1950s American Culture: Suburbia, the American Dream, & Inequality

In the years following World War II, the United States became the world leader in industry and a global power. Culture in the 1950s is often seen as one of conformity, but several contradictions existed during the decade that gave way to several microcosms of culture, some more visible than others. In this article, we will examine how politics, race, gender, and economic status influenced the culture of the 1950s and how it led to the United States of today.

One defining element of 1950s culture was the ever-increasing tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. This tension grew out of fear in the US political sphere of communism. Euphemistically, leaders in the West, particularly in large capitalist countries like the United States, claimed that the USSR had “expansive tendencies.”

The spread of communism was a threat to the global power that the United States had fairly recently established on the backs of democracy and capitalism. Thus began the process of containment by the US and its allies, an effort through diplomacy, veiled threats of nuclear action, and several proxy wars to keep communist countries from the ability to colonize and expand.

The Korean War was the first in a string of proxy wars that the United States and other Western powers saw as a fight against the scourge of communism. Though the war was never formally declared, President Truman justified the American troops in Korea as a matter of “police action.” This would become a trend throughout the following decades of the Cold War.

However, the fight between capitalism and communism ended in Korea in a stalemate. Almost exactly three years after the conflict began, the Korean War Armistice was signed, which created a tenuous peace between the newly formed North and South Korea, drawing a new border and giving additional territory to South Korea. The 38th parallel is still the site of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which marks the border between the communist dictatorship to the North and the democratic government to the South.

This culture of containing communism at all costs also applied to the homefront. Paranoia was at an all-time high during the Cold War Era, as many politicians believed that communists were hiding in plain sight among the American public. This paranoia took the form of 84 hearings in Congress between 1945 and 1952, a push by the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to uncover communist threats in American political and entertainment figures.

The HUAC uncovered little to nothing during these hearings but served to alienate and ostracize normal Americans in universities, public schools, the federal government, and even in Hollywood. The most intense form of this “Red Scare” came in the form of McCarthyism, wherein Senator Joseph McCarthy espoused supposed proof that “subversives” lurked in the upper echelons of government and were influencing the American public through entertainment.

The public tolerated the witch hunt for communist sympathizers until McCarthy turned on the armed forces, claiming once again that subversives were widespread in the military. This, of course, was baseless, and by 1954, McCarthy had been censured by his colleagues in the Senate, and the HUAC held no more hearings. The Red Scare of the 1950s had been for naught except to cause many Americans hardship and create panic in the nation’s collective psyche.

The Cold War and the fight against communism would continue, albeit on a less publicly accusatory level.

The generation of children born in the postwar boom was shaping into a cohesive and defined group. One of the theories for this clear divide between baby boomers and the generations before them is the influence of pop culture.

Advertisers of the day also saw these young people as an opportunity to market entertainment to their specific demographic. This took the form of art, television, and music. However, entertainment diverged on two lines—one that marketed morality and tradition to the younger generation and one that encouraged baby boomers’ desires to rebel against adult authority.

Music of the 1950s

A new form of music began to emerge in the 1950s that encouraged rebellion among American teens. Borrowing from the decades-old rhythms found in traditionally Black blues music, white country singers developed the rockabilly style, which then developed into rock and roll.

This new genre encouraged freedom for young people of the middle class, and it grew in popularity thanks, in large part, to American disk jockey Alan Freed. Freed not only named the genre of music, but also played it on the radio and organized the first two rock and roll concerts- one in Cleveland, Ohio, and the next in New York.

Groups like Bill Haley and His Comets and singers like Elvis Presley took themes and musical riffs from Black music and made them mainstream. The popularity of white rock and roll artists inevitably led to the popularity of Black artists who were making the same kind of music; stars like Chuck Berry and Little Richard made the color barrier in the music industry a bit more blurry.

Though young people went crazy for suggestive performers like Elvis, adults were, predictably, more scandalized and conservative when it came to liberation. For this reason, television performances were kept family-friendly, such as when Elvis performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the camera stayed glued to the singer’s torso, purposely not showing his gyrating hips and shimmying legs.

Television was also a draw to all sorts of crowds in the 1950s, as the postwar boom allowed for more affordable TV sets in American households. By 1955, half of all American homes had a TV, and television shows became a dominant form of entertainment.

Television was a family-friendly activity, and several programs encouraged traditional ideologies, including religious faith, patriotism, and the importance of the nuclear family. Shows such as I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best reinforced this.

These programs, called situational comedies (now known by the shorthand of sitcom), usually portrayed some variation of the same thing: a wise breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother, and mischievous but well-intentioned and moral children. It was the idealized white suburban family, and it not only spoke to its audience but influenced them to believe that this was American culture and morality at its best.

The entertainment industry sought to subvert ideas of rebellion through television, while popular artists of the day encouraged freedom. While contradictory, the pop culture of the 1950s set the stage for several later stars and the development of American domination in the sphere of entertainment.

Growing Affluence & White Flight

The pop culture of the 1950s was made possible through another cultural phenomenon: that of the suburbs. After the end of World War II, couples began having more babies than ever before, largely due to the security and relative peace they felt after four years of war. Nearly 4 million babies per year were born in the 1950s, meaning the population of the United States was growing, as was the economy.

The economic uptick of the 1950s is often known as the “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” as government spending led to citizen spending in turn. Infrastructure, veteran benefits, and new technology led to a growing middle class, one that was low in unemployment and high in wages.

Middle-class Americans had more means and opportunities to spend than ever before, which included where they chose to live. Cities were growing crowded as the population boomed, and almost directly after the end of World War II, a solution began cropping up. Developers like William Levitt built sprawling, self-sufficient neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities, easily reachable with the growing network of highways in the country.

The houses were inexpensive to build thanks to mass production developments, and the G.I. Bill, which allowed for several government benefits for veterans, also allowed returning soldiers and their families to obtain subsidized mortgages. These houses encouraged the baby boom by being perfectly spacious for young families and allowed for cheaper living than cramped city apartments.

However, wealth and opportunities only applied if the returning G.I. was white. Systemic racism and segregation led to a phenomenon called “white flight,” which referred to the ability of white families to pick up and move to the newly minted suburbs, both through their skin color directly, as developers often wouldn’t sell to Black families, and through systemic benefits, as Black soldiers did not receive fair treatment concerning the G.I. Bill.

The white flight also coincided with the Second Great Migration, which saw the mass movement of southern Blacks to northern cities to escape persecution. In escaping persecution, Black city dwellers found themselves forcibly segregated into cities, both by illegal redlining in neighborhood development as well as by outright and systemic racism.

In stark contrast to the WWII era, which saw hundreds of thousands of women taking up roles in traditionally male-dominated fields, the 1950s were a cultural shift to the domesticity of women in America. Suddenly, men were returning home, and women no longer needed to help keep the homefront running smoothly.

This mass exodus of men back to the US was followed by a shift in thinking about women. As the fight between communism and capitalism ramped up, so too did the idealization of the nuclear family: a happy home of two married parents and at least two children. These traditional gender and family roles were seen as an advantage of Americans over the Soviets and an advantage of capitalism over communism.

The idea behind the propaganda was that women in America could stay home and become homemakers and mothers; they were made complete by their traditional femininity and their ability to take advantage of capitalism. Their husbands went to work and earned money so that the “modern housewife” could prepare food, keep the house clean, and raise the children. On the other hand, women in the Soviet Union were portrayed as poor and dirty, miserably suffering through days in factories and fields to further the goals of communism.

This cultural shift was accompanied by the rising rate of marriages, with many couples getting married younger and younger as the decade went on. Another common trope that cropped up during this time was women turning to higher education to earn an “M.R.S.” degree, wherein women went to university solely to meet a husband.

In addition to a young marriage, women were expected to begin having children as soon as they married. The view of sex was shifting, and for the first time, it was seen as a sign of a healthy marriage to never shut one’s husband out of the bedroom. This led to decades of childbirth, as many brides became pregnant about seven months after their weddings. Additionally, the number of families with three children doubled, while those with four children quadrupled in just 20 years.

The media pushed the traditional agenda in almost every way possible, and society began to see independent women as “old maids” or “selfish” if they dared stay single past 25 or get a job when they did not need to. This idealization of a housewife still echoes in American society today, where, on average, women marry much younger than their counterparts in Europe.

A conflicting view of sex also appeared in the 1950s, which had a lasting effect on American culture. As mentioned previously, married women were encouraged to have sex for the first time in American history, while at the same time, avoiding premarital sex was reinforced. Women who became pregnant out of wedlock were shunned, sent away, and disgraced. Despite the idealization of virginity, women both in and out of wedlock were having sex, which spawned the appearance of female-controlled contraceptives.

The birth control pill was introduced in the late 1950s and was warmly accepted by women throughout the country, who could begin taking their sex lives into their own hands by having contraceptives they could control. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it allowed women to start practicing autonomy, which would only develop throughout the decades into the second-wave feminist movement.

Racial inequality was reaching a fever pitch in the 1950s, as even outside of the South, Black Americans were still being treated as lesser. This manifested in many ways, namely the exclusion of Black soldiers and their families from the Levittown phenomenon, as well as being segregated from white Americans in nearly all aspects of public life, from restaurants to buses to bathrooms.

This frustration with inequality was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, which would begin to affect change in earnest in the 1960s and inspire groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

Several outward displays of racism also occurred in the 1950s that sparked an outcry. The Jim Crow South was in full swing and escalated violence against Black Americans, often without repercussions. This is evident from the murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who was lynched for “offending” a white girl while visiting family in Mississippi. Till’s body was then dumped in a nearby river, and his killers, while identified, were acquitted of the crime. Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, was well-known for insisting on an open casket funeral when the remains of her 14-year-old son were finally returned, saying, “I just wanted the world to see.”

While the case of Emmett Till is well-known, another lesser-known case set the stage for one of the first protests of the Civil Rights Movement. Hilliard Brooks Jr. was riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was shot twice and killed by a police officer for “causing a disturbance.” The officer faced no charges, even though Brooks was unarmed. He was 22 years old and left behind a pregnant wife and several children. This act of violence, perpetrated in August of 1950, set the stage for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.

However horrible the decade of the 1950s was for Black Americans, some victories were had that would set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement to make actual change in the United States. The Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 declared separate public school systems for white and Black children unconstitutional and began the process of desegregation throughout the United States.

While desegregation was heavily resisted in the South, the case of the Little Rock Nine was an instance in which the federal ruling helped to push the Civil Rights Movement forward. Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas attempted to block the nine students from attending school in 1957 by calling out the state National Guard. President Eisenhower responded in kind, deploying federal troops and allowing the Little Rock Nine to attend school at Central High.

While the Civil Rights Movement did not fully kick off and cause legislative change until the 1960s, the injustices and experiences of Black Americans in the 1950s certainly set the stage for change.

However conservative the culture of the 1950s looked from the outside, the undercurrent of rebellion flowed steadily, especially through the arts. The prevalence of rock and roll and its popularization of Black rhythm and blues sounds was just one example of the brewing cultural revolution. Literary works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which was typed on a 75-meter roll of paper, works of fine art like Jackson Pollock’s massive canvases with modern lines and bright swatches of color, and poetry like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” were all pointing to a different way of life.

These works of art were small stepping stones into the major cultural upheaval of the 1960s and showed in small ways that convention and normality were not necessary for the modern person to live a happy life. Mainstream media and advertising agencies sought to keep America within neat, traditional, conservative boxes, physically manifested in cookie-cutter homes like those of Levittowns. But these artists, authors, poets, and musicians were looking forward to a future of rebellion and unconventional thinking.

The culture of the 1950s was a unique one in the scope of American history. It provided the bones for modern American society, both in beneficial and detrimental ways. America is still suffering the effects of societal pressure on women, systemic racism, and conservative capitalistic rigidity, but the 1950s also ushered in the generation of free thinkers, powerful activists, and those who simply rebelled against the norm. The culture of the 1950s framed freedom with a specific set of requirements but allowed those who wanted to experience true freedom to break that framework in the following decades.