The world of Brook Corwin

Sept. 27th, 2002

A Conformed Culture
The Tension of America's Attempt to Create a National Standard

In the 1930's, Americans were too preoccupied to think seriously about the concept of happiness. In the midst of a great depression, with opportunities scare and choices scarcer, survival took top priority. And whether it was industrial workers in the cities are farmers in rural areas, Americans were isolated from each other, too caught up in their own worries to see any other side of life. (class lecture, Aug 23rd) It was a situation that mirrored the U.S. on an international scale. Still emerging as a world power, The United States of the 1930's was occupied with New Deal politics and liberal reforms, and had yet to establish itself internationally. World War II introduced Americans not just to the affairs and conflicts of the world, but also to each other. Bolstered by the patriotism of the war effort, each American made material sacrifices for the common good. It was a collaboration where even formally disenfranchised groups such as women, blacks and gays were a part. (class lecture, Aug 26th) Americans came out on the other side of the war having gone through a major transition. Unlike before, they had now been exposed to new groups and new cultures. And for the first time, the country was enjoying an economic affluence that allowed Americans to explore the new ideas. But with opportunity and choice came unrest. Living life was no longer about surviving in an isolated state. There was a much bigger world out there, and Americans struggled to make sense of it all. With survival assured, the question lingered, "what constituted authentic happiness?" In the early 1950's, Americans were suddenly exposed to an unprecedented number of ideas, lifestyles, and opportunities, and struggled to define a single standard of authenticity they could apply to all their new choices.

The United State economy, while still more sluggish than some expected, reached an unprecedented height following the war. Families had the money to purchase material goods such as cars, appliances, and fashions. (Farber, chapter 1) Accordingly, a booming market for such goods sprang up, and the nation thrived commercially on its citizen's desire for comfort. Among the material goods beginning to sweep across American households was the television. Movies and books and already been around, but with the invention of the paperback book and the advances in film technology, these mediums reached audiences on a scale of never before. And each carried with it new ideas for Americans to digest. Whether it was the idolized lifestyles portrayed on the TV sitcom, the emotional drama of the Hollywood movie, or the abstract ideas of an intellectual book, new mediums connected Americans living thousands of miles apart. (class lecture, Sept. 16th) The connection wasn't just through entertainment or even ideas. With average Americans now able to afford one, sometimes several, automobiles, families had the means to travel the country. The development of the interstate highway system made it easy to see the nation in a new popular activity known as the road trip. And when their journeying was done, Americans had choices over where to settle down. The suburban communities were quickly built outside almost every major city, offering residents a comfortable and secure lifestyle. (class lecture, Sept. 23rd) Nestled in homes a few feet apart, sharing in the same forms of entertainment and enjoying the same material goods, Americans had merged from a collection of isolated groups into a single entity that now sought a singular culture to match.
But the push for a shared culture wasn't an altogether natural one. Amidst the happiness and prosperity of the age was a growing international fear compelling Americans to obtain a standard of conformity. The global aftermath of World War II left the world with two superpowers in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, each with its own competing economic ideology. As the communist regime of the Soviet Union began to expand its influence across Eastern Europe, The U.S. grew threatened, and a cold war between the new nations was launched. (Hamby 86-91) But the Soviet did not just exist on an international scale.

Americans lived under the widespread belief that communist spies were among them. As senator Joseph McCarthy rose to national prominence for his persecution of communists, the pressures to conform to an anti-communist "American" standard grew. (class lecture Aug. 28th) Politicians from both sides of the political spectrum spoke out in strong opposition to communism. Liberals such as President Harry Truman or Adlai Stevenson advocated the containment of communist governments abroad. Their conservative counterparts such as William Buckley and Robert Taft pushed for a more aggressive policy to eliminate communists altogether. (Hamby 73-75) But it was a moderate figure in Dwight Eisenhower who captured the adulation of the American people. Reflecting a time when few Americans wanted to be seen to far from the mainstream center, Eisenhower's moderate policies and simple hearted nature was embraced by most Americans, leading to his decisive victories in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. (class lecture, Sept. 9th) Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, won the respect and trust of the American people through a speech made on national television stressing the virtue of open disclosure. (class video, Sept. 11th) His speech perfectly matched the pulse of a nation that didn't want anything hidden. Watching Nixon's speech from near identical television sets, with near identical families in near identical homes, Americans showed a willingness to embrace a single set of ideals in order to fight the communist threat. For many of these families, comfort and security were worth the sacrifice of individuality.

But even if Americans were ready and willing to accept a shared culture, they could not yet bridge the divisive gaps that remained in their definitions of happiness. World War II and the Cold War connected Americans on a national level, but it could not make every one of them subscribe to the same values and beliefs in everything from art to success to morality. While a popular culture that embraced television quiz shows Grandma Moses paintings and Disney cartoons began to take hold across the nation, a minority group of intellectuals favoring thought provoking books and the experimental art of Jackson Pollack or improvisational music of Miles Davis rose to prominence. (class lecture, Sept. 16th) It was not as if such intellectuals had not been around before, but in the push for all Americans to conform to a national standard, their alternative views stood out in stark contrast to the beliefs of mainstream America. Intellectuals were no longer just an isolated group ignored by the masses, they were now given the derogatory name of eggheads by even prominent political figures, and were viewed as a threat by many to the comfort and security most Americans prized above all else. But the divide in values didn't just cleave two opposing groups. It often hit much closer to home. After a war effort in which they were encouraged to do their own part, Women were quickly regulated back to the home. The country's affluence afforded families the option of keeping a spouse at home. Motivated by both the pressures to conform and the desire for comfort, couples chose to settle down early and have lots of kids. The two-parent household with several children and a stay at home Mom provided a lifestyle Americans could share along with everything else, but at the same time it alienated many women who now could only seek happiness through the prosperity of their family members. The feelings of alienation often passed down to youth. Spurred by a natural restlessness not present in their elders, a younger generation sought to define its own identity, and often struggled to do so in the homogenized culture of the era. Many turned elsewhere, and for these youth, the multitude of ideas and choices now present worked to drove them away from their families rather than bringing them together. Weather it was through reading books such as Catcher in the Rye, watching movies such as Rebel Without a Cause, or grasping to a new underground movement of beat poets and improvisational music, youth often rejected the conformity of their parents and sought individuality missing from Suburban life. (class lecture, Sept. 23rd) Even their fathers weren't always immune from tensions in defining a shared standard of happiness. In contrast to the religious boom of the time, where nearly 50 percent of all Americans attended a church or synagogue, Kinsley's report on human sexual behavior indicated that fifty percent of men had premarital sex while twenty five percent all men had been unfaithful to their wives. (class lecture, Sept. 25th) Americans of the 1950's may have been eager to conform to a single standard of happiness, but they were a long way away from agreeing on how that standard could apply to something as complex as art or even as basic as morality.

But in their pursuit for a shared cultural identity, the American people were under a severe handicap. Pulled together after decades of isolation, they were being exposed to new ideas, new people, and new choices all at once, and there was hardly enough time to understand it all, much less accept it. A new international force in the communist party threatened Americans and that threat worked its way down to the new ideas of the intellectuals. The push for comfort and security was an effort by many Americans to simply make sense of a radically changed world, one where suddenly everything was within possibility. But in the face of so many new things, the push for comfort became a pressure to conform, only exasperating the problem of understanding how a multitude of individual values and ideas could ever come together as a whole.