The American Yawp — Chapter Twenty-Four: The Affluent Society
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

In 1958 economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society. He argued that postwar America enjoyed unmatched prosperity, but that an economy built only on buying more goods would increase inequality and harm the public. The title stuck as a label for the 1950s. The two decades after World War II brought massive economic growth: living standards rose and inequality fell. Yet the Affluent Society had deep flaws — prosperity alongside poverty, new freedoms alongside stifling conformity, and opportunity alongside persistent discrimination.

Government programs built the suburbs. During the Depression, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation refinanced mortgages, and the Federal Housing Administration insured home loans. After the war, the GI Bill offered veterans low-interest mortgage loans, and builders like William Levitt mass-produced affordable houses — the first Levittown opened on Long Island in 1946. Homeownership rose from 44 percent in 1940 to almost 62 percent in 1960. TV ownership jumped from 12 percent of households in 1950 to over 87 percent in 1960.

But the suburban dream excluded Black Americans. Government agencies drew "residential security maps" and marked Black and mixed neighborhoods in red. Banks refused to lend in these redlined areas — a practice called redlining — and the FHA would not back mortgages there. Levittown sold homes only to whites. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that a racially restrictive housing covenant was unenforceable, but segregation continued.

The suburbs also damaged the environment: developers bulldozed wetlands and hills to build ever-larger tracts of houses. In 1962 Rachel Carson's Silent Spring exposed how pesticides like DDT poisoned nature, launching the modern environmental movement — though most suburbanites kept their cars and single-family homes.

The fight for civil rights advanced in the 1950s. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," striking down the laws that segregate public schools. But its 1955 order to desegregate "with all deliberate speed" was vague, and most Southern schools stayed segregated for years. In 1957 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus blocked nine Black students — the Little Rock Nine — from entering Central High School, so President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to help integrate the school.

In 1955 two white men murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi and were acquitted by an all-white jury. Four months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. Black residents organized a year-long boycott of the city's buses under the young Martin Luther King Jr., until the Supreme Court ordered the buses integrated in 1956. King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 — the first such law since Reconstruction — though it was weakened by compromises. Mexican Americans also organized: LULAC and the American GI Forum fought discrimination, winning Hernandez v. Texas in 1954.

Culture changed. Television idealized the nuclear family in shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, while the baby boom of 1946–1964 filled the new suburbs with children. Rock 'n' roll, led by Elvis Presley, gave teenagers a rebellious new music. The Beat Generation of writers rejected consumerism, and gay men and lesbians quietly formed the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis for support. These challenges to conformity planted seeds for the movements of the 1960s.

Prosperity renewed faith in free enterprise. Business groups promoted individualism, and writers like Ayn Rand celebrated self-interest. The Republican Party split between conservatives who wanted to undo the New Deal and moderates like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who accepted programs like Social Security. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 and governed from the "middle of the road," threatening "massive retaliation" against communist expansion abroad. The postwar consensus promised ever-rising prosperity — but beneath it, dissent was growing.