The Affluent Society & the Liberal Consensus. 1945-1965

The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Or the Bretton Woods conference, was a gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 nations at the Mount Washington Hotel situated in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of WWII. The conference was held in July 1944, when the agreements were signed to set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World BANK), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).As a result of the conference, the Bretton Woods system of exchange rate management was set up, which remained in place until the early 1970s. IMF & World Bank are still in operation.

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 made Housing Affordable and Companies like Levittown sprouted up to make massive housing projects. The GI

bill also made available grants and Loans for vets to go to college or start businesses.

1956 Interstate Highway Act

Television industry is born

• Television is one of the new marketing tools along with the creation of the credit card that changes American society.

Rock and roll of the 50’s The “colored” Music and the “Covers”

The Election of 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy• VP Nixon

expects to win and it’s a very close election but dead people in Chicago vote for Kennedy.

Bay Of Pigs invasion 1961

• 1959 Cuba- Fidel Castro overthrows Corrupt Batista government. Working with CIA VP NIXON is involved in planning an invasion of expatriates. To happen upon his becoming president.

Kennedy won the election but he was pressured into going ahead with the plan.

At the last minute he withheld much needed Air support and the invasion

failed

Civil Rights Sweatt v. Painter (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully proved lack of equality, in favor of a black applicant, the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessey v. Ferguson.The case involved a black man, Herman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education. At the time, no law school in Texas would admit black students, or, in the language of the time, "Negro" students.

Brown vs board of Education Topeka Kansas 1954, 1955

The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.[2]

Attorney Thurgood Marshall argued Sweatt & Brown. Earl Warren was

Supreme Court Justice

1957. The Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. On their first day of school, troops from the Arkansas National Guard would not let them enter the school and they were followed by mobs making threats to lynch.[1]

The Greensboro Sit-In at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960 launched a wave of anti-segregation sit-ins across the South and opened a national awareness of the depth of segregation in the nation.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ( ) was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings North Carolina in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South.SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. SNCC's major contribution was in its field work, organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Freedom riders 1961

When the Trailways bus reached Anniston and pulled in at the terminal an hour after the Greyhound bus was burned, it was boarded by eight Klansmen. They beat the Freedom Riders and left them semi-conscious in the back of the bus.[9] When the bus arrived in Birmingham, it was attacked by a mob of KKK members,[8] aided and abetted by the police under the orders of Commissioner Bull Connor.[12] As the riders exited the bus, they were beaten by the mob with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains. White Freedom Riders were singled out for frenzied beatings; James Peck required more than 50 stitches to the wounds in his head and he was taken to Methodist Medical Center, which refused to treat him

On May 17, a new set of riders, 10 students from Nashville, took a bus to Birmingham, where they were arrested by Bull Connor and jailed.[12] These students kept their spirits up in jail by singing freedom songs. Out of frustration, Connor drove them back up to the Tennessee line and dropped them off, saying, "I just couldn't stand their singing.” They immediately returned to Birmingham. The Kennedy’s were forced into action and called out Federal Marshalls to protect the Freedom Riders.

It seemed so simple to John Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. If elected, he promised, he would end racial discrimination in federally aided housing "by a stroke of the presidential pen." But months went by without the stroke. Negroes grew impatient, took to mailing him pens as sarcastic reminders. Newsmen questioned him about the delay at several press conferences. On the President's visit to Los Angeles last August, the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality greeted him with placards: PICK UP THE PEN, MR. PRESIDENT.

Kennedy was unable to get the Civil Rights Act

Passed. After his Assassination, Lyndon Johnson got it passed

Using Kennedy as a martyr.