The post-World War II economic and population boom resulted in a series of demographic changes. Movement westward increased dramatically. Meanwhile, millions of white Americans left the cities for the suburbs, while southern African Americans and other minorities moved north to take their places.
Many returning African-American veterans decided not to wait for the end of SEGREGATION and discrimination in the South, and instead they headed north when they returned from the war. Nearly one out of five southerners left the region for northern cities and industrial jobs during the 1940s in a migration pattern that had begun during World War I. Because of this departure, southern farm population declined 60 percent between 1940 and 1960, forcing those farmers who could afford it to mechanize or switch to easier crops to grow and harvest, such as soybeans, and causing those who could not to lose their farms. Tens of thousands of farmers lost their livelihoods.
At the same time, the South, after the war, began to market itself to the big businesses of the North by establishing recruiting offices to tout its nonunion labor, low taxes, cheap land, and the absence of government interference. Combined with the widespread use of air conditioning, these factors served to attract many to Florida, Texas, and other southern states in what came to be called the Sun Belt. Federally funded military bases and weapons production spurred the economies in many states.
Many war workers and their families had streamed into western cities with large numbers choosing to live in California, and the trend continued after the war. Western cities grew phenomenally, and, by 1963, California passed New York as the nation’s most populous state.
The Korean War sparked increased military expenditures, and aircraft production in California accounted for more than 40 percent of the total increases in manufacturing employment between 1949 and 1953. By 1962, the Pacific Coast as a whole held almost half of all Defense Department research and development contracts.
As the population shifted westward after World War II, another form of movement was taking place. Millions of white Americans fled the inner city for the suburbs. Fourteen of the nation’s largest cities lost population in the 1950s. As central cities became places where poor nonwhites clustered, new urban and racial problems emerged. Many businesses pulled out of the areas, and buildings fell into disrepair. Due to low income and discriminatory real estate policies, many blacks and Latinos were forced into the run-down sections of the inner city. This exacerbated the nation’s racial and ethnic stratification and laid the groundwork for future problems. Eventually, such unfair practices led to rioting and political unrest among minority communities.
For many white middle-class people, cities were places to work but leave at five o’clock. In Manhattan, south of City Hall, the noontime population of 1.5 million dropped to 2,000 overnight. “It became a part-time city,” as one observer wrote, “tidally swamped with bustling humanity every weekday morning when the cars and commuter trains arrived, and abandoned again at nightfall when the wave sucked back—left pretty much to thieves, policemen, and rats.” By the end of the 1950s, a third of all Americans resided in suburbs; in 1970, 38 percent did.
Suburbs provided a piece of the American dream for many people, a place of their own. When veterans returned from World War II and married in record numbers, many shared living quarters with their extended families because the construction of new housing had slowed during the Depression, and practically stopped during World War II. Government-issued mortgages, especially for veterans, and low interest rates fueled the building boom after the war. The pioneer of postwar SUBURBANIZATION was William J. Levitt, a builder who recognized the advantages of mass production during World War II, when his firm constructed housing for war workers. Levitt’s team worked as an assembly line, with tasks broken down into individual steps. Groups of workers each performed a single job on each tract. The construction costs at Levittown, New York, a community of 17,000 homes built in the late 1940s, were only $10 per square foot, compared with the $12 to $15 common elsewhere.
Migration trends affected the environment in negative ways. The scarcity of water in the West required massive water projects to support the growing population. Suburbs replaced huge tracts of fields and forests that were divided into standard squares, each with a house, a two-car garage, and a manicured lawn. It was cheaper to cut trees down than to work around them. The move to the suburbs and to the Sunbelt states stretching from Florida to California continued in subsequent decades, as did the decline and decay of historic inner-city communities.
Further reading: Alferdteen Harrison, Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); Bernard L Weinstein, Regional Growth and Decline in the United States: The Rise of the Sunbelt and the Decline of the Northeast (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978).
—Elizabeth A. Henke
World History
