At Home in the Fifties: Suburbs and Segregation. Corresponds with Ch. 24 in your textbook.

1. At Home in the Fifties:
The Suburbs and Segregation

2. 1950s Society: Key
Themes
• Like the 1920s, a conservative decade
• Tensions: growth of suburbs, consumer
prosperity but increasing segregation
• Civil rights movement begins, struggle
against violent repression
• Consensus ideal but stirrings of
generational conflict

3. A Segregated Landscape
• Restrictive covenants
prevented African
Americans from buying
homes in suburbs
• As late as 1990s, 90% of
suburban whites lived in
communities that were
more than 99% white
• “Urban renewal” - poor
neighborhoods on
potentially valuable land
demolished
Image: Demonstrators protest discriminatory housing in Los
Angeles, 1946, Daily News. Source: Calisphere

4. Truman and
Civil Rights
• 1948: desegregation of
armed forces
• 1948: Hubert Humphrey (VP
candidate) - “I say the time
has come to walk out of the
shadow of states’ rights and
into the sunlight of human
rights.”
• 1948: States’ Rights
Democratic Party: Strom
Thurmond for President
• 1952: Democrats retreat
from civil rights

5. Civil Rights under
Eisenhower
• President “found the whole civil
rights issue distasteful” (764)
• 50% of black families lived in
poverty
• segregation was a fact of life, even
where it wasn’t the law - e.g. Las
Vegas

6. Civil Rights
under
Eisenhower
• legal challenges culminate in Brown v. Board of
Education
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)
• 1956: Supreme Court ends segregation in
public transportation
• 1957: Little Rock,AR - federal troops to
integrate high school
• 1961: less than 2% of black students attended
desegregated schools in the south

7. The Invention of the
Suburbs

8. Postwar
Economy
• Servicemen’s Readjustment Act,
a.k.a. GI Bill of Rights
• 1946: 1 million veterans to
college under GI Bill
• 4 million veterans get home
mortgages: the suburbs are
born

9. Levittown
• Housing boom in early
1950s
• Developers such as the
Levitts create suburbs
• Levittowns in NJ, PA, NY

10. Life Magazine: Bernard Levey Family in front of 1948 house and 1950 house
Images: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/building.html
Home in Levittown

11. Building Levittown
Images: Life Magazine; http://tigger.uic.edu/
~pbhales/Levittown/building.html

12. Life 1950
Interior Design Contest

13. Growth of the West
• CA as symbol of
suburban boom
• 1963: CA becomes most
populous state
• LA as the archetypal
“centerless” western
city
Building the suburbs by fleeing the city: Los Angeles,
San FernandoValley, 1950s
Photo and caption:Affordable Housing Institute

14. Women in the 1950s
Image: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/tag/women/
Elliott Erwitt, USA. NewYork. New Rochester. 1955.
Photo: Magnum Photos,Accessed via ARTStor

15. HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE
Home Economics High School Text Book, 1954
Web Version: http://jade.ccccd.edu/grooms/goodwife.htm
Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a
delicious meal, on time.This is a way of letting him know that you
have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.
Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of
a good meal are part of the warm welcome needed.
Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so that you’ll be
refreshed when he arrives.Touch up your makeup, put a ribbon in
your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of
work-weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting.
His boring day may need a lift.

16. Rebellion in
the 1950s
• Consensus as ideal in 1950s
• Critiques of boring modern
work, empty suburban life,
influence of advertising
• Stirrings of generational
tensions
• “juvenile delinquency” panic

17. Conclusions
• Americans in the 1950s valued consensus.
• Cold War fears led to suppression of
dissenting ideas
• Civil rights was disorderly and disturbing
• A nuclear family and a suburban home
was the ideal - but not one accessible for
everyone in a rigidly segregated society