Things changing during late 1940s and 50

hi- not necessarily the 40's and 50's but something in this thread might help trigger some ideas...

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=293549

Hope this helps

Gringa

Just some ideas off the top of my head of what I think of when I consider that time period.

After the war a number of things started happening in the US and continued through the 1950s.
-The US had already become more industrial and urban (suburban). Before the war the US was still largely agricultural except in the industrial areas (what is sometimes called the Rust Belt now). Now people wanted jobs in factories and offices all across the country. This was were the "good jobs" were.
-Many returning soldiers now wanted to do more than stay "down on the farm". They had a chance to go to college with the GI bill. They had big dreams for a bright future.
-More highways were built. More people bought cars. A move to the suburbs began. The "American dream" in many locations became a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom home on a shady suburban lot.
-Women in the workplace was changing. After the war many women who had been employed in factories or the war effort went back to being housekeepers, but many (most?) of the younger women now wanted a job outside of the home even if they were married. I'm not sure of the percentage, but many women before the war had never learned to drive. Two-income family became more common.
-Manufacturers turned to consumer goods; cars, refrigerators, washing machine and all the other "labor saving devices" as well as television.
-Many thought atomic energy was the wave of the future. It was once said that energy would be "too cheap to meter."
-Downtowns were starting to change as malls and shopping centers were built in the suburbs.
-Racial divides were starting to break down (in the army, baseball, schools, etc.).
-Because more people had dependable cars and there were more highways, people took more vacations by car. Motels and "motor courts" spring up all over the country.
-The early version of fast food or national chain restaurants started to appear.
-Shopping changed. It used to be that grocery stores were like the one in the Andy Griffith Show; locally owned and run by mom and pop, or small regional chains. Now national supermarkets began to dominate.
-Flying for either business or travel became more common.
-People moved more, and further. Someone might pick up their family and move to California from Kansas, for example.

And we were all going to soon have flying cars and colonies on the moon and under the oceans.

Addition of "under God" to the pledge of allegiance
HUAC
Commies under the bed
The New Look in women's fashions

The March of Dimes to combat childhood illness, and Salk's Polio vaccine. ~35,000 kids were dying a year from the 'summer plague' before '53.

I remember Mom (born 1915) telling me that the mood of the country had changed. Perhaps she meant more her personal vibe or that of the women of her age cohort. But what I figured out she meant is something like this:

During the war, women were pulled into all kinds of jobs they might not have been considered capable of doing outside wartime. Mom worked in Detroit in Army Ordnance. Tales of women in heavy manufacturing jobs were common.

After the war, Mom quit her job to marry and raise me. She held jobs once I was "old enough" but I was never in any form of day care and raising me and loving my Dad were her "job." She never held a high-level job after Detroit.

She also said that the war years were both very exciting, very good, and very bad years in which to live. The volume was turned up on every activity, every emotion. They went out dancing every night. They drank a great deal. They probably indulged in what Wouk called "unauthorized ass." Everything was painted in more brilliant colors and they lived on a certain edge.

After the war, it all calmed down, to hear her tell it. It was the 3 BR house in the suburbs and planting fall bulbs and joining the PTA. Not exactly exciting, but it was what they had and although they were glad the war was over and those men were home who managed to get home, life was never again lived at quite that fever-pitch.

These are her words. I'm a Boomer so I don't know through personal experience.

The birth and explosion in popularity of rock and roll in the 1950's had a profound effect on culture and life.

The seeds for the social revolution of the 1960s were largely sown in the late 1940s and early 1950s. New middle-class prosperity, new inventions and availability of things like refrigerators and cars, for most everybody. And TV. That might be the single greatest changer of American society in the 20th century.

Racial restrictions began to be relaxed, starting with integration of the Armed Services under Truman in the late 1940s (with a great unpayable debt owned to young Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, one of the kind of politicians so absent from today's U.S. scene). The Supremes' Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Charlie Parker, Hank Williams, a lot of other new musicians taking sound to a place it had never been before. Marlon Brando, James Dean, a lot of other young moviemakers taking video to a place it had never been before.

A war in Korea that, for the first time, demonstrated a limitation to American military power, and feathered into the disastrous 1960s war in Vietnam.

The first baffling rise of Richard Nixon, the most venal, self-serving and neurotic man ever to hold the position of President of the United States, a decade-and-a-half later.

Many other things.

caw

Hit Google's archive of scanned issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science for those years. They provide an interesting window into popular culture, probably more than their titles imply. And probably more than you might expect about public and foreign policy.

Use of antibiotics. That must have been huge. I know my mother was saved by streptomycin in the early 1950s, when she had TB meningitis as a girl. A few years before that it would certainly have killed her. Antibiotics would have cured people of diseases and infections, made childbirth safer, made surgery safer. It would have been a big change.

Mass exodus to the suburbs.

Go take a US history class at your local college. Or at least get the textbook. That will give you a basis. Because pretty much everything changed between 1940 and 1960. Cars. Music. Socially acceptable behavior. Women in the workplace. Race relations. Clothing styles. Technology. (Although I've heard stats that say half of all US homes had a TV by the late 1950s, certainly not everyone did.)

Politically speaking, he biggest thing of the 1950s was the Cold War. The creation of the atomic - and later, hydrogen - bombs by both the US and the Soviets was pretty terrifying. Add to that the McCarthy witch hunts and the Rosenbergs, and it's no wonder people were building bomb shelters in their backyards.

The civil rights movement was equally disturbing to many Americans. Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, just months before Rosa Parks' stand in Montgomery. Brown v. Board of Education went before the Supreme Court in 1954. The KKK came back in many areas, and even in relatively peaceful areas, there was a lot of racial tension.

Well, you'll need to figure out who your characters are before anyone can reasonably say what changes they would find undesirable. For instance, a black couple would appreciate the gradual move to racial equality. A radical leftist couple would be abhorred at the anti-communist sentiments.

That said, here's my take on the period.

1. Machines didn't really replace workers in the 40's and 50's. At that point in time, automation simply assisted in manufacturing, it didn't replace workers like you've see in the last decade or two. In the 40's and 50's, we were in a boom. The United States was the only industrial power to have not had its infrastructure wrecked by WWII. Every other nation--from the UK to Japan--had been heavily damaged. We were the lifeline to the world. If you wanted a job, you had a job.

2. When my grandfather returned from the war, he married my grandmother, got a civilian job, and they had four kids. That's typical for a lot of Americans. The big change was the transition from a war-footing to a peacetime world. Most women became housewives because there wasn't any need for both parents to be working. Daycare didn't really exist in those days--it was up to the families to raise children.

3. Social changes weren't quite at the forefront in the 40's and early 50's as some have mentioned. The big upheavals would come in the 60's, which is past the time of your story. Late 40's and early 50's was a relatively stable time.

4. There certainly was worry about Communist infiltration in that time period. Better Dead than Red was a popular motto. McCarthy and the HUAC were a bit overzealous in rooting out Communists or those who sympathized with them, though we've since learned McCarthy was closer to the truth than his critics would like to believe (declassified Verona reports, and the KGB archives all show the extent of Soviet infiltration of our government going back to the late 1930s).

5. The most widespread changes were the abundance of everything, especially in stark contrast to war rationing.

Detroit built no civilian cars during the war years, but afterward, there were cars everywhere. Things that might have been luxuries in 1941 were commonplace in 1947.
Travel was quite commonplace. Visits to Florida or Southern California and even Hawaii were popular. Oh, and this was before the concept of credit cards, so people actually lived on a budget and saved up for things.

Regular airline travel became a thing. The Jet age began, which would soon make ocean liners obsolete.

Massive suburbs were built for all the GI's who started families. The Boom started. Millions of young men, many of whom were inches from death for 3 years, now wanted to live peaceful lives with families in quiet neighborhoods. Seemingly endless developments were built all over the country outside cities, and thus the morning and evening commute were born ... and long with it the tragically ironic phrase "rush hour."