In the almost two decades after the end of World War II, the American economy witnessed a massive and sustained growth that reshaped American culture through its abundance of consumer goods. Standards of living climbed to unparalleled heights. All income levels shared and inequality plummeted in what some economists have called “the Great Compression.” And yet, American economic progress contained fundamental flaws. The new consumer economy that lifted millions of Americans into its burgeoning middle class also produced inequality. Women struggled to claim equal rights as full participants in American society. The poor struggled to win access to good schools, good healthcare, and good jobs. The same suburbs that gave middle class Americans new space left cities withering in spirals of poverty and crime. The Jim Crow South tenaciously defended segregation and Blacks and other minorities suffered discrimination all across the country. As the following sources suggest, the contradictions of what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “the Affluent Society” defined the decade: unrivaled prosperity alongside crippling poverty, expanded opportunity alongside entrenched discrimination, and new liberating lifestyles alongside a stifling conformity.

1959 Little Rock Rally

Figure 1. John T. Bledsoe, “Little Rock, 1959. Rally at State Capitol” (Aug 20, 1959). Via Library of Congress.

In 1959, photographer John Bledsoe captured this image of the crowd on the steps of the Arkansas state capitol building, protesting the federally mandated integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. This image shows how tensions about desegregation were bound up with other issues, such as the fear of communism’s alleged influence and southern resistance to the expansion of civil rights.