21) Tuesday, April 10. Inventing a "Great Society"

Story Line: Postwar prosperity seemed to reaffirm the many advantages of a consumer society. Americans, who faced no real economic competitors around the globe, were generally confident that they could always find the means to generate prosperity. The possibility of a Great Society emerged from that assurance. By 1962, American Keynesianism triumphed, as Washington increasingly relied on monetary policy to keep Americans active consumers. Review Questions for Discussion X   [Lecture 20] Outline [Lecture 22]

Readings for lecture 21 DJ2306200074 - Failure of the War on Poverty W. W. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth, 1960 Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech, 1964 LBJ, The Great Society, 1964 Herbert Gans, The Levittowners, 1967

Images for lecture 21: Atom Bomb's Effect on Humans The Kitchen Debate Shopping in the Prosperous Sixties Soaring Stock Market Consumption and Sciene Man Reaches the Moon

I. Postwar prosperity: ideology and reality

• The birth rate, 86 per 1000 women of childbearing age in 1945, shot up to 102 the next year, and to 113 in 1947. It peaked at 123 in 1956, returning to WWII levels 10 years later.
• Levitt town
• Michael Harrington, The Other America (1962), an impassioned exposé of poverty

1) Modernization

2) the "American Promise"

• Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909)
• Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends

3) A science-based economy

• technology and R&D
• Walt W. Rostow; "take-off"

4) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960).

1. traditional society
2. preconditions for take-off
3. take-off
4. drive to maturity
5. age of high mass-consumption

II. Significance of the non-communist manifesto

1) The conflict over bigness

• Thurman Arnold's The Folklore of Capitalism (1937)

2) the conflict over America's responsibilities in world affairs.

3) The two ways of life revisited.

• The Kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev
• Sputnik I, 1957; Sokolniki Park in Moscow.

Pictorial interlude

III. A New Social Structure

1) Definition

• David Potter

2) The Infusion of Social Science into Marketing

• Ernest Dichter; Burleigh Gardner; Fortune; Paul Lazarsfeld; Robert Lynd
• German economist Werner Sombart
• Betty Friedan

IV. Shift in the bases of radicalism

1) The case of labor

• David Truman

2) Consumer activism

• Wesley Mitchell
• Walter Lippmann
• Florence Kelley's National Consumers' League (1898)
• Book-of-the-Month-Club best-selling Your Money's Worth by Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink (1927).
• Consumers Union Reports

Conclusion

• Keynesianism

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