In “The illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture,” Alan Brinkley asserts that “many contemporaries and many scholars have overstated the role of the Cold War in shaping postwar American culture” (62-63). According to Brinkley, what is another factor that shaped postwar American culture?
3 thoughts on “Week 1 Day 2 Discussion Question 1”
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As the middle class grew in population due to economic prosperity, insecurity to conform to its homogenous lifestyle also developed. Brinkley asserts that television played a major role in idealizing the nuclear family. Programs like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best became household names, portraying utopian-like societies that contrasted with the underlying state of fear of nuclear annihilation that existed during the Cold War. These idealized television societies and culture perpetrated into American suburbs, and as Brinkley points out, even the architecture of the homes started to conform. While the television programs put forth images of a unified and seemingly perfect society, Brinkley claims the development of the middle-class homogeneity divided America in a sense, as the differences between the middle class and working-class individuals became more evident. Brinkley explains that this division and increasing desire to conform to middle class homogeneity was critiqued by the Beat poets and writers such as Norman Mailer and John Cheever. Brinkley’s assertions show that while television shaped American culture by encouraging the growth of the middle class and the homogeneity that came with it, many writers and poets criticized the growing class division and conformity that resulted.
While its clear that the economic growth of the country and general growth of the middle class is very important to Brinkley, it is necessary to understand why this growth is important. The consequences of the consumerism that is inherent with the development of the middle class as a whole was an extremely important factor in shaping the culture of the cold war. Once the American economy reached such great levels of massive capitalistic expansion, people now had unprecedented amounts of money and naturally wanted to spend it. Suddenly, millions of Americans now had access to not just the necessities of day to day living, but luxury items such as televisions, and when they watched their televisions they all saw shows such as “Father Knows Best,” and “Leave it to Beaver” in which, as Brinkley writes “Almost everyone was upper middle class. Almost everyone was white. Almost Everyone lived in a stable nuclear family.” (68) Naturally, many began to idolize this lifestyle and worked hard to achieve it. This is the true reason the growth of the middleclass is so critical to the formulation of culture during the cold war. Americans everywhere were not only enthralled with the promise of a stereotypical life of luxury, but also had the means to achieve it, and thus had an immense impact on the contemporary culture.
Brinkley’s mention of the growth of the middle class stuck out in particular to me. The number of Americans who met certain criteria used as indicators of the middle class — such as owning a television or graduating from high school — reached its highest point yet, according to Brinkley, and I noticed that quite a few of the factors he cited conflated the idea of the middle-class with at least some level of attention to society in general and some level of social and cultural awareness. Now, it’s a leap without any evidence given in the text to state this, but I’ll at the very least put it out as an idea to consider. Maybe, depending on facts that I don’t know and am not quite ready to research, it could be that the seemingly sudden explosion of dissent, anti-conformism, and socially conscious movements in the 1960s came from the same factors that caused the conservative resistance to them. If a desire for conformity and social obedience are a result of the approach towards a common standard of living, that is, then the flip side of the rising quality of life and access to information for many Americans could be disillusionment towards social conditions. This is all incredibly speculative, but it’s a thought I had, and I think this is sort of the right track to take our discussion responses.