The Cold War Essay -- American History Cold War Violence Essays

From the years 1947 through 1965 the United States was feeling a big impact from the Cold War on their ways of life. The biggest impact of this was seen among the middle class who were quickly rising to be the social class majority. From 1946 until 1964 births were reaching record highs with 76 million babies. This was an increase from just 44 million from 1929 through 1945. With a post-war perspective, Americans ?were better off than ever before?. This could partly be due to the economic boom that had swept the country after World War II was over. This boom was led by the automobile, construction, and defense industries; this boom lasted for twenty-five years. All of these changes in American culture were due to breakout of the Cold War (Norton 788). The United States, in the year 1947, Harry Truman had been president for two years. Unfortunately, as Vice President, Truman had been kept in the dark from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the current President) about military and foreign objectives. Having to deal with the onset of the Cold War, Truman was also confused and felt inadequate. He managed to anger almost everyone including liberals and conservatives, farmers, consumers, and union members (Norton 788). It definitely did not help that from 1949 to 1950 bad things kept happening to the United States. In June of 1949 the Soviet Union set off a nuclear weapon test bomb in Siberia. It was announced to the country as a whole in September of the same year. This managed to leave the United States very vulnerable; however, it would be hard for the Soviets to deliver a nuclear weapon and to detonate it within the boundaries of the country. In 1949 the Civil War in China between the Nationalists and the Co... ...in the suburbs. The people who fled to the newly formed suburbs were often in a group of their own; many were white middle-class families. This led to definite lines being drawn between races. The minorities consisting of African Americans, Hispanics, and others stayed in the cities. The change was so pronounced that many have called the movement of white from the cities to the suburbs ?white flight? (Manzione). This caused a very restrictive and rigid culture among the races. Americans as a whole went through many different thought processes during the Cold War era. They went from thinking they were virtually invincible to realizing that their world could crumble in a matter of minutes with weapons of mass destruction. The Soviet Union challenged America during this time period and this created many cultural changes and complexities.