Events That Made an Impact: United States in the 1950s to 1990s Essay

After the World War II fizzled out, people around the world had no choice but to pick up the pieces of what has been left of the unrelenting devastation that the global was has brought to them. However, the lofty triumphs achieved during the war were pointless because numerous challenges had sprouted because countries realized the inevitability of the Nuclear Age, which triggered fear amongst the people as they realized a grim scenario that a single bomb could decimate cities in seconds. What have transpired beyond the events between the World War II to the 1990s are essential elements that made up what society has become in our present. Naturally, it paved the way for a future society that could learn from all the mistakes made and use it to settle all inequities that could mold conflict among nations and people. In the United States, the time from 1950s to the 1990s has been crucial in shaping democracy, equality and technology that all Americans enjoy today. From the economic boom that sparked the rise of new markets in the 1950s, to the rise of civil rights movement in the 1960s, to the concern about the Vietnam War in 1970s, to the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and the emergence of globalization in 1990s, all of these major events have etched their mark in each decade that brandished the saga of what modern American civilization has become. And despite all challenges that abound, what is important is that Americans have become more tolerant and the government has understood from heeding the call of times during these unforgettable events. The events from the 1950s to the 1990s honed a society that put the people at the forefront of all priorities, as defense policies were institutionalized to protect them from the harsh realities of war while humanitarian causes are still considered appropriately to bring benefit to the greater good of Americans and to other people from the rest of the world. Clearly, the fast-changing times at present can be daunting, but the events that happened in the 1950s to the 1990s had prepared us to be stronger in facing all the odds that lie beneath. Through breaking barriers among nations around the world, people can make things possible and could definitely make our lives better in the future ahead. 1950s – The Emergence of a Post-industrial Society   After the white flags has been raised during the conclusion of World War II, nations around the world dusted off the embers of war and began working on to build nations that would benefit people (Gaddis, 1997). Despite the unwarranted fears that the Cold War between the United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic (USSR) could trigger another war in the future, it is believed that what brought the greatest impact during this decade is the renaissance of the post-industrial economy that led to the emergence of the suburban culture Davidson et al. (2002) observed that during this period, suburban growth accelerated sharply and the suburbs grew 40 times faster than cities, so that by 1960 half of the American people lived in them. The return of prosperity brought a â€Å"baby boom† and a need for new housing. Davidson et al. (2002) indicated that birth rates in the United States in 1952 had spiked to 25 per thousand to reach one of the highest fertility rates in the world. New brides were also younger, which translated into unusual fertility. Americans chose to have larger families, as the number with three children tripled and those with four or more quadrupled. Because of the economic growth, automobiles made the suburbs accessible. But the spurt in suburban growth took its toll on the cities, which suffered as the middle class fled urban areas. Famous sociologist Daniel Bell indicated that the rise of the so-called â€Å"post-industrial† economy can benefit American people. For Bell, this never meant the complete annihilation of American manufacturing, but it did mean that white-collar work within the sectors of finance and banking, leisure and tourism, corporate research and development in technologies, in federal and local government bureaucracies and in retail would supersede manufacturing industry as the major structural bases of the American economy (Waters 1996, p. 112). Furthermore, the development of improved computing and communications technologies facilitated suburbanization by making it easy for companies to decentralize as the managements were able to control their operations more efficiently. American culture also changed in the 1950s. American families began to take the form of the sitcom families popular during the era. Hayden (2003) indicated that American streets and families became â€Å"similar in age, race, and income to†¦ the nationally popular sitcoms of the 1950s†¦ including Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best† (p. 128). Also, many corporations advertised in the 1950s became a cultural consensus just as much as the products they sold. They praised prosperity as a reflection of an American way of life. However, not all Americans were persuaded of the virtues of consensus and business leadership. Intellectuals and artists found in corporate culture a stifling conformity that crushed individual creativity. On the fringes of society, artists flaunted traditional behavior and values. Closer to the mainstream, a new generation of musicians created rock and roll, which became the sound of youthful rebellion that sparked in the decades ahead. 1960s – Seeking Equality and the Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement As the United States enjoyed quite an improvement in economy during the 1950s, turmoil began to spread in its social arena in the 1960s. Fact is that the civil rights movement was triggered by the Montgomery bus incident in 1955. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. Mrs. Parks was arrested and subsequently, she was bailed out of jail by E. D. Nixon, the Montgomery representative of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Later that evening, Nixon was struck with the idea of having Montgomery’s black citizens boycott the city’s segregated bus system. According to Loevy (1990), the major accomplishment of the Montgomery bus boycott was that it turned a non-violent demonstration for racial integration into a national news story. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was elected to lead the bus boycott. Montgomery’s forty thousand blacks stayed off the city buses for more than a year, vowing not to return until the buses were totally desegregated (p. 22). The emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid-1950s was a key event in the escalating fight for civil rights. Through the experience gained during the Montgomery bus boycott, King learned that the northern and western United States were most likely to press for civil rights reform when a dramatic instance of racial segregation was presented on the news media, particularly television (Branch, 1988). Two of the massive racial protests in the 1960s brought about by the Montgomery bus incident in produced major civil rights bills. The impetus for Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which banned racial discrimination in public places) occurred following brutal white suppression of racial demonstrations led by Dr. King in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. An equally brutal reaction to a voting rights march led by King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in which gave the U.S. Government the power to register blacks to vote in southern states (Loevy,1990). It was President Lyndon Johnson had worked assiduously for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Only months after its adoption he added muscle to the demand for nondiscrimination by issuing Executive Order 11246. The racism that had infected federal employment (and also the work forces of private firms with which the federal government did business) was no longer to be tolerated. The words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave specificity and concreteness to the constitutional guarantee of â€Å"the equal protection of the laws.† In employment, in education, in all spheres of public accommodation, there was to be from that time forward no official favoritism for one race or ethnic group at the expense of others. The intentions of the members of the Congress in adopting this law were clearly and emphatically expressed (Cohen & Sterba, 2003, p. 10). This is why, to this very day, that American society learned to frown upon all sorts of racial preference and discrimination. 1970s – Iniquities of the Vietnam War When more than half a million American troops were sent to intervene in Vietnam’s civil war, there was a widespread dissent in United States. Campaigns were outright to denounce the US government’s military conquests in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam.   Though war is a decision that is entered into by governments, public opinion plays a significant role in its execution. By 1971, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam had surpassed 50,000, and antiwar sentiment became very strong. As war was occurring in Vietnam, bloody protests sparked also sparked in the United States. Vietnam War was a relatively young man’s war, with the average age of soldiers serving in Vietnam was 19 (Davidson et al., 2002). The wages of death and survival of these soldiers are also complicated. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), he featured his experiences in the Vietnam War and how he struggled to fight the feeling of isolation after returning home from the war. Instead of forgetting the occurrences during the Vietnam War, O’Brien faced to confront the ghosts of his terrible experiences during the war. His life is caught up in the web of his past experiences as he seeks solace to get rid of his unfavorable traumas that haunt him after the extreme experiences he encountered in Vietnam. He still feels the chaos even it is thirty years later. He wanted to get rid of denial, but his memory of the terrible experiences still traumatizes him greatly. Because of the war, US also suffered poverty because war’s annual cost soared to more than $50 billion a year as it fueled a rising inflation. This is why in 1973, the Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required the president to consult with Congress about military action and prohibited spending in Southeast Asia for more U.S. military action. Coupled with congressional cuts in aid to South Vietnam, the president’s war powers were severely limited (Walsh, 2007). Many people felt that the involvement of Americans in the Vietnam War was a losing battle both in the battleground and at home. In the 11 years of the US involvement in Vietnam, it did not only bring humiliation to the US as it failed to gain control of a small nation but also it brought a tremendous detriment in social and economic costs in its very homeland. 1980s – Closure of the Cold War Fears The silent conflict of United States and Soviet Union finally ceased in the 1980s. With the democratic reform that swept across Eastern Europe, this ended the four decades of communist rule and Soviet domination of the region. Germans, divided since World War II, dismantled the Berlin Wall, which long had been the symbol of Soviet-American confrontation and reunified their country. Nationalist groups within the Soviet Union demanded greater autonomy and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev desperately worked to reform a disintegrating economy and to hold the Soviet state together. With the Soviet Union no longer a threat, Americans felt less a sense of triumph than an uncertainty about the role of the United States in a less predictable and perhaps less stable world (Hess 2001, p. 153). The United States and Russia initiated to end the Cold War and agreed to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. In 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) concluded and surpassed the limits negotiated in earlier SALT talks. By June 1992 US President Bush and Russia’s Boris Yeltsin had agreed to even sharper cuts. However, American foreign policy had been defined by the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Not just America’s relations with the rest of the world, but also its domestic political and social life were shaped by the overriding national imperative of containing the expansion of communism. But the end of the Cold War made it more difficult to articulate what exactly constituted the American national interest. With the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Singh (2003) argued that a new era was ushered into being, although most of the contours of US policy were in fact unchanged by the tragedy. Not least, the fundamental predicament for America since 1945 – whether to accept a role as global policeman while being castigated abroad as a global bully remained inescapable (p. 263). 1990s – Breaking the Barriers Through Globalization The trend of globalization has become one of the most critical factors that determine the path for changes that occur in many economies worldwide in the 1990s. It had triggered enormous changes in various sectors in society and had pressured everyone to ride the waves of change that globalization has brought about. As a concept, McGrew (1992) captured the complexity of the current view of globalization in a concise and balanced way. He defined globalization as â€Å"the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections between the states and societies which make up the modern world system†¦ it describes the process by which events, decisions, and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the globe† (p. 23). United States entered into several trade agreements to ease out doing business around the world, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Also, US became more intertwined to a global community via the Internet. The rise of the Internet also built new economies and opportunities. The revolution in microchip technologies contributed substantially to the economic expansion of the 1990s. In 1998, e-commerce alone generated some 482,000 jobs (Davidson et al., 2002). However, globalization is not without criticism. Lobeda (2006) argued that the growth theory in globalization failed to take into account distribution of wealth and income. For instance, economists point to a 22.2 percent growth in average household worth in the United States from 1983 to 1998. Yet the number of homeless people increased, more and more people were unable to obtain healthcare, and many citizens experienced severe economic insecurity and job loss. The growth indicators don’t spell out that the wealthiest one percent experienced skyrocketing increases in income, while middle- and lower-income families saw their incomes shrink. So while the average household wealth increased, the median household net worth decreased by 10 percent in the same period. Conclusion   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   What we could deem from the era of post World War II to the 1990s are essential events that shaped our history. These are events are very colored with numerous triumphs and some failures in different aspects. Triumphs because of all the achievements gained within this period that led to improve American society as a whole. Failures, on the other hand, will serve as lessons where we can earn our credit from learning the past mistakes so that these will be never repeated again in the future. It can, indeed be daunting that lies ahead might trigger newer challenges, like the rise of technology, terrorism and other new innovations that might have a serious impact to our future. But, with a renewed thought as one nation of multicultural origins, American people can surely take a stand in working as one nation and take advantage of what the future holds for them. References Branch, T. (1988). Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, New York: Simon and Schuster. Cohen, C., & Sterba, J. P. (2003). Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate. New York: Oxford University Press.   Davidson, W.F., West, J., Gienapp, C.L., Heyrman, M.L., and Stoff, M.B. (2002). 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