Communist drive touched thousands of lesser figures: a printer in the
U.S. Government Printing Office, linguists and engineers at the Voice
of America overseas broadcasting service, a Seattle fireman, local pub-
lic housing officials, janitors, even men's room attendants. Long before
the "McCarthy era," loyalty oaths affected teachers. Lawyers, other
professionals, and, in Indiana, even wrestlers had to document their
loyalty. Colleges policed students' political activities. Labor leaders and
unions rose or fell according to their sympathy or hostility toward
communism. Entertainers faced a "blacklist." Ordinary people re-
sponded to the anti-Communist fervor by reining in their political
activities, curbing their talk, and keeping their thoughts to themselves.

Yet paradoxically these bleak years are also remembered as happy
times. America emerged from World War II with her continental ex-
panse untouched by the ruin visited on other lands. An "arsenal of
democracy," the nation had provided materiel for a global battlefront,
food and fiber for friend and conquered foe. The joblessness that
haunted the 1930s vanished. Though the postwar economy had its fits
and starts, and prosperity did not drizzle on every garden, pessimists
were confounded as the good times persisted.

With $140 billion in pent-up wartime savings, Americans went on a
buying spree. New autos rolled off assembly lines too slowly to slake
demand; some customers bribed dealers in order to buy a car. Freezers,
refrigerators, and soon televisions flowed out of factories and into
homes. Americans bought 20,000 new TV sets a day in the mid-fifties.
By the end of the decade, fifty million televisions were in use. The
sprouting forests of antennas snared signals that webbed viewers in
every home into the national consumer culture.

The landscape changed beyond recognition as new suburbs sprawled
out from the central cities, woven to the workplace by highways.
Freshly erected, moderately priced homes--such as the famous Le-
vittown developments--sprang up like new crops in the potato fields
they displaced. The family car and single-family home became the
norm.

The social landscape changed as well. Though poverty persisted,
affluence was far more visible. There were recessions, but no depres-
sion. Products found buyers. Buyers had jobs. Thanks to the GI Bill,
veterans, many from blue-collar homes, went to college, entered profes-
sions, and attained white-collar status. They moved with their families
to the thronging new suburbs and became, for good or ill, "organization

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