Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (50 page)

Critics of suburbs, angry as they were about the deterioration of cities, did not stop there. Many deplored life in the suburbs themselves. Most suburbs, they said, were "techno-burbs" or "slurbs"—large anti-urban conglomerations that existed mainly to suit highway builders and suburban developers.
⁷⁶
John Keats wrote a satire,
The Crack in the Picture Window
, which bewailed the lack of privacy there. His suburb featured a family, the Drones, whose neighbors included the Fecunds and the Amiables.
⁷⁷
Another critic likened suburban life to "Disturbia," a place where the inanity of existence produced "haggard" men, "tense and anxious" women, and "the gimme kids" who, after unwrapping the last Christmas present, "look up and ask whether that is all."
⁷⁸

Easily the most common complaint about suburbs focused on "conformity." Suburbs, indeed, became symbols of what many critics imagined were the most oppressive aspects of life in the 1950s. These were not economic problems; aside from Mills and a few others, American intellectuals tended to be optimistic about the economy. Rather, critics had cultural concerns. They worried about the all-pervasive sameness, blandness, unventuresomeness, mindlessness, and threat to individualism that they thought were flowing from the onrushing materialism of middle-class life in the suburbs.

It followed, these critics thought, that people in suburbs were the ultimate "conformists." Everyone there, a hostile observer noted, "buys the right car, keeps his lawn like his neighbor's, eats crunchy breakfast cereal, and votes Republican."
⁷⁹
David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, influential social thinkers, did much to encourage such criticism in a widely discussed book,
The Lonely Crowd
, that they co-authored in 1950.
⁸⁰
The book argued that "American character" was changing. People were losing a more individualistic "inner-direction" that had existed in the past and were becoming more "other-directed," taking their cues from the opinions and behavior of peers. Suburbs were said to energize this development. "The suburb," Riesman wrote elsewhere, was "like a fraternity house at a small college in which like-mindedness reverberates upon itself."
⁸¹

Other writers chimed in with similar complaints later in the 1950s. John Cheever's short stories focused on the mindless, empty lives of suburbanites. Suburbs, he wrote, "encircled the city's boundaries like an enemy and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity."
⁸²
Another novelist, Sloan Wilson, in a best-selling book,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(1957), skewered the soulless, consumerist lives of suburbanites and the corporate world. William H. Whyte summed up criticisms like these in a big-selling work of popular sociology,
The Organization Man
. Suburbs, he conceded, were often friendly places. Some promoted greater tolerance. But they often had a hothouse quality that highlighted "getting along" or "belonging." Whyte concluded that suburbs, together with large and bureaucratic corporations, were threatening the individualistic and entrepreneurial drives that had made America great.
⁸³

The conformist atmosphere of suburbs, critics added, helped to deaden political debate, thereby sustaining the middle-of-the-road, mostly conservative consensus that seemed to dominate, especially in the mid-1950s. No one expressed this feeling about political ideas in the 1950s more cogently than the sociologist Daniel Bell, especially in his collection of essays
The End of Ideology
(1960).
⁸⁴
Bell insisted that older ideologies strong in the 1930s, notably Marxism, had lost their power to attract people. Instead, Americans focused on more private concerns and did not try to change the world. Bell did not altogether deplore this turn of events; like many contemporary thinkers, he rejoiced that the United States had avoided the bitter internal conflicts of more "ideological" societies like the Soviet Union. But he, too, was a bit wistful for a time when lively political debate had resounded in the land.

Underlying many of these criticisms of suburbia—and by extension of the "American character" in the 1950s—were deeper fears about the nation's psychological health. Buzzwords and phrases exposed these fears: "alienation," "identity crisis," "age of anxiety," "eclipse of community." The "uprooted" peopled America. "Mass society" obliterated identity and "individualism." Society was a "lonely crowd." Many of these words and phrases reflected the rising visibility of popular sociology, of psychological models, and of "experts"—whether Norman Vincent Peale on the power of positive thinking or Dr. Benjamin Spock, who soothed nervous parents with immensely reassuring advice about child-rearing. Psychiatry and psychology, like organized religion, boomed in the 1950s. The United States, it seemed, was becoming a "therapeutic culture" in which "experts" helped people to feel good.
⁸⁵

Some contemporaries thought that the rise of suburbia—and the runaway consumerism that seemed to accompany it—were undermining what they considered to be traditional American values. Mills charged forthrightly that the United States had become "a great salesroom, an enormous file, an incorporated brain, and a new universe of management and manipulation. "
⁸⁶
Other writers cited front-page scandals to demonstrate the apparently ubiquitous subversiveness of materialism, including the penetration by gamblers of big-time college basketball in 1951 and the perversion by television of big-money quiz shows at the end of the decade. The lure of riches seemed dangerously enticing.
⁸⁷

John Kenneth Galbraith, the often iconoclastic Harvard economist, summarized and expanded on these criticisms in one of the most talked-about non-fiction books of the decade,
The Affluent Society
.
⁸⁸
The title was ironic. Galbraith agreed that American society was in many ways affluent, but he emphasized that it was above all grossly materialistic. A liberal, Galbraith called for a range of public policies to improve the quality of life in America: greater spending for public education, price controls to curb profiteering, even a national sales tax to raise money for social services. Galbraith was concerned above all with the contrast, as he saw it, between private opulence and public austerity. His target, like that of many other critics in the 1950s, was as much the vulgarity of the culture as the economy.

All these denunciations of American society and culture in the 1950s revealed that contemporary critics were both lively and trenchant. Moreover, they enjoyed substantial respect at the time; writers like Whyte and Galbraith received widespread critical praise and attracted many readers.
⁸⁹
Some of the criticism, however, was one-sided. Those who lambasted suburbia, for instance, tended to ignore several basic facts: the boom in building energized important sectors of the economy, providing a good deal of employment; it lessened the housing shortage that had diminished the lives of millions during the Depression and the war; and it enabled people to enjoy conveniences, such as modern bathrooms and kitchens, that they had not had before. Like the Levittowners, these people often worked hard to keep up their properties and to bring personal touches to their homes. Few suburbs, Malvina Reynolds to the contrary, were ticky-tacky and all the same. Many suburbanites also took pride in the community life that evolved around schools, churches, and other institutions: the new neighborhoods were hardly as antiseptic and isolating as Keats and others suggested. Above all, millions of suburbanites were delighted to have space—a profound human need—and to own property. A resident of Canarsie in southeast Brooklyn, then a rapidly growing (and essentially all-white) "suburban" neighborhood, remembered, "Most of us who live in Canarsie came from ghettos. But once we made it to Canarsie, we finally had a little piece of the country." Another recalled, "It was exhilarating to own my own home. I felt like I had finally achieved something."
⁹⁰

Critics were on especially shaky ground in suggesting that suburbs—and by extension what they perceived as the materialism and "conformity" of American culture—were subverting traditional values. It was obvious, of course, that economic growth greatly boosted the consumption of goods, with much attendant waste and misdirection of resources from public needs to private display. Galbraith was on target there. Acquiring "things," however, was hardly new to American life in the 1950s—just easier because many more people had much more money. More important, people were hardly abandoning "individualism" for "conformity" or "inner-direction" for "other-direction." Traditional values—the work ethic, competing hard in order to advance in the world—seemed as vital as ever. (Immigrants at the time frequently were appalled by what they considered to be the grim and determined pace of life in the United States.) Other long-standing human aspirations, such as the quest for security and stability and the desire to live among people like themselves, also endured. People did not surrender to the tyranny of conformity. Rather, they searched understandably for whatever enabled them and their families to feel comfortable and safe.

Broad generalizations about changes in values or "national character" are often unsatisfying because they fail to capture the variety and complexity of people. Throughout American history, values of "community" (including "conformity") and "individualism" have coexisted, sometimes amid considerable tension. So, too, in the 1950s. Like Willie Loman, the "hero" of Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
(1950), many Americans remained both fatuously conformist as well as driven to achieve for themselves and their families.
⁹¹
Disneyland, which opened in 1955, revealed these complexities in another way. An enormously successful business enterprise, it testified to the power of affluence and of the consumer culture. Millions of people, most (but not all) of them middle-class, traveled long distances to visit the place.
⁹²
And Disneyland managed to have things both ways, celebrating Main Street (à la Norman Rockwell) as well as Tomorrowland. Main Street evoked nostalgia for traditional smalltown styles of life, while Tomorrowland appealed to the still strong yearning of Americans for the new, the dynamic, and the unknown. The positive values associated with technological progress—individualism and entrepreneurialism among them—had by no means lost their hold on the imaginations of people.

Critics of affluent excess during the boom years of the mid-1950s tended sometimes to expect human beings to deny themselves material pleasures. Yet a culture in which rising numbers of people have the luxury of fairly secure food and shelter—increasingly the case in the United States in the post-World War II era—is one in which hopes for still greater comforts will expand. The majority of Americans, their basic needs more secure, developed ever-larger expectations about life. Some, concentrating on material gain, came to crave quick personal gratification. Others, however, began to imagine a better society in which the best of American ideals could be put into practice—this, too, the nation as a whole could afford. In this way, material progress helped in time to arouse not only quests for personal gratification but also rising awareness of the needs and rights of people. It would not be long before a rights-consciousness emerged that shook the surface calm of American culture.

12
Mass Consumer Culture

To listen to commentators on American cultural life in the 1950s was often to hear a litany of complaints: the mass media were debasing public taste, sexual license was threatening traditional morality, juvenile delinquency was overrunning society, and generational change—a "youth culture"—was undermining the stability of family and community. Here are a few of the voices:

—On the mass media, especially television: "The repetitiveness, the selfsameness, and the ubiquity of modern mass culture tend to make for automatized reactions and to weaken the forces of individual resistance."

—On sexual behavior, as described by a critic of Alfred Kinsey's book
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953): The book reveals "a prevailing degeneration in American morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman Empire. . . . the presuppositions of the
Kinsey Report
are strictly animalistic."

—On youth and juvenile delinquency: "Not even the Communist conspiracy could devise a more effective way to demoralize, disrupt, confuse, and destroy our future citizens than apathy on the part of adult Americans to the scourge known as Juvenile Delinquency."

These complainers were not all prudes or reactionaries. The critic of "modern mass culture" was Theodor Adorno, a leader of the Frankfurt School of cultural criticism, which drew on Marxian and Freudian insights to lament the commercialization of American life. The critic of Kinsey, one among many, was Henry Pitney Van Dusen, head of Union Theological Seminary, a prestigious religious institution. Critics of mass consumer culture also included shrewd and respected intellectuals such as the sociologist Daniel Bell and the historian Daniel Boorstin.
¹

Were these Jeremiahs on target? The answer depends, of course, on the perspective of the viewer. In retrospect it is clear that they erected a number of straw men and exaggerated the curses of change. Still, they correctly placed their fingers on problems (as well as prospects) associated with one of the most profound developments of the postwar era: the dramatic expansion of a mass consumer culture. Some aspects of this culture, notably the rise of television and of "rock 'n' roll" music, struck the nation with great and sudden power. Other related developments, such as more liberalized sexuality and the advent of a "youth culture," provoked a great deal of controversy. While these changes did not stem the force of traditional values in the 1950s, they exposed undercurrents of dissatisfaction and rebellion that were to break loose more powerfully in the 1960s.

I
NTELLECTUALS SUCH AS
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and other European emigres who dominated the Frankfurt School were hardly alone in condemning what they considered to be the commodification and debasement of American cultural life. The effluvium of bad taste, they thought, not only overran the arts but also oozed throughout American culture. The United States, they said, suffered from ugly roadside "strips," rampant commercialization, mindless mass entertainment—Disneyland was often Exhibit Number One—and tasteless, fat-filled food that later made obesity a national concern.
²

Dwight Macdonald, one of the nation's most trenchant critics, summed up many of these feelings in 1960 in a widely cited essay, "Masscult and Midcult." It took special aim at the state of the arts. "Masscult," he complained, was crassly commercial work—we know it when we see it. "Midcult," exemplified by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
, and middle-class magazines like the
Saturday Evening Post
, was more insidious because it "pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them."
³
"Mass society" had arrived but, alas, it was driving quality from the arts and threatening to deprive even intelligent people of their ability to discriminate between what was artistically enduring and what was merely cheap and commercial.
⁴

Critics such as Macdonald identified many baleful consequences of the spread of the consumer culture in the postwar era. Techniques of sales promotion, greatly abetted by the explosion of advertising and public relations, increasingly resorted to "hype" to push a cornucopia of new products and patterns. Just as auto manufacturers and fashion designers changed their styling every year, so did other producers. Painters, sculptors, gallery owners, and curators struggled so hard to come up with what was "new" that by the 1960s they had virtually abolished the concept of avant-garde. By then pop art that replicated consumer goods, such as Andy Warhol's renditions of Campbell's Soup cans, was becoming the latest of many high-priced rages in a market-driven Art World. Warhol's intent was partly satirical. Still, he profited immensely. His visibility by the early 1960s suggested that the boundaries between High Culture and Popular Culture were becoming increasingly blurred over time.

In some ways, however, those who focused on the debasement of American aesthetic life tended to exaggerate their case. The 1950s witnessed the rise to artistic prominence of a number of essayists and novelists—J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike, Philip Roth—whose work received widespread critical acclaim and remained much admired in later years.
⁵
It was equally unfair to dismiss the Art World as only faddish or strictly of "midcult" quality. Thanks in part to the flight of European artists and intellectuals to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, New York City emerged after the war as a vibrant center for painters, sculptors, dramatists, actors, dancers, writers, musicians, and others in the arts. The New York School of abstract expressionist painting by Americans such as Jackson Pollock attracted international attention in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Seekers of High Culture in the United States, moreover, did not need to despair. Recordings of classical music sold well during the 1950s and later. Theater companies, art museums, and symphony orchestras, though struggling amid the decline of central cities, usually survived, even in relatively small markets. Sales of books—including classics of literature—were bolstered by the paperback revolution that exploded after 1945.
⁶
What these quantitative trends indicated was surely a matter of opinion; who could prove, for instance, that most of the people who went to art museums "appreciated" what they saw? Still, it was equally hard to demonstrate that taste—surely a subjective word—declined in the 1950s, especially in a country with increasing numbers of highly educated people.

The output of Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s exposes some of the hazards of sweeping generalizations about American culture. Movie producers, rapidly losing viewers, sought anxiously to bring people back to the theaters. Most responded, as usual, by playing cautiously to a mass audience. Westerns proliferated, many of them celebrating heroic men, submissive women, and treacherous and dirty Indians. Other movies played to Cold War obsessions by raising the specter of communism and glorifying strong military authorities.
⁷
Cinerama in 1952, 3-D movies in 1953, and stereo sound and CinemaScope and Vista Vision in the mid-1950s resorted to technological wizardry in the hope of enticing big turnouts.
The Searchers
(1956) featured a ten-foot-tall John Wayne. Lots of films relied on lavish display, panoramic photography, vivid Technicolor (standard by the late 1950s), hackneyed boy-gets-girl scenarios, biblical extravaganzas (such as Cecil B. De Mille's
The Ten Commandments
in 1956), and predictable Hollywood endings aimed at sending people happily out of the theater.
⁸

A few movies of the early postwar era, however, considered serious subjects. Among them were
Gentleman's Agreement
(1947), in which Gregory Peck coped with anti-Semitism;
Pinky
(1949), a controversial film that broke ground by showing a black woman passing for white;
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1954), on drug addiction; and
On the Waterfront
(1954).
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) gave James Dean the chance to emote about adolescent rebellion. Hollywood even brought forth a few anti-war movies, including Stanley Kubrick's powerful
Paths of Glory
(1957), and
On the Beach
(1959), which concerned the horrors of nuclear catastrophe.
⁹
As these examples suggest, movies in the 1950s, while for the most part tame and unventuresome, offered a modest amount of range. Here, as elsewhere in the realm of cultural criticism, complaints about the rapid debasement of culture were excessive.

This range suggested that critics such as Macdonald tended to overlook two things. First, there was the obvious point that the mass media were necessarily commercial in nature. It stood to reason that editors and movie producers would seek to maximize profits by going after mass markets. So to a lesser extent did impresarios in the Art World. The result was predictable: much cultural production continued to be aimed at popular, not elite, taste. And it did not assail contemporary social norms, such as racial segregation. These realities existed throughout the commercialized Western world. By the late 1950s, when the people of western Europe were at last climbing out of the trough of wartime destruction, critics across the Atlantic were bewailing the "Americanization" (or "Coca-Colaization") of Europe.

Elitist critics erred also when they suggested or implied that the purveyors of mass culture commanded hegemonic power over the minds and values of people. It was true, of course, that film producers, like owners of radio and television stations, possessed vast economic resources that they might use to shape public tastes. Critics understandably worried much about this power. It was far less clear, however, that the producers and owners succeeded in molding popular opinions in any thoroughgoing way. For one thing, they had many "publics" to satisfy. Hedging their bets, they cooked up a smorgasbord of things for consumers to feast on. An increasing variety of films, television shows, music, drama, books, and magazines—compare a good newsstand or music store of the 1960s with one of the 1940s—arose in an effort to sate these specialized appetites.

Consumers, moreover, clung to their own tastes. As post-modern critics were later to emphasize, "texts" (whether High Culture or popular entertainment) received distinctively personal "readings" from individuals.
¹⁰
People are not easily programmed. That this is the case can be demonstrated by exploring the world of television, a dynamic force in the explosion of mass culture during the 1950s.

W
AYNE
C
OY, A MEMBER
of the Federal Communications Commission, recognized in 1948 the forthcoming triumph of television. "Make no mistake about it," he said, "television is here to stay. It is a new force unloosed in the land. I believe it is an irresistible force."
¹¹

His prediction proved prescient, for TV grew enormously in the next few years. In 1948 it was still in its infancy; few Americans had ever seen it. People relied instead on radio, which in 1949 had 1,600 stations compared to twenty-eight for television. Then the TV boom: 172,000 American households had television in 1948, 15.3 million by 1952. In 1955 there were 32 million television sets in use, in roughly three-fourths of households. The growth continued: by 1960 some 90 percent of households, including once isolated shacks in the Deep South and elsewhere, owned at least one set; bars and restaurants catered to many other viewers. Color sets then came into vogue. By 1970, 24 million homes (38 percent of the total) had color TV.
¹²

As innumerable commentators noted at the time, television stood as an icon in American homes. Millions of families dropped other activities to watch the early stars, such as the comedians Milton Berle, Arthur Godfrey, Lucille Ball, and Jackie Gleason. Water companies reported enormous increases in usage during commercial breaks. Families suspended talk during meals to watch the "tube," especially after the advent of TV Dinners in 1954. Ball, star of the immensely popular "I Love Lucy," captivated audiences in late 1952 as the date arrived for her (real-life) baby. When she featured the blessed event on January 19, 1953, some 44 million people tuned in to watch. The show received the highest TV rating (68 percent) of any in the 1950s. (A smaller number of viewers, some 29 million, watched Eisenhower's televised inauguration the next day.) By the 1960s polls reported that television was the favorite leisure activity of nearly 50 percent of the population and that TV sets were on for an average of more than three hours a day in American homes.
¹³

In its early years (until 1951 or 1952) television seemed promising to people with high-brow tastes. From their perspective this was something of a Golden Age free of the crassest kinds of commercial pressures. Programs such as "Playhouse 90" and the "Kraft Television Theater" featured live drama with performers—Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eva Marie Saint—starring in plays crafted by well-known writers.
¹⁴
"Meet the Press," moving over from radio, began on NBC in 1948. Edward R. Murrow's sometimes iconoclastic "See It Now" programs, such as those concerning Joe McCarthy in 1954, suggested that TV could challenge the norms of American politics.