Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (156 page)

31.
Juliet Schor,
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
(New York, 1991). Schor sees the 1950s and the 1960s as a "golden age" of relatively short work weeks in America; the "overwork" came later.

32.
Those excluded included federal workers covered under civil service plans; most railroad employees, who had their own retirement plan; most household and farm workers; and many self-employed. Workers covered by Social Security (the Old Age and Survivors and Disability Insurance program, or OASDI) paid a rising percentage of their paychecks for coverage in the 1950s—from 1.5 percent in 1950 to 3 percent in 1960. Employers chipped in the same percentages. The self-employed paid higher percentages.

33.
Unions represented 25.4 percent of all workers in 1954, second only to the all-time high of 25.5 percent in 1953.

34.
Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era," in Fraser and Gerstle, eds.,
Rise and Fall
, 142.

35.
David Brody, "Workplace Contractualism in Comparative Perspective," in Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, eds.,
Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise
(Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 176–205.

36.
Robert Zieger,
American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985
(Baltimore, 1986), 138–57, 169; Robert Griffith, "Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,"
American Historical Review
, 87 (Feb. 1982), 87–122. Work stoppages soared during the Korean War, to a record high (to that time) of 5,117 in 1952. Thereafter, however, relative peace descended: considerably fewer stoppages (fewer than 4,000 per year for most subsequent years in the 1950s) and considerably fewer workers involved in them.

37.
Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty
, 116–18; Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise
, 55–56.

38.
Daniel Bell, "Toward the Great Instauration: Religion and Culture in a Post-Industrial Age," in Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
(New York, 1976), 146–71.

39.
David Halle and Frank Romo, "The Blue-Collar Working Classes," in Alan Wolfe, ed.,
America at Century's End
(Berkeley, 1991), 152–78; Godfrey Hodgson,
America in Our Time
(Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 478–84; Morris Janowitz,
The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America
(Chicago, 1978), 129–33; Richard Parker,
The Myth of the Middle Class
(New York, 1972); Daniel Bell, "Work and Its Discontents," in Bell,
End of Ideology
, 227–72.

40.
Zieger,
American Workers
, 140–44, tentatively concludes that 60 percent of the American labor force was still "working-class" in 1974.

41.
C. Wright Mills,
White Collar: The American Middle Classes
(New York, 1951); Paul Goodman,
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
(New York, 1960).

42.
See
chapter 12
for discussion of women and work.

43.
Herbert Gans,
The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community
(New York, 1967), 417; Eli Chinoy,
Automobile Workers and the American Dream
(Boston, 1955); David Halle,
America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners
(Chicago, 1984).

44.
Definitions of poverty are highly controversial. A percentage of this magnitude is most often used—by contemporaries as well as by later observers—for that era. "Poverty" by such definitions meant having insufficient income (from all sources, including government aid and charity) to live at a "decent" standard of living. That was ordinarily thought to be around $2,000 to $2,500 a year for a family of four in the mid- to late 1950s. James Patterson,
America's Struggle Against Poverty
, 1900–1994 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 78–98. For fuller discussion of poverty in the postwar era, see
chapters 17
and
18
.

45.
The decline of unions grew precipitous in the 1980s; by 1995 only 15 percent of non-agricultural workers in the United States belonged to unions.

46.
Zieger,
American Workers
, 158–62.

47.
Melvyn Dubofsky,
The State and Labor in Modern America
(Chapel Hill, 1994), 217–23; Diggins,
Proud Decades
, 322.

48.
These percentages, moreover, continued to fall in the 1960s. By 1970 the percentage of foreign-born had declined to 4.7 percent, an all-time decennial year low, and the percentage of people who were of foreign or mixed parentage had dropped to 11.7 percent. By contrast, 14.7 percent of the American population had been foreign-born in 1910, and 21.3 percent had been natives of foreign or mixed parentage in 1920. These were highs for decennial years in the twentieth century. After 1970, thanks in part to more liberal immigration laws, immigration increased—rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. See
chapter 19
.

49.
Bernard Weisberger, "A Nation of Immigrants,"
American Heritage
, Feb./March 1994, pp. 75ff; Richard Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since
1938 (New York, 1980), 145–46. For earlier trends see Robert Divine,
American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952
(New Haven, 1957).

50.
Needless to say, many people, especially from Mexico, which had a long and easily crossed border with the United States, came unnoticed by the census to the United States. Still, illegal immigration from Mexico and other countries was relatively insignificant in the 1950s; big increases happened later, mainly after 1970.

51.
Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible
, 145–46.

52.
Herberg's subtitle was
An Essay in American Religious Sociology
(Garden City, N.Y., 1955).

53.
The subtitle of Glazer and Moynihan's book was
The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
(Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

54.
Leo Ribuffo, "God and Contemporary Politics,"
Journal of American History
, 79 (March 1993), 1515–33.

55.
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 83–84; O' Neill,
American High
, 212–15.

56.
Catholic leaders, of course, did not speak for everyone in the faith; millions practiced birth control.

57.
James Hunter and John Rice, "Unlikely Alliances: The Changing Contours of American Religious Faith," in Wolfe, ed.,
America at Century's End
, 310–39.

58.
Nora Sayre,
Running Time: Films of the Cold War
(New York, 1982), 207–14.

59.
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 88.

60.
Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America,"
Daedalus
, 96 (Winter 1967), 1–21.

61.
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 78–80; George Marsden, "Evangelicals and the Scientific Culture: An Overview," in Michael Lacey, ed.,
Religion and Twentieth-Century Intellectual Life
(Washington, 1989), 23–48.

62.
Graham was also close to the Nixon family. Much later (in 1993 and 1994) he conducted funeral services for Patricia and Richard Nixon.

63.
William McLoughlin,
Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age
(New York, 1960).

64.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 322.

65.
Paul Boyer,
When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Boyer estimated, 2, that these beliefs became increasingly powerful in later years. Some 40 percent of Americans, he wrote, told the Gallup poll in 1980 that the Bible was the literal word of God; another 45 percent said that the Bible was divinely inspired.

66.
Donald Meyer,
The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts
(New York, 1980), 258–95;
New York Times
, Dec. 16, 1993 (obituary); Whifield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 83–84.

67.
Frederick Siegel,
Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan
(New York, 1984), 113. See also William Lee Miller, "Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale,"
Reporter
, 12 (Jan. 13, 1955), 19–24.

68.
Landon Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation
(New York, 1980), 38–39. Needless to say, these figures should not be taken too literally; no two definitions of a "suburb" fully agreed. The numbers used here are based on census definitions and describe people living "outside the central cities" but within "standard metropolitan statistical areas" (SMSAs). The definition of SMSAs differed from place to place and from census to census, but in general the term referred to a county or group of contiguous counties containing a city or "twin cities" with a population of 50,000 or more.

69.
James Baughman,
The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since
1941 (Baltimore, 1992), 35–36, 61–62.

70.
Jon Teaford,
The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality
(Baltimore, 1986), 98–110. Mumford cited in Russell Jacoby,
The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
(New York, 1987), 57–60.

71.
Teaford,
Twentieth-Century American City
, 112; Mark Reutter, "The Last Promise of the American Railroad,"
Wilson Quarterly
(Winter 1994), 10–35.

72.
Kenneth Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York, 1985), 219–30. Also Martin Anderson,
The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal
, 1949–1962 (New York, 1962); Mark Gelfand, A
Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America
, 1933–1968 (New York, 1975); and Thomas O'Connor,
Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950–1970
(Boston, 1993).

73.
Robert Griffith, "Forging America's Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman," in Michael Lacey, ed.,
The Truman Presidency
(Washington, 1989), 57–88.

74.
Teaford,
Twentieth-Century American City
, 122–26.

75.
Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(New York, 1961); Lewis Mumford,
The Urban Prospect
(New York, 1962); William Whyte, ed.,
The Exploding Metropolis
(New York, 1958).

76.
Robert Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia
(New York, 1987), 182–220.

77.
(Boston, 1956).

78.
Richard Gordon et al.,
The Split-Level Trap
(New York, 1960), 33, 54, 142.

79.
Stanley Rowland, "Suburbia Buys Religion,"
Nation
, July 28, 1956, pp. 78–80.