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The Cold War Begins Chapter 36, p. 852-859

The Cold War Begins Chapter 36, p. 852-859. Postwar Economic Anxieties. The Americans cheered the end of World War II in 1945, but many worried that with the war over, the U.S. would sink back into another Great Depression.

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The Cold War Begins Chapter 36, p. 852-859

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  1. The Cold War Begins Chapter 36, p. 852-859

  2. Postwar Economic Anxieties • The Americans cheered the end of World War II in 1945, but many worried that with the war over, the U.S. would sink back into another Great Depression. • Upon war’s end, inflation shot up with the release of price controls while the gross national product sank, and labor strikes swept the nation. • To get even with labor, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed “closed” shops (closed to non-union members), made unions liable for damages that resulted from jurisdictional disputes among themselves, and required that union leaders take non-communist oaths. Opposite of the Wagner Act of the New Deal, this new act was a strike against labor unions. • So essentially, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was passed to check the growing power of labor unions.

  3. Labor tried to organize in the South and West with “Operation Dixie,” but this proved frustrating and unsuccessful. • To forestall an economic downturn, the Democratic administration: • Sold war factories and other government installations to private businesses cheaply. • Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946, which made it government policy to “promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” • Created the Council of Economic Advisors to provide the president with data to make that policy a reality. • It also passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, which allowed all servicemen to have free college education once they returned from the war. • Actually, the passage of the GI Bill was partly motivated by fear that the labor markets could not absorb millions of discharged veterans.

  4. The Long Economic Boom, 1950-1970 • Then, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, the economy began to boom tremendously, and folks who had felt the sting of the Great Depression now wanted to bathe in the new prosperity. • The middle class more than doubled while people now wanted two cars in every garage; over 90% of American families owned a television. • Women also reaped the benefits of the postwar economy, growing in the American work force while giving up their former roles as housewives. • Even though this new affluence did not touch everyone, it did touch many. • In the end, the long economic boom from WWII to the 1970s was fueled primarily by low energy costs.

  5. Coca-Colonizing the WorldAmerican consumerism—and American products—flooded over the globe after World War II, as this 1950cover from Time magazine illustrates.

  6. The Roots of Postwar Prosperity • Postwar prosperity was fueled by several factors, including the war itself that forced America to produce more than it’d ever imagined. • However, much of the prosperity of the 50s and 60s rested on colossal military projects. • Massive appropriations for the Korean War, defense spending, industries like aerospace, plastics, and electronics, and research and development all were such projects. • R and D, research and development, became an entirely new industry. • Cheap energy paralleled the popularity of automobiles, and spidery grids of electrical cables carried the power of oil, gas, coal, and falling water into homes and factories alike. • Workers upped their productivity tremendously, as did farmers, due to new technology in fertilizers, etc. In fact, the farming population shrank while production soared.

  7. AgribusinessExpensive machinery of thesort shown here made mostof American agriculture acapital-intensive, phenomenallyproductive big business by the1990s—and sounded the deathknell for many small-scale familyfarms.

  8. The Smiling Sunbelt • With so many people on the move, families were being strained. Combined with the baby boom, this explained the success of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. • Immigration also led to the growth of a fifteen-state region in the southern half of the U.S. known as the Sunbelt, which dramatically increased in population. • In fact, in the 1950s, California overtook New York as the most populous state. • Immigrants came to the Sunbelt for more opportunities, such as in California’s electronics industry and the aerospace complexes of Texas and Florida. • Much of the Sunbelt’s new prosperity was based on its tremendous influx of money from the federal government. Dollars poured into the Sunbelt (some $125 million), and political power grew there as well, as ever since 1964, every U.S. president until Barack Obama has come from that region. • Sunbelters were redrawing the political map, taking the economic and political power out of the North and Northeast.

  9. Sunbelt ProsperityThe old and new Westare evident in this viewof booming Dallas

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