The years 1945-60 really were an American High, to use the title of William O’Neill’s book, and the main reason for that was that every other great power in the world had been knocked so low by the Second World War. The Greatest Generation had indeed rendered a great service to their country and to those who had not yet been born: they had kept Adolf Hitler 3,000 miles away from the U.S. and helped destroy his regime forever, and there would have been no Affluent Society had this not occurred. No other nation on earth was as wealthy and powerful as the U.S. in these years, and the middle class was larger than ever before in history, but blacks and other minorities hardly shared in this prosperity, and in the South lacked even basic civil rights and the vote before the 1960s.
In 1945-61, the U.S. simply had no economic rivals in the world, and most of the manufacturing on earth occurred in its industrial cities. No depression or financial crash occurred in the period from 1945-73 and recessions not as long as in the 1930s, the 1980s or the present. During this era “full employment was maintained, real wages rose constantly, economies were relatively stable, and wealth and income inequalities were reduced”, which was definitely not the case in the 1920s and 1930s or in the last thirty years (Skidelsky 64). For whites at least, the U.S. offered unprecedented opportunities to live a middle class lifestyle and obtain higher education, a house in the suburbs, cars, televisions and appliances (O’Neill 33). This was one of the features of the American Dream that Vice President Richard Nixon boasted of the great U.S. consumer society in his Kitchen Debate with Nitika Khrushchev.
Blacks and other minorities were largely excluded from this affluence, though, since the suburbs were segregated and many were left behind in inner-city ghettos that would finally explode in the 1960s. Blacks had half the income of whites and double the rate of unemployment, lived in substandard housing attended college at only 5% the rate of whites while lived in poverty (King 1967). In the ghettos of the North, they were “confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness” (King 1967). In the South, Jim Crow segregation of public facilities and schools and denial of voting rights remained in place as they had been for decades. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won a number of important victories for civil rights in Supreme Court cases during this era. By far the most important of these was Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which reversed the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision and declared that segregated schools were inherently unequal (O’Neill 244).
Although the Court ordered desegregation and abolition of dual school systems in the South with all deliberate speed, a campaign of ‘massive resistance against integration continued until the early-1970s. In Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957-58, for example, Gov. Orville Faubus openly defied a federal court order to integrate Central High School and forced the Eisenhower administration to send in troops. As in other Southern states, Faubus then ordered the school closed, and in many areas the schools stayed closed for years as white parents removed their children to private or religious schools. It would be ten years before the schools were finally integrated at all or indeed before blacks received even basic civil rights everywhere in the U.S. (Hasday 2008).
Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement demanded that blacks be included and integrated into the Affluent Society and that they receive voting rights and equal social, economic and educational opportunities. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in 1957 and headed by Martin Luther King until his assassination in 1968. It grew out of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which has organized a successful boycott of the segregated city bus system in 1955-56, which resulted in the city’s segregation laws being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Under King’s leadership, it would go on to win a number of important civil rights victories in the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 that did substantially improve the lives of blacks in the United States.
WORKS CITED
Hasday, J. The Civil Rights Act of 1964: An End to Racial Segregation. Infobase Publishing, 2007.
King, Martin Luther. “Where Do We Go from Here?” (1967).
http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/martin-luther-king-speeches/martin-luther-king-speech-where-do-we-go-from-here.htm
O’Neill, William American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1961. NY: The Free Press, 1986.
Skidelsky, R. Keynes: The Return of the Master. Perseus Books Group, 2010.
