Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945-1960 Roland Marchand The constraints and sacrifices of World War 1I did not prepare Americans to meet the realities of the postwar era with equanimity.t Expectations ran high, despite underlying anxieties about atomic perils and the possibility of a postwar depression. Wartime discourse resonated with acclamations of equality and promises of the coming of a better, technologically wondrous life for all. The common man, idealized in nostalgic imagery, would carve out a future of unobstructed independence. Centralized controls, bureaucratic complexities, diminished autonomy for the individual these were largely dismissed as the temporary conditions of war. Postwar popular culture reflected these expectations, expressing complacent satisfaction in the realization of some and providing vicarious compensations for the intense disappointment of others. World War II came closer than any other twentieth-century phenomenon to enacting the drama of the melting pot in the United States, as disparate groups and values seemed to fuse into a composite national culture. Four years of war brought unprecedented national consolidation. Vast wartime migrations to the armed forces and to war industries and boomtowns undermined regional loyalties and broadened provincial horizons. Class barriers, and even some of the outward identifying marks of class, seemed to disappear. The nation's dramatists of popular culture, its persuaders and performers, enlisted in the task of uniting the nation behind common assumptions. The explicitly democratic themes of wartime popular culture promoted unity. Morale-builders stressed the idea of equal sacrifices and personalized the war through such democratic figures as G. 1. Joe, Rosie the Riveter, Norman Rockwell's everyman figure in the "Freedom of Speech" poster, and Rockwell's Willie Gillis (the common man as G. I.). ' The war years also prolonged the modest redistribution of income from rich to poor that had begun during the 1 930s. Although this process was to come to a standstill in the late 1940s, Americans emerged from the war confident of a snowballing trend toward economic democratization and a classless culture.2 Meanwhile, in what Frank Fox has characterized as "World of Tomorrow" advertising, business interests painted stirring images of the technological future. Wartime research, when applied to consumer products, would bring new power and comfort to the common man in a "thermoplastic, aerodynamic, supersonic, electronic, gadgetonic" postwar world. Popular anticipation of a precise watershed moment when the war would end and the "future" begin took on a millenial cast.3 In style these wartime visions paralleled themes of the General Motors Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair. The message was one of man's technological dominion over nature, of machines as social solutions. Yet another wartime message, infused in advertising and other forms of popular culture, promised that victory would restore a cherished version of the true American way of life, based on the small town, the corner drugstore, and the close-knit family an image aptly described as "American Pastoral."4 Instead, the postwar world brought bureaucratic complexity, cold war insecurity, and a shrunken sense of individual mastery. It produced a technology of atomic peril as well as material comfort. Inspired by the sweeping democratic promises of wartime ideology and a hunger for security and stability, Americans welcomed the notion of classless prosperity. Enticed by expectations of increased power and control, they reacted with dismay as they found themselves slipping into a condi- tion of greater vulnerability and dependency. In response they embraced popular culture reveries that seemed to enhance their sense of personal dominion The postwar period saw the emergence of a popular culture more homogeneous than Americans had previously known, as the cold war reinforced the trend toward consolidation. This greater homogeneity also reflected changes in demography, increasingly centralized production of popular culture images and artifacts, and more effective dissemination of popular culture by the media. One measure of increasing homogeneity was a decline in competition from ethnic cultures. By the time of World War II, unrestricted immigration had been cut off for a full generation. Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of foreign-born declined from 8.8 percent to 5.4 percent, and the percentage of Americans with at least one parent of foreign birth fell from 17 percent to 13.5 percent. A decline in carriers of ethnic culture such as foreign-language newspapers, theaters, musical organizations, and social halls reflected these demographic changes. Commercial entertainment increasingly outrivaled the attractions of ethnic folk culture and filled the new increments of leisure time. Network radio expanded its nationalizing and homogenizing influence, and radio sets in use increased right up to the advent of an even more powerful agent of common popular culture television. Between 1940 and 1950 the "big four" popular periodicals, Life, Reader's Digest, Look, and Saturday Evening Post, increased their combined total circulation by 105 percent. Although some groups did maintain "taste subcultures," more and more Americans read, heard, and saw the same popular fare.5 Another measure of homogeneity was the decline of class and regional differences in clothing and recreation. During the late 1940s sales of traditional work clothes fell precipitously, with the production of men's casual pants and shirts rising almost as rapidly. More workers wore casual clothes on the job, and off work men of different classes seemed indistinguishable on the street. Life referred matter-of-factly in 1949 to blue jeans as part of a national teenage "uniform." By the 1950s these classless, vaguely "western" progeny of democratic G.I. dungarees had come to symbolize the triumph of denim as an equalizing casual wear for virtually all Americans. Steady increases in the length of paid vacations for workers had also begun to equalize the distribution of formal leisure time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics even argued that by 1950 the earlier, distinctively "working class" patterns of spare-time activities and expenditures had almost disappeared among urban workers.6 Signs of a national culture abounded. In the early 1950s, as journalist Russell Lynes remarked, Sears, Roebuck ceased publication of regional catalogs on the grounds that tastes in furniture had become identical throughout the country. Fortune reported that tastes in food were "flattening" regionally. Merchandising consultants began to talk about a "standard middle-majority package," a laundry list of home furnishinrs and other consumer goods that should be marketable to all families One suburb looked pretty much like another; what Louise Huxtable has characterized as "Pop Architecture" dominated the landscape every. where. Local bowling palaces, motels, and auto showrooms quickly copied the f'iash, glitter, and eccentric shapes of Las Vegas's "architec ture of the road." Even where franchised chains did not proliferate, the designers of shopping centers and the entrepreneurs of a thousand "miracle miles" created uniform visual imagery.7 The leveling of styles was in many ways a leveling down a fact that did not escape the champions of high culture. In their search for the culprits of cultural debasement, they excoriated first the threats to literacy, order, and good taste coming from the comic book industry, and then the affronts to high culture by the new monster, TV. No previous mass medium, not even radio, expanded its audience so explosively as television. Households with TV sets mounted from fewer than one million in 1949 to more than 46 million in 1960, at which point 90 percent of all American homes were consuming TV programming at an average rate of five hours per day. The convenience of TV and the national standards of performance it set were devastating to provincial commercial entertainment and much of ethnic culture.8 The 1950s would later seem a golden age of diversity and cultural quality on TV. But, fixing their gaze on Hopalong Cassidy, Milton Berle, wrestling matches, and formula westerns, contemporary critics denounced the new medium as an attack on culture and literacy. With the advance of TV, homogenized franchise operations, and organizational bureaucracy, a major debate erupted among intellectuals over the prospects and perils of mass culture. Even political concerns seemed to fade before the social menace of mass culture. Did a debased mass culture involve passivity, conformity, and a stifling of creativity in the audience and a formulaic, manipulative, whatever-will-sell attitude by the producer? Then TV seemed to its critics to have unquestionably triumphed as the mass culture medium.9 Actually, TV probably served more to nationalize and homogenize than either to uplift or degrade. Television advertising embedded slogans, brand names, and affective imagery into the national consciousness with a new intensity, creating symbols for a more uniform national language. Television also helped promote the "common language" functions of national sports spectatorship. Together with convenient air travel, TV made attractive the nationalizing of the professional sports leagues. Minor league baseball declined as did a multitude of more significant local institutions ethnic clubs, local union meetings, local pol zical clu jngS of ;3 M;ant hocial i scenes l ,n the h pliec tOgeth childrf entert ~c nate 6 come cultu Ownt The free` plex lan' con life cia uhaO G. ..~ itical clubs contributing, in Martin Mayer's view, to individual feelings of anomie and powerlessness. ' Manufacturers of TV sets fought this negative interpretation of the social impact of TV. Their ads nostalgically depicted warm family scenes in which the connective links of the old family circle were restored in the harmony of the family semicircle plus TV. However specious the implied claims that TV would keep the kids home and the generations together, TV did serve the momentarily unifying function of making children more frequent participants in (or cospectators of) their parents' entertainment. " A critical component of the popular culture that TV helped disseminate was "California Culture." Even before the war California had become the symbol of relaxed, prosperous outdoor living, linked to a "car culture." California led the nation in miles of highway and per capita ownership of cars. The supermarket and the "drive-in" flourished there. The Los Angeles area led the nation in new suburban developments, freeway construction, and experiments with outlying shopping complexes. Smog and traffic notwithstanding, the Los Angeles suburban landscape seemed the landscape of the future.'2 The media readily promoted California culture as mobile, changing, comparatively "democratic." It had a "life-style." The ambience of that life-style was just about everything that media advertisers liked to associate with their products an image of the new, the enjoyable, the cas- ual. California provided models of everything from sportswear to houses, and displayed an easy contempt for environmental limits. The Gallup Poll reported that it ranked number one among Americans as "best state" and "ideal place to live." Los Angeles scored first among cities for best-looking women and most-desired place to live. It ranked second in climate, beauty of setting, and gaiety of night life 13 The imagery of California culture centered around the postwar fad in popular architecture the California ranch house. A single-story, ground-hugging structure, it was adaptable to split-level form. Picture windows and other expanses of glass accentuated the idea of a freeflowing continuity of space and mood between indoors and outdoors. Population pressure and high costs had imposed limitations on the postwar suburban search for spaciousness. In response the ranch house nurtured illusions of open continuous space and freedom. This was particularly necessary as the sprawling ranch house (invariably pictured alone with no adjacent neighbors) was pared down to I ,200-square-foot tract dimensions. 14 Inside, the quest for openness was linked with architectural expressions of democracy and "togetherness" (a word coined by McCall's in a moment of nostalgia and marketing acumen). In a servantless setting the dining room often disappeared, and the door segregating the kitchen gave way to a counter or open vista that allowed the wife to maintain contact with family and guests. A new room appeared an amalgam of rumpus room and den. Introduced as "the room without a name," it quickly gained status as the "family room" a casual, nurturing, and democratic gathering place for all. Naturally, the new room was where the TV was lodged, to be followed in due course by TV trays and TV dinners. 15 By 1954 Russell Lynes pronounced the California ranch house "ubiquitous," a national symbol of the increasing unity of tastes of "the relatively poor and the relatively well-to-do," and "the standard new suburban dwelling in the suburbs of New York as of Boston, of Chicago as of . . . Los Angeles." Another commentator explained how the outdoor joys of the patio could be retained in midwestern ranch houses throughout spring and fall by the use of radiant heating coils in patio paving. Builders liked the construction efficiencies of the ranch style. Buyers saw in its casual informality, undecorated sense of impermanence, access to nature, and freedom from internal physical barriers an image of western openness and mobility.'6 The California ranch house seemed to epitomize the postwar dream of classlessness and dominion. Everybody, presumably, was moving to the suburbs. Everyone could belong to the modern, democratic version of the "landed gentry." Limitless energy would make possible heated patios, air-conditioners, and countless appliances. A prolonged do-ityourself craze suggested that husband as well as wife could make the suburban home a fulfilling last refuge for the exercise of competence and control. Here the common American might evade international tensions and organizational complexities and thus regain a reassuring sense of individual dominion. The dream of suburban comfort and microcosmic control was a striking instance of upper-middle-class myopia. "Everybody" was not moving to the suburbs, despite impressions conveyed by Sunday supplements, TV advertisements, and popular sociology. Most housing developments were priced out of the range of those below the median income. The migration that inundated the suburbs came primarily from those among the top 40 percent in family income, especially those of the professional and technological elites who made impressive gains in income after 1945. Moreover, the most highly publicized sociological studies of suburbia focused on areas that were even more affluent than average thus exaggerating "typical" suburban prosperity. 17 Since writers, academics, and advertising executives came from the very segment of society making the most rapid gains, they found it easy to believe everyone was riding the same wave of prosperity. The idea of a consummated classlessness struck them with the force of a revelation. The celebration of this "classless prosperity" permeated the popular culture that other Americans of the era consumed. Russel1 Lynes helped popularize the new "obsolescence" of class with his essay "High-brow, Low-brow, Middle-brow" in 1949. Life magazine's version carried a striking two-page chart depicting the cultural tastes of Lynes's various brows" in ten categories ranging from furniture to entertainment. Economic classes were obsolete, Lynes insisted; people now chose their pleasures and consumer goods strictly on the basis of individual taste. Sociologist William Whyte noted the "displacement of the old class criterion" by "the impulse to 'culture' and 'good taste'." Values were "coming together," he concluded, and the suburbs had become the "second great melting pot."'8 "The distinction between economic levels in the ownership of tangibles is diminishing," the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted, thus "breaking d own the barriers of community and class. " Sportswriters celebrated the supposed democratization of golf: "Class lines are eliminated," they argued, "when the nation wears sports clothes." Producers of the bigmoney TV quiz shows nurtured popular enthusiasm for illusions of equality by creating such folk heroes as the "cop who knew Shakespeare." The sponsor of "The $64,000 Question" explained: "We're trying to show the country that the little people are really very intelligent. . . . " Winners were prototypes of the common man and woman, symbols of democratized intelligence. Advertisers now cast affluent suburban families not only as models of appropriate consumer styles but also as realistic portrayals of average Americans. In the 1' 20s and 1930s, Americans had known that they were seeing explicit models of high society "smartness" in many ads. Now they were encouraged to see the advertising models as mirrors of themselvesd9 Such images and perceptions of classlessness eventually found expression in the language itself. The 1961 Webster's International DicJionary acknowledged the existence of a new word not recognized in earlier editions life-style. 20 This new term, which gradually replaced the older phrase "way of life," conveyed nuances of classlessness. The phrase "way of life" had been fully compatible with a recognition of important economic class distinctions. Although people might be described as seeking to choose or achieve a certain "way of life," thev could also easily be thought of as having inherited a particular way of life along with their class standing. But a "life-style" was less likely to seem class-determined or inherited. The word style suggested free choice, the uninhibited search for what looked and felt right. It might also connote a particular consumer-consciousness, a notion of choosing among various ensembles or "packages" of goods that represented a style consistency, i.e., that "went well together." Behind the rise of the word lifestyle lay the assumption that increases in real income, the equalizing qualities of new synthetic fabrics and suburban amenities, and the ex- pansion of automobile and appliance ownership had created a totally middle-class society in which all significant differences were simply free expressions of personal tastes. This vision reflected some real changes in American society. During the 1 950s the average income of all families and individuals rose 26 percent in real dollars, and increased installment buying allowed many families to raise their living standard at an even greater rate. 21 Still, as Richard Parker has pointed out, "among those who called themselves middle class, perhaps a majority have always lacked the money to be in fact what they believe they are." It was those of high income, as ever, who consumed the bulk of popular culture products and services whether sports event admissions, frozen foods, cars, or hi-fi components. And the gains that were achieved by median and marginal sectors of the society did not represent gains in relative wealth or power. In fact, those below the top 40 percent remained stationary in their proportion of national income during the 1 950s, and all but the wealthiest lost in relative power. Despite the National Advertising Council's puffery about "people's capitalism," corporate assets were more narrowly held in 1960 than in 194522 Americans appreciated their new material comforts, but many no doubt sensed an erosion of independence and control as large organizations in media, government, and business overshadowed or preempted their spheres of competence and power. It fell to popular culture to exorcise these demons and provide compensating, vicarious adventures in potency and dominion. Enter the Shmoo and Mike Hammer! Best described as a "snow-white ham with legs," the Shmoo appeared in cartoonist Al Capp's 1948 parable on the quandaries of prosperity. Lured musically into that consumer's paradise, the "Valley of the Shmoon," Capp's hero Li'l Abner rec- ognized the Shmoo as utopia incarnate. The accommodating little creature, so eager to please that it would die of sheer happiness from one * I am indebted to the students in my fall 1979 undergraduate seminar, and to David Brody, Eckard Toys and James Lapsley, for their criticism of ideas contained in an initial version of this essav.