The Importance Of Freedom In The 1950s

The publicity stunt featured on the 1959 cover of Life magazine would have been a very odd scene for today’s society. The popular magazine displayed a photo of a young couple about to embark on their very own “sheltered honeymoon” (May 1). The happy newlyweds were captured posing in their backyard lawn dressed in acceptable honeymoon attire surrounded by an array of foods, utensils, and other commodities that would be brought with them down into the bomb shelter for the duration of their honeymoon. The profound concept of a honeymoon being spent underground in a confined space is fascinating in a strange way. What caused society to feel that this would be an appropriate cover to “Life” during the 1950s? In short, what Americans craved during

Freedom during the 1950s took concepts from the Great Depression as well as the Second World War and extended them. Amid the bleak years of the Great Depression, Americans began to search for a new escape from their current predicament. President Herbert Hoover’s hands off method was clearly ineffective. Homeless shantytowns became “Hoovervilles” to indicate discontent and display how Americans thought the current situation was Hoover’s fault. Laissez faire’s lack of success caused Americans to believe that positive freedoms rather than total liberty would alleviate their

These fears proved to be something that Americans needed to have dealt with but could not do all by themselves. As a result, America’s definition of freedom expanded to show the same concepts of positive freedom that were seen in the 30s and 40s. Throughout the Cold War Americans called for the government to “protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice” (Foner 789). Consequently, the positive freedoms from the depression that provided security against the domestic issues that filled the 1930s were expanded to cover domestic and international concerns during the