Analysis Of The 50's

Life after the War: Analysis of the 20’s and 50’s
What does jazz legend Duke Ellington and rock star heartthrob Elvis Presley have in common? For a moment it might seem as if they are completely different but they both reside in eras where new movements and values were created, some positive and others more negative. The 20’s and 50’s were similar with regards to new musical discoveries, rebellious youth, prosperously booming economies and striving towards peaceful living after a sanguinary war. However the differences vastly outweigh the similarities when looking in in depth at the social, economic, labor and cultural life in these post wars periods.
Social outlooks took a turn from the worn-out traditional view of Americans in the 1920’s,

Where women in the 20’s rose to a more independent image and a decrease in family size, the 50’s saw an age of women moving back to the more ‘perfect mother’ image of society and the Baby Boomers . Shows like I Love Lucy portrayed an ideal wife as needing her husband and that she is incompetent without him. Women got discontent with this, as they felt their education and skills were being undermined by staying at home. In contrast to the women’s suffrage, the next movement of this era is the civil rights movement or the freedom movement as Foner calls it (957). The leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. rose swiftly, which would later lead to the March on Washington in 1963 (964). Rosa Parks, an icon in the earlier stages of the movement, refused to give her seat up to a white passenger in a segregated city bus on December 1st, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. This moment of courage came to be known as ‘The Montgomery Bus Boycott’ that ignited a yearlong bus boycott. This was the commencement of a mass phase of the civil rights movement in the South (Foner,

Many Americans had enough money to buy not only basic necessities, but also had sufficient funds to splurge on new products that encouraged a social change, like the telephone. The period patented the rising of modern mass-production. An example of this would be, Henry Ford’s assembly line that produced over 4.8 million affordable automobiles in the 20’s, which was later surpassed by General Motors (Foner, 771). Including a mass-consumption economy, which brought revenues to investors, whilst raising the living standard of the urban middle- and working-class. The greater minority of Americans who made their living wages in farming, the decade resounded merely with the distress of a continued depression. Farmers did not share in the economy growth, but instead saw a decline during the 1920’s due to a surplus of crops that weren’t needed after the war. A negative impact was also the cut back of government spending. Due to the heightened consumerism and gap in middle classes and increased incomes, the Stock Market crashed and was also followed by the Great Depression, giving an end to a prosperous economic era, as seen in