ABSTRACT
The Cold War, McCarthyism, racial segregation, self-satisfied prosperity and empty materialism, coupled with ignoring poverty and other social problems, complacency, conformity, the suppression of women, and puritanical attitudes toward sex. In all, it was bland and boring, too, although people are supposed to have been paralyzed with fear of war, Communism, or McCarthyism, or all three. The chapter shows that the conventional view of the 1950s practically stands reality on its head. Far from being the dismal prelude to a glorious period of progress, it was the postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s that was an era of unprecedented progress and prosperity. The main problem in the postwar era actually pointed in a very different direction from that taken by American history. The chapter explains the existing confusion by trying to distinguish between the two postwar decades, and the narrower topic of the 1950s.
