America After Ww2

After the victory of World War 2 with the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, America lived in constant fear, especially children in schools. A film was shown to all students demonstrating survival techniques on a nuclear attack, and the image of little johnny showed how a nuclear attack can occur at any moment, thus giving them nightmares.(Cnn Duck and Cover).Living daily life with the fear of nuclear attacks isn’t a “happy” life since fear is a negative connotation. Happy days falls on the other side of the spectrum when talking about post ww2 America. Prior to World War 2, America’s foreign policy was isolationist following the ideas of George Washington. The U.S only felt they should intervene if they were directly attacked, and after their …show more content…
Americans were more bound to mold their ideas in order to meet societal standards rather than think for themselves. This was influenced by the domestic Cold War and McCarthyism. Many Americans at that time feared not being conformist therefore they thought as a group. After the war, millions of veterans came home and those women were replaced by men leading to similar roles between men and women. Most of all the men were “breadwinners’ and women were meant to be housewives staying at home taking care of the family. Due to the growing economy and mass production, consumerism began and the majority of Americans were purchasing the same thing, such as T.V and refrigerators mostly through credit card. All Americans watched the same shows such as “leave it to beaver” and “father knows best”. Rock and roll music became extremely popular among the teenagers during the 1950s, where mostly all of them were listening to it, this dividing American society. Teenagers and adults dressed the same, and the suburbs an area where white Americans lived. There were about 1% of African Americans who lived in Levittown and the majority were white. Levittown promised a bright future for the rest of Americans where 2 cars were common, and it was a middle-class suburban neighborhood full of hopes and dreams(Levittown). When seen from an aerial view all the houses were next to each other by rows and looked exactly the same.(Doc N) This Levittown was destined for white Americans only, and in the song “little boxers” by Pete Seeger, those “ticky tacky” houses were the suburbs which all looked the same but different colors. Unraveling the words, these citizens were all living the same lives with prosperity and they did not know it.(Little Boxes) Baby population dramatically increased postwar all over the world. 16 million