Boomtime: Post-War Prosperity [VHS]

“Cars in the 1950s weren’t cars, they were status symbols: they said who you were and what you had and maybe even where you came from and where you could go.” - Georgette Braga, an American teenager in the 1950s Growing up in the 1950s “was golden” remembers Caryn Pace. “My parents wanted me to have everything they couldn’t.” But ownership wasn’t just an American dream. As Marshall Plan aid rebuilt Europe, cars, motorbikes, washing machines, televisions, and refrigerators became affordable for the newly employed.

“It was like a fairy tale,” says German autoworker George Stege. “We could buy something and enjoy it. We’d become somebody again.” The desperate days of breaking ice at the wash-house or farming with real “horse power” were over, replaced by steady work, rising wages, mass production, and an American-inspired consumer economy. Cheap oil sustained the boom for 30 years, until the Arab oil embargo and the cost of fuel slowed it down.

The People Remember: American cars, motorbikes, vacations, electric kitchens, Levittown, the Marshall Plan, Edith Piaf.If you were among the first wave of baby boomers and you remember Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” then this program from the Emmy Award-winning series People’s Century will bring an instant smile of nostalgia.

This final volume in the Saga of World War II boxed set spans primarily the years 1947 to 1960, a period of unprecedented prosperity and postwar flourish. “New cars, new tires, car radios, nylons, juicy steaks,” enthuses a newsreel narrator, “It sounds almost like a dream.”

Boomtime also chronicles how the American Dream was being exported throughout the world. As this program notes, the war had left the people of Europe exhausted. Families still grieved and food and fuel were scarce, and people scavenged for necessities. Dramatic archival footage and interviews with those who lived through it are a devastating reminder of the poverty and misery wrought by the war. Massive relief efforts such as the “Friendship Train” and the Marshall Plan brought goods to and helped rebuild crisis-ravaged Western Europe.

Back in the United States, it was a time when new suburban communities changed how people lived, and the supermarket changed the way people shopped. With the end of gas rationing, Americans took to the road again and our love affair with the automobile blossomed. “Cars in the 1950s were status symbols,” remarks one woman who grew up during this period. “They said who you were, where you came from, and where you could go.”

The program literally runs out of gas with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which marked a turning point. The days of cheap oil and the certainty that the West dominated the world were over. It was the beginning of the end for the greatest boom of the century. The People’s Century series continues with the box set Communism: The Promise and the Reality, the first title of which is Fallout: Nuclear Energy and Destruction. –Donald Liebenson
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Tags: cars in the 1950s, car radios, poverty and misery, europe cars, arab oil embargo, unprecedented prosperity, juicy steaks

Boomtime: Post-War Prosperity [VHS]

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