SPECIAL REPORT: "1964-1970 NEWS"

As the decade of the 1960s began, the United States had the “highest mass standard of living” in world history.1 The strong American postwar economy of the late 1940s and 1950s continued into the 1960s. In fact, from 1940 to 1960, the U.S. gross national product increased fivefold.2 There were several reasons for this economic growth. As previously discussed, the military spending during World War II finally pulled the economy out of the Great Depression. The temporary curtailment in production of many consumer products during the war resulted in a burst of consumer demand at war’s end. Servicemen rushed home to take a job, buy a car, purchase a home in the suburbs, and start a family. This led to a “baby boom” and further consumer demand for products. During this period, growing U.S. corporations were well positioned to meet both domestic and foreign demand for products, given the crumbled economic infrastructure of foreign competitors such as Japan and Germany. Military spending during the “Cold War” rivalry with the Soviet Union added further to this economic expansion, creating a formidable “military-industrial complex” in the United States.3

Leading intellectuals began to deliberate on the nature of this society and the impact it was having on American citizens. In 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith published “The Affluent Society” in which he described the growing power of American corporations, their success at producing material goods, their ability to create consumer demand through advertising, and the growing “New Class” of highly educated business and professional people for whom work was no longer dirty and menial, but interesting and rewarding.4 Galbraith argued that, in the old world, poverty was an “all-pervasive fact” of life, but that in the contemporary United States, social and economic policies should be based on the fact that “the ordinary individual has access to amenities – foods, entertainment, personal transportation, and plumbing – in which not even the rich rejoiced a century ago.

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