Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

With 7 percent of the world's population in the late 1940s, America possessed 42 percent of the world's income and accounted for half of the world's manufacturing output. American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 43 percent of electricity, 62 percent of oil, 80 percent of automobiles.

From the perspective of later years, it is clear that nostalgia for the late 1940s can be misplaced in other ways, for millions of people—especially blacks and Mexican-Americans—did not share in the blessings of prosperity.

Even American families with annual earnings around the median (slightly over $3,000 in money income in 1947) lived carefully at that time.

Still, the dominant, increasingly celebrated trend of these years was economic progress that ultimately—in the 1950s and 1960s—shot millions of people into the ranks of the home-owning, high-consuming, ever-better-educated middle classes.

All these assets accounted for perhaps the most revealing statistic of all: gains in productivity.

Impressive as such economic statistics are, they cannot convey the broader, though admittedly hard to quantify, sense of well-being that the majority of Americans were beginning to feel by the late 1940s.11

In any event, the mood among the ever-larger middle classes was positive. Americans felt increasingly flush as the years passed.

Rather, it was defined by the belief that hard work would enable a person to rise in society and that children would do better in life than parents. The United States was indeed the land of opportunity and high expectations.12

From the 1940s to the 1970s roughly 20 percent of Americans changed residence every year.15

The dream depended finally on the sense that social mobility, too, was possible. Rags to riches made no sense, but rags to respectability did.

These were years, too, of grander expectations about the blessings of science, technology, and expertise in general.

According to the 1940 census, only one-third of the 74.8 million Americans who were 25 years of age or older at that time had gone beyond the eighth grade. Only one-fourth were high school graduates; one-twentieth had graduated from four-year colleges or universities.19 Teenagers by that time were staying in school much longer than their elders had, but still only 49 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school.

Some of this improved—and suddenly—after the war. A key to the change was passage of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944.22

By 1956, when the programs ended, 7.8 million veterans, approximately 50 percent of all who had served, had taken part. A total of 2.2 million (97.1 percent of them men) went to colleges, 3.5 million to technical schools below the college level, and 700,000 to agricultural instruction on farms.

The GI Bill indeed promoted an educational boom. Colleges and universities were nearly swamped by the change; almost 497,000 Americans (329,000 of them men) received university degrees in the academic year 1949–50, compared to 216,500 in 1940.

The GI Bill was almost certainly worth it economically, helping millions of Americans to acquire skills and technical training, to move ahead in life, and therefore to return in income taxes the money advanced to them by the government.

THESE WERE ABOVE ALL years of nearly unimaginable consumption of goods.

The postwar years were an automobile age on an unprecedented scale. New car sales in 1945 totaled 69,500. In 1946 they leaped to 2.1 million, in 1949 to 5.1 million, a figure that broke the record of 4.5 million set in 1929. Sales kept going up, to 6.7 million in 1950 and to 7.9 million in 1955.

By 1950 there were 40.3 million cars registered to 39.9 million families.

As in the 1920s, but on a much larger scale, automobiles not only hastened the adoption of new patterns of living; they also did much to stimulate the remarkable economic growth of the era.

The amazing growth of the automobile industry helped drive another powerful engine of economic growth: construction.

Much of the building, however, was of single-family homes in suburbs.

At peak the teams, using pre-assembled materials, including plumbing systems, could put up a house in sixteen minutes.

Opponents of suburban development disliked above all the forced conformity that they claimed to find in some of these places.

A more serious criticism deplored the racial exclusiveness of many suburban developments. This exclusiveness tightened a "white noose" around minorities in many American cities.40

Racist patterns set at that time persisted long after civil rights activity changed much else in America: the 1990 census showed that there were only 127 African-Americans in the Levittown, Long Island, population of more than 400,000.

Levitt's defense was of course cold comfort to black people. But he was surely correct about white attitudes.

Levittowners, and others who moved in the millions to suburbs in the postwar years, pulled up stakes, finally, because they were seeking a more satisfying family life. Most were very glad that they did.

The baby boom that ensued was perhaps the most amazing social trend of the postwar era.

The babies kept on arriving: 3.8 million in 1947, 3.9 million by 1952, and more than 4 million every year from 1954 through 1964, when the boom finally subsided.

The total number of babies born between 1946 and 1964 was 76.4 million, or almost two-fifths of the population in 1964 of 192 million.

The boom in fact happened mainly because of decisions made by two different groups of Americans in these years. The first, who played a major role in the immediate postwar boom, were older Americans who had been forced by the Depression and World War II to delay marriage and child-rearing.

The second group, which accounted for the remarkable duration of the boom, was composed of younger folk, in their late teens or early twenties in the late 1940s.

The boom was not the result of parents having huge families, but rather of so many people deciding to marry young, to start a larger family quickly, and to have two, three, or four children in rapid succession.

In this way as in so many others, the health of the economy—as well as optimistic perceptions of continuing prosperity—drove social change in postwar America.

To generalize about a "generation," as if sharp differences of class, race, gender, and region did not exist within an age cohort, is foolish.

Early "baby boomers" had very different life experiences from later ones.

It is also clear, mainly in retrospect, that the baby boom years were hardly the untroubled years of domesticity that television shows such as "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" made them out to be.

family life in the 1940s and 1950s was considerably more complicated and less idyllic than nostalgia-mongers have cared to admit.61

On the contrary, the baby boom symbolized a broader "boom" mentality of many younger Americans, especially whites and the ever-larger numbers of people moving upward into the middle classes. They were developing expectations that grew grander and grander over time.

World War II did more than usher in unparalleled prosperity for the United States. It transformed America's foreign relations.

Alone of the world's great powers the United States emerged immeasurably stronger, both absolutely and relatively, from the carnage. In a new balance of power it was a colossus on the international stage.

As it turned out, public opinion shifted decisively toward acceptance of substantial American engagement with the rest of the world:

In their approach to international relations they developed very grand expectations that they managed to fashion into official American policy.

"Averell is right," FDR complained three weeks before his death in April 1945. "We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta."9

Having built the world's biggest army in his efforts to stop Hitler, Stalin maintained much of it after the war was over. Estimates placed its size at 3 million men.

Other critics of Stalin doubt, probably correctly, that ideological considerations alone do much to explain Stalin's behavior in the late 1940s. They think the Soviets mainly pursued imperial policies similar to those of the tsars.12

Stalin's critics, then and later, rest their case finally on the fact that he was a powerful, dour, often brutal dictator. The very fact of this dictatorship deeply offended Americans, who cherished their freedoms, who sympathized with the oppressed masses of eastern Europe, and who earnestly hoped to promote the spread of democracy.

President Truman agreed, noting privately in November 1946, "Really there is no difference between the government which Mr. Molotov represents and the one the Czar represented—or the one Hitler spoke for."14

A specially religious people, many Americans approached foreign policies in a highly moralistic way.