April 4: Consumption—selling capitalism at home and abroad

Required reading:

·         Excerpt from The Other America

 

Questions to consider from the reading: How did freedom get defined as “free enterprise” capitalism,  and as consumption in the 1950s? How do C.Wright Mills views differ from those of Lilienthal in the reader? What role do American women have in keeping Western society free, according to Adlai Stevenson?  Who was left out of the affluence of the 1950s according to the text and Harrington’s excerpt above, and why?

 

Recommended documents:

Race issues, both South and North

·         A Southern Congressman Explains Lynching, 1948

·         Terrorism in the South in the 1940s and 1950s

·          1949 Arguments for Federal Civil Rights Legislation

·         W.E.B. DuBois on why he wouldn’t vote in 1956

   Same writer who discussed what it was like to be black in Philadelphia in 1895 in an earlier class reading

·         Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison—classic work on being Black in 1950s America

·         “The Negro in the North”: South African Novelist Alan Paton Dissects the Racial Situation Beyond the South

·         Letters to the Editor about Alan Paton’s 1954 Article “The Negro in America Today”

·         Black and White Fathers in Atlanta Try to Explain Race Relations to Their Sons, 1955

 

Military spending and concerns:

·         Military Industrial Complex” complete speech by Eisenhower

·         The Military Industrial Complex and its critics

 

Consumert society and its limits culture and fears:

·         Advice to Parents about Raising Children at the End of World War II

·         Colliers Magazine discusses the Distractions of Youth –allaying fears of anomie

·         The Comic Book Code of 1954

·         TV Censorship in the 1950s

·         Nostalgia for the 50s website –lots of links to mainstream icons of the period

·         Outrage for Invasions of Privacy by marketers –oh, what a distance from the present!

·         The Quiz Show Scandal (see links at bottom for additional testimony)

·         Air Waves “are in the Public Domain”: Public Television Advocacy in the 1950s

·         Tanning Becomes a Fad

·         White Men are the Weaker Sex—Perceptions of Men in the 1950s

·         “Women Without Men”: The Pros and Cons of a “Man-Free Life”

·         Worrying about the Single Men (and Women) – marrying and conformity

·         Kinsey

·          Attitudes toward Smoking in 1950s

·         Advocating Sex Education in the 1950s

 

Women in American Society

·         Adlai Stevenson, Presidential Candidate, describes Women’s role in American Society

·         Women Workers Wages in the age of affluence

·         “The Bottom of the Economic Totem Pole”: African American Women in the Workplace

·         A Waves Officers Says Mothers Can be Soldiers

·         The Army Shouldn’t “Dictate the Terms of Motherhood”

·         The Department of Defense says that Mothers Can’t be Soldiers

·         “Politics Is a Pretty Personal Thing with Women”: A1950s Look at the Impact of Women Voters

·         Chronological developments for Women in the 1950s

 

Labor in the Postwar Order

·         GM Rejects Reuther’s Call to “Open the Books”: The Post-WWII Strike Wave

·         Truman Speaks on the 1946 Railroad Strike—using Government power to Tame Labor

·         Anti-Union Violence in the Wake of Taft-Hartley

·         Union Officials Blame the Taft-Hartley Act for Mob Antiunion Violence

·         Argument that Congress should extend the minimum wage to farm workers (1949)