The Boom of the 1950s

Baby Boom of the 1950s

The 1950s was a time when our men and women in uniform had just returned triumphantly from World War II.  We had every reason to believe and were justified in the feeling and attitude that we were staring a wonderful future full of promise.  We were staring at a time of peace and prosperity without foreseeable end in sight.

What Seat Belts

 

Never had so many great things come together to make our future so bright.  It seems that from this point on, almost everything 50s was labeled “BOOM.”

·       The Postwar Booms: Historians use the word “boom” to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called “baby boom.”

·       This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies–3.4 million–were born in the United States. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million “baby boomers.” ~HISTORY.COM

During the 1950s the United States was the world’s strongest military power, it’s economy was the best in the world and booming, and the benefits of the prosperity were, new cars, new houses, and a never ending amount of consumer goods were available to people more than ever before.

Shopping Boom

Many developers correctly read the opportunity to buy property available on the outskirts of town and started mass producing modest inexpensive tract houses.  The end of the war brought about the G.I. Bill to subsidize low-cost mortgages for our returning heroes from the war.  The low cost mortgages were often cheaper than the rent on an apartment in the city.

·       The Cold War: The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had what one American diplomat called “expansive tendencies”; moreover, they believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. As a result, communism needed to be “contained”–by diplomacy, by threats or by force. This idea shaped American foreign policy for decades. ~HISTORY.Com

Talk about history repeating itself.  We are now (2014) in some sort of stand-off with the Russians in a new case of Cold War.

 All the history of the 1950s is much more involved than the above information, but now you know the condensed version of it.  The best is yet to come….