Summary: Today we will contemplate the dialectic of consensus and fear that characterized the years following the Second World War. Major themes include the place of technology in the American imagination; the cultural practice of scapegoating as reflected in the Second Red Scare; and the place of religion in post-1945 America. Building on the dialectical interplay of consensus and anxiety that animated post-1945 American cultural life, we will also briefly consider two other cultural developments: the growth of consumerism and suburbanization. We will look at how postwar consumerism and suburban development reflect Americans' Cold War anxieties, even as they connote Americans' widespread embrace of materialism and a home-centered version of the American dream.

I. Introduction

A. Technology and the American Imagination: Aftermath of WWII

B. "Happy Days" of comfort, consumerism, and community

C. Anxious years of Cold War conflict and insecurity

D. Manifestation of postwar anxiety: the Second Red Scare

II. Worship: religion as a symbol of the age

A. God, Americanism, and fellowship

1. Chambers' vision of two warring faiths

2. Hellman's reference to basic Christian fellowship

3. McCarthy:

"Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity."

B. Norman Vincent Peale, Power of Positive Thinking (1952)

1. Christianity as a cure for Cold War anxiety

2. Christian formula for selling vacuum cleaners

3. faith in science and faith in God?

C. Godliness and American National Interests: "One Nation under God"

III. Happy Days? Anxiety and Consensus

A. Postwar affluence: growth of the middle class

B. Consumerism sets the tone of American life

1. automobile symbolizes affluence, mobility, freedom

2. side effects: change in patterns of residence, pollution, urban sprawl, fast food and motel chains, shopping malls

3. another side effect: the suburb (look at clip [8:20-13:00] of In the Suburbs [1957])

4. Nixon, Kruschev, and the "Kitchen Debate"

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)

C. Home life: the suburb as a symbol of the age

1. positive characteristics: home ownership, strong sense of community, family-centeredness

2. negative characteristics: "white flight," coercive conformity

3. contemporary criticism: the suburb as home to the "organization man"

a. William Whyte, The Organization Man (1956) (see also this advertisement)

b. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950)

4. The bomb shelter in the suburban home

D. Anti-intellectualism, conformity, and the expansion of education [Are You Popular (1947)]

IV. Conclusion: Beneath the surface of postwar community and consensus were powerful anxieties