Another important element to the 1950’s was the economy creating a generation of materialism. The economy was thriving because the government had put into a place a system of spending high amounts of money and also people were spending high amounts of their own money. The government also started programs through an ideas inspired by Keynesian, but it was called the fair deal. The fair deal was used to help grow the economy through government spending in order to keep others to also spend their money. The fair deal was different from the old new deal because it created government growth rather, while the new deal provided relief. Another reason was the high amounts of money people ad been saving up because items were limited and people were …show more content…
When the war had ended things were made available that were previously available like tires, cars, and some appliances. In a way the extraordinary amount of spending led to materialism, which eventually led to people living well beyond their measures. An example of this would be the family in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit because they were a family that appeared to be very wealthy and well off, but in reality they were unable to afford their lifestyle. In turn the husband had to start looking for a higher wage job to help support their lifestyle. Many times throughout the book the wife Betsy was constantly asking for newer belongings, a finer house. This system of materialism helped the economy not go into another depression, but at the same time led a life of overall …show more content…
However, in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Betsy talks about how Tom has changed so much since coming back from the war and how things have changed. Through the story there are many moments where flashbacks from the war effect Tom’s everyday livelihood. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit can also show the struggle people had understanding why people may have been different from before the war, and how it was so hard to relate. Another big adjustment that the fair deal had set up programs to help former war veterans get back to everyday life. One of the programs was free college education. The free education program not only helped the veterans find a new career, but it also helped society find higher paid wage jobs like, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. In turn the higher wages meant higher taxes, so more money into the government in return. Another positive that turned into free education was the high amounts of people who started to get into college. The high turns out rate led for more colleges to be constructed, then in turn created supplementary jobs and more money. Life after war seemed to be difficult to deal with emotionally, however through government programs individuals were able to form into a better working class and
They left people without jobs, homes, and money. In the story “Digging In” by Robert J. Hastings it explains how people did anything to make money for their families even if it was only for 5 dollars. Even with these hard times some people still had hope like it showed in “Depts” by Karen Hesse. In this poem a farmer had hope that rain would come to grow his dying wheat while his wife didn’t think so. This was a very stressful time right until president Roosevelt made some changes. In the article “The New Deal” it explains how Roosevelt helped end the great depression with programs that gave millions of people jobs. The great depression was a very hard, stressful, and sad time for the american people that had many
The economy during the thirties was very bad in America. At the end of the last century, in 1929, the stock exchange crashed. It is referred to as the Wall Street crash and the collapse of the NY stock exchange, but most importantly it started the Great Depression. Every day there were more bankruptcies and layoffs. Even big, seemingly indestructible companies were in danger. Companies like Industrial Steel. They had to lay off 225,000 workers. The Great Depression hit everywhere and everyone. There was no food and no money. People rushed to the banks to get their savings, but there was no money to get. Nine million savings accounts were wiped out. Bank failures crushed tens of thousands of people. Everyone was selling all they had. Half the families in the United States were facing eviction. Four million United States families were without means for one year after the crash. Hoovers theology was that if America was left alone, it would right itself. So he did nothing. When Roosevelt became president, he closed down all the banks and rushed them two billion dollars, then reopened them. Roosevelt, although this was not enough to fix what the crash had done to America, attempted to bring America back from the brink.
In the book, Only Yesterday: An informal History of the 1920's, the author Frederick Lewis Allen started the book by introducing a family (the smith's) in the year 1919. Mrs. Allen depicted the normal woman of the times, who dressed modestly (wearing a dress about 6 inches length from the ground), had long hair and basically took care of all of the household maintenance including doing chores around the house and preparing the meals. Whereas Mr. Smith on the other hand was the head of the household and the bread winner. Allen goes on to depict things that were popular among the normal folks during that time period. For example, the Chicago tribune was widely popular as a reputable newspaper. Other things that were popular during this time were certain sports (mainly baseball), the news (peace conference at Paris), and the economy (the stock market). During this time ordinary commodities such as food, transportation and normal goods were becoming more expensive which is the reason for this being the “age of inflation”.
For the first time women were working in the industries of America. As husbands and fathers, sons and brothers shipped out to fight in Europe and the Pacific, millions of women marched into factories, offices, and military bases to work in paying jobs and in roles reserved for men in peacetime. Women were making a living that was not comparable to anything they had seen before. They were dependent on themselves; for once they could support the household. Most of the work in industry was related to the war, such as radios for airplanes and shells for guns. Peggy Terry, a young woman who worked at a shell-loading plant in Kentucky, tells of the money that was to be made from industrial work (108). “We made a fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. To us that was an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing (108)." Sarah Killingsworth worked in a defense plant. " All I wanted to do was get in the factory, because they were payin more than what I'd been makin. Which was forty dollars a week, which was pretty good considering I'd been makin about twenty dollars a week. When I left Tennessee I was only makin two-fifty a week, so that was quite a jump (114)." Terry had never been able to provide for herself as she was able to during the war. " Now we'd have money to buy shoes and a dress and pay rent and get some food on the table. We were just happy to have work (108).” These women exemplify the turn around from the peacetime to wartime atmosphere on the home front. The depression had repressed them to poverty like living conditions. The war had enabled them to have what would be luxury as compared to life before.
The country is no longer in the midst of a depression nor involved in a brutal global conflict. Wartime production had helped pull the American economy out of the depression it was in, and from the late 1940s on, young adults saw a rise in their spending power (PBS). At this time, jobs were abundant, wages were higher, and Americans had money to spend. During this time, modern American consumerism started. Consumer spending no longer means just satisfying an indulgent material desire (PBS).
The 1950s seemed like a perfect decade. The rise of suburbs outside cities led to an expansion of the middle class, thus allowing more Americans to enjoy the luxuries of life. The rise of these suburbs also allowed the middle class to buy houses with land that used to only be owned by more wealthy inhabitants. Towns like Levittown-one of the first suburbs- were divided in such a way that every house looked the same (“Family Structures”). Any imperfections were looked upon as unfavorable to the community as a whole. Due to these values, people today think of the 1950s as a clean cut and model decade. This is a simplistic perception because underneath the surface, events that took place outside the United States actually had a direct effect on our own country’s history. The rise of Communism in Russia struck fear into the hearts of the American people because it seemed to challenge their supposedly superior way of life.
One of the main waves of music of the time was a calmer more gentle rock. A major band called The Beatles were so popular during this time it was called Beatle Mania. The Beatles were one of the numerous bands coming to America either many more would coming getting the title of the British invasion. During the 1960s America’s economy was greatly increasing. This time period focused on the housing and computer industry which overpowered automobiles, chemicals, and electrically powered consumer durables, which were the leading sectors in the 1950s. Agriculture fell from 19.2 to 7.5 percent, minimum wage increased from $1.00 to $1.25, and the unemployment of was around 6 percent. Another economic point is the growing middleclass. Between 1945 and 1960, the median family income, adjusted for inflation, almost doubled. Rising income doubled the size of the middle class. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s only one-third of Americans qualified as middle class, but in postwar America two-thirds did. Many middle class families of postwar America became suburban families. Of the 13 million new homes built in the 1950s, 85 percent were in the suburbs. The GI bill helped this growth greatly. Soldiers coming home from the war would have a government loan for a home or going to college. Making college more of a social norm. Which still effects society today making more jobs having a college degree required. The political culture focused more on containing communism with the theory helping this being called the domino theory “Military Intervention in Korea and Vietnam finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration
People, especially blacks, were being put out of work everywhere; the wave of depression had hit the entire country. Banks were failing, and the cities, in a desperate attempt to provide relief, were running out of money. Because President Hoover was confident that business conditions would soon improve, federal funds were not used to provide relief; relief was the responsibility of private charities. City allowances soon ran out, and there was no money left. Pennies were used to buy food and fuel. Many people went without food in order to p...
During The Great Depression, people had to find ways to save money on even the bare necessities. One example of this was the widespread use of vacant lots, and land provided bythe cities to grow food. Americans now had to live in the manner of their ancestors, making their own clothing, growing their own food, and agai...
The Great Depression and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath Though most Americans are aware of the Great Depression of 1929, which may well be "the most serious problem facing our free enterprise economic system", few know of the many Americans who lost their homes, life savings and jobs. This paper briefly states the causes of the depression and summarizes the vast problems Americans faced during the eleven years of its span. This paper primarily focuses on what life was like for farmers during the time of the Depression, as portrayed in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and tells what the government did to end the Depression. In the 1920's, after World War 1, danger signals were apparent that a great Depression was coming.
The Great Depression was the greatest economic downturn America had ever faced. With the fall of the stock market in one day, the entire country was in chaos. People’s entire life savings as well as plans for the future were destroyed in minutes. This paper will discuss how the Great Depression affected family dynamics and everyday life as the result of economic hardship. Before the Great Depression happened, American family life was very different.
The bureaucratization of business in the 1920’s meant that more people could be employed in higher paying white-collar jobs than before, including, for the first time, housewives. This new income combined with the reduced prices for goods that resulted from mechanized production, assembly lines and a general decrease in the cost of technology created a thriving consumerist middle class that went on to fuel the economy in all sectors, especially the upper classes. Likewise, during World War II Americans saved up around 150 billion dollars, and this sum combined with the income of the GI Bill allowed normal people to buy expensive things, from houses to cars to electronics to education at a rapid rate, fueling the trademark prosperity of the 1950’s. The new automobile culture of the 50’s spawned new businesses that catered to mobile Americans, such as nicer and more standardized hotels like Holiday Inn, and drive-up restaurants like McDonalds. Just as the culture of the 1920’s was transformed by modernist ideas, the world of the 1950’s was reinvigorated by the introduction of the automobile to the middle class....
The young, recently married farmers living in the Great Plains during the 1930s had a terrible life. First off, being married meant having multiple people to provide for. This is more responsibility, and leads to dividing up the food between family members. Then, the country was also in an economic downturn, so the price of food and crops were low. Farmers already had debt because of new machines and land that was purchased during World War I to keep up with the demand during the war. Then the depression caused banks to fail, so farmers lost all their money that was in the bank. Everyday life was treacherous, and there were few amenities in the home, with no plumbing or electricity. Life was awful for a farmer during the Great Depression.
The 1950s was a time when conformity held supreme in the culture at large. Issues such as women 's rights were thrown to the back as people tried to remain in the popular form of a family. These issues being put off only caused the prolonging of the tumultuous 1960s that would soon
The 1950s are characterized as a decade marked by the Cold War and social conformity. It is hard to generalize the lives of millions of Americans, but the values of Americans in the fifties were shaped by two major events: the Great Depression and World War II. After a period of war and poverty conforming to a suburban way of life was a dream come true for Americans.