Affluence and Anxiety: Society and Culture in the 1950s

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Affluence and AnxietySociety and Culturein the
1950s
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America in 1945

• Half of all world manufacturing
• Generated more than half worlds electricity
• Owned two thirds of the worlds gold and half of
  all its monetary reserves
• Produced twice as much petroleum as the rest of
  the world combined

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• What did Cold War culture
• owe to the Cold War?
• Key feature of 1950s America
• Powerful myth of consensus

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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

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• 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

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1959 Kruschev-Nixon Kitchen debate
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• "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

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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

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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!
• ChorusAtom 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!

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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

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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.

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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

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Television and the shaping of middle class culture
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• Father Knows Best

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The Feminine Mystique
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Suburban Living
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Bureaucratisation of work
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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,

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Allen Ginsberg

• Jack Kerouac

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