as just chaotic and incoherent. it was a y labor day weekend. >> next on lectures in history, hillsdale college professor teaches a class on 1950s american culture. he describes how post-world war ii society changed due to the baby boom, suburbization and teen culture. his class is about an hour and ten minutes. today we're going to start the third part of this course, the third theme of this course. it says there were three salient developments that characterized the united states after world war ii. the concentration of power and economic life, the continuation

of american involvement in global affairs and the collapse of traditional few daden christian moral and standards. that's what we're going to talk about today the culture of the 1950s. ever since historians have paid more attention to what's regarded as the '60s cultural rev lugds, really had its seeds planted. so i want to share what the victorian was like. the little piece i gave you from william o'neil's book from "america 1945" describes some of the cultural assumptions. but much like the term liberalism, victorianism was actually liberal in its day. it was really an advance upon earlier pre-modern cultural pattern. much as liberalism in the 19th century was a progressive new saying and principles of the classic liberalism of the 1970s is considered progressive today. they were advanced or progressive with regard to old world or premodern. if you look at how basic things how families are formed over the

course of a historic development, the old-fashioned or traditional way was arranged marriage. the victorians made that more consensual and voluntary. children were allowed to pick who their patterns were, but the process was still controlled through the rituals of courtship. there were still certain rules and regulations applied to it. whereas today we have evolved to hooking up, where it's common as many college campuses not in hillsdale. i still don't understand what hills dating is, but maybe you could explain it to me. but large herds of men and women drink together and fornicate. that's sort of what the process of courtship has evolved into. and then the prehysteric unit of socialization was the tribe and over the course of time this was reduced to the extended family. in the victorian period this is

the nuclear family. where you had essentially parents and children, one generation living together. over the course of the 20th century this evolve said into single parents or groups that are sort of not just a nuclear family but a subatomic family, a child and two parents and any combination in the household. so sort of a progressive devolution of these social forms. the victorian moral standard was really those promoted pie the

methodist. the victorian morals were necessary as a way of maintaining social order in a rapidly changing world, and the same thing applies in america in the 20th century. there's also an element of what you call post-millennyism. victorian social reformers in the 19th century believed the sort of protestant ridge provided a way of dealing with problems that played a role since the beginning.

you can see this with the free will baptists, very active in the anti-slavery movement, the free will movement. all those reform movements, the campaigns against drinking, campaigns in favor of keeping the sabbath, prison reform, the thing that brought -- due to democracy in america really all had their origins in this predominantly evangelical movement. that we can christianize the social order, that we can bring about the perfect society on earth. and thelogically this is known

as post-millennialism. it's a kind of perfectionism in 19th century america. the traditional view that jesus christ would come to initiate. this movement is more characteristic of post-millennialism. this movement has its origins in religion, especially protestant christianity. but over the course of time sort of out lived its protestant origins. you can see this especially in benjamin franklin. you all read some selections of his autobiography, and you see the way benjamin franklin though he had lost his traditional upbringing still advocated

cruised to be referred to as the protestant work ethic in the autobiography. all those things of frugality, thrift, temperance, turned out to be valuable for the purpose of advancing and success in this world. the way to wealth, the way to improve society, the material conditions of the world are very useful, frankly. so you can see the utility of the old puritan values, even though he doesn't think they have any religious significance anymore. and anyway benjamin franklin sort of the outstanding figure of the american dream, the self-made man. that if you simply follow these moral principles, if you cultivate these virtues there'll be moral success in the world and if you ply this as a whole, that social problems can be solved wii the cultivation of

these religiously based virtues. this is rooted in the understanding of the nature of man. one that goes back to the origins of western civilization. the idea of the dual nature of man. that we were creatures that had a rational and an animal element. and part of the job of human beings is to make sure their rational capacities would control their animal capacitiesch. and humans had the ability to transcend, your self-control and moral improvement was what morality and virtue was all about. benjamin franklin, you can see his quest for moral perfection, that he was going to eliminate all his moral devises.

he was going to achieve personal perfection. so moderation or temperance would be the moltivation here. you may remember originally in the movie humphrey bogart, he's a drunkard and he's all hung over. and he's pleading with catherine hepburn saying you've got to understand -- what was her name -- it's only human nature. and she says human nature is what we're put on this earth to overcome. this is what the victorian moral drama is all about. the individual effort and sort of the social effort to over come our vices and to be able to control ourselves to transcend our lust and our vices and our animal nature, right? so self-control is the chief victorian virtue. i want to show you an example of

this from major league baseball, 1947. this is joe dimaggio, as an example of this self-control type. dimaggio is famous for not controlling his emotions. it was 1947 world series, yankees against the dodgers. and he was batting and two men on base. he hits a long fly ball and certainly would have been a home run and was caught by the dodger's home fielder. look at this clip. it was very quick. and not look so much at the catch but at dimaggio's reaction. >> he makes a one-handed catch.

>> when dimaggio kicked the dirt like that, that was as emotive as he ever got. he had such self-control, that was the remarkable thing about that play. when you compare this in the way athletes today express themselves on field you can see the difference between that old model and the new model. and joe dimaggio, for a generation of eamericans demaumg yo really did incapsulate that sort of old idea of the greatest generation of stowic self-control. was that the same year -- broke in, yes, it was. a very important year in american cultural history. and also important because dimaggio was an italian-american.

and italian-americans have a reputation for having less self-control an british protestants. again, these were cultural stereo types. but the fact that dimaggio had absorbed this anglo-american stoic demeanor. dimaggio was known as -- that's a term you don't hear much anymore. but we live in the moderate epicenter those sort of mediterranean dissent. they're adopting this sort of standard of victorian. that's sort of the individual. they sort of struggle for self-control in the individual. to have your rational capacities control your emotions.

likewise social policy follows the same model. do everything we can to get individuals to control themselves. in other words, social policy is supposed to award virtue and punish vice. we want our social institution, our political institution, our cultural institution to help cultivate these virtues and minimize these vicess. one of the most interesting things about america in the 19th century and into the 20th century. and one of the things that's changing fundamentally is you had a laissez-faire economy -- combined with that, though, was a great deal of cultural and social control. the federal government doesn't get involved with this very much. but local and state governments did a great job of policing

moral and cultural, in constitution parliament's this is known as police power. there was a great deal of controlsert of culturely or morally. and today it's rather just the opposite. we have a highly regulated economy but the cultural is libitarian. so that's sort of a great transformation for america over the last century or so. but you'll see these institutions were designed in a way to make sure people were able to manage the economic freedom they have by the dultivation of these virtues. if you engage in the right kind of behavior, if you're frugal and zraes and temperament, it will lead to economic success. that's the way to wealth. they saw a connection not a discordance between a laissez-faire economy.

and the family of victorians was monogamous, and it was heterosexual, right. >> the family was a nuclear family and between one man and one woman only. but, again, to emphasize the ways in which victorian sort of social standards were different than earlier ones, it was still voluntary. no arranged marriages. the family was much more based on a affection rather than interest and compulsion. it was the modern nuclear family. it comes into the shape in the 19th century and comes into norm in the 20th century. the interest for divorce was still limited. legally no state had divorce law

until the 1960s. divorce was legally made to be expensive and difficult to obtain. i can remember in the 1970s where divorce was rather scandalous. over time it's lost that stigma. but in this period divorce was still something unusual, something that was socially frowned upon. it was also politically fatal. people like nelson rockefeller was more or less inelvableigible to be president of the united states because he had been divorced. there was supreme court who had been divorced. it still had a stigma to it because it was this threat. and social policy the assumption was -- and this goes back to

benjamin franklin -- vice is what led to poverty and not vice versa. the idea today of social sciences of the 20th century comes to see that people engage in bad behavior because of their economic conditions. the victorian assumption is just the opposite. people are poor it's because they have engaged in vice behavior and not vice versa. this is why it's important to adopt the welfare state because it would have inverted and interrupted this assumption people make. one of the things that changed this assumption was the great depression. if you have 25% of the population out of work it can't be because of their morals. something has broken down in the economic system, and that's one of the chief reasons why the new deal became acceptable. >> is the moral argument the same argument they made for the prohibition argument?

>> go too far, and you'll see one of the ways in which progressives took the moral argument on temperance -- the idea of moderating as opposed to absolutely abolishing. absolutely, that's one of the reasons why prohibition was adopted and the 18th amendment was repealed by the 21st amendment. so the old standard of distribution to the poor, charity had to be limited to the deserving poor as they were called. the victorians recognize some people are poor just because of bad luck, widows and orphans essentially. people not because of vicious behavior are suffering from poverty.

those people you can take care of. those are the deserving poor. most of the poor, you have to allow them to suffer the consequences from their behavior. that's the only way they're going to reform. so you don't want give charity to undeserving poor. again, one of the chief reasons on the limitation of the welfare state. this is one of the arguments against an income tax. an income tax is a tax on people with high incomes. so why tax them? this is discouraging productive behavior. you don't want to do that anymore you want to encourage vicious behavior by giving well fair to the undeserving poor. those are sort of the assumptions between the connection of moral and economic outcomes that continued into the 20th century but really taking a beating especially with the great depression. thus when charity was

administered what was called indoor relief. what we want to do is take the deserving poor outside of their morally dangerous environment and put them into asylums or orphanages where we can protect them from the temptations of vice. the goal here was to improve the moral environment of the poor and remove them from circumstances of vish neighbors. and again the whole asylum movement was about. this is what prison reform was about. not just to punish people who had committed crimes but to morally -- likewise for orphans,

you wanted to take them out of their neighborhoods and put them into institutions where they could be taught the right kind of behavior. and this is all an ideal. out of their neighborhoods and reform them. that was the theory behind victorian social policy. likewise there were lots of laws especially again at the state and local level that were many to surprise vice and to help people control themselves by removing the temptation to drink too much or take drugs or gamble or all these other thing. these ideas that those kinds of police regulations were perfectly legitimate was something that the government did do. as ian just pointed out this is the difference between temperance and prohibition. the victorians generally they didn't try to prohibit alcohol all together but into the 19th and early 20th century began do so until the whole nation -- it took a constitutional amendment

to do it but the whole nation adopted briefly prohiggs. likewise with regard to prostitution, the victorians generally held to a sexual double stt standard. their belief was males had more of a sex drive than females did and that prostitution was sort of an outlet that you needed males to have. the thing to do about prostitution was to establish a red light district where prostitution would be limited and regulated rather than trying to do away with it altogether. before world war i especially every major american city used to have its district that it was known where prostitutes were available. people will tell you stories that this is the case in hillsdale, michigan. i don't know if this is true or not you about you hear stories about buildings downtown used to be places where prostitution was flagrant because it was legally tolerated in these ibds in a. among 19th century feminist in a

social purity movement they objected to the double standard not because they wanted women to engage in the same kinds of sexual behavior as males you about they wanted males to exercise as much self-control as females did. they wanted a very stringent eun terry measure for the sexes and so/so campaigned against prostitution all together. finally in world war i where the federal government made it a requirement if you wanted an army base camp in your city you had to do away with drinking and prostitution. so the red light districts in america pretty much disappeared with world war i. some of the ways the federal government got involved in this. another is the man act. the white slave act. congress passed this in 1910. it made it a federal crime to transplant women across state lines for sexual purposes. it was designed to be against

prostitution but came to be against sexual relations in which lines were crossed or where anyone abetted terroristing that took place. if any woman was having sex with a man who was not her husband she was a de facto prostitute. this law that was designed to get after the institution of prostitution ended up being a nationwide campaign against any kind of sexual immorality. likewise, gambling. although today states actually promote gambling and advertise for it. the idea being that the lottery proceeds are going to promote education every state in 1900 printed gambling. some limited that someone won a lottery in another country. it was a federal crime to transplant wloert tickets across state lines and every state suppressed and put down gambling. this is a legitimate function of government is to try to remove the temptations to vice that

will allow people to improve their morals. likewise, every american church condemned artificial contraception until about 1930. i think it was the ebusiness copalians who were the first church to accept for married couples the use of contraception. in the 1960s, when almost every state repealed laws about dispensing of contraception and the catholic church was the last holdout tributing the use and dispensing of contraception. also congress tried to help the states through come stock acts. anthony come stock was sort the principle 19th century crusader against sexual vice especially. and the come stock acts made ate federal crime to mail anything, to use the federal mails for anything that was obscene or immoral. and that included any

information about abortion or contraception. and this is one of the ways in which the federal government through the postal power tried to help the states in their regulation of sexual immorality. another indication of this would be that circumstance up sigs reached its high point this the united states in about 1940. there was a revifl -- i'm talking here about male sirm up sigs. there was a revival of the male circumstance up sigs in the angelo american world for reasons that were not religious. it goes back to the church of st. paul that christians didn't have to sirm up size as jews but for reasons of hygiene and the idea that males would exercise more self-restraint was trobl probably the reason for male circumstance up sigs. it has been declining ever since and in in your opinion has been practically eradicated.

but all of these signs of encouraging the self-control. all of this was concentrated among protestants denominations. again, methodists, evan gelcals of various kinds. as opposed to the will it urgical protestants like the ebusiness cokalians or the lawsuit rans who were less inclined with the social movement associated with the evan gelcals and roman katd licks were largely out of it. part of the reason protestants were suspicion of american catholics was they didn't fit into this sort of victorian culture and enthusiasm for social reform. again, the protestant assumption here that i am talking about is that we can sort of achieve perfection in this world by the cultivation of these morals. and traditionalist catholics are rather suspicion of that. and pat stantsds were suspicion

of catholics because of that. they didn't believe that people had the capacity to improve the world in this kind of way. catholics were considered too lean yen about sin, right, and catholics were sort of other worldly in a way the protestant vision here i am talking about here is about perfecting the world in which we live and traditional catholicism tended to emphasize the next world rather than this world. as of well-known marion hymn hail holy queen enthrowned above. there is line that emphasizes this iptd po. it says this earth is but a vale of tears a place of banishment of fears. katd licks had a failingistic view that life on this earth is not about achieving perfection and improvement 6789sds it's something you have to suffer through until you get to your final reward in the other world. catholics don't have sort of the inclination to make the kind of social improvements that evangelical protestants are about.

the catholic ideas that success or poverty in this world may not have any clear connection between people's morality and behavior, that sims the wicked do achieve great wealth and success and sometimes good people are reduced to poverty. catholics just don't -- they are just kind of not with this program of protestant personal and social improvement. so this is -- since most americans are broadly speaking protestants in one way or another this is sort of the cultural tone of america in the 19th into the 20th century. thus it was promoted in public education. reading the bible, this kind of -- the encouragement of the protestant work ethic in american schools are just taken for granted. this is the reason why catholics established their separate system of parochial schools was they understood that public education was essentially protestant he had indicating. and you can see it in the public school system. likewise the mcgivy readers, you could see the way they were trying to sort of everyone cull

kate the protestant work ethic as a way of teaching children to read. later on the who ashio alg injury stories are ways to inculcate this moral vision through literature. american public life, even though you have no established church in the united states, there was this broad,ion denominational protestant culture which didn't emphasize sort of the religious and sectarian points about this but the widely shared sort of judeio christian protestant ethic. american product life was sufficient fuse with this as well. okay, so the 1950s now, talk about how this developed in the 1950s. the unraveling of the traditional judeo christian etd ethic you could see it in europe in the late 19th early 20th century. for americans you only begin to see it in the 1920s. the roaring '20s. the jazz age. the disillusionment after world

war i. right? but then it was sort of interrupted by the great depression, and then the wars. both world war ii and the cold war. the 1950s are really part of that. this is why you don't really see american society unravel until the 1960s, especially when the decline of cold war tensions as well as demographic factors like the baby boomers coming of age began to kick in. the 18950s are kind of a period of highiate us where the united states and the american people are still security conscious right? they still place a great deal of value on the family and on social order because of the traumtd impacts of the depression and the world wars. this is why the 1950s are considered a conservative decade even though as i said historians have tended to emphasize the way in which there is sort of of continuity in this development of cultural modernism from the beginning of the 20th century. the popular image of the 1950 as is a decade of conformity, that

americans were other directed as one of the phrases that social yolgss of the 1950s used, and that the americans were more than ever parts of large organizations. there was less individualism in the american culture in the 1950s than earlier there had been or later there would be. the term other directed is a good one because the idea is that the old sort of protestant worketic was about being inner directed, about you sort of having some fixed absolute standard, one that largely came from religion, and following that. right? that there was kind of a healthy kind of american individualism in this inner directedness that came out of especially a purant theology in the 1950s americans were very other directed taking their moral cues from other people, that americans were just sort of largely social in the 1950s rather than individually directed. in america in the 1950s you had

the society and the culture and the economy dominated by large organizations. there is a period where the american economy was dominated more than ever before since by a small number of large corporations. we have talked about the ways in which new deal economic policy and the war itself tended to concentrate american business in the mid 20th century. likewise, unions. workers ten to be members of handwriting industrial unions in the middle of the 1950s. in fact 1955 was the high point of union density in american labor history. so workers are part of large organizations. and of course government. that the new deal had established big government, a big federal central government of the kind that we've never seen before so that the middle of the 20th century is kind of a big unit economy, big unit society in which americans belong to large organizations. a large part of that too is there is a centralized media in the 20th century. a small number of large

networks. a smaller number of large big city newspapers. nothing like the sort of array of news outlets that you people have today. trinity? >> large corporations and centralized government also combine with the laisses-faire economics? >> oh, yeah, big government, big unions in the big corporations in the middle of the 20th century is because we even upped the laisses-faire with the new deal. the new deal established -- you couldn't have had large industrial unions without the wagner act. likewise a lot of new deal economic policy was meant to reduce competition, reduce individualism in the marketplace and to have cartels which are, you know, organizations that attempt to reduce competition. so the new deal largely swept away the laisses-faire economic idea. but it hasn't yet adopted -- this new deal liberalism hasn't adopted the cultural liberalism

that you sort with today's democratic party. that hasn't happened. fdr, la guardia, many of the new dealers they did attack the laisses-faire economic assumptions of victorianism that came from the 19th century but they didn't have in mind homosexual rights or abortion rights. they were very victorian in the social moral cultural beliefs. that's going to change in the 1960s. but there are some avant-garde intellectuals and artists and people like this that were calling into question those judeo christian moral standards. up with of the most interesting illustrations comes from oscar wilde from 1890 called the soul of man under socialism. it's this connection between the economic and the moral. wilde makes the argument that once socialism takes care of the economic problem, you have to

believe that socialism is going to take care of the economic problem. everyone is going to have enough. they don't have to worry about making a living anymore, then the individual will be free to create himself in any way that he wants to n. a way, marcos makes a similar argued in the german ideology and then every individual will be able to be like oscar wilde and express themselves artistically and creatively and be real vivid. there is economic socialism, collectivism in the economy is what leads to cultural individualism. in the 1950s we are in sort of a transition age where we have to some degree collectivized the economy. no longer lays affair but it's not socialist. we have not yet embarked at least in the mainstream on that cultural moral of overturning. okay. and as i said, the families is the central institution in this, in the '50s had this reputation

for bag conservative. there was the baby boom. there was a great period of family formation in the united states. this is why sort the popular images of the 1950s are very domestic. the father knows best sit come image of the 1950s. you had sort of a normal bore swa jaw. you have this this great domestic explosion in the united states one by the way that was limited to the united states. this didn't happen in western europe after world war ii. didn't happen in japan after world war ii. this was a peculiarly american thing, a little bit in australia and new zealand apparently but principally american. most of the historians trying to explain why this happened in the united states and not other places was a higher degree of religious observance. that americans were more religious than western europeans so the appeal of a continued sort of judeo christian culture

was more in evidence in the united states. the more religious you are, the more family oriented you are. there is a clear correlation between religious observance and family size for example. part of the reason for the demographic implosion that we talked about on day one, those population pyramids. it's closely correlated with the decline of religious observance. so we have the baby boom. that is the central demographic phenomenon of this course. 76 million children were born between 1946 and 1964. the baby boom years. and this reached a peek of about 4.3 million that were born in the year of 1957. so that's sort the peak of the baby boom bulge. to give you one example of what a massive and sudden increase in births this was, more children were born in the five years after world war ii than had been born in the 30 years before world war ii.

right? again, this is a tremendous expansion. a tremendous bulge, boom in the population. the average female marriage rate had been about 26 in 1890. and it had fallen below 20 in 1956. so women were getting married a lot younger. the average marriage rate. which means that some women got married even younger than that. it reached its low point in 1956. there were two cohorts that made up the baby boochl one was older women when had delayed having children during the depression and world war ii. sort of getting started late having children. but also and much more important were younger women who were marrying earlier and starting earlier. so that the average american woman in the 1920s had her last child when she was 26 years old. i remember the first time i read this, i thought oh, that's a tip typo. they mean that the average american woman had her first child at the age of 26. no. they were done having children at age 26. today most american women don't start having children until they are 26. that leaves more time to have

more children, the earlier it starts. another amazing thing about the baby boom was that it was -- there was no part of the american population that was not affected by it. usually when we talk about sort of large scale social phenomenon in american history you start making exceptions and talking about differences based upon race or class or religion. but there was none of that this affected almost the entire american population. same for blacks as it is for whites. the same for rich as it is for poor f. there is any indication of more of a great increase in the birth rate it was among urban educated whites which usually demographically it is the opposite. it was usually immigrants who had more children less educated people that had more children than those natively born and more educated. it's not that americans were turning to 18th century family practices of having large families with eight or ten

family. most families in the baby boom generation had three or four children. what made the numbers so vast was that almost none had no children. almost everybody had two or three or four children. there were very few childless couples. and very few people who didn't get married. again, the incidence of marriage in the american population in the 1950s was still very high. i think we have talked about this on the first day of class. i think it was recently in the last census or some point since the last census that a majority of adults, women, are not married. first time this has ever happened in american history. the vast majority of marriage aged men and women are married in the 1950s. another thing that happens in the 1950s is more children who are born live. there were great medical advances in the 1950s. the greatest thing that kept the population down through all of human history was infant mortality. the idea that a third or a half

of children wouldn't make it through to their first year. and thus wouldn't produce the next generation. most of that tremendous increase in human population in the 19th and the 20th centuries was due to a decline in infant mortality rate. that continues in the 1950s. case of polio and the most dramatic stories of medical advances was the conquest of polio in the 1950s which was a often fatal disease and a terrifying disease affecting young people, especially fdr having been afflicted by polio later in life. when he was in in his 20s. diphtheria and rubella vaccines are developed. children will living longer. polio cases is almost completely eradicated. the year before i was born, there was a great rubella outbreak, before the vaccine that produced 20,000

miscarriages and 30,000 birth defects. this is just one year before i was born. these things are unheard of today. these kinds of epidemic diseases. used to be a common part of life, childhood diseases. those children are now living longer as a result of these medical advances. another thing that comes out of the baby boom was since, especially this enjags of american women had not themselves been part of large families or extended families one of the best selling books in all of american history was benjamin spock's book on baby and child care. first edition came out in 1946. over 30 million copies were sold over the course of its life. advice to large numbers of young women who are having children. many pointed to to spock's book as an indication of this movement towards the cultural revolution of the 1960s that i have been talking about that spock was responsible for the generation the 19670s, that his advice to raise children by

permissive standards was what accounts for the social turmoil of the 1960s. which one of you is doing spock as your reading assign men. that's one of the nits of this spock. it was true that compared to earlier victorian guides of child rearing spock was relatively permissive. the old standard in the 19th century was that children are little devils and their wills need to be broken 678 right? that's what child rearing was all about. spock compared to that was a lot more indulgent, yes but not by later later standards of permissive parenting. there were a lot of things that he advised that american women didn't follow. he counselled ondemand breast feeding. when i was a child breast feeding was very much out of fashion and formula in bottles was the way babies were raised. also, spock, it's very interesting, if you read his book he sort of assumed that

boys are boys and girls are girls. he did counsel raising children by traditional gender roles. by today's standards spock wassing is something of a reactionary when it kams to his assumption that there were girls and boys. what made him controversial was his opposition of the vietnam war in the 1960s. he became active in the anti-war movement then people projected his anti-war liberalism onto his child rearing books but that's something of a distortion. all right, american families are expanding a great deal in the 1950s. skpitsds' all taking place -- mostly taking place in the american suburbs. 1955 was also an important landmark year because it is a year when more americans lived in suburbs and cities in history. 1920 had been a landmark where america became an urban nation where more people lived in cities than on farms. and not long after, american

america became a suburban nation. suburban population double between 1950 and 1970. by 1970, the suburbs included more people than cities and farms combined. the country was majority suburban nation. in this period about 1 million acres of farm 8d was being involved in suburban housing better year. the landscape was changing. 83% of the population increase of america in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. the 1950s were the decade of greatest population increase in american history with maybe the exception of the first or second decade of the 20th century. and it was notedbly all driven by natural increase. american population had increased in the past because of both natural increase but also a lot of immigration. in the 1950s immigration almost was completely cut off.

this is all homegrown, literally. this is natural increase. immigration doesn't play much of a role in this at all. every major american city in the 1950 right side lost population except los angeles. los angeles was something of a suburban sprawl itself really not a concentrated city. also within one of the political consequences of this is that big cities began to lose their dominance within the states so that boston doesn't dominate massachusetts the way it used to. new york city doesn't dominate new york the way it used to. new york declined from 55 to 40% of new york state's population in this period. it's increased actually. there has been something of a reurbanization movement. new york city has more population now and it has increased its relative influence in the state of new york. boston went from being 18 to being only 9% of massachusetts's population. chicago, much more concentrated population, losing it to the suburbs in illinois.

cleveland went from being 13% of ohio's population to 4% of ohio's population. and detroit, likewise. once a third of michigan's population lived in detroit. that's down -- it's probably even lower than that now. about 11% of michigan's population. so there's, again a great tide, exodus of population from the cities into the suburbs. and also from the farms into the cities. what is happening in a lot of big american cities is the native born white population is moving out of the suburbs. we have talked about many of the ways in which the subsidies and government policies that encouraged suburbanization, the interstate highway act, banking policies, federal loans were racially discriminated. this move from the cities to the suburbs was largely a white movement. the population of those cities was being replaced by black migrants from the south, the

continuation of the great migration, also of puerto ricans because they were -- because they were part of the american commonwealth. immigration from puerto rico wasn't limited the way it was from other countries. in other words you have a city like new york city, whites are moving out and their places are being taken by blacks ander port ricans so the demographics of american cities changes a great deal in the 1950s. all right. domestic culture and television will be the most important sort of illustration of this. the development of television right about the beginning of the 1950s. and you can say that in the 1950s it starts out where virtually nobody has television in 1950. and then by the end of the '50s everybody has television. the numbers are about 172,000 in 1950 to 15 million between 1948 and 1952. this is a faster growth curve than any previous technological development. radio really took off in the

1920s. by the gingham of the -- right after world war i, almost nobody had a radio. it became a massive sort of consumer product in the 1920s. one of the fastest growing consumer industries in the 1920s. likewise, automobiles. henry ford making mass production available to ordinary americans. what starts off as a luxury item then becomes a mass produced consumer good. likewise, the telephone. these devices were all rapidly adopted but television was more rapidly adopted than any other. it may be the smart phones. i can remember a time when nobody had a smart phone and now setly everyone has one. i would imagine the growth curve for those was bigger than television. television was a rapid culturally transforming phenomenon. the important thing about television is it is connected to to family. it sort of replaces the fireplace as the center of the home.

that's the hearth, the thing the family gathers around, sort of brings the american people together. it's replacing what had been previously the dominant form of popular entertainment and the biggest entertainment industry in the united states motion pictures, and the movies. in 1946, it was the peak of american movie attendance. about 90 million americans went to the movies every week in 1946: about 60% of americans let's just say went to the movies each week. and that fell to about 45 million a week, half, by 1953. and this is apparently still falling because, you know, because of later technological innovations like vcrs and dvds or you know, whatever -- netflix, whatever it is, streaming, people don't go to the movies the way they used to. dana? >> [ inaudible ]. break down the family unit because they are watching tv,

not talking? do you disagree with that? >> tell, television is -- movies you could say bring people together, and the description that patterson gives of movie theaters as, you know, cultural sort of civic institutions, they were very ornate, very palatial, had a lot of services and they began to decline as a result of television. television reduces social interaction and television is mass produced commodity. one of the things it is doing is sort of homogenizing american taste. broadcast media, where everyone is watching the same things, is one of the things that is sort of making american life more sort of bland and sort of interchangeable. and it's certainly true that television may well reduce the amount of say sort of culture that individuals produce by conversation and by personal interaction. yeah, there is some truth to that. there is a degree in which there are sort of cross currents in these cultural developments.

and television when it started out in the early 1950s when you had to have some money for a television because they were still very expensive, the programming changed over theers to of the '50s as well. initially there was a lot of sort of high quality kind of high culture television, sort of things that were applied from the stage to early television. and as the audience got bigger, and became more and more of a mass audience the quality of television declined in the 1950s. cultural critics made a lot out of that as well. whenever you sort of mass produce something it's going to be pitched towards the lowest demonstrate denominate ar. what's the largest audience share you can get. the quality is going to be reduced. you have more access, but quality at least by some standards declines. okay. new york city. 55 movie theaters closed in new york city in just the year 1951 alen. this is also changing the urban

land skachlt as i said, movie theaters were places that drew people oitd of their homes and put them together in social space whereas television issed a omizing them and reinforcing them as the family as the basic social unit. the only growth in movie theaters was naturally drive-ins in the 1950s because americans became more car oriented in the 1950s. that was the only place there was an expansion n outdoor movie watching. also television changed the preferences americans had for sports. football was more well adapted to television than baseball was. and this is the period in which football and later on basketball also began to compete with baseball as the american past time. television had a lot to do with that. there are people to this day who tell you they prefer to listen to a baseball game on the radio than to watch it. whereas these other sports lend themselves more to the visual of television than to the old radio

format. so television, you sort of take it for granted today because the application of this idea of the image being broadcast and available to people -- you have to imagine how new that was in the 1950s. right? that radio, buy bringing sound, the radio and the phonograph into the home had a similar impact. television changes that very dramatically. you are so used to having, you know, sort of what i would still call television at your fingertips, you are sort of watching television or images all the time. some of you might well be doing that now if i didn't forbid you to bring your cell phones into the classroom. so the ubiquitousness of this in today's culture. you have to historically imagine what it was like when this was all together new, when the idea of the image being available through television was cutting edge. all right. another consequence of the baby boom was the development of a separate youth culture within the united states. really, the whole idea of adolescence, of the teenager, is

something that's new in western civilization in 20th century. for one thing, the united states just became a lot younger country in the 20th century and as a result of the baby boom. the median age in the united states in this period fell to a little over 28. that was the average american was 28 years old. it's over 38 today. the population has been age ever since the baby boom. the so-called teen population, and again, this is a cohort that really social yolgss and people didn't recognize until the 20th century. there being a distinct kinds of teen phase of life or adolescence was a relatively recent development so the teen niche or cohort increased, doubled from 10 to 20 million between 1950 and 1970. this had all kinds of economic effects. i am going to talk principally with thecal turl effects in the effects in there being a

separate youth culture. in additional society there was no such thing as being a teenager. you were a child. and then usually at some point that coincided with a biology sexual maturity and you became an adult. there was usually some sort of initiation process by which you went from being a child to being an adult. as western society, and as the economy, ads all these sorts of demographic changes take place there becomes this extended intermediate period between childhood and adulthood of adolescence, the teen years begins to take on an independent sort of population cohurt, kind of demographic. the number of years that people spent in school also was attenuated. it used to be about the age of adulthood, most people didn't go to school beyond the eight helicopter grade, didn't need to in 19ths century society. they spend more and more time in school extinldsing this period

of adolescence. only about 13% of the high school aged population, between say 14 to 18 were actually in high schools in 1900. high school was a thing that was limited to a small segment of the population. high school was a big deal. it was only for the few, for the elite. and that's increased rapidly over the course of the 20th century. about half of the population that is high school age is in high school in 1930. increases to 75% by 1950. almost everybody -- by 1965, almost everybody who is high school age is in high school. and about half of them go on to college. if you look at the college numbers, a similar replication where in the late 19th century almost nobody went to college and it's increasingly common today. today about two thirds of americans spend at least some time in college. only about half of them finish. so you have got about one third of the pop hags that are college graduates. but the vast majority of people spend some time now in higher education. look what it was just for high

school in 20th century. and again all of this is sort of extending the period of time, this period of adolescence. so you get a separate youth culture. right? again, advertisers are looking at this. young people begin to adopt their own styles of dress. the kind of music they listen to especially is very different. there's a kind of segregation, a separation of youth culture from mainstream culture. what you had was people who were physically adults. in fact one of the things that happens in 19th and 20th century that biologically speaking men and women became sexually thatture at an earlier age probably because of increased better nutrition and things like that. people are actually biologically adults earlier but they are not expected to behave like adults especially earn a living until later. you have this biological adults who are still dependent upon their families.

this dependence is being increased further and further. maybe of you may be thinking about this today, what are you going to do after you graduate from college? i don't know what the numbers are, but apparently an increasing number of college graduates go home and continue to live with their families. right? one of the big points in the obamacare debate was president trump said he wants to maintain the ability for kids to be on their parents' health insurance until they are 26 years old. right? 26 is about the age at which we might expect young people to go out and start making a living for themselves. that's what i'm talking about the extension of this period of economic social dependence even while again you have ironically enough earlier biological maturity. here are the college numbers. 2 million americans went to college in 1940. it reaches 10 million by 1973. and that's further expansion of this youth culture. also, more disposable income --

jenna. >> go back quickly i'm sorry to your comment about biological adults versus -- >> social adults. >> what about there is evidence that psychologically we are not really adults until prefrontal cortex development finishes at age 25. was there any belief in this in the 1950s that psychologically they are not fully developed as adults yet? >> again, the question of when people are psychologically adults as opposed to able the reproduce. really that's what i'm talking about here. is that people are able to reproduce without producing economically. the idea that you are emotionally not our full self until you are in your 19 autos i'm not familiar with any work about that in 1950s. but there certainly was a sense in which this idea of a -- this is a good way to put it. that children or adult adolescents, instead of taking

their social cues and being aculturated by adults, by the previous generation, are getting it from their peers. right? it is peer rather than adult acculturation that's taking place. people were worried about this. patterson talks about many people who thought that juvenile delinquency was a big problem in the 1950s. this next generation was going to be completely unsocialized. we will talk about rock and roll and musical expression and what that was. somewhat exage rated but no one had seen this sort of large number of people who were in this sort of twilight zone economically and biologically. aristotle said you are not mature enough to study philosophy until you are in your 30s. >> arguments to be made that even though biologically you are

adults younger but emotionally you become adults later because of school, not having to do adult things at a very young age, like mill father and get a job and stuff. they are not being forced to he gro up. >> the idea is that children don't have to engage or be socially adults until a much later date because society provides for them. their parents provide for them. they have disposable income. again, before the -- early 20th century, even adults didn't have much disposable income. there wasn't much money to spend on entertainment and things like that. now the adults have and it they allow their kids to have it. they are able to indulge in the consumer culture the kind of consumer culture that patterson describes. deferring the age at which children have to be adults is what is going referred to. no society in history had the resources to be able to support

such a large segment of the population without being productive. in a way you can say this is wonderful, the fruits of cap taflism and economic development but it may well have these retarding social emotional consequences. no human society ever experienced this before. lgs also, youths are able to physically separate themselves from adult supervision by the automobile, right, they are able to consider the geographical mobility of american people. automobiles provide a place for young people who are sexually mature to you know, be sexually active without adult supervision. things like the transistor radio allowed people to have their separate different musical tastes indulged apart from adults. all of these things contributed to a way in which the young people were able to have their own cultural setting. this had never been seen before

the 1950s. one of the concerns about this as more and more children are going to high school and college there was a steady decline in s.a.t. scores as the baby boom cohort increased. this was a matter of some concern. it appeared like the intellectual consequence was this new youth culture are not good. there is no ready explanation for this. but one possibility is there does seem to be a clear correlation between a decline in standardized iq test scores and birth order. you are having more and more second and third and fourth children they are less apt to do well on the s.a.t. birth order may be sequence. don't want to discourage anybody. i'm third born myself. educational decline in the 1950s. there is sort of a panic. american periodically have senses that their educational system is in the crisis. especially in the 1950s as a

result of we mentioned the development of sputnik by the soviets, they appeared to be ahead of america in terms of technological and military development and that we needed to do something to reform our educational system and this sort of decline in educational standards in the 1950 ds was another sense there is smog wrong with american youth and it's displaying itself in standardized test scores. the music of the 1950s is perhaps the most important development, the most important sign of their being a separate youth culture. the development of rock and roll in the 1950s. and this really was one that came together, brought together earlier sort of distinct and local musical cultures that came into the mass form known as rock and roll. it really arose out of country and western music on the one hand and rhythm and blues on the other and they were brought together into rock and roll. in the 1950s, people brought the argument there were earlier

examples of this in the 1940s. country and western music was a distinct niche. country and western music was considered vulgar hill billy music. rhythm and blues likewise that was black music. it was rooufrd referred to as race music before they renamed it rhythm and blues. and rock and roll was taking these two musical subcultures and bringing them together to again the white middle class vast baby boom culture. and the person who is most responsible for this is elvis presley, he is considered the largest rock and rollen in of the 1950s. patterson tells you sam phillips, the guy who discovered elvis presley was saying if i could find a white man with a negro sound i would be a billionaire. this is what concerned a lot of americans in the 1950s about rock and roll is it was taking the music of the hill billies and the negros and our children are going to be affected by it. many people believed rock and

roll was responsible for juvenile delinquency, increase in drug use all of these pathologist that were associated with white people from the wrong side of the tracks and blacks. you can go and listen to elvis presley and a video of him and it's hard for you today to imagine in a people ever were concerned about him being a threat. he would seem sort of rather innocent and quantd to you. but at the time that idea, sort this crossover these cultures into mainstream middle class white culture was something that alarmed a great many people. it's interesting though. over the course of the 1950s, rock and roll eventually became more whitened. lost some. edges of its original rhythm and blues backgrounds. if you look at pat boone as an illustration of this you can see the way in which rock and roll aerd to be tamd by the end of the 1950s. it's going to change in the '60s with the british invasion which is going to start innocently enough with beatles but is then

going the take on elements like the rolling stones and the who. but the idea that rock and roll might have been just a temporary phenomenon, there appeared to be an argument that that was the case that by 1960 that rock and roll in its original phase, it was reared to as rock and roll as opposed to rock from the 1960s. but that was the audio of the manifestation of this youth culture. okay. let me stop there. and we will continue with the culture of the 1950s in our next class on thursday. thanks for your attention. american history tv is in primetime all week with our original series, lectures in history. focusing on college and university classrooms around the country. tonight, we take look at the civil war, including a lecture on cultural heritage and confederate monuments. american history tv in primetime

begins at 8:00 p.m. eastern. labor day weekend, on american history tv on c-span3, at 8:00 p.m. eastern, saturday on lectures in history, fears about overpopulation. >> some of the issues talked about are interesting. pesticides was a big one. pollution was a big one. non-renewable resources, things like oil and gasoline. but the super big one, the thing that really overshadowed that first earth day was the prospect of global famine due to overpopulation of the earth. >> sunday on the presidency, the friendship between presidents hoover and truman. >> it is easy to overlook the fact that they both had roots in farming communities, they had known economic hardship and self relyians. they were transformed by the

conplaying rags of world war i, and they lived in the shadow of franklin d. roosevelt. >> and monday, the 1967 detroit riots. >> we prefer to think about it like a rebellion because of all of the energy and anger and act victim of that went into that moment had long been predicted. people had been begging for some remedy for the housing discrimination, the police brutality, the economic discrimination. so that frustration cannot be understood as just chaotic and incoherent. it was a rebellion. >> three day labor day weekend on american history tv on c-span3. now on lectures in history, it's james madison university professor evan friss. he teach as class about the evolution of suburbs from the early 1900s to the frept and talks about how changes to home loan