By the end of
World War II , Europe
was in ruins and the allied powers who had won the war, the US and
USSR, draw an agreement to determine the control of liberated
territories: the countries of Eastern Europe, occupied by the Red Army
remained under Soviet communist influence, while Western Europe fell
under the economic and political influence of the U.S.A., who provided
extensive economic aid for the rebuilding and modernisation of
the loser countries (with the
Marshall Plan ).
In Asia, the US exerted almost complete control over a defeated Japan.
Nevertheless, a step towards peace was made in 1945 with the creation
of the
United Nations Organization
(UNO).
When, in 1949, Russia acquired the
nuclear
bomb and China's revolution occurred, the world fell under the
shadow of the so-called "
Cold War [ES1] [F1] ":
in this period, that lasted thirty years (until the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989), the prospect
of nuclear confrontation was very real and feared. The development of
the atomic bomb made the general sense of precariousness and
instability greater than ever; in the US, many people began to build
atomic shelters [E1] in their backyards.
The determination of the
Unites States to protect and consolidate its
economic and military interests against communism led to two major
conflicts, first in
Korea (1950-1953) and then in
Vietnam [I1]
(1964-1975).
American society of the immediate post-war years, during the
administrations of
Harry
Truman (1945-1952, Democrat)
and
Dwight D.Eisenhower
(1952-1960, Republican), was conditioned to conform to a standard way
of life based around the
nuclear
family, employment in corporate business for men and homework
for women, always in the all-pervading atmosphere of the Cold War.
Americans were the most prosperous people in the world: their cities
were not bombed and their land did not suffer the damage caused by
warfare. Moreover, the war brought economic advantages such as
increased production and higher wages: Americans
bought more and more consumer goods like cars, television sets,
refrigerators and washing machines.
The
consumer
boom was possible thanks to
the advances in production technology and materials which made goods
cheaper and more easily available than ever before. However, these same
technological innovations had eventually the disadvantage of reducing
the need for labor apart from highly skilled technicians.
In the early 1950s
Senator
Joseph McCarthy , assisted by the
FBI of
J.Edgar
Hoover , set up the
House of Un-American
Activities Committee, leading to the notorious
witch-hunts in
which a considerable number of public officers, scientists,
intellectuals, artists and figures from the entertainment business were
persecuted for their vaguely socialist sympathies. In the years
of
maccarthism, freedom of
the individual seemed very distant and a split between the
intellectuals and the rest of society was inevitable.
J.F.Kennedy [E2] [F1] [ES1] ( a Democrat) was elected in 1961
and became a figure of great symbolic importance to the nation,
especially after his assassination in Dallas in 1963: he
was the first Catholic and the youngest president ever elected.
In 1962, Kennedy presided over the so-called
Cuban Missile Crisis
(Russia installed nuclear weapons in Cuba and later withdrew them) and
over the US's aborted invasion of the island, at the
Bay of Pigs, which for a moment
brought the world on the verge of a nuclear war. President
Kennedy was
perceived as a force of change and rejuvenation: his progressive ideas
galvanized protest movements such as the Afro-Americans' campaign for
civil rights led by
Martin Luther King [F2] [ES1]
and
Malcolm
X . Kennedy's successor,
Lyndon Johnson
(1963-1968- Democrat) carried on his reforms and persuaded Congress to
pass the
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Sixties saw the emergence of a youth-led counterculture whose most
prominent manifestation was the "
hippy [ES1] movement": in
more than one way, the "
hippies"
can be considered the
Beats'
younger siblings.
