Consumerism and the Backlast of the 1960's
...introduction of the Installment Plan allowed for mortgages, department stores, hardware stores, consumer credit, automobiles, furniture and appliances. People began moving to the suburbs; prior to this many people lived in the area where they worked. The advent of the automobile led people to work in one place and live in another. Tracks of housing were brought out into the suburbs and people could afford housing due to the GI Bill of Rights that gave people loans for housing. The National Highway Act and general road building that made transportation easy and also made a suburb living possible. GM even went as far as to buy out the Greyhound Company in order to put public transportation out of business. (Lecture 9/20/04). The Middle Class was no longer in debt and now had money to spend. The Middle Class was now educated and owned businesses and was successful and able to live in luxury beyond their means even. The Installment Plan and all the things it could buy a person helped develop “identity” to mean personal property. A person was only as good as what they could afford. “The citizen is replaced by the consumer” (Lecture 9/20). By the end of the 1950’s one-third of the population is living in the suburbs. Even the food becomes standardized with the beginning of McDonalds, where the food is cheap but it is also the same from restaurant to restaurant. The television also added to this conformity. The television told people how to act and speak. In the video “You Can’t Get There From Here” we just how much influence the television had on people. This video showed clips of public service announcements for teens. The video showed teens how to act, date, dress, etc. It also emphasized the technology front and glorified those who were able to buy the newest things like the family that bought the automatic drying machine and no longer had to spend hours hanging the clothes and waiting for them to dry. Football became the television sport. The fear of communism is expressed on television in the Olympics in which the Soviets take home more medals than the United States, leading the US to cry foul and accuse the Soviets of drug use and women being men. Sitcoms portrayed life as it wasn’t, (lecture 9/22); Westerns had the “good versus bad” theme, “The Twilight Zone” dealt with political issues in a science fiction theme. The television helped elect John F. Kennedy during the televised political debates. All of these things led people to believe that conforming to an ideal citizen, spending your money and competing with your neighbor by having more than them, was the definition of what it was to be an America. There was a certain way to behave and a certain way of doing things and people were willing to do them out of fear of being left out or of being considered abnormal. Freedom would be protected if your fulfilled these roles. This conformity was an unrealistic utopia. The world outside of this was not such a wonderful place. Globally the world was suffering, the United States was closed off to the rest of the world. People were not informed of the realities they were living on a cloud of happiness. They were blind to problems within the United States, the unhappy African-Americans and other minorities, women who felt that they were treated unfairly and a group of youngsters who were not roped in by consumerism happiness. This conformity of the United States would not remained unchallenged. One movement that challenged the conformity was the Women’s Rights movement. Women were considered second-class citizens and were the last hired first fired (lecture 10/04). A women with a college degree in 1969 still made less than an unionized man with an eighth grade diploma. Women began challenging their roles and were seen as misfits who needed to adjust. The idea that women would be happy as wives and mothers was being challenged. By 1963 women were one-third of the work force and were trapped in “women’s work” called pink-collar jobs. During the Kennedy administration a woman by the name of Esther Peterson who had been a new dealer was head of the Women’s Division of Labor. Kennedy established a commission to see the status of women. A program was created to advance women’s rights. The Commission of the Status of Women needed workplace protection for women. The Equal Pay Act called for equal pay for equal work, although many women were still working pink-collar jobs so this was not entirely helpful. In 1964 when JFK is assassinated Lyndon B Johnson takes over the civil rights movement issues. A civil rights act is drafted and in order to make it not pass a democrat from Virginia, Howard Smith includes women in it under Title 7. A woman named Martha Griffith rallies women in Congress and gets LBJ to support the act barring discrimination based on race, color and gender. The women’s rights legislation sees is greatest victory in the passing of that Act. Another group of people who challenged the conformity was the Civil Rights Union. During the 1950’s deep racial discrimination was a problem. In the Deep South African- Americans were not given rights to vote by physical force and the use of rigid voting regulations. Places like restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, public facilities, and the school systems were still segregated during the early sixties and blacks were treated unfairly in the workplace as well. In 1954 the Supreme Court rules that segregation in schools in unconstitutional overturning ...