Chapter 29

Front 1

Levittown

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the name of four large suburban developments created in the United States of America by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. They featured large numbers of similar houses that were built easily and quickly, allowing rapid recovery of costs.

Front 2

Baby Boom

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The period of a huge increase in births between 1943-1960

Front 3

Sputnik

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Sputnik’s appearance rattled the United States. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the shock the “Sputnik Crisis” because of the looming threat of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, America was in a state of fear from the Soviet Union. Once the Soviets started to launch satellites into orbit, even a payload harmless to the U.S., the concern increased. If the USSR could launch a satellite, it could also launch a nuclear warhead able to travel intercontinental distances.

Front 4

Highway Act of 1956

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The money for the Interstate Highway and Defense Highways was handled in a highway trust fund that paid for 90 percent of highway construction costs with the states required to pay the remaining 10 percent. It was expected that the money would be generated through new taxes on fuel, automobiles, trucks, and tires. As a matter of practice, the Federal portion of the cost of the Interstate Highway System has been paid for by taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel.

Front 5

Commission on Civil Rights

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historically a bipartisan, independent commission of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for investigating, reporting on, and making recommendations concerning civil rights issues that face the nation.

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Explorer

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The first American Satellite to orbit Earth on January 31, 1958. Carried a sophisticated set of instruments to send back data from space.

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Brown v. BoE

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a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

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Plessy v. Ferguson

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a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

Front 9

MLK Jr

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an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African American civil rights movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King is often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism.

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SCLC

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an American civil rights organization. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The SCLC had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement.

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FEPC

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implemented US Executive Order 8802, requiring that companies with government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. It was intended to help African Americans and other minorities obtain jobs in the homefront industry. On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) by signing Executive Order 8802, which stated, "there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." This was due in large part to the urging of A. Philip Randolph, who had the support of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

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Presidential election of 1956

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saw a popular Dwight D. Eisenhower successfully run for re-election. The 1956 election was a rematch of 1952, as Eisenhower's opponent in 1956 was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier.

Incumbent President Eisenhower was popular, but had health conditions that became a quiet issue. Stevenson remained popular with a core of liberal Democrats but held no office and had no real base. He (and Eisenhower) largely ignored the civil rights issue. Eisenhower had ended the Korean War and the nation was prosperous, so a landslide for the charismatic Eisenhower was never in doubt.

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Modern Republicanism

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The principal that Eisenhower ran under. Modern Republicanism was started by Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration. The concept of Modern Republicanism is being somewhat liberal in Fiscal and Domestic affairs, while remaining conservative in global affairs. Modern Republicanism calls for lower taxes, smaller government and more state power in issues. There have only been three Presidents who have been Modern Republicans and who have practiced Modern Republicanism. They were: Ike Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Front 14

Little Rock Nine

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a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. On their first day of school, troops from the Arkansas National Guard would not let them enter the school and they were followed by mobs making threats to lynch. Was part of Brown v. BoE

Front 15

Orville Faubus

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the 36th Governor of Arkansas, serving from 1955 to 1967. He is best known for his 1957 stand against the desegregation of Little Rock public schools during the Little Rock Crisis, in which he defied a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court by ordering the Arkansas National Guard to stop African American students from attending Little Rock Central High School. Despite his initial staunch segregationist stances, Faubus moderated his positions later on. He even endorsed the African American minister, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries.

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C Wright Mills

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is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public, political engagement over disinterested observation.

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David Riesman

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was a sociologist, attorney, and educator.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review, Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from 1935-1936. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School.

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John Keats

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n English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the first generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.[1] During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life. The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are among the most popular and influential works in English literature.

Front 19

Katherin Gordon

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A contributing Author to The Split-Level Trap. Concerned with the psychological toll of suburban life. Labeled the new lifestyle as "Disturbia."

Front 20

Rosa Parks

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On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind. Irene Morgan in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, respectively, in the area of interstate bus travel. Nine months before Parks refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. In New York City, in 1854, Lizzie Jennings engaged in similar activity, leading to the desegregation of the horsecars and horse-drawn omnibuses of that city. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks' action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Front 21

Earl Warren

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the 14th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and one of only two people to be elected Governor of California three times. Before holding these positions, Warren served as a district attorney for Alameda County, California and Attorney General of California. He is best known for the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court, which ended school segregation and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending school prayer, and requiring "one-man-one vote" rules of apportionment. He made the Court a power center on a more even base with Congress and the presidency especially through four landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

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Thurgood Marshall

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an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

Front 23

Jack Kerouac

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Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as spontaneous prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness. Although Kerouac’s prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or Roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted.

Front 24

Beatniks

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a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. Kerouac spoke out against this detour from his original concept.

Front 25

Fair Deal

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President Harry Truman addressed Congress and presented a 21 point program of domestic legislation outlining a series of proposed actions in the fields of economic development and social welfare. The proposals to Congress became more and more abundant and by 1948 a legislative program that was more comprehensive came to be known as the Fair Deal. In his 1949 State of the Union Address to Congress on January 5, 1949, Truman stated that "Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal." Despite a mixed record of legislative success, the Fair Deal remains significant in establishing the call for universal health care as a rallying cry for the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson credited Truman's unfulfilled program as influencing Great Society measures such as Medicare that Johnson successfully enacted during the 1960s. The Fair Deal faced much opposition from the many conservative politicians who wanted a reduced role of the federal government. The series of domestic reforms was a major push to transform the United States from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. In a context of postwar reconstruction and entering the era of the Cold war, the Fair Deal sought to preserve and extend the liberal tradition of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. During this post-WWII time, people were growing more conservative as they were ready to enjoy the prosperity not seen since before The Great Depression. The Fair Deal faced opposition by conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats. However, despite strong conservative opposition, there were elements of Truman’s agenda that did win congressional approval.

Front 26

SNCC

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one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 a week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland.

Front 27

Taft-Hartley Act

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The amendments enacted in Taft-Hartley added a list of prohibited actions, or "unfair labor practices", on the part of unions to the NLRB, which had previously only prohibited "unfair labor practices" committed by employers. The Taft–Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary or "common situs" picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass "right-to-work laws" that outlawed union shops. Furthermore, the executive branch of the Federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike "imperiled the national health or safety," a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts.

Front 28

John Birch Society

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totalitarian, particularly anti-socialist and anti-communist. It seeks to limit the powers of government and defends the original intention of the U.S. Constitution, which it sees as based on Christian principles. It opposes collectivism, including wealth redistribution, economic interventionism, socialism, communism, and fascism. In a 1983 edition of Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (D-Georgia), then its newly appointed president, characterized the society as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.

Front 29

NASA

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NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, replacing its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The agency became operational on October 1, 1958. NASA has led U.S. efforts for space exploration since, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and has been developing the manned Orion spacecraft. After the Soviet space program's launch of the world's first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) on October 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to national security and technological leadership (known as the "Sputnik crisis"), urged immediate and swift action; President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced an agreement that a new federal agency was needed to conduct all non-military activity in space. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was also created at this time to develop space technology for military application.

Front 30

Segregation

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The pattern of hypersegregation began in the early 20th century. African-Americans who moved to large cities often moved in to the inner-city in order to gain industrial jobs. The influx of new African-American residents caused many European American residents to move to the suburbs in a case of white flight. As industry began to move out of the inner-city, the African-American residents lost the stable jobs that had brought them to the area. Many were unable to leave the inner-city, however, and they became increasingly poor. This created the inner-city ghettos that make up the core of hypersegregation. Though the Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned discrimination in sale of homes, the norms set before the laws continue to perpetuate this hypersegregation.

Front 31

Montgomery Bus Boycott

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a political and social protest campaign that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. Many historically significant figures of the civil rights movement were involved in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others, as listed below. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city's black population who were the drivers of the boycott were also the bulk of the system's paying customers. The ensuing struggle lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person, to December 20, 1956 when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional.

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Adlai Stevenson

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an American politician, noted for his intellectual demeanor, eloquent oratory, and promotion of liberal causes in the Democratic Party. He served as the 31st Governor of Illinois, and received the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1952 and 1956; both times he was defeated by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination for a third time in the election of 1960, but was defeated by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. After his election, President Kennedy appointed Stevenson as the Ambassador to the United Nations; he served from 1961 to 1965. He died on July 14, 1965 in London, England after suffering a fatal heart attack at age 65.

Front 33

NDEA

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signed into law on September 2, 1958, provided funding to United States education institutions at all levels. The act authorized funding for four years, increasing funding per year: for example, funding increased on eight program titles from 183 million dollars in 1959 to 222 million in 1960. While motivated by the increase in the number of students attending college and a growing national sense that U.S. scientists were falling behind scientists in the Soviet Union, it was arguably catalyzed by early Soviet success in the Space Race, notably the launch of the first-ever satellite, Sputnik, the year before.

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Dr. Benjamin Spock

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Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be "spoiled" by picking them up when they cried.

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Will Herberg

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Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement

In his September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?", Herberg wrote:

"It did not come easy for us in this country, under the weight of the vast influx of immigrants and the residual effects of the frontier tradition, to consolidate a secure internal order based on custom and respect for constituted authority; but finally we managed. This internal order is now in jeopardy; and it is in jeopardy because of the doings of such high-minded, self-righteous “children of light” as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates in the leadership of the “civil rights” movement. If you are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los Angeles, look to them: they are the guilty ones, these apostles of “non-violence.

"For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind."