The American Dream in the 1950s

Association and Organization of Man

In the 1950s, businesses expanded rapidly. By 1956, most Americans no longer held blue-collar or industrial jobs. But more people were working in higher paid, white collar drinks – clerical, managerial, or professional occupations. Unlike blue-collar workers who manufactured goods for sale, white collar workers performed work in the fields such as sales. advertising, insurance and communications. Many white-collar workers performed their jobs in large corporations or government organizations. Some of these universities were expanding through conglomerations. (A conglomerate is a large corporation that includes many smaller companies in the same industries.) For example, in the conglomerate, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), whose original business was communications, bought car rental companies, insurance companies, and hotel and motel chains. Through this diversification, or investment in various areas of the economy, ITT tried to protect itself from declines in individual industries. Other giant parent companies included American Telephone and Telegraph, Xerox and General Electric.

In addition to diversification, other strategy for business expansion – franchises were developed at this time. Liberty is a company that offers similar products or services in many areas. (It is also called the free right, sold to someone, to do business using the name of the parent company and the system developed by the parent company.) San Bernardino.They were making hamburgers, hamburgers, and their kitchen.Salesman Ray Kroc paid $2.7 million for the rights to the drive-thru in April 1955 , Illinois, where he further improved the assembly line process and introduced the golden arches, which are not known throughout the world.

While franchises like McDonald’s helped set the standard for what people ate, some American workers found themselves having such standards. Employees who were well paid and secure in their companies sometimes paid a price for economic advancement: the loss of their individuality. In general, they didn’t want to do business with creative inventors, rebels, or anyone who would rock the corporate ship. In The Organization, a classic 1956 book based on a study of suburban Forest Park, Illinois, and other communities, William H. Whyte described how new and large organizations created “society of people.” Companies giving personality tests to people applying for jobs to make the physical culture “fit” work. Societies rewarded hard work, cooperation, and trust and therefore contributed to the growth of conformity, which Whyte called “goodness”. Despite these achievements, many workers questioned whether pursuing the American dream would demand too great a price to replace individual conformity.

The Suburban Life Style

Although the job of achieving security took a psychological toll on some Americans, who resented having to control their own personalities, it also allowed them to provide their families with good things in life. Most Americans worked in cities, but fewer and fewer lived there. New roads and the availability of cars and gasoline made commuting possible. In the early 1960s, every large city in the United States was surrounded by suburbs. Of the 13 million new homes built in the 1950s, 85 percent were built in the suburbs. Many people in the suburbs embraced the American dream of an affordable home for a single family, good schools and a safe, healthy environment for their children, and close neighbors like themselves.

Baby Boom

When soldiers returned from World WarII and settled into family life, they contributed to the unprecedented human explosions known. baby boom In the late 1940s and early 1960s, the birth rate in the United States sat. At the height of the baby boom, in 1957, one American baby was born every seven seconds, amounting to 4,308,000 births that year. From this came the greatest generation in the history of the nation. As the population in America flew, businesses expanded, and more moved home to the suburbs, it had an even greater impact in the 1950s.

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