ABSTRACT
The decade and a half to two decades following World War II formed a marked contrast to both the bleak period before the war and the expectations most people held during the war itself. Before World War II, and probably as late as the 1950s, most white Americans, and almost certainly a majority of whites outside the South, had probably never seen a Negro in person. Robert Samuelson wrote in 1995, "Even now the most impressive advances in material well-being of the past half century seem disproportionately bunched into the first twenty-five years after the Second World War". The postwar era saw the peak of traditional "Fordist" mass production conducted by giant corporations, most reorganized on the more efficient, decentralized multidivisional model pioneered by General Motors, DuPont, and a few others between the world wars. The Cold War and the threat of World War III overshadowed, and sometimes seemed to eclipse, all the successes of postwar American society.
