The Greatest Generation Gets to Eat
The first fifteen years after WW2 saw the U.S. go through unparalleled economic growth. Pent up demand for consumer goods fueled a steady industrial expansion. The economy surged for two reasons - the ability of consumers to indulge themselves after years of doing without and the continued government spending due to the Cold War. By the mid-1950's the average American family had twice as much real income to spend than his counterpart in the boom of the 1920's.
A House and a Family For Everyone!
In 1947, William Levitt began building mass produced houses in a pre-planned neighborhood called Levittown. The dream of the men returning from the war was to own his own home and with this process he could (the first homes cost less than 7,000 dollars.) As neighborhoods like this grew around the country, people moved out of the cities and the beginning of the suburban sprawl was established. Families began to have children in record numbers (baby boom) and the automobile became necessary for life as shopping centers sprouted (There were only 8 shopping centers in the entire country in 1946!) Family life became the center of the society, as parents huddled with their children around the new modern conveniences such as television and took vacations in their station wagons. Feminism took a back seat to the increased emphasis on the nuclear family as women were taught to raise their children well (1946 best seller - Dr. Spock - Baby and Child Care) and to keep a good home (magazines like McCall's and Good Housekeeping).
Homework Journal
List 10 TV shows from the 1950s or early 1960s. Be prepared to explain a little about them. Ask your parents!
Reading # 1 Underline/highlight 5 important segments. You must write in the margins why it is important or interesting!
Suburban Legend
William Levitt
His answer to a postwar housing crisis created a new kind of home life and culture: suburbia
BY RICHARD LACAYO
It wasn't until the later 20th century that suburbia was imagined as the ideal human habitation, an arrangement of houses and lives so fundamental, it was taken for granted that the Flintstones lived there.
Suburbia required cars, highways and government-guaranteed mortgages. It also required William Levitt, who first applied a full panoply of assembly-line techniques to housing construction. That insight enabled him, and the many builders who copied him, to put up houses fast and cheap. Levitt's houses were so cheap (but still reasonably sturdy) that bus drivers, music teachers and boilermakers could afford them. And the first place he offered them was Levittown, N.Y., a town that is as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem.
That moment came right after World War II. When the servicemen and -women headed home, there wasn't much home for them to come to. Wartime shortages of everything had crippled the housing industry. Returning veterans, their libidos fully charged with the ambitions that would create the baby boom, found themselves doubled up with parents and in-laws. To publicize their search for an apartment, one New York City couple camped out for two days in a department-store window.
In those years, the American housing industry was not so much an industry as a loose affiliation of local builders, any one of whom completed an average of four houses a year. What Levitt had in mind was 30 to 40 a day. Before the war, Levitt and his brother Alfred had built a few houses on land their father owned in Manhasset, N.Y. And in 1941 the Levitts won a government contract to provide 2,350 housing units for defense workers in Norfolk, Va. Once the fighting ended, they brought the lessons of that experience to 1,000 acres of potato farms on New York's Long Island 25 miles east of Manhattan. On July 1, 1947, Levitt, then 40, broke ground on the first of what would be 17,000 homes.
He could build fast because he had broken down the construction process into 27 operations, then mustered specialized teams to repeat each operation at each building site. Twenty acres were set aside as an assembly point, where cement was mixed and lumber cut. Trucks would deliver parts and material to homesites placed at 60-ft. intervals. Then the carpenters, tilers, painters and roofers arrived, each in his turn. There was a team for white paint, another for red. One worker's sole daily task was to bolt washing machines to floors.
Reading # 2 Highlight/underline 5 important or important segments. You must write in the margins and explain why it is interesting or important.
Burger Meister - Ray Kroc
McDonald's begat an industry because a 52-year-old mixer salesman understood that we don't dine - we eat and run
BY JACQUES PEPIN
Ray Kroc's obsession with Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value--the unwavering mission of McDonald's--was gathering momentum. Kroc was adroit and perceptive in identifying popular trends. He sensed that America was a nation of people who ate out, as opposed to the Old World tradition of eating at home. Yet he also knew that people here wanted something different. Instead of a structured, ritualistic restaurant with codes and routine, he gave them a simple, casual and identifiable restaurant with friendly service, low prices, no waiting and no reservations. The system eulogized the sandwich--no tableware to wash. One goes to McDonald's to eat, not to dine.
Although he sold paper cups by day and played the piano for a radio station at night, Kroc had an ear better tuned to the rhythms of commerce. In the course of selling paper cups he encountered Earl Prince, who had invented a five-spindle multimixer and was buying Lily cups by the truckload. Fascinated by the speed and efficiency of the machine, Kroc obtained exclusive marketing rights from Prince. Indefatigable, for the next 17 years he crisscrossed the country peddling the mixer.
On his travels he picked up the beat of a remarkable restaurant in San Bernardino, Calif., owned by two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, who had ordered eight mixers and had them churning away all day. Kroc saw the restaurant in 1954 and was entranced by the effectiveness of the operation. It was a hamburger restaurant, though not of the drive-in variety popular at the time. People had to get out of their cars to be served. The brothers had produced a very limited menu, concentrating on just a few items: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, french fries, soft drinks and milk shakes, all at the lowest possible prices.
Kroc, ever the instigator, started thinking about building McDonald's stores all over the U.S.--each of them equipped with eight multimixers whirring away, spinning off a steady stream of cash. The following day he pitched the idea of opening several restaurants to the brothers. They asked, "Who could we get to open them for us?" Kroc was ready: "Well, what about me?"
The would-be Great War veteran would grow rich serving the children of World War II vets. His confidence in what he had seen was unshakable. As he noted later, "I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me." He was even more convinced than the McDonalds and eventually cajoled them into selling out to him in 1961 for a paltry $2.7 million.
He was now free to run the business his own way, but he never changed the fundamental format that had been devised by the brothers. Kroc added his own wrinkles, certainly. He was a demon for cleanliness. From the overall appearance, to the parking lot, to the kitchen floor, to the uniforms, cleanliness was foremost and essential. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean," was one of his favorite axioms. He was dead on, of course. The first impression you get from a restaurant through the eyes and nose is often what determines whether you'll go back.
By 1963 more than 1 billion hamburgers had been sold, a statistic that was displayed on a neon sign in front of each restaurant. That same year, the 500th McDonald's restaurant opened and the famous clown, Ronald McDonald, made his debut. He soon became known to children throughout the country, and kids were critical in determining where the family ate. According to John Mariani in his remarkable book America Eats Out, "Within six years of airing his first national TV ad in 1965, the Ronald McDonald clown character was familiar to 96% of American children, far more than knew the name of the President of the United States."
Reading # 3 Highlight/underline 5 important segments. You must write in the margins to show why it is important or interesting.
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From 'The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit': Tom Rath
All seemed to be cut from the same cloth, both the suits and those who wore them, all striving to fit the mold of the good company man, the kind who knew how shut up, toe the line and look exactly like the guy next to him, who looked exactly like the guy next to him. Such a life offered war-weary soldiers like Tom Rath the things they dreamed of most on the battlefield: security and comfort. Tom was a paratrooper, jumping into darkness and enemy fire. He killed 17 men. One freezing night in Germany he slit the throat of a young Nazi sentry for the kid's fleece-lined jacket. Seven years had passed since he took his last leap, shot his last German and returned to his young wife, Betsy, and their little house in Westport, Conn., and drifted into a soft, steady job in Rockefeller Center. He was the assistant to the head of the Schanenhauser Foundation, a philanthropy of a millionaire oldster who happened to be a pal of Tom's grandma. The job didn't pay much, and that was fine in 1946. But by 1953, 32-year-old Tom had three kids, a crack in the plaster in the living room and a wife who was whining that nothing was fun anymore. He needed more money than his foundation job could pay, and he was beginning to feel a panic. So it was with great interest that he listened as a commuter-train acquaintance told him of an opening in public relations at the United Broadcasting Corp. The job was high-powered, with great opportunity assistant to Ralph Hopkins, a legendary business genius who was president of the television giant. Most important to Tom was the salary, $10,000 a year, $3,000 more than he was making at the foundation. There was, though, one hitch. "I don't know anything about public relations," Tom said. "Who does?" his friend replied. "You got a clean shirt, you bathe every day. That's all there is to it." The next day, Tom dressed for battle crisp gray flannel, a new white handkerchief, freshly shined shoes and stepped into the glittering brass elevators at UBC to start the humiliating interview ordeal. The whole thing terrified him, as much as the guns and grenades years earlier. "After the whole damn war, why am I scared now?" he said to himself. He didn't have an answer; no one did. But this peculiar fear was common among the gray flannel herd, even among the World War II heroes who had faced death over and over. Published in 1955, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" defined a generation of executives, men who jumped from troop ship to corporation, the civilian version of the military, complete with uniforms, unbreakable chains of command and pitched battles. That scramble would deprive men of love, their families, their health, sometimes their lives. But once on the treadmill, most would not get off until they were thrown off. This would not be the case for Tom Rath. Unwilling to make the sacrifices, he said no thank you, taking a lower-key position that would mean less money but more freedom. |
In class journal: How does society push you to conform today? What do you do to rebel against these pressures?
from On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. "Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there, he may be in Chicago by accident this year." We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to downtown Chicago. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking--"We're in the big town, Sal! Whooee!" First thing to do was park the Cadillac in a good dark spot and wash up and dress for the night. Across the street from the YMCA we found a redbrick alley between buildings, where we stashed the Cadillac with her snout pointed to the street and ready to go, then followed the college boys up to the Y, where they got a room and allowed us to use their facilities for an hour. Dean and I shaved and showered, I dropped my wallet in the hall, Dean found it and was about to sneak it in his shirt when he realized it was ours and was right disappointed. Then we said good-by to those boys, who were glad they'd made it in one piece, and took off to eat in a cafeteria. Old brown Chicago with the strange semi-Eastern, semi-Western types going to work and spitting. Dean stood in the cafeteria rubbing his belly and taking it all in. He wanted to talk to a strange middle-aged colored woman who had come into the cafeteria with a story about how she had no money but she had buns with her and would they give her butter. She came in flapping her hips, was turned down, and went out flipping her butt. "Whoo!" said Dean. "Let's follow her down the street, let's take her to the ole Cadillac in the alley. We'll have a ball." But we forgot that and headed straight for North Clark Street, after a spin in the Loop, to see the hootchy-kootchy joints and hear the bop. And what a night it was. "Oh, man," said Dean to me as we stood in front of a bar, "dig the street of life, the Chinamen that cut by in Chicago. What a weird townwow. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go." Then here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments out of cars. They piled right into a saloon and we followed them. They set themselves up and started blowin There we were! The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others--and said, "Blow," very quietly when the other boys took solos. Then there was Prez, a husky, handsome blond like a freckled boxer, meticulously wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape and the collar falling back and the tie undone for exact sharpness and casualness, sweating and hitching up his horn and writhing into it, and a tone just like Lester Young himself. "You see, man, Prez has the technical anxieties of a money-making musician, he's the only one who's well dressed, see him grow worried when he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry and just blow and blow--the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music is all he cares about. He's an artist. He's teaching young Prez the boxer. Now the others dig!!" The third sax was an alto, eighteen-year-old cool, contemplative young Charlie-Parker-type Negro from high school, with a broadgash mouth, taller than the rest, grave. He raised his horn and blew into it quietly and thoughtfully and elicited birdlike phrases and architectural Miles Davis logics. These were the children of the great bop innovators.
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety--leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest--Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie--Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.
Stranger flowers yet--for as the Negro alto mused over everyone's head with dignity, the young, tall, slender, blond kid from Curtis Street, Denver, jeans and studded belt, sucked on his mouthpiece while waiting for the others to finish; and when they did he started, and you had to look around to see where the solo was coming from, for it came from angelical smiling lips upon the mouthpiece and it was a soft, sweet, fairy-tale solo on an alto. Lonely as America, a throat pierced sound in the night.
Rocket Boys!
The insecurity that lay beneath the surface of the 1950's came into view with the Soviets putting the satellite Sputnik into orbit in 1957. The public's reaction to this feat was panic, fear that we had fallen behind the Soviets technologically, educationally and economically. Congress responded by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, along with vast sums of money to develop the space program (The Right Stuff). They also passed the National Defense Education Act, authorizing federal financing of scientific and foreign language programs in our schools.
On the Road Again!
The American people found that moderation was the keynote of the Eisenhower presidency. His major goal was to restore calm and tranquility to a badly divided nation, and made no commitment to social or economic reform. A fervent believer in the separation of powers, he preferred not to engage n lobbying for his own legislative agenda. The one significant legislative achievement in his administration was the passage of the Highway Act of 1956. Justified on grounds of national defense, 41,000 miles of interstates were built connecting the nation's major cities. This had a tremendous impact of interstate trade.
An Election of Transition?
In the Election of 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy faced each other in a series of televised debates. This forever changed electoral politics as Kennedy gained a great advantage in the campaign because he "looked" better, healthier and more relaxed. Those who heard the debate on radio felt that Nixon had won. Kennedy went on to win a very close election, with voting irregularities in Chicago and Texas playing a big part. The election of JFK marked the arrival of a new generation of leadership in America, those born in the 20th century. The new administration mirrored Kennedy's aura of youth and energy, with cabinet positions being filled with activists rather than administrators. Though he championed many reforms, called the New Frontier, he found it difficult dealing with a Congress that was controlled by 101 southern representatives who held the balance of power between 160 northern Democrats and 174 Republicans. This roadblock long with his preference for foreign policy allowed the New Frontier to languish in Congress.
Homework Assignment # 40
Create an outline/concept map that includes all of the major terms mentioned in this packet.