Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (48 page)

The best way to describe what was happening at the time is not to trumpet the coming in the 1950s of a classless or post-industrial society. Rather, it is to observe that the United States, like other advanced industrial nations, was depending less on heavy manual labor—in factories, fields, and mines—and more on service work and office-based employment. Larger percentages of people escaped hard physical labor, earned higher real wages, and enjoyed more comfortable lives. Most, to repeat, had higher hopes than their parents had about the future. Sharp divisions in income and wealth, however, persisted. Regional differences remained pronounced; then as always the South had the highest incidence of poverty. Living standards and opportunities (especially in schools) differed greatly. At least 25 percent of Americans were "poor" in the mid-1950s.
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From these perspectives, class distinctions, while softening when measured by census definitions of occupation, remained significant, both as facts of social life and as elements in the ways that people perceived themselves.

Unions, moreover, began to lose their potential to promote socio-economic mobility. Falling into a slow but apparently irreversible slide after the mid-1950s, they represented by 1970 only 27.4 percent of non-agricultural workers, a percentage well below those in most other industrial countries.
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Several forces drove these trends, among them the relatively greater growth of service work, where unions often struggled to gain a foothold. Many employers moved to the South and West, which had always been relatively hostile ground for labor organizers. Some corporations began moving their activities overseas, where cheap non-union labor offered competitive advantages.

It did not necessarily help the prospects of low-paid workers that many of the most powerful labor leaders of the early and mid-1950s became increasingly cautious and conservative. Chief among these leaders was George Meany, a strongly anti-Communist labor bureaucrat who became head of a newly merged AFL-CIO in December 1955. The merger, indeed, symbolized the weakening state of the CIO, which became a sort of junior partner. Walter Reuther, who presided over the Industrial Union Department within the new entity, became increasingly disenchanted with Meany, who showed little interest in mobilizing the masses of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the United States. Meany also gave up trying to advance unions in the South. Although a few unions—of retail clerks, service employees, and communications workers—managed to expand, most grew only slowly, if at all, in the 1950s and thereafter.
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It further hurt the cause of unions that the huge Teamsters Union under Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa was shown to be flagrantly corrupt and mob-dominated. Reflecting a mood of rising popular disenchantment with unions, Hollywood produced
On the Waterfront
(1954), which showed goons running a longshoremen's local. It won a number of Academy Awards. Losing patience, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters in 1957. And Congress, after conducting highly publicized hearings on the internal evils of unions—evils that were said to range from Communist influence to racketeering—passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959. The law opened the door to government intervention into union affairs—corporate crooks faced no comparable intrusions—and tightened restrictions against secondary boycotts and picketing.
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Although the act probably had little effect on unionization, its passage symbolized the declining political power of the House of Labor, which never recaptured the fire that it had enjoyed in its halcyon days of the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was sad commentary on what happened thereafter that the Teamsters emerged as the largest labor organization in the country by the mid-1960s.

A
MERICANS IN THE
1950s who heralded the view that ethnic consciousness was declining, like those who celebrated the advent of classlessness, could also point to developments that appeared to support their claims. By 1960 the percentage of foreign-born in the population had dropped to a new twentieth-century low of 5.4 percent (compared to 7.5 percent in 1950). The percentage of native-born people of foreign or mixed parentage also fell, from 15.6 percent in 1950 to 13.4 percent in 1960. This, too, was a twentieth-century low.
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Some trends, to be sure, suggested otherwise. Puerto Ricans, who as United States citzens were not subject to stringent immigration laws, jammed night flights from San Juan to New York City, and Mexicans began coming in larger numbers to the Southwest. Still, immigration to the United States remained insignificant in the 1950s, averaging only 250,000 a year during the decade. Ellis Island, the nation's preeminent immigration center, closed in 1955.
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Most "ethnic" Americans, moreover, continued to be white in skin color and of European background. In 1960 the most numerous groups of people with a foreign or mixed parentage had hardly changed since 1945. They continued to be German- and Italian-Americans (approximately 3.3 million each), followed by people with roots in Canada, Poland, Britain, Russia, and Eire. Mexican-Americans ranked next, well down the list, with 1.2 million. Asians remained an almost invisible group outside a few concentrated urban neighborhoods. The census in 1960 enumerated only 642,000 people (of a total population of 180.7 million) who had one or more parents from anywhere in all of Asia.
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The low level of immigration, together with the formidable patriotic fervor exerted by the Cold War, sustained an assimilationist
Zeitgeist
. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, actively promoting a more homogeneous society, abetted this spirit by aggressively deporting illegals, especially Chinese, and by pressing aliens to become American citizens. A massive effort in 1954 culminated in the induction to American citizenship of 55,000 people on Veterans Day alone, including 7,500 at the Hollywood Bowl and 8,200 at the Polo Grounds in New York City. In 1946 aliens had taken an average of twenty-three years to become citizens; by 1956 the average time had plummeted to seven.
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Amid long-range and apparently irreversible trends such as these it was hardly surprising that contemporaries imagined a not-too-distant, consensual time in which ethnicity would not matter much. Will Herberg, a prominent theologian, captured these expectations in 1955 in his widely hailed study of American religion and ethnicity,
Protestant Catholic Jew
. Herberg argued that religious and racial identifications remained strong but that ethnic loyalties were rapidly weakening. Like others, he was impressed by the ability of the melting pot to acculturate people into an "American Way of Life."
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Later developments, notably the open ethnic consciousness that arose in the 1960s and 1970s, showed that Herberg and others greatly exaggerated the heat of the melting process. It then became obvious that ethnic differences (like class distinctions) refused to boil away. Even fairly well established groups, such as Irish-Americans, often nursed old resentments and clung to neighborhood enclaves. But in the aggressively assimilationist milieu of the mid-1950s Herberg's analysis seemed persuasive. Only later did other scholars, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their perceptive book
Beyond the Melting Pot
(1963), highlight the enduring power that ethnic identifications—what one eats, who one marries, where one lives, how one votes—had in the lives of the American people.
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Herberg's book, among others, noted the apparently powerful role of organized religion in American society during the 1950s. Self-identification as Protestant or Catholic or Jew, he argued, had become central to the culture. Many contemporary developments bolstered this view. Even more than in the past, polls suggested, Americans openly embraced one of these faiths. The ubiquity of church-building, especially in the booming suburbs, stunned foreign visitors. Popular songs included such favorites as "I Believe," "It's No Secret What God Can Do," "The Man Upstairs," and "Vaya con Dios." The percentage of people who said they belonged to a church or synagogue increased from 49 percent in 1940 to 55 percent in 1950 to a record-high 69 percent in 1959. No other Western culture was nearly so "religious" in that sense.
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Some 66 percent of these self-identifiers proclaimed themselves Protestant, 26 percent Catholic, and 3 percent Jewish.
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Most Americans at the time knew little about other religions (or even their own), and they displayed small interest in ecumenicalism. Some openly disparaged other faiths and denominations. Catholic leaders clung to traditional beliefs, resisting marriage outside the Church and firmly opposing birth control.
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Anti-Catholic feelings remained open. Former Harvard president James Conant, a prominent educational reformer in the 1950s, denounced Catholic parochial schools, even if maintained without state aid. The Catholic faith, he said, was undemocratic.
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Cold War concerns did much to stimulate this apparently rising religiosity. Communism, many Americans believed, was evil in part because it was Godless. Hollywood, tapping into such feelings, brought out big-selling films such as
Quo Vadis?
(1951),
The Robe
(1953), and
Ben-Hur
(1959) in which Christians starred as heroes against authoritarian and pagan Roman villains.
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The Reverend Billy Graham explained that Communism, "a great sinister anti-Christian movement masterminded by Satan," must be battled at every turn. Eagerly promoting such views, many politicians and writers highlighted the contrast, as they saw it, between "atheistic Communism" and the spirituality of the "Free World." On Flag Day in 1954 Eisenhower signed legislation that added the phrase "one nation under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance as recited by millions of children in American schools. The new pledge, he said, would enrich a world in which there were so many people "deadened in mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life." The President then expressed one of his most fatuous (yet apparently popular) utterances: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is." A year later Congress endorsed this approach by approving legislation that added the words "In God We Trust" to American currency.
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In taking steps such as these, some critics said, the President and Congress were blurring the constitutionally decreed separation of church and state. But relatively few people in the 1950s seemed to notice or to care. On the contrary, these actions reflected widely held and popular feelings that fused the ideals of Christianity and "Americanism" into a firmly anti-Communist "civil religion."
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God, many people believed, had endowed the United States with a mission to spread the sacred truths of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution throughout the world and to destroy the diabolical dogmas of Communism.

In such a climate of opinion conservative evangelicals made impressive advances. In 1950 Billy Graham founded his Evangelistic Association. It began as a one-room office with a single secretary. By 1958 the association had a staff of 200 operating out of a four-story office building in Minneapolis. They answered 10,000 letters a week and collected and disbursed $2 million a year. Graham appeared on a weekly television show and offered a column syndicated in 125 newspapers. He told the faithful that they should believe in the literal truths of the Bible and warned that the world might soon come to an end. "Time," he said repeatedly, "is running out." Graham branded drinking, smoking, card-playing, swearing, and dancing as sins.
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Graham was far and away the most famous evangelist of the postwar era. A frequent visitor to the White House, he appeared to be a special friend of Eisenhower, who, though never much of a church-goer before he became President, made a show of attending thereafter. (Ike even opened Cabinet meetings with a prayer.)
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Graham's remarkable visibility testified to the eloquence and intensity of his preaching, to the eyecatching theatrics of his massive revivals, and to the special care that he and his increasingly large staff devoted to marketing. Few postwar "personalities"—a word that reflected the media-based culture of the age—better combined old-fashioned ideas and modern packaging.
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Other rising evangelists, most of them deeply conservative Protestants, joined Graham in preaching against the materialism, hedonism, and secularism of modern life. They attracted millions of Americans (how many no one knows for sure), many of them relatively poor, geographically unsettled, and ill educated. These were people who felt cut off—or alienated—from the more secular world of the middle classes and who searched for consoling and unambiguous truths. Large numbers of such people followed Oral Roberts, a Pentecostal Holiness preacher and faith-healer who used television and mass-mailing techniques to build up a nationally known fundamentalist organization. By the mid-1950s Roberts had a huge ranch in Texas, a twelve-passenger plane, a television and radio show carried by 400 stations, and a university in his name. He was then drawing in more than $50 million a year in revenues.
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