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Chapter 4. Reconversion
- Texas A&M University Press
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Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Foundation.Americans were eating more prepared foods, most of it canned and some frozen. Folks still shopped for food in nearby mom-and-pop stores, but grocery chains (some turning into what were being called supermarkets) continued to grow in number and size. Long-playing records were an immediate success: these new twelve-inch vinyl LP disks could play up to forty-five minutes of music and were light enough to tote to parties.Another rage at parties was the new board game called Scrabble.Hexachlorophene ,developed during the war,was added to Dial,the world’s first deodorant soap. The transistor, which would eventually replace bulky vacuum tubes, made its first appearance. People were still interested in reading about the war: James Michener’s Pulitzer prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead were best-selling fiction . However, much of the literary conversation was about the shockingly blunt nonfiction Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, often called simply the Kinsey Report. Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway. Still in its infancy,television aired its first western series,NBC’s Hopalong Cassidy, and CBS’s variety show Toast of the Town, later renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Walt Kelly’s newspaper comic strip Pogo debuted. In sports, Citation won horse racing’s triple crown, and baseball legend Babe Ruth died. Jackson Pollock set the art world on its ear with his “Composition No. 1,” an abstract canvas of seemingly random paint drips and splashes. But realistic art still held sway; for example, Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” attracted crowds when it was exhibited. In movie theaters, folks watched Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama, Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Two splendid British films received raves that year: the ballet fairy tale The Red Shoes and Olivier’s Hamlet. Vittorio de Sica’s Italian masterpiece The BicycleThief would have to wait a year before being released in the United States. Pop hit songs included Nat King Cole’s mysterious “Nature Boy,” Spike Jones and the City Slickers’ lisping “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,”and Frank I n 1948, U.S. president Harry S. Truman held up an issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune with its famously erroneous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”Now in his first elected term, Truman faced off against Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in the Cold War (a phrase coined by Truman’s advisor Bernard Baruch ) as leaders of the only two superpowers.Soviets were jamming Voice of America radio broadcasts behind what Winston Churchill dubbed the Iron Curtain. America’s Marshall Plan came up with more than $5 billion in aid to feed and rebuild sixteen European nations.American and British planes airlifted supplies into Berlin to get over Stalin’s road and railroad blockade .The United Nations’ official establishment of Israel led to an immediate attack by the Arab nations of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon , Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Transjordan; by the end of the year, the General Assembly created a conciliation commission to work with Israelis and Arabs to find common ground for a lasting peace. Japan’s wartime prime minister Tojo was convicted and hanged for war crimes. In India, Mahatma Ghandi was assassinated, and Mother Teresa began working with the poor. American labor unions, which had been patriotically patient during the war years, were demanding higher wages now; Truman had to deal with paralyzing strikes by coal miners and railroad workers. Idlewild Airport, the world’s largest, opened in New York City. Public relations, or PR, departments burgeoned in major corporations and in smaller businesses with larger ambitions. The first jet aircraft (military planes only) crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Dramamine, a boon for travelers prone to motion sickness, was developed. A record number of the world’s ships were registering in Liberia, whose maritime law excluded income from taxation. Liverpool introduced the first radar system designed to direct port shipping traffic. Returned veterans of World War II were having children in record numbers—the result would be called the baby boom— and looking for scarce housing.Levittown,a suburban community of affordable, mass-produced homes in Long Island, New York, couldn’t build fast enough to keep up with the demand. A different kind of response to the population explosion was...