hello historians and welcome to week six of has 206 this week we'll be taking a look at the post-world War II period leading up to what we'll call the 60s um so this is 1946 through November 22nd 1963. and there's a reason why we're stopping it here which we'll find out at the end of the lectures this will cover the early Cold War period early civil rights and then we'll end with JFK's assassination so we left off last week the second world war and then also before that the Great Depression so that period which started 1929 and ended in 1945 it featured many years of open well over a decade of unemployment until World War II came it featured not readily accessible access to you know supplies of food for a lot of Americans upward Mobility in terms of economic salary things like that people's bank accounts were in Jeopardy people's retirement were in Jeopardy and then during the second world war there's this new influx of employment but there's also rationing that kind of controls what people can buy what they can buy not everybody played by those rules but nevertheless it was there so by the time we get to the end of the second World War there is pent up demand when people want to buy stuff so the immediate postwar period is a new era for United States consumerism and consumerism is acting in the interest of buying and selling stuff but just for the sake of you know consuming it so we'll take a look at a couple of examples as exactly what consumerism is and the textbook definition would be it's the spending for material satisfaction new Lifestyles um and no longer being frugal so and also acting in the best interests of consumers part of that is how do you keep them buying stuff right how do you keep them interested the post-world War II period in the United States is going to be a poster child for that so a couple of the things that we're going to get access to is credit so here's a picture of a Diners Club credit card live now pay later that kind of thing and I'm sure that some of you are immediately thinking like well this sounds a lot like what we read about during the 1920s with the payment plans people buying stocks on debt and that was a fear everyone thought there's going to be a not everybody most people thought there was going to be another economic depression after the second world war um but if you think about like the demand and so people are buying stuff when people buy stuff and there's manufacturing capacity in the country it's going to put people to work so people are buying um you know cars people are buying homes people are buying food um clothing if it's manufactured in the United States that demand will increase employment so access to credit is going to help drive that demand one example of consumerism also is toys so obviously that we're looking at Barbie Barbie embodies consumerism because a you get the doll but it's not so much just the doll there's things oops excuse me there's things that you buy for Barbie and those are our accessories and sunglasses the purses the clothes Ken gets a little insecure gets the Corvette with the Malibu Beach House so Barbie itself is consumerism um and the accessories are definitely consumerism but they're also Mary in real life are those are kind of the things that real human beings are buying for themselves sunglasses new outfits that they were not doing during the Great Depression and the Second World War cars are another example of this new consumerism cars are one of those things that seem to go along with the American dream and you can see that in the immediate post-war period new car sales are going to Skyrocket and the big oh sorry I have a typo here the big three that are driving this are Ford General Motors and Chrysler not motos that needs to be Motors my apologies so we'll take a look at General Motors General Motors in the post-war periods really going to embrace the idea of a new model of car every year so this new model of car like let's say the 1947 model will have different features and it'll look different than the 1946. this is consumerism as it gives an incentive for people to buy something new even though they don't need it people don't need a new car every year especially back then because they were actually built to last but nevertheless that's consumerism like the fins on the back of Cadillacs different upholstery different options just the way the headlights look in different yearly models that's consumerism and a lot of that was embraced by General Motors at the end of the or sorry at the beginning of the Cold War period in post-war America so you can see they also had tears too so in addition to the new yearly car models you also had tiered brands so Cadillac was at the top this was the most expensive model around this period you could have bought a Cadillac for fifty six hundred dollars and that was real money back then a little bit more affordable would have been Oldsmobile and then more accessible in terms of affordability that everybody would have been the Chevrolet they're all General Motors products but you can see how they're tiered and then again within the tiered Brands every year there's a new model car that comes out so this is going to drive competition because this is capitalism this is a market driven Society now and General Motors is in competition with Ford you know who is in competition with Chrysler so they too are developing new yearly models and this drives Innovation this drives eventually safety features and Automobiles this drives a lot it drives power as in the 60s we're going to get muscle cars which are awesome and um the way that cars are built too they're different than European models because if if any of you've ever been to Europe or if you can envision roads in Italy or Germany or France they're not long and straight typically with the exception of the Autobahn in Germany but they're winding and they're kind of tight so agility Mobility cornering suspension those are kind of the Hallmarks of European automobiles with the United States once we get the interstate and highways it's all about going straight and fast so like quarter mile drag racing that's a byproduct of the way that more or less our roads work and that's how part of the reason why we get bigger and better engines and Automobiles and muscle cars because that's in our Geographic DNA so in addition to consumerism another Trend that's going to hit during this post-war period is suburbanization Americans are going to start leaving those cities which has kind of been a theme of our class just how cities were you know more or less created during the Gilded Age how they changed during the Great Migration and also immigration during the late 19th century and now they're going to change through suburbanization so there's a few different things that are driving this what is the availability of new homes so things like innovators like uh Levant so like Levitt towns they took the assembly line towards these suburbs and one team would come in and pour concrete the next team would come up and build walls then they would go on to the next plot the next team would come up put Windows in next team rough next team shingles and then they would go down the road and they would be well-built homes and they would be affordable because remember part of that GI bill was Uncle Sam was providing funding for veterans to buy homes and when you had over 12 million Americans who were in uniform that is incentive for this post-war boom and this is because in addition to automobiles a big part of the American dream or at least is what a lot of folks say is the idea of home ownership this is the idea of private property that goes back to John Locke during the founding of the United States so the suburbanization kind of like away from the industrial noise pollution of the city um is part of it the other part of it too is something that's called white flight which is when the Great Migration hits and then uh many of these white Americans now have the mobility and the uh cash to benefit from suburbanization they're going to leave the cities and then you're going to have this it's going to affect cities in quite a different ways they're gonna cities are going to become much more diverse because a lot of white Americans are going towards the suburbs tax revenues are going to fall because businesses are going to close in the cities because there's less consumers and customers to shop at them you're going to see big things happen to the way people buy groceries appliances as department stores are going to start kicking off in the suburbs and in downtowns too um so there's all these trends that are happening that are increasing suburbanization I do want to come back to that when we talk about the interstate the 50s are a cultural revolution too there's this idea of rebellion and these are coming from the kids of the folks who have served in the second world war so you can see it in movies with Marlon Brando and James Dean you can see it in rock and roll with Elvis Presley and if you notice just some of the things here that we're looking at um you know they're kind of dressed like the badasses like obviously motorcycle culture is starting to become a thing um like Petty criminal um Elvis is singing here in jail but also the thing that these three have in common and many other entertainers at the time is they're very young so with Baby Boomers who are the children of the folks of that generation that served in World War II and survived the depression they're going to embrace Rebellion they're going to be more individualistic than their parents were so this rebellious culture is going to hit the youths of the 1950s and it's going to be a really big deal the other thing that's happening in ever in most or not most a lot of Americans households is television television is going to become more affordable it's going to become very popular like we talked about with the radio and pressing records uh TV is going to democratize entertainment even further especially when if you think about motion pictures and movies those are something where you had to you know walk or drive or ride your bikes towards a destination in a movie theater pay admission and then watch the film now because of Television this is a direct competitor movie industry thought that it was going to be put out of business by television because you pay the initial cost up front and then you can watch entertainment motion pictures on your television so it's going to give movies a run for its money but you're also going to have more mass culture in the forms of television shows uh quiz shows entertainment so on and so forth another place where we left off last week was the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the United States were the only Power who had those kinds of weapons which is a really really big deal the Soviets were working on them everyone's working on them but we were the first ones to drop them and develop them so we make the conscious decision that rather than give the world access to this technology is we're going to try to have a monopoly on nuclear weapons when you try to have a monopoly on something this is not unlike a market considered a market for weapons technology you're going to have competition that are also going to want access to it so there with the exception of maybe the nuclear weapons Monopoly that we tried to instill this is a the United States is going to create a world of internationalism the days of the Monroe Doctrine and us doing our own thing those are now done so we're going to have institutions like the United Nations which is international democracy this was a product of the failures of the League of Nations and also the destruction from the first and second world wars and this is an institution where Nations can air grievances they can debate devote sorry debate vote and discuss and then it's an alternative to war especially it's an alternative to World War and they didn't exclude everybody either there's a general assembly which has mass membership and there's also what's called the security Council the security Council are the ones who can make changes to the un's Charter they're the ones who approve or veto peacekeeping missions and the members are the United States the United Kingdom France China and Russia now Russia is an adversary of the United States now in this period because they were Communists but the reason why they were on there is because they helped fight and win the Second World War the other institutions are the World Bank and the international monetary fund which are providing loans for Nations to come back online in the wake of the second World War I'm going to end this video here because this is really important in terms of a Break um the Truman Doctrine is what we'll discuss throughout the next video and then we'll talk about Eisenhower a little bit so see you in episode two