Victorian. That is what we will Start Talking about today, the culture of the 1950s and leading toward the 1960s and the cultural revolution. Historians have paid more to the 1960s cultural revolution. But it had the seeds planted in the 1950s. I will describe what the old culture was like. Sometimes referred to as victorian, angloAmerican Culture of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. The little piece that i gave you from william oneills book on america in 1945 describes the cultural assumptions of americans of this generation. Victorianism is today considered conservative in that it is kind of a derogatory term, considered puritanical, oldfashioned, retrograde, but much like the term liberalism, victorianism was actually liberalism of its day. It was in advance of premodern cultural patterns. Much as liberalism was a progressive new thing and the principles of classical liberalism of the 19th century is considered conservative. Likewise, the progressive conservative developments of the 19th century are nowadays considered conservative. They were progressive with regard to old traditions. If you look at basic things like how reproduction is carried on. How families are formed over the course of a Historical Development viewed development. The traditional way was arranged marriages. Women were considered as property. The parents arranged the marriage as a way of preserving property. It was done without the childrens consent. The victorians make that more consensual and voluntary. Children were allowed to take their partners. But the process was still controlled through the rituals of courtship in the 19th century. That evolved in the 20th century into dating. Young people have more independence and how they pick their partners, but rules and regulations still apply. Today we have evolved to hooking up. Large herds of young men and women together, drinking excessively, and then fornicate, that is what the process of dating and courtship have devolved into. Thewise, the family form, traditional, prehistoric family the with the tribe, over course of time was reduced to the extended family, several generations related by kin. The course of the 20th century, this devolves into Single Parents or groups that are not just a nuclear family, but a subatomic family. Be any combination of children in the same household. It is a progressive devolution of the social forms. Victorianism you could say originated in protestant angelica knows evangelicalism, especially in england. Victorian moral standards are those promoted by the methodists within the church of england. They were considered to be especially important to deal with the transition that was going on in the 19th century of the urban and industrial revolution. The victorian morals were necessary as a way of maintaining social order in a rapidly changing world. Same thing applies in america in the later 19th into the 20th century. There is also an element of postmillennialism in there. Victorian social reformers in the 19th century believed that protestant religion provided a way of dealing with all kinds of social problems that had plagued the world since its beginning. You can see this with the people who founded hillsdale college, free will baptists who were active in the antislavery although social Reform Movements of the 19th century. The campaigns against drinking, campaigns in favor of keeping the sabbath. Prison reform. The thing that brought alexis de tocqueville over to the United States. All had their origins in this predominantly evangelical Protestant Movement that we can christianize the social order, we can bring about a Perfect Society on earth. Theologically, this is known as postmillennialism. It is a period of peace, justice, and prosperity before the Second Coming of jesus christ. The kind of perfectionism. The traditional view had been that jesus christ would come initiate the millennium, the thousand reign of peace and justice. That is premillennialism. This movement is more characteristic of postmillennial. This movement has its origins in religion, especially protestant christianity. Over the course of time, it outlived its protestant origins. You can see this in Benjamin Franklin. You already selections from his autobiography. You can see the way in which Benjamin Franklin, though he had lost his traditional Orthodox Christian upbringing, still advocated, perhaps the greatest ocate for the first law thehile virtues bourgeois virtues, or the protestant work ethic in the autobiography. All of those things that were religious in origin, honesty, frugality, thrift, industry, temperance, they turn out to be available not for purposes of eternal salvation but for the purposes of advancing and success in this world, as a way to wealth, as a way to improve society. The material conditions of the world are very useful. You can see the utility of the old puritan values, even though he doesnt think they have any religious significance anymore. Benjamin franklin is sort of the outstanding figure of the american dream, the selfmade man, that if you follow these moral principles, if you cultivate these virtues, you have success in the world. If you apply this to society as a whole, the idea that social problems can be solved with the cultivation of religiously based virtues. This is rooted in an understanding of the nature of man. It goes back to the very origins of western civilization. Something that you all explored over and over again in western heritage. The idea of the dual nature of man, that we were creatures that had a rational and an Animal Element to us. Part of the job of human beings was to make sure that their rational capacities would control their animal capacities. That human beings have it in their power to transcend their fallen nature. That selfcontrol, that your morality isauge in what it is about. The principle of virtuous self control. Benjamin franklin could see his quest for moral perfection. He would eliminate all of his vices. He was going to be able to achieve personal moral perfection. Moderation or temperance would be the chief virtue here. Have any of you seen the movie the African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn . It is a classic and you should all see it. Humphrey bogart is a drunkard. He is pleading with katharine hepburn, saying you have to understand that she said it was only human nature to get drunk. She says human nature is what we are put on this earth to overcome. This is what the victorian moral drama is all about. The individual and the social effort to overcome our vices and to be able to control ourselves and transcend our vices and animal nature. So selfcontrol was the chief victorian virtue. I want to show you an example of this from major league baseball, 1947. Joe dimaggio as an example of this victorian type. Joe dimaggio was famous for not being very expressive. For being, kind of controlling his emotions on the field. There is one moment in the 1947 world series with the yankees against the dodgers. The dodgers were up by three runs. Joe dimaggio was at bat and there were two men on base. He has a long fly ball that would have been a home run but was caught by the dodgers outfielder. Look at this clip. It is very quick. Not too much is going on. But look at Joe Dimaggios reaction. Its a long one. Back, back, back. He makes a onehanded catch against the bullpen. When dimaggio kicked the dirt like that, that was as emotive as he ever got. He was such a model of selfcontrol, that was the remarkable thing about that play. The famously stoic joe dimaggio lost his temper. If you compare this with a way that athletes today express themselves on the field, you can see the difference between the old model and the new model. For a generation of americans, joe dimaggio did encapsulate that old idea of the greatest generation stoic selfcontrol in american males. Student was at the same year that Jackie Robinson broke in . Prof. Moreno yes it was. It was a very important year in american cultural history. It was also important because joe dimaggio was an italianamerican. It was an example of immigrant and ethnic assimilation. Joe dimaggio was an italianamerican. Italians had a reputation of having less selfcontrol than british protestants. These were cultural stereotypes. There are known as volatile people. The fact that dimaggio had absorbed this angloamerican, stoic demeanor was a sign that they had made it in america. This is in the 1940s when the expression of prejudicial attitudes about white ethnic groups was still widely accepted. Dimaggio was known as the daigo of the yankees. You dont really hear anymore. It was a person of mediterranean dissent. At this point dimaggio had assimilated these new ethnic groups. They are adopting this stance of victorian morality. That is the individual, the struggle for selfcontrol within the individual. Have your rest home rational capacity control your emotions. The whole goal of social policy is to cultivate personal responsibility. Do everything we can to get individuals to control themselves. In other words, social policy is is supposed to social policy is supposed to reward virtue and punish vice. We want our social institutions, political institutions, cultural institutions to help cultivate these virtues and minimize the vices. It is one of the most interesting things about america in the 19th century and into the 20th century. One of the things that is changing fundamentally is on the one hand, you had a laissezfaire economy, where the federal government does not do much to regulate economic activity. America at about 1900 was the freest economy the world had ever seen. Combined with that was a great deal of cultural and social regulation and control, especially at the local level. The federal government doesnt get involved with this very much because of the constitution. State and local government did a great deal of policing of moral, cultural and even religious questions. You have a society that was very free economically. But there is a great deal of control culturally or morally. Today, it is rather the opposite. We have a highly regulated economy, the culture is regular relatively libertarian. That is a great transformation of america. As you will see, most of these institutions were designed to make sure that people were able to manage the Economic Freedom that they have by the cultivation of these virtues. Again, for Benjamin Franklin, they were directly connected. If you engage in the right kind of behavior, frugal, industrious, temperate, it would lead to economic success rate success. That is the way to wealth. The victorian saw a connection. The families at the center at of this, that is the chief institution by which individuals are socialized. The family of the victorians was monogamous and heterosexual. It was the nuclear family. It was between one man and one woman only. Again, to emphasize the ways in which victorian social standards were different than earlier ones, it was still voluntary. There were no arranged marriages. The family was much more based on affection rather than on interest or compulsion. As i said, it was nuclear. This is not the extended family. It was premodern society, but the modern nuclear family. It comes into shape in the 19th century. It becomes the norm into the 20th century. The institution of divorce is still limited. Legally, no states had nofault divorce laws until the 1960s. Divorce was deliberately meant to be expensive and difficult to obtain. It was still stigmatized. I can remember growing up in the 1970s and divorce was still something that was rather scandalous. Over the course of time, it has lost that stigma and the escalatedof divorce rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. But at this point, it was still unusual and socially frowned upon. It was also politically fatal. People like Nelson Rockefeller , more or less ineligible to be president of the United States because he had been divorce. There wasnt a Supreme Court justice who had been divorced until the late 1930s. It had a stigma to it because it was a threat to the family, the central institution. Social policy, the assumption was, this goes back to Benjamin Franklin and the protestant work ethic, a vice is what led to poverty and not vice versa. The idea today in social sciences of the 20 century come to see that vice is a result of poverty. People engage in bad behavior because of their economic conditions. The victorian assumption is just the opposite. If people are poor, it is because they have engaged in vicious behavior and not vice versa. That is why they were so reluctant to adopt welfare in the 19th and 20th century. It would have inverted and interrupted this assumption that people make that there is a can onnection between vice in poverty. One of the things that changes this is the Great Depression. 25 of the population out of work cannot be because of their morals or vicious behavior. Something has broken down in the economic system. That is one of the chief reasons why the new deal became accepted. Student is the moral argument the same argument they made for prohibition . Prof. Moreno the moral arguments that are made to encourage the right kind of behavior in people reach their height in prohibition. One of the ways in which the progressives actually took victorian emphasis on temperance , that is an illustration of this. There is a difference between temperance and prohibition. Moderating as opposed to abolishing. That is one of the ways prohibition was adopted with the 18th amendment, and that it was repealed. Charity, for example. The old standard in the distribution of charity to the poor. Charity had to be limited to the deserving poor. As they were called. The victorians recognize that some people were poor just because of bad luck. Widows and orphans especially. People who through no fault of their own are suffering, not because of the vicious behavior. Those people you can take care of, those are the deserving. Most of the poor, if they are poor because of their own vicious habits, you have to allow them to suffer the consequences of the bad behavior, that is the only way they will reform. You dont want to give charity to the undeserving poor because that will be subsidizing that behavior. Then you get more of it. This is one of the chief reasons there was an limitation on the welfare state before the 20th century. Likewise, income transfers would have the same effect. This was what it was an argument against the income tax. Income tax is a tax on people with high income. People have high income because they are engaging in the right kind of behavior, frugal, hardworking, why tax them . That is discouraging productive behavior. You dont want to do that anymore than you want to encourage vicious behavior by giving welfare to the undeserving poor. The assumption is that people are economically successful because of their virtuous behavior, and that is called into question in the 19th and 20th centuries as well. But those are the assumptions of the connection between moral and economic outcomes. It continued into the 20th century, that really took a beating with the Great Depression. When charity was administered into the early 20th century, it was called indoor relief. We want to do is take the deserving poor outside of their morally dangerous environment and put them into asylums or orphanages where we can insulate them and protect them against the temptations of vice. The goal was to improve the moral environment of the poor. To remove them from the circumstances and vicious neighbors. The whole Asylum Movement in the 19th century was all about that. This is what Prison Reform is all about. Not just to punish people who had committed crimes, but to morally regenerate them. The reformatory as opposed to the penitentiary. Likewise, for orphans, you want to take them out of neighborhoods and put them in student them into institutions were they could be taught behavior. They do not usually work this way, but that was the moral theory that was behind it. Likewise, there were lots of laws, especially at the state and local level, that were meant to suppress vice. To help people control themselves by removing the temptations to drink too much or to take drugs or to gamble or other things. The idea that those kinds of Police Regulations were legitimate was something that the government did do. This is a difference between temperance and prohibition. The victorians generally did not try to prohibit alcohol on altogether. Into the 19th and early 20th century, they took a constitutional amendment to do it. The whole nation adopted prohibition. With regards to prostitution, the victorians held to a sexual double standard. They believed that males have more of a sex drive than females did. Prostitution was an outlet that you needed males to have. The thing to do about prostitution was to establish a red light district where prostitution would be limited and regulated rather than try to do away with it altogether. Especially, war i, every major American City used to have a district where prostitutes were available. People would tell stories that this was the case in hillsdale, michigan. I dont know if this is true, but you hear stories about buildings downtown where prostitution was flagrant was because it was legally tolerated. The progressives held to a stricter standard than this, especially among 19thcentury feminists. What was known as the social purity movement. They objected to the sexual double standard, not because they wanted women to be a will to engage in the same kinds of sexual behavior as males, but they wanted males to exercise as much selfcontrol as females did. They wanted a very stringent, unitary standard for the sexes so they campaigned against prostitution altogether. It was world war i when the federal government made a requirement that if you had a federal base camp in your city , the county had to do away with the red light districts. They pretty much all disappeared with world war i. There were some ways in which the federal government did get involved in this. Another example would be the man act, the white slave act that Congress Passed in 1910. It made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. It was designed to get at commercial prostitution, later came to be applied to any kind of illicit sexual relations in which state lines were crossed or any type of trysting that took place across the line. One of the assumptions is that if any woman was having sex with a man who was not her husband, she was an acting prostitute. It was a law designed to get at the institution of prostitution. It became a nationwide campaign against any kind of sexual immorality. Likewise gambling. Today, states promote and advertise for gambling. The idea being that the lottery proceeds go to promote education. Every american state in 1900 prohibited gambling. Some states even prohibited the publication that somebody won the lottery in other countries. Crime tofederal transport lottery tickets across state lines. Every state suppressed and put down gambling. This is the legitimate function of government, to try to remove the temptation of vice that will allow people to improve their morals. Likewise, every American Church condemned artificial contraception until about 1930, i think it was the episcopalian who were the first to accept the use of contraception. It was not until the 1960s where every state had repealed laws that prohibited the distance of dispensing and use of contraceptives. The Catholic Church was the only holdout. The Supreme Court swept away the last of those laws prohibiting the use and dispensing of contraception. Congress tried to help this through various laws, the comstock act. Anthony comstock was the principal 19thcentury crusader against sexual vice. It made it a federal crime to use the federal mail for anything that was the scene bscene or immoral. That included any information about abortion or contraception. This is one of the ways in which the federal government tried to help the states and their regulation of sexual morality. Another indication of this is that circumcision reached its high point in the United States in 1940. Male circumcision. There was a revival of circumcision in the angloamerican world in the 19th century for reasons that were not religious. It goes back to the early church , and the idea that christians did not have to get circumcised as jewish people did have been taken care of centuries ago. But for reasons of sexual hygiene and the belief that circumcision would help males exercise more selfrestraint, it is probably the reason for the increase in circumcision in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has been declining ever since, in europe especially. Theyre all these signs of encouraging selfcontrol. The prohibition of these various practices. All of this is especially concentrated among american protestants. Denominations. S methodists, evangelicals of various kinds. As opposed to the liturgical protestants like the episcopalians or the lutherans, they were less inclined in the social Reform Movement that is associated with the evangelicals. And roman catholics were largely out of it. Part of the reason why protestants were suspicious of american catholics was they did not fit into this victorian culture enthusiasm for social reform. The protestant assumption that i am talking about is that we can achieve perfection in this world by the cultivation of these morals. Traditionalist catholics were suspicious of that. Protestants were suspicious of catholics because of that. They did not believe people have the capacity to improve the world in this sort of way. Catholics were considered too lenient about sin. Catholics were otherworldly. The protestant vision is about protecting the world in which we live. Catholicism tended to emphasize the next world rather than this world. A wellknown hymn, there is a line that is emphasized. This earth is but a veil of tears, a place of banishment and fears. Catholics had a fatalistic view that life on this earth is not about achieving perfection and improvement, you have to suffer through it until you get to your final reward in the other world. The catholics do not have an inclination to try to make these kinds of social improvements that evangelical protestants are about. These are catholic ideas that success or poverty in this world may not have any clear connection between peoples morality and behavior. That sometimes the wicked do achieve great wealth and success. Sometimes good people are reduced to poverty. Catholics are not with this program of protestant personal and social improvement. Since most americans are broadly speaking, protestants in one way or another, this is a cultural tone of america in the 19th and 20th century. Thus it was promoted in public education. Reading the bible, this kind of encouragement of the protestant work ethic in american schools. It was taken for granted. This is the reason why catholics established their secondary system of parochial schools. Public education was essentially protestant education. Likewise, you can see the way in which they were trying to inculcate the protestant work ethic in teaching children how to read. Later on, the Horatio Alger anries are good example of attempt to inculcate a moral vision through literature. Even now you no established church in the United States, there is a broad, nondenominational protestant culture that did not emphasize the religious and sectarian points about this, but the widely shared judeochristian and protestant ethic, American Public life was suffused with this as well. Lets talk about the 1950s now. Lets talk about how this developed in the 1950s. The unraveling of the traditional judeochristian ethic, you could see it in europe in the late 20th century. For americans, you really only begin to see it in the 1920s, the roaring 20s, the jazz age, disillusionment after world war i. Then it was interrupted by the Great Depression, then world war ii, the cold war. You do not see it unravel until the 1960s. Especially when the decline of cold war tensions as well as democratic factors like the baby boomers comingofage began to kick in. The 1950s are a period of hiatus. They are still security conscious. They still place a great deal of value on the family and of social order because of the dramatic impacts of the depression and the world wars. This is why 1950s are considered a conservative decade, even though historians emphasize the way in which the continuity in development of cultural modernism from the beginning of the 20th century. The popular image of the 1950s is a decade of conformity. That americans were other directed is a phrase that was used, they were parts of large organizations. There was less individualism in American Culture in the 1950s, then earlier there had been, or later there would be. The idea was that, the old, protestant work ethic was about you having a fixed, absolute standard, one that came from religion, and following that. A healthy kind of american individualism in this innerdirectedness that came out of, especially, a puritan the elegy. The elegy. Theology. In the 1950s, americans are very otherdirected. They take the moral cues from other people. They were largely social in the 1950s rather than individually directed. You had a society and culture and economy dominated by large organizations. A period where the economy was dominated more than ever before or since by a small number of large corporations. We talked about the ways the new deal economy and politics concentrated American Business in the mid20th century. Likewise, unions. Workers tend to be members of large, industrial unions in the 1950s. 1955 was the high point of Union Density in American Labor history. Workers are part of large organizations. And of course, government. The new deal had established, a a big, federal central government, the kind we had never seen before. The middle of the 20th century is a big unit economy and big units society in which americans belong to large organizations. There was a centralized media in the 20th century. A small number of large networks, nothing like the array of news outlets you people have today. [indiscernible] prof. Moreno you have Big Government and big corporations in the middle of the 20th century because we had given up the laissezfaire ideal with the new deal. The new deal helped establish you could not have had them without the wagner act. Likewise, Economic Policy was meant to reduce competition and individualism in the marketplace. And to have cartels, organizations that reduced to attempt to reduce competition. It largely sucked away the laissezfaire attitude. But it has not adopted the cultural liberalism we associate with todays democratic party. That does not really happen until the 1960s. Someone like fdr or many of the new dealers, they did attack the laissezfaire economic assumptions of victorianism that came from the 19th century. Mindhey did not have in homosexual rights or abortion rights or anything like that. They were still victorian in and moralltural beliefs. That is all going to change rapidly in the 1960s. There are some avantgarde intellectuals and artists calling into question the judeochristian moral standards. One of the most interesting illustrations comes from oscar wilde. An essay he wrote in 1890 called the soul of man under socialism. It is an illustration of the connection between economic and morality. You should read that. It makes the argument that once socialism takes care of the economic problem, everyone will have enough so they do not have to worry about making a living anymore, then the individual will be free to create himself in any way they want to. Marx makes a similar argument in the german ideology. And every individual could be like oscar wilde, expressing themselves artistically and creatively and to be a real individual. Economic socialism, collectivism in the economy is what leads to cultural individualism. In the 1950s we are in a transition phase where we have, to some degree, a collectiveized economy, a mixed economy. It is not laissezfaire or socialist. But we not were not yet embarked in the mainstream on the culturalmoral overturn. Said, the family is the central institution. The 1950s have a reputation for being conservative because there was a great baby boom, because it was a great period of family formation in the United States. That is what popular images of this is why popular images of the 1950s are very domestic. You have the father knows best sitcom image of the 1950s. A return to normal, bourgeois family life, americans making up for disruption of the Great Depression and world war ii. You have this great domestic explosion. One that was limited to the United States. This did not happen in western europe or japan after world war ii. It was a peculiarly american thing. A little bit in australia and new zealand, apparently. But principally american. Most historians try to explain why this happened in the u. S. And not other places, was a higher degree of religious observance. Americans were more religious than western europeans. The appeal of a continued judeochristian culture was more in evidence in the u. S. The more religious you are, the more familyoriented you are. There is a clear correlation to religious observance and family size. Part of the reason for the demographic implosion we talked about on day one, the population pyramids, are closely correlated with the decline of religious. Religious observance. The baby boom was the central demographic phenomenon of this course. About 76 million children were born between 1946 and 1964, the baby boom years. This reached a peak of 4. 3 million born in the year of 1957. That is a peak of the baby boom bulge. To give you one example of what a massive and sudden increase in births this was, more children were born in the five years after world war ii thean in the 30 years before world war ii. It is a tremendous expansion, boom in the population. The average female marriage rate had been 26 in 1890, and had fallen below 20 in 1957. Women working married this was the average. Some got married even younger than that. It reached its low point in 1956. There were two cohorts that made up the babyboom. One was older women who had delayed having children during the depression and world war ii, Getting Started late having children. But also, and much more ere younger women who married earlier and started earlier. The average American Woman in the 1920s had her last child when she was 26 years old. The first time i read this i thought, that is a typo. They mean the average american had her first child at the age of 26. No, she was done at age 26. Today, most American Children do american women do not start having children until 26. That leaves time to have more children, the earlier it starts. The other thing about the babyboom, there was no part of the American Population that was not affected by it. Usually we talk about largescale social phenomenon in American History, you start making exceptions and talking about differences based on race, religion, class. But there was none of that, this affected almost the entire American Population. Percent for blacks and whites, the same for rich or poor. If it is any indication of the great increase in the birth rate, it was among urban educated whites. Usually demographically it is the opposite. Usually immigrants had higher birth rates than native born. Less educated people usually have more children. Also, very unusual. Also, it is not that americans were returning to the 18th century Family Practice of having large families of eight or 10 children. Most families of the baby boom generation had three or four. What made the numbers vast, almost no one had no children. Almost everybody had two or three or four. There were very few childless couples and very few people who did not get married. I think we talked about this the first day of class. It was recently in the last census or some point since, a majority of adult women are not married. The first time it happened in American History. The vast majority of marriageage men and women were married in the 1950s. Another thing that happened to the 1950s, more children who are born, live. Great medical advances in the 1950s. The thing that kept human population down throughout Human History was infant mortality, the idea that 1 3 or 1 2 of children would not make it to the first year. Most of that tremendous increase in human population was due to a decline in infant mortality rates. That continues in the 1950s. Diseases like polio and one of the dramatic stories of medical advances was the conquest of polio in the 1950s. It was not a fatal disease, but it was a terrifying disease that affected young people. Especially fdr, having been affected later in life. Diseases like diphtheria and rubella, vaccines were developed. Children are living longer. 37,000 polio cases in 1954, below 1000 by 1962. It was almost completely eradicated. The year before i was born there was a great rubella outbreak before the vaccine that produced 20,000 miscarriages and many birth defects, just one year before i was born. These types of epidemic diseases used to be a common part of life, childhood diseases that would take your life. Those children are living longer as a result of the medical advances. Another thing that comes out of especially this generation of american women had not themselves been part of larger extended families. One of the bestselling books in American History was benjamin spocks book on baby childcare. The First Edition came out in 1946. Over 30 million copies were sold. Advice to large numbers of young women having children. Many people pointed to spocks book as an indication of the Movement Toward a cultural revolution of the 1960s. That spock was responsible for the generation of the 1960s, that his advice to raise children by permissive standards was what accounts for the social turmoil of the 1960s. Which one of you is doing spock for your reading assignments . It was true that compared to earlier victorian guidance to child reading, spock was relatively permissive. The old standard in the 19th century was children were little devils and their will needed to be broken. Spock, compared to that was indulgent. But not by later standards of permissive parenting. There are also a lot of things he advised that american women did not follow. He counseled on demand breastfeeding. That has made a big comeback, though. When i was a child, breastfeeding was out of fashion and formula and bottles were the way babies were raised. Also, spock, he assumed boys are boys and girls are girls. He did counsel raising children according to traditional gender roles. By todays standard, spock was something of a reactionary when it came to his assumption there are girls and boys. What really made spock a controversial figure was his opposition to the vietnam war. He became very active in the antiwar movement. People projected his antiwar liberalism onto his childrearing books. That is something of a distortion. American families are expanding a great deal in the 1950s. It is all taking place in the american suburbs. 1955 was an important landmark year because more americans lived in suburbs and cities for the first time in American History. 1920 have been the landmark when america became an urban nation, where more families live on cities than farms. 1955, america became a suburban nation, more living in suburbs than cities. The suburban population doubled from 36 million to 72 million between 1950 and 1970. By 1970, the suburbs included more people than cities and farms combined. It was a majority suburban nation. In the 1950s, about one million acres of farmland were developed into suburban housing every year. The american landscape is changing fundamentally by this demographic change. About 83 of the population increase of america in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. The 1950s have the greatest population increase in American History. It was driven by natural increase. American population had increased in the past because of both the natural increase, but also a lot of immigration. In the 1950s, immigration had almost entirely been cut off. This was homegrown. Immigration does not play much of a role in this. Every major American City in the 1950s lost population except for los angeles. Los angeles is a suburban sprawl itself, not a concentrated city. One of the political consequences, big cities lost their dominance within the state. Boston does not dominate massachusetts the way it used to, new york city does not dominate new york the way it used to. To york declined from 55 45 in this period. It is increased, there is been a reorganization movement. New york city has more population now and is increased its relative influence in the state of new york. Boston went from being 18 to massachusetts population. Cleveland went from being 13 of ohios population to only 4 . Detroit went from 32 to 11 of michigans population. There is a great exodus of population from the cities into the suburbs. The farms into the cities. What is happening in big american cities, the nativeborn white population is moving to the suburbs. Weve talked about the ways the subsidies and Government Policies encouraged suburbanization. The highway act, banking policies, federal loan guarantees and things like that were racially discriminatory. It was harder for blacks to leave the central suburbs than for whites. This movement from cities to suburbs was largely a white movement. The population of those cities is being replaced by black migrants from the south, the continuation of the great migration. Also, puerto ricans. They were part of the american commonwealth. Immigration was not limited the way it was from other countries. A city like new york city, whites are moving out and their places were being taken by blacks and puerto ricans. Demographics and cities changed a great deal in the 1950s. Domestic culture. Television would be the most important illustration. The development of television at the beginning of the 1950s. In the 1950s, it starts where virtually no one has television, but by the end of the 1950s, everyone has television. 172,002 50 million. 170,00 to 50 million. This is a faster growth curve than any previous technological development. Radio took off in the 1920s. World war i, almost no one had a radio. It became a massive consumer product, the fastestgrowing consumer industry. Likewise, automobiles. Henry ford making mass production automobiles available to ordinary americans. What starts off as a luxury item becomes a massproduced consumer good. Likewise with telephones. These devices were rapidly adopted. But television was more rapidly adopted than any other. It may well be smartphones, i have not looked into this. I can remember a time when no one had a smartphone and then suddenly everyone had one. But television was a rapid, culturally transforming phenomenon. The important thing about television, it is connected to the family. It replaces the fireplace as the center of the home. That is the hearth, the thing the family gathers around and brings the American People together. It was replacing what was previously the dominant form of popular entertainment, the biggest Entertainment Industry in the United States, motion pictures. 1946 was the peak of american movie attendance. About 90 million americans went to the movies every week in 1946. About 60 of americans went to the movies each week. That fell to about 45 million a week by 1953. About half baird this is apparently still falling because of later Technological Innovations like vcrs and dvds, or netflix, streaming. People dont go to the movies the way they used to. Student [indiscernible] prof. Moreno it is funny because, movies you could say bring people together. The description patterson gives of movie theaters as cultural, civic institutions. Very ornate, palatial, had services. Those began to decline as a result of television. Certainly television reduces personal interaction. It is a massproduced commodity. One of the things it is doing is homogenizing american tastes. Broadcast media, where everyone is watching the same thing, is one of the things making American Life more bland and interchangeable. It is certainly true that television may well reduce the amount of culture that individuals produce by conversation and personal interaction. There is some truth to that. There is a degree in to which there are crosscurrents in these cultural developments. When television started out in the early 1950s, you had to have money for television because they were expensive. The programming changed over the course of the 1950s. Initially, there were highquality, high culture television, things applied from the stage to early television. As the audience got bigger, it became more and more of a mass audience, the quality of television declined in the 1950s. Cultural critics made a lot of that, as well. Whenever you massproduced something, it will be pitched for the lowest common denominator. What is the largest audience you audience share you can get . More accessible, but the quality , my some standards, declines. New york city, 55 movie theaters closed in new york city in 1951 alone. This is changing the urban landscape. Movie theaters were places that drew people out of their homes and put them together in social space, whereas television is reinforcing the idea of the family as the basic social unit. Theaterswth in movie in the 1950s was driving. That was because america became more car oriented. There was an expansion in outdoor movie watching. It change the preferences americans had for sports. Football was more well adapted to television than baseball was. This is a period in which football and basketball begin to compete with baseball for the american pastime. Day will say they prefer to listen to baseball on the radio then watch it. Than watch it. Whereas the other sports lend visual of more to the television than the radio format. You take it for granted because the application of this idea of the image being broadcast and available, you have to imagine how new that was in the 1950s. Radio, by bringing sound into the home, had a similar impact. Television changes that dramatically. You are used to having television at your fingertips. You are watching images all the time. Some of you might well be doing that now if i did not forbid you to bring your cell phones to class. The ubiquitousness, you have to imagine what it was like when it was new. The idea of the image being available through television was cutting edge. Another consequence of the baby boom was the development of a separate Youth Culture within the United States. The whole idea of adolescence, the teenager, is something that is new in western civilization in the 20th century. For one thing, the United States became a younger country in the 20th century as a result of the baby boom. The median age fell to a little over 28. The average american was 28 years old. It is 38 today because the population has been aging since the baby boom. The socalled teen population, a cohort that sociologists did not recognize until the 20th century. That there is a distinct phase of life, a recent development. The teen niche or cohort doubled from 10 million to 20 million between 1950 and 1970. This had economic effects. We will talk principally about cultural effects, and there being a separate Youth Culture. In traditional society, there was no such thing as being a teenager. You were a child, and then usually at some point that coincided with biological sexual maturity, you became an adult. There was usually an initiation process by which you went from being a child to an adult. As western society and the economy and demographic changes took place, there was an extended, intermediate period between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence, the teen years takes on an independent population cohort demographic. The number of years people spent in school also was attenuated. It used to be that at about the age of adulthood, most people did not go to school beyond the eighth grade, did not need to in 19thcentury society. They spent more and more time in school, extending this period of adolescence. Only about 13 of the High School Aged population between 14 and 18 were in high schools in 1900. High school was limited to a small segment of the population. It was a big deal for the few, the elite. That has increased over the century. Half the population of High School Age is an high school in 1930. 75 by 1950. Almost everybody. 1965, everyone who is High School Age is an high school and half of them go to college. College numbers have a similar replication. Late 19th century almost no one went to college, it is increasingly common today. Today, about two thirds of americans spend some time in college. Only half of them finished. The vast majority spend time on higher education. Look at what it was just for high school in the 20th century. All of this is extending the period of adolescence. You get a separate Youth Culture. Advertisers are looking at this, young people begin to adopt their own style of dress. The music they listen to is very different. There is a segregation, separation of Youth Culture from mainstream culture. What you have is, people who are physically adult one thing that happened in the 19th and 20th century, biologically speaking, men and women became sexually mature at an earlier age. Probably because of better nutrition. People are biologically adults earlier, but they are not expected to behave like adults or make a living for themselves until much later. People are biological adults without adult responsibilities. They are still dependent upon their families. This dependence is being increased further and further. Many of you may be thinking about this today. What you going to do after you graduate from college . I do not know what the numbers are, but an increasing number go home and continue to live with their families. One of the big points in the obamacare debate was, President Trump says he wants to maintain the ability for kids to be on their Parents Health insurance until they are 26 years old. 26 is about the age we might expect young people to start making a living for themselves. That is what im talking about, the extension of the period of economic and social dependence even while you ironically have earlier biological maturity. College numbers, about 2 million