At Home in the Fifties:The Suburbs and Segregation

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

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

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

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

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

The Invention of the Suburbs

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

Levittown

• Housing boom in early 1950s

• Developers such as the Levitts create suburbs

• Levittowns in NJ, PA, NY

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

Home in Levittown

Building Levittown

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

Life 1950Interior Design Contest

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 Fernando Valley, 1950s

Photo and caption: Affordable Housing Institute

Women in the 1950s

Image: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/tag/women/Elliott Erwitt, USA. New York. New Rochester. 1955.

Photo: Magnum Photos, Accessed via ARTStor

HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFEHome 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.

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

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