United States in the 1950s

Retrospective depictions of the United States in the 1950s tend to romanticize the decade as an idyllic and prosperous time for many Americans. People generally settled back into traditional gender roles after the wartime upheaval of the 1940s had prompted millions of US women into typically male-dominated positions in the workforce. Family values dominated mainstream social life, with the reimagined American Dream established during the World War II (1939–1945) era becoming a driving force in the continued growth and development of leafy-green suburban neighborhoods.

At the same time, a growing sense of unease clouded the serene veneer of the US social landscape. Politicians such as Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) drove a heavily politicized brand of Communist paranoia known as the Red Scare. McCarthy’s name became synonymous with what is often described as a “witch hunt” of alleged Communist infiltrators in the US government. The movement, now known as McCarthyism, began in February 1950 when McCarthy claimed to have uncovered evidence that more than two hundred Communist affiliates were working for the US Department of State.

The deepening ideological divide of the Cold War (1947–1991) between the democratic United States and the Communist Soviet Union reached a new level of intensity in 1950, when the United States, the United Kingdom, and other allies entered the Korean War (1950–1953) with the backing of the United Nations (UN). The conflict was fought to contain the growth of Communism in the Korean Peninsula but is now widely viewed as a proxy war between the rival superpowers at the heart of the Cold War. In 1953, hostilities were ended by an armistice agreement that established the Soviet-aligned Communist state of North Korea and the United States-aligned, democratic country of South Korea. An estimated 2.5 million people died during the Korean War, with the United States suffering approximately one-hundred forty thousand casualties including about forty thousand fatalities. Tensions between the United States and North Korea, which persists as a reclusive and totalitarian Communist state, have continued well into the twenty-first century.

Domestically, consumer culture gained a strong foothold in the United States, serving a dual purpose as an important driver of sustained economic growth and a source of Cold War cultural propaganda. Commentators note that during the 1950s, consumerism was often equated with patriotism, and people were routinely encouraged to make constant upgrades to the newest, latest, and best available products. Fast-growing suburbs prompted a sharp rise in automobile sales as families sought mobility and the freedom to explore the country. Meanwhile, the rise of television had a profound impact on the US media landscape, driving the continued acceleration of consumer culture and exerting a powerful influence on culture through curated portrayals of American life that functioned to reinforce dominant values and the social status quo.

Yet, the youth culture and counterculture of the 1950s hinted at elements of dissent beneath the nation’s unified sociocultural surface. The loud and energetic popular music style of rock and roll became a major phenomenon, rankling older generations and conservative factions of US society. The so-called Beat Generation also challenged the conformist values of the 1950s through alternative lifestyles and provocative literary works.

Society

The US population, tabulated in the 1950 census at 150,697,361, grew to 179,323,175 by 1960. This surge marked a growth rate of nearly 19 percent over the course of the 1950s, continuing the “Baby Boom” trend that began in the 1940s. People born during the 1950s are often said to belong to a generation known as the Baby Boomers, which references the rapid population growth rates facilitated by the country’s strong economic performance and financial stability.

Two presidents held office during the 1950s. Harry S. Truman (1884–1972), who was elected to a second term in office in 1948, and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), a veteran of both World Wars who championed a forceful foreign policy designed to confront and contain Soviet Communist expansionism. During the 1950s, Truman oversaw the US entry into the Korean War and helped guide the country out of a temporary economic downturn that began in 1949 with rising levels of inflation and unemployment. Truman’s strategy of using deficit spending to stimulate a flagging economy proved successful, creating a blueprint that has since been repeated by many US federal governments. Truman also opposed the paranoid Communist hysteria promoted by McCarthyism, contradicting Senator McCarthy’s claims regarding the Communist infiltration of the US government in the spring of 1950. Congressional Democrats and Republicans both formed politicized and partisan committees to investigate the other’s claims, with McCarthy-aligned Republicans ultimately being exposed for leveling rash and largely baseless attacks on Truman’s Democratic administration and the Democrats’ congressional membership.

Truman ultimately decided not to seek reelection in 1952, with the Republican candidate Eisenhower posting a significant victory over Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson II (1900–1965) in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. Eisenhower generally enjoyed high levels of popularity among voters, with his presidential approval rating routinely topping 70 percent during his two terms in office. Commentators note that Eisenhower’s domestic policy favored a moderate approach to federal governance that rejected the legacy Republican principles of economic deregulation and the elimination of interventionism. Instead, Eisenhower embraced what he called Modern Republicanism, which sought to strike a balance between an open economy and an effective social safety net. Eisenhower strengthened the nation’s Social Security program and authorized increases to the federal minimum wage. However, perhaps the most enduring aspect of his legacy is the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which he championed. The act mandated the construction of an integrated, nationwide system of high-speed freeways, resulting in the modern Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower also presided over the end of McCarthyism, which sputtered in 1954 when the bombastic senator was censured by his peers and confined to marginalized sidelines of the US political scene for the remainder of his career.

Traditional gender roles, which were disrupted in the 1940s by US involvement in World War II, largely returned to established norms during the 1950s. The typical 1950s household, as portrayed in media and popular culture, was headed by a breadwinning man who supported his family on a single income. Social norms encouraged women to confine themselves to homemaking roles that prioritized motherhood over their own personal ambitions. Gender roles were reinforced in children’s upbringings, which saw high levels of segregation by sex and differing social standards for boys and girls. Despite these prescriptive norms, women’s workforce participation rates generally rose over the course of the decade, especially among married women. Statisticians have noted that married women made up only 8 percent of the US female workforce in 1890, rising to 26 percent in 1930 and 47 percent in 1950. However, working women largely remained relegated to support roles, especially in corporate environments.

Race relations during the 1950s began to evolve toward the sweeping mass reforms that civil rights leaders helped achieve in the early-to-mid-1960s. Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), lead counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), seized the opportunity he had systematically been working toward through a long-term process of litigation when the US Supreme Court heard the case of Brown v. Board of Education. The case, which Marshall argued in 1952–1953, ultimately yielded a decision that invalidated the established “separate but equal” principle that had been used as the legal precedent for upholding racial segregation policies. Marshall’s historic victory in the case created a path for the desegregation of US public schools, which began in 1954.

Another iconic episode of the civil rights struggle unfolded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, when Black bus passenger Rosa Parks (1913–2005) refused to cede her seat to a white passenger as required by Alabama law. Parks went on to become a stand-in for the plight of Black Americans fighting the continued injustices of the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized racial segregation throughout the American South.

Science and Technology

The economic prosperity of the postwar period created favorable conditions for the major scientific and technological advancements that occurred over the course of the 1950s. Television technology, which had been in development for decades, went mainstream in the 1950s and supplanted radio as the leading medium of mass communication. The decade witnessed the peak of the so-called “golden age of television,” which saw the percentage of US households with at least one television set soar from 9 percent in 1950 to 64.5 percent by 1955 and 87.1 percent by 1960. It is difficult to overstate the profound effects television had on the US cultural landscape. The medium emerged as a unifying force for the decade’s defining social homogeneity and was a highly effective means of distributing the cultural propaganda considered by US leaders to be so important to the nation’s ongoing efforts in the Cold War. Television was also a key driver of 1950s consumer culture and conservative social and family values, which were heavily reinforced through programming.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit around Earth, prompting the United States to challenge the achievement by developing its own advanced space program. Subsequent competition between the rival superpowers, commonly known as the Space Race, became a defining feature of the Cold War in the late 1950s and 1960s. The US federal government established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in July 1958 to lead the nation’s space program, just a few months after the United States launched its first space satellite, Explorer 1.

While arguably more important to the US economy than the country’s history of scientific development, novel process innovations began to transform the US food service industry during the 1950s. Entrepreneur Ray Kroc (1902–1984) began licensing and standardizing the branded “Speedee Service System” created by brothers Maurice (1902–1971) and Richard McDonald (1909–1998) at their San Bernardino, California, hamburger stand, opening the first McDonald’s franchise in April 1955. Kroc later acquired control of the fast-growing chain from the brothers and built McDonald’s into a nationwide, then international empire. Kroc is now widely considered the pioneer of the modern fast-food industry.

Among many consumer-oriented inventions including transistor radios and power steering, the 1950s are also notable for marking the early development of fiber optic cable, computer microchips and modems, and the creation of the Fortran computer programming language. Commercialized computing technology began to be featured in the decades’ visions of the future, with the UNIVersal Automatic Computer I (UNIVAC) system becoming the first fully digital and electronic computer system to reach business-oriented consumer markets. In 1952, UNIVAC correctly predicted the outcome of that year’s presidential election, which greatly elevated the system’s public profile. Other key technological innovations of the 1950s included the development of the first barcodes, credit cards, and long-distance turbo jet aircraft. The decade’s emerging generation of jetliners built on the aeronautical propulsion innovations of the 1940s to normalize transnational and international air travel.

The 1950s also brought multiple significant medical innovations, including the invention of kidney dialysis, the first generation of polio vaccines, and major advancements in cardiology. While working at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, the Dutch-American physician Willem Kolff (1911–2009) invented dialysis machines and instituted their use through a novel dialysis program now recognized as the first of its kind in the United States. Virologist Jonas Salk (1914–1995) created and refined the original polio vaccine while holding a research position at the University of Pittsburgh. Because of his work, the first polio vaccine ever to be administered outside of clinical trials began being distributed to a group of Pittsburgh schoolchildren in 1954. By the twenty-first century, Salk’s vaccine and later refinements had been credited with reducing the worldwide incidence of polio by 99 percent. It was previously a relatively common and potentially devastating illness.

The medical field of cardiology benefitted from multiple key advancements during the 1950s, including improvements in imaging technologies and the successful use of the first heart pacemakers. Imaging techniques that allowed doctors to generate detailed views of the heart system’s blood vessels vastly accelerated scientific understanding of heart disease, facilitating the subsequent development of bypass surgeries. Pacemaker technology debuted in 1958 and has since been credited with saving and extending millions of lives.

Another transformative scientific advancement evolved over the course of the 1950s as research into oral contraceptives for women began to progress at accelerated rates. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved birth control pills for use in 1960, giving women access to a low-cost and reliable family planning option credited with helping advance their workforce participation and economic standing across the remainder of the twentieth century.

Economic and Cultural Trends: Economic Performance

Though the 1950s are generally remembered as a time of widespread prosperity, the US economy had numerous ups and downs over the course of the decade. Annual rates of economic growth as measured by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) ranged from highs of 8.7 percent (1950) to lows of -0.7 percent (1958) as the national economy weathered multiple recessions. Notably, the Dow Jones Industrial Index, which infamously crashed in 1929 to touch off the Great Depression (1929–1939) finally recovered all its Depression-era losses by 1954.

The unprecedented growth of the US economy, which saw the nation’s nominal GDP output nearly triple from 1940–1950, slowed during the 1950s but generally remained solid. In 1950, the United States posted a nominal GDP of $300 billion, which ascended to $542 billion by 1960 for a respectable 80.6 percent increase over the course of the decade.

Media and Popular Culture

Television’s golden age made it a highly influential mass medium of the 1950s as audiences engaged with news and entertainment programming in fast-growing numbers. A 2020 TV Guide review of the most popular television shows of all time referenced multiple 1950s shows in its top twenty-five, including I Love Lucy, Texaco Star Theater, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, The $64,000 Question, and Gunsmoke. However, by decade’s end, the emerging medium had also problematized itself through events such as the 1958–1959 quiz show scandal that prompted a congressional investigation and the vocal protests surrounding the violent content of The Untouchables, a gritty urban crime drama that debuted in 1959.

The film industry, which had already been upended by the 1948 antitrust decision handed down by the US Supreme Court, faced a new identity crisis with the rise of television. Movie studios responded by introducing technical innovations that could not be effectively replicated on smaller-format television screens, which succeeded in reasserting film’s relevance as a dominant mass medium. The decade’s defining movie icons included the likes of Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), Marlon Brando (1924–2004), Grace Kelly (1929–1982), Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011), Tony Curtis (1925–2010), Susan Hayward (1917–1975), and James Dean (1931–1955), best-remembered for the cult classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955). According to the film history and box-office tracking portal Filmsite, the top ten movies of the decade in terms of unadjusted domestic revenues were The Ten Commandments (1956), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Peter Pan (1953), Cinderella (1950), Ben-Hur (1959), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), This Is Cinerama (1952), and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) consolidated his position as one of the decade’s most acclaimed directors, creating classics such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959).

In the mid-1950s, a new genre of rhythm-and-blues-inspired popular music began dominating broadcast radio airwaves. Dubbed rock and roll, the emerging musical style introduced US pop culture audiences to multiple figures who went on to become entertainment legends, including Elvis Presley (1935–1977), Chuck Berry (1926–2017), Little Richard (1932–2020), Fats Domino (1928–2017), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935– ), Bill Haley (1925–1981), and Buddy Holly (1936–1959), among others. Rock music became a dominant aspect of youth culture, with its irreverent attitude and sexualized energy creating consternation among social conservatives, initiating a cultural pattern that would persist for decades.

Other pop culture trends associated with the 1950s include hula hoops, which reached the peak of their popularity in the late 1950s, and the world-famous Barbie line of plastic fashion dolls. Credited to creator Ruth Handler (1916–2002), Barbie dolls debuted at the 1959 American International Toy Fair in New York City.

The Beat Generation

A counterculture movement centered around a dynamic group of emerging literary figures challenged the conformist status quo of the 1950s by embracing taboo behaviors such as drug use, conscious nonconformity, sexual liberation, and anti-materialistic values. Known as the Beat Generation, the movement championed penetrating criticism of the decade’s consumer culture and carefully curated social hegemony, rejecting it as empty and hollow. Self-identified members of the Beat Generation were also referred to as Beatniks, a term that came to bear a pejorative connotation in certain use cases.

Leading literary figures of the Beat Generation included Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), and William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). Beat Generation authors became well-known in the cultural mainstream in the late 1950s, particularly for their poetry. Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Roadis often cited as one of the movement’s emblematic works.

About the Author

Jim Greene is a freelance writer and Canadian expatriate currently based in the European Union. A graduate of the University of Guelph (BA, English), Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA, Film Studies), and the University of Southern California (MFA, Creative Writing), he has been writing professionally since 2001 through his owner-operated editorial services and consulting firm.

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