While every decade of American life seems to provide a defined and unique expression of the state of the nation, the 1950s remains a more removed – and certainly less likely to be repeated – period. What made the 1950s unique in cultural, economic, and political terms was a set of circumstances coming into play unlike any other in the nation’s history. Never before or since would there be so dogmatic and fiercely-maintained a national ideology. Never before or since would America both perceive itself in such an isolationist and ultimately empowered way, and the 1950s would mark the last period when the United States would, perhaps with some awareness of the futility, cling to an American “dream” of maintaining a kind of global sovereignty and independent, discretionary power.

Political and Economic Background

In a  very real sense, the 1950s was an era chiefly due to that which preceded it. Everything of note about the decade, from cultural preoccupations to political responses, was a direct consequence of the 1940s and the nation’s involvement in World War II.

Although there had been great reluctance on the part of America to enter the European conflict, and while much of the motivation has been attributed to purely economic necessity and the need to mobilize the country away from the Great Depression, the reality was that the victory achieved in large measure from American support created an intense and widespread patriotism of staggering proportions. In the view of the average American, the country had risen to meet a challenge out of altruistic impulses and had conquered an enemy who could be seen in those days as unquestionably evil. The nation had, very simply, saved the world, and was rather pleased with itself for doing so.

The result of the birth of the Cold War and the threat of the Soviet Union would occupy American minds, but in a strangely disconnected fashion. It was still a time of great political ignorance within the masses, and the government’s issued statements on the dangers posed by the USSR gave rise to the immense tides of anti-communism fears that gripped the country. The average American might possess only a dim understanding of what communism was, but the power structure had informed him that is was wrong and a threat to the U.S., and that was enough to generate the notorious McCarthy hearings in the Senate, and the formation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Meanwhile, “Much policy debate in the 1950s…was quite confused. People generally did not separate the worry that the USSR could wipe out the U.S. force from the argument that second-strike capability was not sufficient for the United States to make credible threats…” (Mansfield, Sisson, 2004, p. 110). Riding high on a national confidence in U.S. military supremacy, citizens were nonetheless urged to set up bomb shelters in their homes, and elementary schools began conducting drills in case of nuclear attack. It was a time of simultaneous bravado and terror of an unknown, malicious power.

Culture and Society

Perhaps as a means of suppressing more urgent considerations, Americans uniformly embraced the prosperity which came from the manufacture demands of the earlier war. Returning soldiers had jobs waiting for them, and the economic boom served to sustain itself through one component of it: the car. “From 1945 to 1960, the nation’s population grew 30 percent while the number of motor vehicles on the road increased by almost 140 percent…” (O’Sullivan, Keuchel, 1989, p. 209). As the demand for newer – and bigger – cars increased, the automobile industry experienced the greatest surge it would ever know, and employment opportunities rose exponentially with the consumers’ abilities to purchase the latest models. Something on the order of a phenomenon was occurring, and a kind of consumerist idolatry: “During the 1950s, the church of the automobile, like the Protestant church in America, has an unprecedented number of followers…the car influenced culture as no other technology of the day” (Heitmann, 2009, p. 133).

As the new prosperity gave birth to the rise of the suburbs, the pervasive mood of the nation was one determined to enjoy earned creature comforts, as each citizen worked to maintain a correct and secure place in the community. It is no actual distortion to portray mainstream America of this period as staid, conservative, and above all intolerant of change; the legacy of the war had forged a national insistence on a status quo. The country had done its part and was now entitled to settle back into “normalcy”.