The Affluent Society

Read this article, which takes its name from John Kenneth Galbraith's book about the postwar economic boom and political culture. It was undoubtedly an unprecedented time in American history, but it ultimately did not quite match mainstream expectations.

Notes

  1. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 129.
  2. See, for example, Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century," Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (February 1992), 1–34.
  3. Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden, Well Worth Saving: How the New Deal Safeguarded Home Ownership (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
  4. Leo Schnore, "The Growth of Metropolitan Suburbs," American Sociological Review 22 (April 1957), 169.
  5. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2002), 202.
  6. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, Basic Books, 1999), 152.
  7. Leo Fishman, The American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962), 560.
  8. John P. Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941–1960 (New York: Norton, 1989), 219.
  9. David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 17.
  10. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
  11. Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working–Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 193.
  12. Adam W. Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7.
  13. See also J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
  14. Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
  15. James T. Patterson and William W. Freehling, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25; Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 161–164.
  16. Patterson and Freehling, Brown v. Board, xxv.
  17. Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 6.
  18. William Bradford Huie, "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," Look (January 24, 1956), 46–50.
  19. Lewis L. Gould, Watching Television Come of Age: The New York Times Reviews by Jack Gould (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 186.
  20. Gary Edgerton, Columbia History of American Television (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 90.
  21. Ibid., 178.
  22. Christopher H. Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2001), 364.
  23. Bruce Springsteen, "SXSW Keynote Address," Rolling Stone (March 28, 2012), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-the-complete-text-of-bruce-springsteens-sxsw-keynote-address-20120328.
  24. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 102–103.
  25. See Richard Tedlow, "The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal," Business History Review 50 (Spring 1976), 25–45; and Wendy Wall, Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  26. Gregory Eow, "Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932–1952," PhD diss., Rice University, 2007; Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); and Kim Phillips Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009), 43–55.
  27. Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  28. Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 180, 201, 185.
  29. Steven Wagner, Eisenhower Republicanism Pursuing the Middle Way (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 15.