The American Dream in the 1950s

For each term or name, write a concise sentence or two explaining its significance.

1. Baby Boom was the largest generation in the nations history, where one time in 1957 over 400,000 babies were born. This was somewhat caused by the soldiers returning from WWII and being ready to settle down and start a family.

2. Dr. Jonas Salk published a book where he told parents, mostly mothers, how to raise children like how they should have sit down chats with their children and express their feelings. He also proposed and believed that women should be paid for being stay-at-home mothers.

3. Interstate Highway System allowed Americans living in the suburbs to get to their jobs in the city, which made more people move to the suburbs picturing a picture perfect way to live, like “blue shutters and a white picket fence” perfect. Also, this allowed families to travel all over the place like to lakes and parks, however an increase in accidents and high stress levels from traffic became much more prominent.

4. Franchise is where businessmen were able to build a company off of another company, which provided many jobs for Americans. Also, the bosses or managers hired people who wouldn't riot or think individually, in-turn the workers of these businesses had to sacrifice their individuality to work there.

5. In a paragraph, describe in detail how Americans spent their leisure time in the 1950s
In the 1950s Americans spent their leisure time buying televisions, lawn mowers, hi-fi record players, and many more. They bought televisions and hi-fi record players to entertain themselves, which were invented one after the other making the products very alluring to consumers. Also, they bought lawn mowers to mow their grass and bought casual clothing for their suburban lives. Almost everything they bought was to entertain themselves or make their home look better. For example, they bought lawn decorations to decorate the outside of their homes, which goes to show that they wanted their home to look the best. More and more products were made and these products were constantly being updated. Businesses and others saw that they could use planned obsolescence to get consumers to keep buying their products. Most likely every year the business would update their product and convince to the consumers that the new one was much better and the older product was worse to have. This kept consumers buying and began almost a competition to have the best.