Affluence and Anxiety:Society and Culture

in the 1950s

America in 1945

• Half of all world manufacturing• Generated more than half world’s

electricity• Owned two thirds of the world’s gold

and half of all its monetary reserves• Produced twice as much petroleum

as the rest of the world combined

What did Cold War culture owe to the Cold War?

Key feature of 1950s America:Powerful myth of consensus

End of Ideology?

“Ideology, which was once the road to action, has come to a dead end… [this is a good thing] because the tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to color them with moral fervor and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society…”

“Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States were by the people of Russia in the late 1940s…”Archibald MacLeish

1959 Kruschev-Nixon “Kitchen debate”

"On this American model and hanging alonside her is a complete and stylish Soviet wardrobe. The total cost, excluding hat, is $461." "U.S. envoy's wife finds Moscow modes high priced, wide shouldered, not very handsome… The slender gams of the girl above give her away as American." Life 1952

“COLD WAR, WARM HEARTH”

• "Cold war ideology and domestic revival are two sides of the same coin". Elaine Tyler May

• Containment a domestic metaphor• Domesticity, gender roles

The Five Stars [1957]

Got a doll baby, I love her soNothing else like her anywhere you goMan she's anything but tallA regular pint-sized atom bomb!

Chorus:Atom bomb baby little atom bombI want her in my wigwamShe's just the way I want her to beA million times hotter than TNT!

Atom bomb baby, loaded with powerRadioactive as a TV towerA nuclear fission in the soulWorks with electronic control!

Economic prosperity

• Pax Americana: Bretton Woods system, World Bank, General Agreement of Tariffs and Trades (GATT)

• Penetration of foreign markets• Affluence at home: 25% rise in real

income 1945-1959; by 1960 62% of Americans owned their own homes; low inflation

• Military-Industrial Complex • Corporate strategies: consolidation

Culture of Consumption

• Basis for new American nationalism?• A new frontier of abundance for

capitalism?• Consensus theory? Even critics

thought that the problem with Ameican society was its banality not its injustice or inequality.

An Expanding Middle Class

• Increasing middle class, whether defined in terms of education or wealth

• More leisure time, more consumer spending

• Increasing homogeneity and self-consciousness of middle class

Television and the shaping of middle class culture

“Father Knows Best”

The “Feminine Mystique”

Suburban Living

Bureaucratisation of work

Beyond the Consensus

• “A Dual Collective Representation” (Warren Susman): America was living its dreams yet terrified of the future…

• Racial tension, increasing de facto segregation,

Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg