In 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged national exhibitions,
giving each nation’s citizens a chance to learn about life in the other. The Soviet
Exhibition in New York City displayed factory machines, scientific advances, and other
signs of the ways that communism had modernized an undeveloped country. The
American Exhibition in Moscow displayed consumer goods, including stereos, a
movie theater, home appliances, and twenty-two cars, all to show the superiority of
modern capitalism and how it embodied political and economic freedoms. But the
exhibition’s most important message was the conflation of consumption and
freedom.
At Moscow, vice-president Richard Nixon celebrated America’s high standard of living
and its ability to create prosperity for all social classes. The Moscow Exhibition
witnessed the “kitchen debate,” unscripted talk between Nixon and Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev about the relative merits of communism and capitalism that
unfolded in a model suburban American kitchen. Nixon claimed the kitchen showed
the mass enjoyment of freedom in America—freedom of choice among products,
colors, styles, and prices. Nixon understood that “soft power,” or the penetration of
American goods and popular culture, was stronger than military might. His
celebration of American freedom defined as affluence and consumer choice within a
traditional family life captured much about America in the 1950s. Khrushchev mocked
American consumer culture and Americans’ obsession with goods. But his prediction
that the Soviet Union would soon surpass America in the production of consumer
goods conceded the victory of the American way of life in the Cold War.
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A “golden age” of capitalism followed World War II, in which economic expansion, stable
prices, low unemployment, and rising living standards characterized American economic life
until 1973. In every measurable way, most Americans lived better than had their parents and
grandparents. By 1960, a majority of Americans were defined by the government as middle
class, and the poverty rate had dropped to one in five families. New innovations like
television, air conditioners, dishwashers, cheap long-distance phone calls, and jet air travel
came into widespread use and former luxuries like electricity and indoor plumbing became
common features for many Americans.
Although the economies of Western Europe and Japan recovered after the war, the United
States remained the world’s industrial superpower. Major industries like steel, automobiles,
and aircraft dominated the American and world markets, and like other wars, the Cold War
increased industrial production and redistributed population and resources. The West
became a center of military technology production, and the South housed military bases and
shipyards. In New England, new aircraft and submarine production replaced some of the jobs
lost by the movement of textiles to the South. But the 1950s were in fact the last years of
America’s industrial age. Ever since, the U.S. economy has moved toward services, education,
information, finance, and entertainment, while employment in manufacturing has dropped.
Union-led wage raises caused many employers to turn to mechanizing production in order to
reduce labor costs. The number of farms in America declined as well, even as new
technologies and irrigation increased agricultural production. Changes in southern agriculture
continued to reduce the number of agricultural laborers, 3 million of whom, both black and
white, left the South.
What most spurred economic growth in the 1950s was housing construction and spending on
consumer goods. The postwar baby boom and population migration from cities to suburbs
created a demand for housing, televisions, home appliances, and cars. By 1960, there were
more suburban residents of single-family homes than people living in urban or rural areas. In
the 1950s, the number of houses doubled, most of which were built in suburbs. Many
Americans now realized dreams of owning their own home by purchasing an inexpensive
house in a housing development. But suburbs were often centered around malls, which were
accessible by cars and were used only for shopping and other private activities, unlike city
centers with multiple uses.
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California best symbolized the postwar suburban boom. Between World War II and
1975, more than 30 million Americans moved west of the Mississippi River. One-fifth
of the 1950s population growth happened in California, and in 1963 it surpassed New
York as the most populous state. “Centerless” western cities emerged, such as
Houston, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. These were decentralized clusters of single-family
homes and businesses tied together by highways, unlike eastern cities with central
business districts and surrounding residential areas united by public transportation. In
the new suburbs, life was revolved around the car; people drove to work and drove to
shop, and older city centers stagnated. Suburban homes required lawns, so much so
that today more land area in the United States is cultivated in grass than in
agricultural crops.
Affluence and consumerism had never before so pervaded American society. In a
consumer culture, freedom became the ability to satisfy market desires. The 1950s
was the culmination of a long-term trend in which consumerism replaced economic
independence and democratic participation as central definitions of American
freedom. Americans now happily accumulated debt in order to maintain a consumer
lifestyle.
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Racial deed restrictions (otherwise known as “racial covenants”) became common after 1926 when the U.S.
Supreme Court validated their use. The restrictions were an enforceable contract and an owner who violated
them risked forfeiting the property. Many neighborhoods prohibited the sale or rental of property to Asian
Americans and Jews as well as Blacks. In 1948, the Supreme Court changed its mind, declaring that racial
restrictions would no longer be enforced, but the decision did nothing to alter the informal structures of
segregation. It remained perfectly legal for realtors and property owners to discriminate on the basis of race. In
fact, the FHA STILL INSURED MORTGAGES WITH THESE COVENANTS EVEN AFTER THE SUPREME COURT DECLARED
IT UNCONSITUTIONAL!!!!!! Only after Congress passed the Housing Rights Act in 1968 were there measurable
openings in Seattle's system of housing segregation.
Above is a five-acre subdivision in Clyde Hill, near Bellevue. Between 1946 and 1948, J. Gordon and Mary
Schneidler subdivided and sold more than a dozen lots. Each deed of sale included the following restriction:
"This property shall not be resold, leased, rented or occupied except to or by persons of the Aryan race.“
The concept of an Aryan race had been popular in the early part of the 20th century, but had become closely
associated with Adolph Hitler's genocidal Aryanism before and during World War II. By 1946, the full dimensions
of the Nazi holocaust were known everywhere and it is surprising (indeed shocking) that this language was still in
use and that it would be written into this set of deeds.
Why the Schneidlers used the term "Aryan race" is unclear. That racial concept usually meant northern Europeans
as distinct from eastern and southern Europeans. The Aryans-only restriction thus would have excluded Italians,
Greeks, Poles, Russians, and many other European ancestries as well as Jews and all non Europeans.
Anti-semitism was also not uncommon – e.g. some deeds used the term "Hebrew" in its restriction. Another
common restriction was for the residents to be of the "white and Gentile race," or the "white and Gentile and
Caucasian race."
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Sometimes called Detroit's mini Berlin Wall, sometimes called the Wailing Wall, this
seemingly innocent looking wall in Joe Louis Park does little to betray its shameful
past.
After World War I, some black residents of Detroit moved into a then rural and vacant
area near the intersection of Wyoming and Eight Mile. In 1940, a developer sought to
build homes for middle income whites in a nearby area. However, the Federal
Housing Administration's policies of that era precluded their approving loans in
racially mixed areas. To secure FHA approval, this developer put up a wall six feet
high, one foot in width and one-half mile in length to clearly demark the white and
black areas. His wall led FHA to approve loans for his project.
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Although Congress, in 1949 passed a law to build almost a million units of public
housing, the law set a very low ceiling on residents’ income (in order to limit
competition for the construction of middle-class housing, on behalf of private
contractors). This limited housing projects to the very poor. Along with the fact that
white urban and suburban neighborhoods opposed the construction of public
housing, this reinforced the poverty of urban non-white areas. “Urban renewal” also
demolished poor neighborhoods in city centers in order to develop shopping centers,
all-white middle-income residential areas, and state university campuses. Whites
displaced by urban renewal often moved to suburbs, while non-whites were unable
to leave the inner city.
Suburbanization reinforced racial divisions in America. Between 1950 and 1970,
about 7 million whites left cities for suburbs, while 3 million blacks moved from the
South to the North, expanding and creating urban ghettos. Half a million Puerto
Ricans, many of them small farmers and laborers pushed off the island by sugar
companies, moved to the mainland, and many settled in New York City (hey….this
sounds like the context for “West Side Story!!!!!). Racial exclusion reinforced itself.
Non-whites facing employment discrimination and exclusion from educational
opportunity were confined to unskilled jobs. As whites and industrial jobs moved out
of the cities, poor blacks and Latinos stayed in the urban ghettos and became seen as
centers of crime, poverty, and welfare. Suburban whites feared that any non-white
presence in their neighborhoods would lower their quality of life and property values.
6
Elaine Tyler May Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era New York: Basic Books.
1988. 284 pp.
Elaine Tyler May aims to illustrate the connection between foreign and political policy (i.e.
containment, stopping the Russians and dealing with the Atomic Age) and family dynamics during the
post war and Cold War eras. She posits that political containment bred domestic containment In other
words, just as the US was supposed to contain the spread of communism, so the family was supposed
to do the same. It was to create stability in the home as a bulwark (or defense) against Communism -that stability was to demonstrate superiority. The home was looked at as a fortification against
external threats such as nuclear annihilation and communist subversion.
After World War II Americans married in greater numbers and with more stable, longer lasting
marriages than previous generations. May argues that such uniform yearning for marriage and families
was not a passive act during the Cold War but rather a political statement. “Marrying young and
having lots of babies were ways for Americans to thumb their noses at doomsday predictions” (i.e. the
Russians and the “bomb”). A secure family and home was how Americans could maintain their way of
life against the communist threat. So in May's view, the postwar rush into marriage and baby-making,
white middle-class Americans' embrace of traditional gender roles, and their new-found commitment
to family life were all responses to "the terrors of the atomic age.”
Both the foreign policy of the United States and family life were characterized by a quest for security
and an attempt to contain potentially dangerous forces, whether it was Communism or women’s
sexuality and or men’s wayward tendencies. Americans, she argues, responded to the tensions of the
Cold War era by seeking security at home: reproduction was more important than sexuality, housewife
and mother became a career path, and for men, the home was to be a safe haven from the alienation
of mind numbing work
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After the atomic bomb was dropped and the capacity for retaliation realized, theories
of sexual chaos emerged. Ties between communism and sexual depravity were
widely believed and those who engaged in any sexual activity beyond the norm
(between a married man and woman) were considered deviants or perverts who
would spread their poisonous views. The home was to contain sexuality -- specifically
keep women from being the “tempress” and men from falling prey to temptation.
This would, as the experts argued, keep American society morally sound and thus
safe from communist subversion and perversion.
8
At the same time women were learning how to stock pantries and bomb shelters
in case on emergencies, how to cook with makeshift utensils, rotate canned goods,
and maintain first aid and emergency kits. The cozy depiction of a dad, mom, and
child in a shelter were safe from the chaos on the outside. The Federal Civil Defense
Administration made pamphlets and posters depicting mannequins inside bomb
shelters being okay while those outside of the shelters were maimed after an attack.
The building industry capitalized on this fear and began selling all types of
configurations from fox holes to deluxe “suites” with “telephones and Geiger
counter.”
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Let’s paraphrase Nixon:
See here Nikita – the Americans ability to consume and consume would be a safe guard
against the threat of class warfare – what you argue has been a huge problem in the US.
See Here Nikita – This typical American kitchen demonsrates the virtues of capitalism over
communism by pointing to the superiority of American consumer goods and the classlessness
that capitalism now creates. We’ve fixed the class problem!!!!! Yeah!!!!
See here Nikita -- The American housewife in her fully equipped state of the art and modern
kitchen has become a powerful symbol of American might. Let’s be real Nikita, this is also a
contest between two styles of womanhood: the Russian version, with its stress on hard work
and equal responsibility, versus the American version, with its emphasis on consumerism and
physical attractiveness. Not only doesthe United States produce more and better consumer
goods, but as it turns out, better-looking and more "feminine" women.
With all this emphasis on family and children women did resent not having a career or
independence from familial obligations. The generation who got married and raised children
in the post war years had a much lower divorce rate than previous generations but it
eventually caught up with them. Evidence indicates that women were not happy with their
relationships or that in an effort to raise their children they had neglected their own interests
and desires. The pressure of having the perfect marriage, children and house was too much
to bear at times and psychiatric therapy was sought as an alternative to divorce. May uses
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique to illustrate the rebellion towards these
post war familial ideals that were beginning to crumble.
11
Television especially spread the culture of middle-class life and consumerism. By
1960, almost all American families owned a TV set, and television replaced
newspapers as the most common information source about public events. TV
became the nation’s primary leisure activity. It changed Americans’ habits and offered
Americans of all backgrounds a common experience. TV programming almost always
avoided controversy and depicted a humdrum middle class existence. Early TV shows
that featured urban working-class families fell to later quiz shows, Westerns, and
comedies set in suburbia, such as Leave It to Beaver. TV also became the most
effective advertising medium ever, selling goods and spreading an image of the good
life as one based on consumer goods.
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