Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (157 page)

80.
With Reuel Denney, subtitled A
Study of the Changing American Character
(New Haven, 1950).

81.
David Riesman, "The Suburban Sadness," in William Dobriner, ed.,
The Suburban Community
(New York, 1958), 375–402.

82.
O'Neill,
American High
, 23.

83.
A handy summary of many of these criticisms is Richard Pells,
The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the
1940s
and 1950s
(New York, 1985), 232–48. Whyte's book appeared in 1956.

84.
Daniel Bell,
End of Ideology
. Also Howard Brick,
Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism
(Madison, 1986).

85.
Janowitz,
Last Half-Century
, 418–30; Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise
, 151–52; and Jonathan Imber, ed.,
The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings by Philip Rieff
(Chicago, 1990). Oscar Handlin's
The Uprooted
(New York, 1951), an account of American immigration, emphasized such psychological effects. It won a Pulitzer Prize for history.

86.
Mills,
White Collar
, xv.

87.
Randy Roberts and James Olson,
Winning Is the Only Thing: Sports in America Since 1945
(Baltimore, 1989), 73–92.

88.
(Boston, 1958).

89.
John Higham, "Changing Paradigms: The Collapse of Consensus History,"
Journal of American History
, 76 (Sept. 1989), 460–66.

90.
Jonathan Rieder,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 17–18; Hine,
Populuxe
, 32–35; Gans,
The Levittowners
, xxvii, 180.

91.
Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise
, 60–62, 151–52, 160–63, 174–77, 202–3.

92.
George Lipsitz, "The Making of Disneyland," in William Graebner, ed.,
True Stories from the American Past
(New York, 1993), 179–96.

1.
Adorno (1954) cited in James Gilbert, A
Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the
1950s (New York, 1986), 75; Van Dusen (1953) cited in David Halberstam, "Discovering Sex,"
American Heritage
, May/June, 1993, p. 42; the alarmist about juvenile delinquency (in 1954) was Robert Hendricksen, a Republican senator from New Jersey, cited in Gilbert,
Cycle of Outrage
, 75. See also Daniel Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
(New York, 1976), esp. 33–84; and Daniel Boorstin,
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
(New York, 1973), esp. 525–55.

2.
For food and diets, see Harvey Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
(New York, 1993), 106–10, 119–26. General interpretations of the rise of consumerism and mass culture, especially before 1940, include David Nasaw,
Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
(New York, 1993); William Leach,
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
(New York, 1993); and Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds.,
The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History
(New York, 1983), esp. 1–38, 101–41.

3.
Originally in
Partisan Review
, Spring 1960. Reprinted in his
Against the American Grain
(New York, 1962), quote on 37.

4.
Evaluations of Macdonald and other critics include Michael Wreszin, A
Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald
(New York, 1994); Richard Pells,
The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and
1950s (New York, 1985), 174–82, 348–49; William O'Neill,
Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s
(Chicago, 1971), 225–26; and Gilbert,
Cycle of Outrage
, 118–20.

5.
The new literary canon, however, mostly excluded women writers.

6.
Arlene Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty
(New York, 1991), 56–57; Janice Radway,
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill, 1984), 25–30; Morris Janowitz,
The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America
(Chicago, 1978), 351–52.

7.
Nora Sayre,
Running Time: Films of the Cold War
(New York, 1982), 195–98. See also
chapter 7
on the Red Scare, above.

8.
Peter Biskind,
Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties
(New York, 1983), esp. 44–56, 117–20. Also see Douglas Gomery, "Who Killed Hollywood?"
Wilson Quarterly
(Summer 1991), 106–12.

9.
The anti-war themes, to be sure, were cautiously packaged:
Paths of Glory
, while uncompromising, took on a relatively safe subject—the idiocy of foreign armies in World War I. Hollywood, like other creators of popular culture after 1945, mostly celebrated American involvement in World War II.

10.
See George Lipsitz,
Class and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight
(New York, 1981), 173–94; and John Fiske, ed.,
Understanding Popular Culture
(Boston, 1989), 18–21, 159–62.

11.
Joseph Goulden,
The Best Years
, 1945–1950 (New York, 1976), 175.

12.
Erik Barnouw,
Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television
(New York, 1982); Karal Ann Marling, As
Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Stephen Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War
(Baltimore, 1991), 153–54; Douglas Gomery, "As the Dial Turns,"
Wilson Quarterly
(Autumn 1993), 41–46; William Leuchtenburg, A
Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945
(Boston, 1973), 67.

13.
Janowitz,
Last Half-Century
, 337–338; Landon Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation
(New York, 1980), 120–23.

14.
James Baughman,
The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since
1941 (Baltimore, 1992), 48–54.

15.
Godfrey Hodgson,
America in Our Time
(Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 148.

16.
Baughman,
Republic of Mass Culture
, 61.

17.
J. Ronald Oakley,
God's Country: America in the Fifties
(New York, 1986), 103–10.

18.
Ibid., 107; Baughman,
Republic of Mass Culture
, 74–75.

19.
Statistics on audiences and many other matters may be found in Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh,
The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network
TV
Shows
, 1946–
Present
, 5th ed. (New York, 1992), 802–4.

20.
"The Honeymooners," featuring Gleason as a bus driver, focused on working-class life and did very well. So did "The Life of Riley."

21.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 104. See also James Davidson and Mark Lytle, "From Rosie to Lucy: The Mass Media and Images of Women in the 1950s," in Davidson and Lytle,
After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection
(New York, 1992), 303–28.

22.
The quiz show scandals have been descibed by many historians, including Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 172–76.

23.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 110. David Karp added a few years later that TV was the "cheekiest, vulgarest, noisiest, most disgraceful form of entertainment since bear-baiting, dog-fighting, and the seasonal Czarist Russian pogrom"
(New York Times Magazine
, Jan. 23, 1966).

24.
By Rudolph Flesch.

25.
Marty Jezer,
The Dark Ages: Life in the United States,
1945–1960 (Boston, 1982), 132; David Farber,
The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
(New York, 1994), 49–66.

26.
Among his best-known works were
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto, 1962), and
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Men
(New York, 1964). A thoughtful evaluation of McLuhan's thinking is William McKibben, "Reflections: What's On?,"
New Yorker
, March 9, 1992, pp. 4off.

27.
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 153–54. See also Ben Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly
(Boston, 1983); and William Tillinghast, "Declining Newspaper Readership: The Impact of Region and Urbanization,"
Journalism Quarterly
, 58 (1981), 14–23.

28.
Herbert Gans,
The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans
(New York, 1962), 187–96.

29.
For reviews of some of this writing, see Frank McConnell, "Seeing Through the Tube,"
Wilson Quarterly
(Sept. 1993), 56–65; Douglas Davis,
The Five Myths of Television Power
(New York, 1993); Fiske,
Understanding Popular Culture
, 134–36; and Gilbert,
Cycle of Outrage
, 109–26.

30.
See Lawrence Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Capitalism: Popular Culture and Its Audiences" (and rejoinders by others),
American Historical Review
, 94 (Dec. 1992), 1369–1430.

31.
Gans,
Urban Villagers
, 194–96; Radway,
Reading the Romance
, 209–22; John Fiske,
Television Culture
(London, 1987), 314–17.

32.
John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York, 1988), 260–62; George Chauncey, Jr., "The Postwar Sex Crime Panic," in William Graebner, ed.,
True Stories from the American Past
(New York, 1993), 161–78.

33.
The books were published by W. B. Saunders of Philadelphia. Convenient summations of Kinsey's data and influence can be found in Goulden,
Best Years
, 188–94; William O'Neill,
American High: The Years of Confidence
, 1945–1960 (New York, 1986), 45–48; and Regina Markell Morantz, "The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and American Culture,"
American Quarterly
, 29 (Winter 1979), 563–89. O'Neill called Kinsey "one of the great revolutionaries of private life" (48). John Burnham,
Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History
(New York, 1993), 190–91, is much more censorious.

34.
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 184–85.

35.
O'Neill,
American High
, 47–48.

36.
Goulden,
Best Years
, 194.

37.
Lionel Trilling, "The Kinsey Report," in Trilling,
The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
(New York, 1950), 223–42.