and aerosol hair sprays, were releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that
trapped heat and damaged the ozone layer, producing global warming and an
increase in skin cancer. (Both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons had
been invented by General Motors research scientist Thomas Midgley. He “had
more impact on the atmosphere,” writes one historian, “than any other single
organism” in the history of the world.) The chemical insecticides that enabled
agricultural conglomerates to produce the country’s remarkable abundance
of food were poisoning farm workers, consumers, and the water supply.
Housewives were rebelling against a life centered in suburban dream houses.
Blacks were increasingly impatient with the slow progress of racial change.
The United States, in other words, had entered that most turbulent of decades,
the 1960s.
CHAPTER REVIEW
REVIEW QUESTIONS
- Explain the meaning of the “American standard of living” during the 1950s.
- Describe how the automobile transformed American communities and culture in the
1950s. - Identify the prescribed roles and aspirations for women during the social conformity of the
1950s. - How did governmental policies, business practices, and individual choices contribute to
racially segregated suburbs? - Explain the ideological rifts between conservatives in the 1950s. Why did many view Presi-
dent Eisenhower as “not one of them”? - What was the new “social contract” between labor and management, and how did it
benefit both sides as well as the nation as a whole? - How did the United States and Soviet Union shift the focus of the Cold War to the Third
World? - What were the most significant factors that contributed to the growing momentum of the
civil rights movement in the 1950s? - How did many southern whites, led by their elected officials, resist desegregation and civil
rights in the name of “freedom”? - How and why did the federal government’s concern with U.S. relations overseas shape its
involvement with the Brown v. Board of Education case?
What was the significance of the presidential election of 1960?CHAPTER REVIEW ★^981