Chapter 16: Post War America• Essential Questions– How did Presidents Truman and Eisenhower transform

the nation from a war-time economy to a peace-time economy?• Which efforts were successful and which were not?

– How did American lifestyle and culture change during the 1950’s?

– Which groups did not share in the prosperity of the 1950’s and why?

Post-War Poverty

• Read the portions of your text (section 3) describing the poverty that affected about twenty percent of the American population, particularly people of color and those living in the inner cities and the Appalachian region.

• Choose one of the following four groups, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and the population of Appalachia.

• Use library resources and the Internet to research the level of

poverty of your group in the 1950’s and today. Write a brief paper comparing and contrasting the poverty level and standard of life of those two periods of time.

• Due Friday, April 15.

Section 1 – President Truman • The G.I. Bill • Taft-Hartley Act• The Fair Deal– Successes• Increased minimum wage to .75 cents• Increased and expanded Social Security benefits• Increased funding for low-income housing

– Failures• No national health insurance• No civil rights legislation• No aid for farmers or schools

Section 1 – President Eisenhower• Dynamic Conservatism– Economic Conservatism• Pro business• Cut government spending • Lowered taxes• Cut government regulations

– Activism to benefit America• Federal Highway Act• Great Lakes – Saint Lawrence Seaway

Section 2 – The Affluent Society

• Other PPt

Section 3 - The Other Side of American Life

• African Americans• Hispanics• Native Americans• Appalachia

Music of the 1950’sPopular music has reached its lowest depths in the “grunt and groin” antics of one Elvis Presley. The TV audience had a noxious [morally corrupt] sampling of it on the Milton Berle show the other evening. Elvis, who rotates his pelvis, was appalling musically. Also, he gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.

—Ben Gross, New York Daily News

The sight of young (21) Mr. Presley caterwauling [screeching] his unintelligible lyrics in an inadequate voice, during a display of primitive physical movement difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper, has caused the most heated reaction since the stone-age days of TV when Dagmar and Faysie’s [two female television celebrities from the 1950s] necklines were plunging to oblivion.

—Jack O’Brian, New York Journal-American