I. POST WAR ECONOMY-
AFTER ROOSEVELT’S DEATH ECONOMY HAD TO BE RECONVERTED DEMOBILIZE MILITARY.
END WARTIME CONTROLS.
REDUCE TAXES.
STORED-UP CONSUMER DEMAND SUPPORTED PRODUCTION.
INFLATION ALLOWED REPUBLICANS TO WIN BOTH HOUSES.

II. 1947 - TAFT HARTLEY ACT.
OUTLAWED CLOSED SHOPS.
ALLOWED PRESIDENT TO ORDER COOLING OFF PERIOD.
CONGRESS OVERRODE TRUMAN’S VETO.

III. BABY BOOMERS -
EARLY MARRIAGES.
GENERATION OF DIVORCE.
LARGER FAMILIES.
MILLIONS OF WOMEN - IN HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT / CHILD REARING.
INCOME TAX DEDUCTIONS ENCOURAGED LARGE FAMILIES / HOME OWNERSHIP.

iv. ELECTION OF 1948 -
SPRING OF 1948 - MOST POLLS INDICATE TRUMAN INCOMPETENT.
REPUBLICAN -THOMAS DEWEY (GOV. OF NEW YORK) LOOKED FOR EASY
VICTORY.
RAN HALF-HEARTED CAMPAIGN.
TRUMAN ON WHISTLE STOP TOUR.
SUCCESS OF BERLIN AIRLIFT HELPED TRUMAN WIN.
TRUMAN SURPRISED EVERYONE / HE WENT TO BED THINKING HE HAD
LOST.

v. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER -
REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR 1952.
POPULAR AS WAR HERO.
GENIAL CHARACTER.
GOOD LEADERSHIP SKILLS.
EASILY DEFEATED ADLAI E. STEVENSON.
ELECTORAL VOTE - 442-89.
EISENHOWER-DULLES FOREIGN POLICY.
DISMANTLED NO NEW DEAL PROGRAMS.
7/1953 - IKE TO KOREA .
TRUCE TALKS RESUMED.
KOREA REMAINED DIVIDED.
US. CASUALTIES = 135,000.
IKE / JOHN FOSTER DULLES - POLICY OF MASSIVE RETALIATION.
WOULD NO LONGER GET INVOLVED IN WARS OF ATTRITION.
1955 -IKE AGREES TO MEET W/KHRUSHCHEV. (GENEVA SUMMIT).
1959 - WORLD OPINION AGAINST NUCLEAR TESTING.
NEW SUMMIT MEETING - NEVER HELD.
5/1/1960 - U2 SPY PLANE SHOT DOWN.
US. /SOVIET RELATIONS SOURED.

America at Mid-century, 1952-1963
Popular Music in Memphis
The nineteen-year-old singer was peering nervously out over the large crowd. He knew that people had come to Overton Park's outdoor amphitheater that hot, sticky July day in
1954 to hear the headliner, country music star Slim Whitman. Sun Records, a local Memphis label, had just released the teen-ager's first record, and it had begun to receive some airplay on local radio. But the singer and his two band mates had never played in a setting even remotely as large as this one. And their music defied categories: it wasn't black and it wasn't white; it wasn't pop and it wasn't country. But when the singer launched into his version of a black blues song called "That's All Right," the crowd went wild. He sang a second song, the bluegrass tune "Blue Moon of Kentucky," transformed by a heavy beat and a speeded-up tempo. "I came offstage," the singer later recalled, "and my manager told me that they was hollering because I was wiggling my legs. I went back out for an encore, and I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they went." Elvis Presley had arrived. Elvis combined a hard-driving, rhythmic approach to blues and country music with a riveting performance style, inventing the new music known as rock 'n' roll. An unprecedented cultural phenomenon, rock 'n' roll was a music made largely for and by teenagers. It became the most important expression of the common identity shared by American young people in the postwar era. In communities all over America, rock 'n' roll brought teens together around jukeboxes, at sock hops, in cars, and at private parties. It also demonstrated the enormous consumer power of American teens. Rock 'n' roll also embodied a postwar trend accelerating the integration of white and black music. This cultural integration prefigured the social and political integration won by the civil rights movement. Located halfway between St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi River, Memphis had become a thriving commercial city by the 1850s, with an economy centered on the lucrative cotton trade of the surrounding delta region. It grew rapidly in the post-Civil War years, attracting a polyglot population of white businessmen and planters, poor rural whites and blacks, and German and Irish immigrants. By the early twentieth century Memphis also boasted a remarkably diverse variety of popular theater and music, including a large opera house, numerous brass bands, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrel shows, jug bands, and blues clubs. Musicians and audiences from the city and countryside regularly streamed into Memphis in search of work and entertainment. Like most American cities, the Memphis economy enjoyed a healthy growth during World War II, as lumber mills, furniture factories, and chemical manufacturing supplemented the cotton market as sources of jobs and prosperity. Like the rest of the South, Memphis was also a legally segregated city. Its population of nearly a half-million was 40 percent African American; whites and blacks lived, went to school, and worked apart. Class differences among whites were important as well. Like thousands of other poor rural whites in these years, Elvis Presley had moved from Mississippi to Memphis in 1949, where his father found work in a munitions plant. The Presleys were poor enough to qualify for an apartment in Lauderdale Courts, a Memphis public housing project where many residents enjoyed their first indoor plumbing. To James Conaway, who grew up in an all-white, middle-class East Memphis neighborhood, people like the Presleys were "white trash." Negroes, he recalled, were "not necessarily below the rank of a country boy like Elvis, but of another universe, and yet there was more affection for them than for some whites." African American neighborhoods existed as separate worlds. Gloria Wade-Gayles, who lived in the all-black Foot Homes housing project, vividly remembered that her family and neighbors "had no illusion about their lack of power, but they believed in their strength." For them, strength grew from total immersion in a black community that included ministers, teachers, insurance men, morticians, barbers, and entertainers. "Surviving meant being black, and being black meant believing in our humanity, and retaining it, in a world that denied we had it in the first place." Yet in the cultural realm, class and racial barriers could be challenged. Elvis Presley grew up a dreamy, shy boy, who turned to music for emotional release and spiritual expression. He eagerly soaked up the wide range of American music styles available in Memphis. With his parents, he attended services at the Assembly of God Church, which featured a hundred-voice choir renowned throughout the city. Elvis and his friends went to marathon all-night gospel singings" at Ellis Auditorium, where they enjoyed the tight harmonies and emotional style of white gospel quartets such as the Blackwood Brothers and the Song fellows. Elvis also drew from the sounds he heard on Beale Street, the main black thoroughfare of Memphis and one of the nation's most influential centers of African American music. In its nightclubs, theaters, and honky-tonks, one could hear ragtime, jug bands, delta blues, big-band jazz, brass ensembles, and black vaudeville orchestras. In the postwar years, local black rhythm and blues artists like B. B. King, Junior Parker, and Muddy Waters attracted legions of black and white fans with their emotional power and exciting showmanship. At the Handy Theater on Beale Street, the teenaged Elvis Presley, like thousands of other white young people, heard black performers at the "Midnight Rambles"- -late shows for white people only. Elvis himself performed along with black contestants in amateur shows at Beale Street's Palace Theater. Nat D. Williams, a prominent black Memphis disc jockey and music promoter, recalled how black audiences responded to Elvis's unique style. "He had a way of singing the blues that was distinctive. He could sing 'em not necessarily like a Negro, but he didn't sing 'em altogether like a typical white musician. . . . Always he had that certain humanness about him that Negroes like to put in their songs." The expansion of the broadcasting and recording industries in the postwar ears also contributed to the weakening of racial barriers in the musical realm. Local Memphis radio stations WDIA and WHBQ featured the hard-driving rhythm and blues music that was beginning to attract a strong following among young white listeners. These Memphis stations also featured spirituals by African American artists such as Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward. Thousands of Memphians eagerly listened every Saturday night to white country singers such as Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Ernest Tubb, broadcast live from the "Grand Ol' Opry" in Nashville. Other stations added pop ballads, opera, and classical music to the mix. A key figure in guiding Elvis's career was Sam Phillips, a visionary music
producer who owned Sun Studios in Memphis. Phillips had eked out a living recording black blues singers like B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Mae Thornton, Junior Parker,
and Little Milton-- but he was constantly on the look out for original sounds. From his contacts with record salesmen, jukebox operators, and disc jockeys, Phillips knew that
white teenagers were listening to black music. He sensed enormous commercial potential if he could find a white artist who sang in the black style. In Elvis, Sam Phillips found a white singer with the same emotional intensity and power that he had admired in the black artists he recorded at Sun. Elvis himself understood his debt to black music and black performers. "The colored folks," he told an interviewer in 1956, "been singing and playing it just like I'm doing now, man, for more years than I know. They played
it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind until I goosed it up. I got it from them." For Sam Phillips, Sun Records was something of a crusade to transcend racial difference. Years later he recalled, "I knew from nature, from childhood, that the poor white people felt they really couldn't play-- 'Who'd listen to me?'-- and the blacks were even below that. I just hope I was a part of giving the influence to the people to be free in their expression." Under Phillips's guidance Elvis and his small band refined an totally unique blend of black rhythm and blues, white country, gospel intensity, and pop crooning that defined rock 'n' roll. Presley's first records for Sun, such as "That's All Right," "Good Rocking' Tonight," and "Mystery Train," were regional hits, but no more. It was as a live performer, playing hundreds of small-town dances, school hops, and county fairs throughout the South, that Elvis began attracting national attention. He sang and moved to the beat like a man possessed-- hips gyrating, knees bending, voice pleading. With his carefully pomaded long hair, flashy outfits, and sexy sneer, Elvis was a big hit with young fans and a nightmare for their parents. The phrase rock 'n' roll had been popularized around the same time by Alan Freed, a white disc jockey in Cleveland. It had long been a slang expression in African American speech and song, a shorthand for dancing and sexual intercourse. Alan Freed, along with others in the music industry like Sam Phillips, had noticed that many young white listeners were dissatisfied with the bland, cloying pop records of the day. For dancing, driving, courting, and lovemaking, young whites increasingly turned to the rhythmic drive and emotional singing found in the best rhythm and blues records made by black artists. Teenagers across the nation were united by a feeling that rock 'n' roll was their music.
But it was more than just music: it was also an attitude, a way of walking, a love of dancing, a celebration of being young, and a sense of having something that parents, and adult authority in general, could not understand or control. When Sam Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA Records in 1956, Elvis became an international star. Records like "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," and "Jailhouse Rock" shot to the top of the charts and blurred the old boundaries between pop, country, and rhythm and blues. By helping to accustom white teenagers to the style and sound of black artists, Elvis helped establish rock 'n' roll as an interracial phenomenon. Institutional racism would continue to plague the music business. Many black artists, such as Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, author of Elvis' first hit, "That's Alright Mama," were routinely cheated out of royalties and severely underpaid. But the music that emerged from postwar Memphis at least pointed the way toward the exciting cultural possibilities that could emerge from breaking down the barriers of race. It also gave postwar American teenagers a newfound sense of community.