The%20Postwar%20Landscape%20of%20Mass%20Consumption

1
The Postwar Landscape of Mass Consumption

• Consumer Culture and U.S. Civic Identity

2
World War II and Postwar Consumer Culture

• "In the context of World War II, good citizenship
  and good consumership were promoted as
  inseparable, and women gained special stewardship
  over both." (83)

3
After the War

• the significance of citizen-consumer concerns
  like "product safety, grading and labeling, and
  just prices" lost ground to the investigation of
  "how the individual consumer's subjective frame
  of mind boded for the nation's economy." (133)

4

• OPA discontinued at end of 1946 over objections
  of consumer activists
• Many groups endorsed the importance of mass
  consumption to making a successful reconversion
  from wartime to peacetime, although each came to
  value mass consumption for its own reasons." (114)

5
Postwar American Dream

• widespread postwar affluence
• Democratization through shared abundance (Cohen)
•  
• by 1953, average US family enjoyed twice as much
  real income as in the 1920s

6

• "Suburbia is becoming the most important single
  market in the country. It is the suburbanite who
  starts the mass fashionsfor children,
  dungarees, vodka martinis, outdoor barbecues,
  functional furniture, and picture windows All
  suburbs are not alike, but they are more alike
  than they are different."
• William H. Whyte, author of the 1956 best seller,
  The Organization Man
• How does this passage relate to Whytes
  discussion of the organization man and the social
  ethic in the introduction to his book?

7

• "Although there are many ways that historians
  might conceptualize the second half of the
  twentieth century, I have put Americans'
  encounter with mass consumption at the center of
  my analysis. . .
• . . . I am convinced that Americans after World
  War II saw their nation as the model . . . of a
  society committed to mass consumption and . . .
  its far-reaching benefits. (Cohen, 7)
• Watch clip In the Suburbs

8

• Suburbanization
• baby boom
• consumerism set the tone of postwar American life
•  

Levittown circa 1950
9

• Mass consumption dictated the most central
  dimensions of postwar society, including the
  political economy (the way public policy and the
  mass consumption economy mutually reinforced each
  other), as well as the political culture (how
  political practice and American values,
  attitudes, and behaviors tied to mass consumption
  became intertwined)." (7-8)

10
Political Economy

• According to Cohen, what are some ways that
  public policy and the mass consumption economy
  mutually reinforced each other?

11
Dan Ryan Expressway, Chicao
12
Consequences of superhighway development for
urban, ethnic neighborhoods
13
suburban sprawl note dependence on cars
14
FHA, Redlining, and Covenants
15
Political Culture

• According to Cohen, how did political practice
  and American values, attitudes, and behaviors
  tied to mass consumption become intertwined?

16

• Emphasis on "growing the economic pie," rather
  than assuring its fair distribution, helped to
  attenuate the connection between citizenship and
  consumerism and to pave the way for the
  ascendancy of the purchaser consumer

17
(No Transcript)
18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21

• Perhaps most attractive about the Consumers'
  Republic was the way it promised the socially
  progressive end of economic equality without
  requiring politically progressive means of
  redistributing existing wealth.
• The prevailing wisdom persisted that continued
  economic growth in the Consumers' Republic could
  sow the seeds of a natural egalitarianism." (129)

22

• Cold War Context
• Politicians conflated free choice as
  consumerswith political freedom
• Nixon-Kruschev Kitchen Debate in 1959 (Cohen,
  126)

23
To us, diversity, the right to choose, . . . is
the most important thing. We don't have one
decision made at the top by one government
official. . . . We have many different
manufacturers and many different kinds of washing
machines so that the housewives have a choice. .
. . Would it not be better to compete in the
relative merits of washing machines than in the
strength of rockets? -Vice President Richard
Nixon at the opening of the American National
Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 (quoted in Elaine
Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 1988, 17)
24
Re-gendering the Consumer

• Consumerism centrally important to the nations
  economic health and national security
• Increasingly male-oriented
• "The gendering of the 'consumer' thus shifted
  from women to couples, and at times to men alone.
  The female citizen consumer evolved into the male
  purchaser as citizen who, with the help of state
  policies, also dominated as head of household,
  breadwinner, home-owner, and chief taxpayer."
  (147)

25

• This change in gender norms was abetted by the
  GI Bill, the adoption of the joint tax return
  (which, argues Alice Kessler-Harris and others,
  made male breadwinning normative), the increasing
  unavailability of credit for women, and the
  lessons of television, wherein "authoritative
  male voice-overs taught incompetent house-wives
  the merits of everything from kitchen floorwax to
  headache medication on the myriad of commercials
  that filled every crevice of time within and
  between TV programs." (150)

26
Consumer Credit
installment buying, home mortgages, and auto
loans raised Americans total private
indebtedness in the 1950s from 73 billion to
196 billion
First credit card in 1950 AmEx follows in 1958
27
(No Transcript)
28
(No Transcript)
29
Race and Suburban Property Ownership

• Racism conspired with the fear of losing
  purchasing power to create racially segregated
  suburbs the nation over. . .
• "As a majority of white Americans invested most
  of their life savings in a home by 1960, fear of
  racial mixing moved beyond a simple white
  discomfort with sharing neighborhoods and public
  institutions. The presence of black neighbors
  threatened to depress property values and hence
  to jeopardize people's basic economic security,
  or so homeowners were convinced." (213)

30
Class and Consumers Republic

• Finally, the rise of the Consumers' Republic "not
  only fostered new rules of the game for gender
  roles, but for the class structure as well."
  (152) Namely, it helped to spell the end of the
  idea of a separate working-class labor movement,
  particularly after the passage of the
  Taft-Hartley Act and the acceptance by labor
  leaders of the goals of purchasing power and a
  mass middle class.

Pamphlet issued by the California CIO Council in
August, 1948
31
Civil Rights

• The "firm connection between citizenship and
  consumption presented African Americans with new
  opportunities for fighting the discrimination in
  public places that had so angered them during
  wartime," and hence the Montgomery bus boycotts
  and Woolworth sit-ins across the South. (166)

32
http//www.statemuseumpa.org/levittown/one/d.html
33

• "Regardless of the Levittown house which you
  choose, you will be acquiring the latest in
  modern design with the most up to date appliances
  and features."
• Levitt and Sons sales brochure

Interior of the Country Clubber model. Levittown
Regional Library http//www.statemuseumpa.org/lev
ittown/one/d.html
34
Family gathered near a picture window, standard
in most Levittown house models. Rita Calzarette
http//www.statemuseumpa.org/levittown/one/d.html
35
Woman standing in Levittowner model kitchen.
Rita Calzarette http//www.statemuseumpa.org/lev
ittown/one/d.html
36

• The landscape of mass consumption created a
  metropolitan society where people no longer left
  their residential enclaves to enter central
  marketplaces, and the parks, streets, and public
  buildings that surrounded them, but rather were
  separated by class, race, and less so gender in
  differentiated commercial subcenters." (288)

Hillsdale Shopping Mall, San Mateo, California
circa 1960
37
(No Transcript)
38
(No Transcript)
39
(No Transcript)