essays on Historical Developments Since World War Two
(Washington, 1989), 246; and Allan Winkler,
Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom
(New York, 1993), 136–64. See Paul Boyer,
By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
(New York, 1985), for attitudes toward things atomic prior to 1950.

20.
Francis Crick, an English physicist, was another key member of the team.

21.
Lewis Thomas,
The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher
(New York, 1983), 27–30; Paul Starr,
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
(New York, 1982), 338–47.

22.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 313.

23.
Arlene Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty
(New York, 1991), 157. Life expectancy statistics were among the many health data that revealed the impact of poverty and racial discrimination. In 1950 life expectancy at birth for whites was 69.1, for Negroes (and "other") 60.8. In 1960 the figures were 70.6 for whites and 63.6 for Negroes. The life expectancy of women at birth in 1950 exceeded that of men by 5.5 years (71.1 years to 65.6). The gender gap in this respect slowly widened: by 1970, life expectancy of women at birth was 74.8 years, compared to 67.1 years of men—a difference of 7.7 years.

24.
Thomas McKeown,
The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis?
(Princeton, 1979).

25.
James Patterson,
The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture
(Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

26.
In 1957, 52 percent of American men and 34 percent of American women over 18 smoked. It was not until the late 1970s—well after widespread scientific warnings about the dangers of tobacco—that these percentages began to fall consistently.

27.
John Burnham, "American Medicine's Golden Age: What Happened to It?"
Science
, 215 (March 19, 1982), 1474–79.

28.
Children with rheumatic fever or leukemia were much more likely to die than were children who got polio; polio was not usually fatal. But polio came in epidemics and was far more terrifying at the time.

29.
O'Neill,
American High
, 136–39. By the 1960s live-virus vaccines favored by Dr. Albert Sabin and other researchers were preferred by the AMA.

30.
Daniel Bell, "The End of Ideology in the West," in Bell,
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
(Glencoe, 1960), 393–407.