Chapter 24 An Affluent Society, 1953-1960

In 1955, what percentage of nonagricultural workers were unionized?

35 percent

A leading voice of the Beats was:

Allen Ginsberg.

The name for the small group of poets and writers who railed against mainstream culture, and that included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, was:

Beats.

Which of the following was not a philosophic feature of Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Black Americans must not try for full racial equality too quickly; before they achieve that, they must first prove their worthiness to all America.

What was the landmark United States Supreme Court case decided on May 17, 1954, in which the "Warren Court" unanimously asserted that segregation in public education violated the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment?

Brown v. Board of Education

Although Americans in the 1950s grew more intensely religious, fewer than ever were affiliated with religious institutions.

False

As president, Eisenhower sought to roll back the New Deal, abolish social security and unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs.

False

During the 1950s, the farm population rose from 15 million to 23 million, while agricultural production declined by 25 percent.

False

Dwight Eisenhower entered the presidency determined to dismantle the New Deal.

False

It is a myth that children in the 1950s and 1960s were trained to hide under their desks in the event of an atomic attack.

False

New York became the most prominent symbol of the postwar suburban boom; one-fifth of the population growth of the 1950s occurred there.

False

Orval Faubus was among the attorneys on the team hired by the NAACP to pursue the watershed case Brown v. Board of Education.

False

President Eisenhower hailed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education as a positive move toward a more equal and just America; when a federal court ordered that Autherine Lucy be admitted to the University of Alabama in 1956, Eisenhower authorized the use of federal troops in her support.

False

Prior to her arrest that led to the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks had never been involved in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activism.

False

The suburban explosion of the 1950s did much to diminish racial divisions in America.

False

Which of the following series of events is listed in proper sequence?

Geneva summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev; Soviet invasion of Hungary; Khrushchev visit to United States; U-2 incident

What did President Eisenhower call his domestic agenda, which embraced a "mixed economy," in which the government played a major role in planning economic activity, and by which Eisenhower consolidated and legitimized the New Deal?

Modern Republicanism

In the aftermath of Rosa Parks's arrest for refusing to give her bus seat to a white rider, a yearlong bus boycott took place in what city?

Montgomery, Alabama

Which does not describe Rosa Parks in the years prior to her December 1, 1955, arrest?

She was a housewife, with no previous experience as a political activist.

Which of the following was not a key premise of American foreign policy during the Eisenhower years?

The United States will always respect the sovereignty of foreign democracies—even those whose policies we oppose.

Although it was a nationwide phenomenon, 1950s suburbanization gathered its greatest momentum in the West.

True

As part of the expansive and dynamic growth of the American economy, in the twenty years after 1950, about 7 million white Americans left cities for the suburbs, nearly 3 million blacks moved from South to North, and half a million Puerto Ricans moved to the mainland.

True

By 1960, almost 90 percent of American families owned television sets, average daily television viewing time was five hours, and television had proven itself the most effective advertising medium ever invented.

True

By the mid-1960s, 25 million Americans owned shares of stock.

True

Cultural dissent was more conspicuous than political dissent during the 1950s.

True

During the 1950s, gay men and lesbians increasingly created their own subcultures in major cities.

True

During the 1950s, material consumption came more and more to eclipse economic independence and democratic engagement as the hallmarks of American freedom.

True

During the 1950s, prominent psychologists insisted that women who were unhappy as housewives suffered from a failure to accept the "maternal instinct."

True

For all of America's successes, by 1960 more than one in five Americans lived in poverty.

True

Government policies and expenditures played a crucial role in the postwar economic boom.

True

In 1956, for the first time in American history, white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar factory and manual laborers.

True

In 1960, women earned, on average, 60 percent of the income of men.

True

In many ways, the economy and culture of the 1950s was dominated by the automobile.

True

In the 1950s, the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

True

In the 1950s, the number of houses in the United States doubled; most were built in the suburbs.

True

In the consumer culture of the 1950s, the measure of freedom became the ability to gratify market desires.

True

In the decades following World War II, pluralism reigned supreme and the free exercise of religion was yet another way of differentiating the American way of life from that of life under communism.

True

In the post-World War II United States, Americans' daily lives were transformed by the widespread use of televisions, air conditioning, dishwashers, long-distance telephone calls, and jet travel.

True

In the two decades following World War II, services that had generally been enjoyed only by the rich or solidly middle class in the years before the war—including central heating, indoor plumbing, and electricity—now became features of common life.

True

One strand of social analysis in the 1950s asserted that Americans were psychologically and culturally discontent, lonely and anxious, and yearning not so much for freedom as for stability and authority.

True

One strand of social analysis in the 1950s criticized the monotony of modern work, the emptiness of suburban life, and the pervasive influence of advertising.

True

Richard Nixon's rise in politics was fueled in part by his ability to make free market conservatism appealing to ordinary people.

True

The Brown decision encouraged an awakening of civil rights protest—and segregationist protest—in the South.

True

World War II was followed in the United States by what has been called "a golden age" of capitalism; between 1946 and 1960, the nation's gross national product more than doubled.

True

Which was not part of the new "social contract" between organized labor and management in leading industries during the 1950s?

Unions sponsored "wildcat" strikes in an effort to discipline management.

Which of the following was not a prominent feature of suburban married life during the Fifties?

a growing tendency of husbands and wives to share the roles of breadwinner and homemaker

Which of the following was not a significant trend in 1950s America?

a surge of student radicalism on college campuses

In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower brought to the presidency all of the following experiences except being the:

chief executive officer of the General Electric Corporation.

In the 1950s, Richard Nixon pioneered efforts to transform the Republican Party's image:

from defender of business to champion of the "forgotten man," for whom heavy taxation had become a burden.

Which was not one of the elements of "the power elite"—the interlocking directorate that dominated government and society in the 1950s—in the view of sociologist C. Wright Mills?

labor leaders

Which of the following was not a key cause of the economic prosperity of the Fifties?

large income tax reductions

The 1954 update to the doctrine of containment, announced by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that declared a Soviet attack on any American ally would be countered by a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, was called "brinksmanship" by its critics and this by supporters:

massive retaliation.

In 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine:

pledged the United States to defend Middle Eastern governments threatened by communism or Arab nationalism.

The wave of decolonization that began when India and Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, and by which, in the decades following World War II, Europe's centuries-old empires collapsed, witnessed the newly created Third World nations:

resist alignment with either major power bloc.

The principal organization in the Southwest—the equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—that challenged restrictions on housing and employment, as well as the segregation of Latino students was named:

the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).

What was the coalition of black ministers and civil rights activists that pressed for desegregation and was formed in 1955, and in whose organizing Martin Luther King, Jr., took the lead?

the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

The National Defense Education Act, which for the first time offered direct federal funding for higher education, was passed into law by Congress in 1957 in response to:

the Soviet launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik.

Eric Foner writes, "the either-or mentality of the Cold War obscured the extent to which the United States itself fell short of the ideal of freedom." In this context, to what does "the either-or mentality" refer?

the notion that, in a polarized world, you were either for the United States or for the Soviet Union

During the 1950s, the mass movement for civil rights found principal support among:

the southern black church.

Which of the following did not inform Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, 1950s leadership of the civil rights movement?

the writings of Malcolm X, particularly his autobiography