Baby Boom (1 gen 1945 anni – 31 gen 1965 anni)

Descrizione:

The surge in the American birthrate between 1945 and 1965, which peaked in 1957 with 4.3 million births.

teenager: A term for a young adult. American youth culture, focused on the spending power of the “teenager,” emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s.


Children also spurred spending. The lives of Americans born in the “ baby boom” between World War II and the early 1960s (peaking in 1957 with 4.3 million births) track the evolution of consumption and advertising. When the boomers were infants, companies focused on developing new baby products, from disposable diapers to instant formula. When they were toddlers and young children, new television programs, board games, fast food, TV dinners, and thousands of different kinds of toys came to market. When they were teenagers, a commodified “teen culture” — replete with clothing, music and movies, hairstyles, and other accessories — courted their considerable spending power. In 1956, a single middle-class American teenager spent on average $10 per week, close to the weekly disposable income of an entire family a generation earlier.


One of the most striking developments in postwar American life was the emergence of the teenager as a cultural phenomenon. In 1956, only partly in jest, the CBS radio commentator Eric Sevareid questioned “whether the teenagers will take over the United States lock, stock, living room, and garage.” The youth culture Sevareid lamented had emerged in the 1920s and blossomed in the 1950s thanks to lengthening years of education (high school had become nearly universal), the growing variety and influence of peer group subcultures, and the consumer tastes and spending power of young people. Market research showed a distinct teen market primed for exploitation. In 1951, Newsweek noted with awe that the total weekly spending money of American teenagers could buy 190 million candy bars, 130 million soft drinks, and 230 million sticks of gum. Increasingly, advertisers targeted the young, both to capture their dollars and court their influence on family purchases.

This movie poster is from the 1960 Hollywood film Where the Boys Are. The plot, about the adventures of college students in Florida during spring break, was aimed squarely at teenagers. The 1950s saw the creation of the “teenager” as a distinct demographic and cultural category and, perhaps most significantly, as a consumer group — with money to spend. Where the Boys Are is one example of a whole new film genre, the “teenpic,” invented in the 1950s by Hollywood executives eager to win over this lucrative new market.


The poster shows various illustrations that include men, women, and automobiles. Toward the bottom of the illustration are two couples engaged in a kiss. They are dressed in swimsuits. The text at the top reads, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents a Euterpe Production.” The center part has the text, “The Hilarious Inside Story of those Rip-Roarin Spring Vacations,” and the name of the movie. The text on the bottom-right corner reads, “Dolores Hart, George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, Jim Hutton, Barbara Nichols, Paula Prentiss with Frank Gorshin and introducing Connie Francis. Screen play by George Wells. Based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout. Directed by Henry Levin. Produced by Joe Pasternak.” The text on the left corner reads, “In Cinemascope and Metro color.”

Hollywood movies played a large role in fostering a teenage culture. Young people made up the largest audience for motion pictures, and film studios learned over the course of the 1950s to cater to them. The success of films such as The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando; Blackboard Jungle (1955), with Sidney Poitier; and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean, convinced movie executives that features made for teenagers were worthy investments. Such features focused on youth rebellion so frequently that the rebel became a commodity of teen culture itself. “What are you rebelling against?” Brando is asked in The Wild One. “Whattaya got?” he replies. By the early 1960s, Hollywood had retooled its business model, shifting emphasis away from adults and families, the industry’s primary audience since its rise in the 1920s, to teenagers. The “teenpic” soon included multiple genres: horror, rock ’n’ roll, dangerous youth, and beach party, among others.


A popular 1945 song was called “Gotta Make Up for Lost Time,” and Americans followed the song’s advice. The immediate postwar years saw a demographic tidal wave of weddings and births. Two things distinguished this race to “make up.” First, these marriages were remarkably stable. Not until the mid-1960s did the divorce rate begin to rise sharply. Second, the newlyweds were intent on having babies. Nearly everyone expected to have several children — it was almost a civic responsibility. After a century and a half of decline, the birthrate shot up. More babies were born in the six years between 1948 and 1953 than in the previous thirty years (Figure 25.3). These developments were not a new normal, but instead temporary reversals of long-standing demographic trends. Within the twentieth century as a whole, the 1950s and early 1960s stand out as exceptions to lower birthrates, rising divorce rates, and a steadily rising marriage age.

When birthrates are viewed over more than a century, the postwar baby boom is clearly only a temporary reversal of the long-term downward trend in the American birthrate.


One of the drivers of the baby boom was a drop in the average marriage age — down to twenty-two for men and twenty for women. Younger parents meant a bumper crop of children. Women who came of age in the 1930s had averaged 2.4 children; their counterparts in the 1950s averaged 3.2. Such a dramatic turnaround reflects both the younger age of marriage of the 1950s and the decade’s improved economic conditions, which encouraged larger families. Originating in 1945, the baby boom peaked in 1957, and birth rates remained high until the early 1960s. The intimate decisions of couples after World War II shaped American life for decades. When boomers went to work during the 1970s, the labor market became tight. When career-oriented boomers belatedly began having children in the 1980s, the birthrate jumped. And, as noted earlier, consumer trends catered to the needs and interests of the boomer generation, from the publication of parenting books to the development of teen culture. Today, as baby boomers face retirement, the costs of their entitlements strain Social Security and Medicare.

Baby boomers and the country as a whole benefitted from a host of important advances in medicine and public health in the postwar years. “Miracle drugs” such as penicillin (introduced in 1943), streptomycin (1945), and cortisone (1948) provided ready cures for previously serious diseases. When Dr. Jonas Salk perfected a polio vaccine in 1954, he became a national hero. The free distribution of Salk’s vaccine in the nation’s schools, followed in 1961 by Dr. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine, demonstrated the potential of government-sponsored public health programs.

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