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chapter one the 1950s Limited Government, Limited Affluence For many Americans the decade of the 1950s has an agreeable image. As people stumbled through the turmoil of later years, they remembered the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Lucille Ball as a time of prosperity and moral calm. Two books published in 1986 reflected this warm popular assessment : William O’Neill’s American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 and J. Ronald Oakley’s God’s Country: America in the 50s. Of course, there were negative reviews; they included claims that anticommunism and consumerism quashed critical thinking and that economic advances were limited. Lawrence Wittner wrote of a ‘‘blackout of critical opinion ,’’ and Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak assailed the decade’s celebration of ‘‘people’s capitalism,’’ the myth of a fair and democratic economy. These authors pointed out that millions of Americans remained poor and that economic power was still exercised by a tiny group of corporate leaders.∞ My chapter is in the second school. It challenges our cheery image of the 50s by examining poverty and how Americans defined poverty. It judges whether the economy of the 50s cured poverty, and whether it did so without significant government assistance. Were the 50s proof that individual willpower and laissez-faire policies were su≈cient antipoverty programs, as conservatives later claimed? We will see that growth was strong and that it cured much poverty, especially in the early 50s, but also that government’s role was vital in both promoting economic growth and lifting the destitute. Success against poverty evaporated in the late 50s when the president refused to spend.≤ Linked to the issue of what government should do, a discussion began whose outcome would profoundly influence antipoverty policy. The discussion involved a big question. Were the high unemployment and persistent poverty of 10 / the 50s the late 50s due to discrete problems of specific groups (such as racism) or to large defects in the economy? Were people poor because of skill deficits and dysfunctional lower-class cultures or because they were simply the most distressed section of a large working class that su√ered from deeply based income inequalities and a long-term labor glut? In short, was poverty caused by defective individuals and subcultures or by capitalism? The 50s as Economic Utopia The economy of the 50s seemed robust. Real (that is, after eliminating the e√ects of price changes) gross domestic product (all the goods and services produced in the United States) was 41% larger in 1960 than in 1950. Because the average tax bite did not rise much and because income inequality did not worsen, after-tax real income for the average family grew by an amazing 41%.≥ The 50s were especially good for male workers, in part because the baby bust of the 20s and 30s meant less competition for good jobs. The male work force grew by less than 1% a year. At the same time, and contradicting widely held views that women belonged at home, the female labor force grew by almost 25%. While wives had more babies, more wives worked for pay, too. More than a third of all adult women were in the labor force.∂ Men monopolized the growing number of elite white-collar and unionized blue-collar positions, and their pay advanced faster than women’s. Average weekly earnings of employees in the male-dominated construction industry rose 62% to $113 in 1960; weekly earnings in a sector with many women, retail trade, rose 45% to $58.∑ Historically, economic growth has been a popular method of solving poverty because it jibes with the American work ethic and because it often uses tax cuts and subsidies to businesses and the rich to spur investment and job creation . The benefits are supposed to trickle down. And a booming economy normally lifts people who are poor because they have not been working and earning, and it raises wages because demand for labor is up and employers must pay more to attract and keep workers. Also, increased output expands the income pie; if enough new income goes to the poor in the form of jobs and higher wages, the poverty rate will fall. And fall it did in the 1950s. The proportion of the U.S. population that was poor declined from 30.2% in 1950 to 22.2% in 1960. (See figure A.2 in appendix 1.)∏ It is hard to argue with the notion...

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