Where to start?Post hoc, nec ergo propter hoc.
I guess the GI Bill for one. That big gumnit program worked pretty well in producing a middle class, yes?
See also the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans from 1941-1981, which further subsidized the greatest expansion of the middle class in world history.
Probably fair to say both were successful.
That greatest expansion of the middle class, particularly as that expansion applies to relatively low-skilled workers in unionized factories, might have been a division of monopoly rents among bourgeois and proletarians that at the time caused some industrial economists some concern.
Perhaps I'm showing my age, but at one time the populist political economy saw those large manufacturing firms as building blocks of a monopoly capitalism that practiced conscious parallelism, which reduced efficiency by restricting output and raising prices, and the unions as accomplice residual claimants to the monopoly profits thereby obtained. The retailers of the era were complicit in that monopoly capitalism, with a concentrated food packing industry and often vertically integrated supermarkets profiting by the inflated price of bread, although, again, food and commercial workers' unions participated as residual claimants. Because firms could practice conscious parallelism without calendars to keep track of the phases of the moon or meetings in the back room at Dirty Helen's, antitrust action could do nothing about the resulting inefficiencies, although Wal-Mart could.The creation of an educated middle class, courtesy of the G.I. Bill? Without the foundation of a knowledge-intensive economy in which the comparative advantage rests in advanced technology goods (Bessemer steel, American System assembly lines, aircraft and freight diesel locomotives, microchips and software, do you see the pattern?) the aftermath of the G.I. Bill might have foreshadowed China's college bubble.
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