31

THROUGH THE PICTURE WINDOW:

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE,
1945-1960

Americans emerged from World War II elated, justifiably proud

of their military strength and industrial might. As the editors of
Fortune magazine proclaimed in 1946, "this is a dream era, this is
what everyone was waiting through the blackouts for. The Great
American Boom is on." So it was, from babies to Buicks to Admi-
ral television sets. An American public that had known depriva-
tion and sacrifice for the last decade and a half began to enjoy
unprecedented prosperity. The postwar era enjoyed tremen-
dous economic growth and seeming social contentment. Divorce
and homicide rates fell, and the prevailing mood of the country
was aggressively upbeat. Yet in the midst of such rising affluence
and optimism, many social critics, writers, and artists expressed a
growing sense of unease. Was postwar American society becom-
ing too complacent, too conformist, too materialistic? These
questions reflected the perennial tension in American life be-
tween idealism and materialism, a tension that arrived with the
first settlers and remains with us today. Americans have always
struggled to accumulate goods and cultivate goodness. During
the postwar era the nation fried to do both, and for a while, at
least, it appeared to succeed.

PEOPLE OF PLENTY

THE POSTWAR ECONOMY The dominant feature of post-World War

II American society was its remarkable prosperity. After a sur-
prisingly brief postwar recession, the economy soared to record
815
816 • Through the Picture Window People of Plenty 817
matic growth rate had a host of reverberating effects. Indeed,
heights. The gross national product (GNP) nearly doubled be- much of America's social history since the 1940s has been the
tween 1945 and 1960, and the I960s witnessed an even more story of the unusually large baby-boom generation and its prog-
spectacular expansion of the economy. By 1970 the gap between ress through the stages of life. One initial effect oFthe baby boom
living standards in the United States and the rest of the world had was to create a massive demand for diapers, baby food, toys,
become a chasm: with 6 percent of the world's population, medicines, schools, books, teachers, and housing. Another was
Americans produced and consumed two-thirds of the world's the growth of new suburban communities as the burgeoning
goods.
population moved from the cities into the countryside.
Such abundance generated a mood of giddy optimism. During
the 1950s government officials assured the citizenry that they
A CONSUMER CULTURE American Factories soon adjusted to new
should not fear another economic collapse. The leading econo-
mists of the postwar era were likewise agreed that with the New consumer demands. Native and foreign observers alike marveled
Deal safeguards built into the economy there need be no more at the widespread abundance generated by America's prolific in-
dramatic downturns. They and others led the public to believe dustrial plant. In 1950 almost 37 percent of American homes
that perpetual economic growth was possible, desirable, and, in were deemed substandard; in 1970 only 9 percent. The propor-
fact, essential. The expectation of unending plenty thus became tion of homeowners in the population increased by 50 percent
the reigning assumption of social thought in the two decades between 1945 and 1960. And those new homes were increas-
after 1945. ingly fi lled with the latest electrical appliances —refrigerators,
Several factors contributed to this sustained economic surge. washing machines, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, Freezers,
The massive federal expenditures for military needs during and mixers.
World War II, which had catapulted the economy out of the De- By far the most popular new household product was the televi-
pression, continued to drive the postwar economy, thanks to the sion set. In 1946 there were only 7,000 primitive black-and-
tensions generated by the Cold War and the increase in defense white sets in the country; by 1960 there were 50 million
spending provoked by the Korean conflict. Military-related re- high-quality sets. Nine out of ten homes had one, and by 1970,
search also helped spawn the new glamor industries of the post- 38 percent owned new color sets. TV Guide was the fastest
war era: chemicals, electronics, and aviation. growing new periodical of the 1950s, and the new television cul-
Most of the other major industrial i itions of the world—Eng-
land, France, Germany, Japan, Russia—had been physically de-
vastated during the war, which meant that American
manufacturers enjoyed a virtual monopoly in international
trade. In addition, the widespread use of new and more efficient
machinery and computers led to a 35 percent jump in the pro-
ductivity of American workers between 1945 and 1955.
The. major catalyst in promoting economic expansion after
1945 was the unleashing of pent-up consumer demand. During
the war Americans had postponed purchases of such major items
as cars and houses, and in the process had saved over $150 bil-
lion. Now they were eager to buy. Likewise, many young adults
who had delayed having a family were also intent upon making
up for lost time. The United States after World War II experi-
enced both a purchasing frenzy and a population explosion.
The return of some fifteen million soldiers to private life
helped generate a postwar "baby boom," which peaked in 1957.
Between 1945 and 1960 America's total population grew by al- "I Love Lucy,"starring Lucille Ball (right), was one of
the most popular television series in the 1950s.
most 40 million, a whopping 30 percent increase. Such a dra-
818 Through the Picture Window
ture had a transforming effect on the patterns of daily living.
Time previously devoted to reading, visiting, playing, or movie-
going was now spent in front of the "electronic hearth." Televi-
sion, one social commentator recognized in 1950, "is even
upsetting the established patterns of courtship and the market-
ing of beer." Said one housewife: "Until we got that TV set, I
thought my husband had forgotten how to neck."
What differentiated the affluence of the post-World War II era
from earlier periods of prosperity was its ever-widening disper-
sion. Although pockets of rural and urban poverty persisted,
destined to explode in the 1960s, during the 1950s few noticed
such exceptions to the prevailing prosperity. After being sworn
in as head of the AFL-CIO in 1955, George Meany proclaimed
that "American labor never had it so good."
To perpetuate such prosperity, economists repeated the basic
marketing strategy of the 1920s: the public must be taught to
consume more and expect more. Experts knew that people had
more money than ever before. The average American had twice
as much real income in 1955 as in the rosy days of the late 1920s
before the Crash. Still, many adults who had undergone the se-
verities of the Depression and the rationing required for the war
effort had to be weaned from a decade and a half of imposed fru-
gality in order to nourish the consumer culture. A motivational
researcher told a businescgroup that the fundamental challenge
facing the modern capitalist economy was to demonstrate to the
consumer that "the hedonistic approach to life is a moral, not an
immoral one."
Marketing specialists accelerated their efforts to engineer a
revolution of rising expectations and self-gratification. Advertis-
ing became a more crucial component of the consumer culture
than ever before. TV advertising expenditures increased 1,000
percent during the 1950s. Such startling results led the presi-
dent of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to claim in
1956 that the primary reason for the postwar economic boom
was that "advertising has created an American frame of mind
that makes people want more things, better things and newer
things."
Paying for such "things" was no problem; the age of the credit
card had arrived. Between 1945 and 1957, consumer credit
soared 800 percent. Where families in other industrialized na-
tions were typically saving 10 to 20 percent of their income,
American families by the 1960s were saving only 5 percent.
"Never before have so many owed so much to so many," News-
week announced in 1953. "Time has swept away the Puritan
conception of immorality in debt and godliness in thrift."
People of Plenty 819
This consumer revolution had far-reaching cultural effects.
Shopping became a major recreational activity. In 1945 there
were only 8 shopping centers in the entire country; by 1960
there were almost 4,000. Much as life in a medieval town re-
volved around the cathedral, life in postwar suburban America
seemed to center on the new giant shopping centers and malls.
Playwright Arthur Miller addressed this phenomenon in The
Price:
Because you see the main thing today is—shopping. Years ago a
person, if he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself—
he'd go to church, start a revolution —.something. Today you're un-
happy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation'? Co shopping.
Young Americans especially participated in this shopping cul-
ture. By the late 1950s the baby boom generation was entering
its teens, and the disproportionate number of affluent adoles-
cents generated a vast new specialized market for goods ranging
from transistor radios, hula hoops, and rock-and-roll records to
cameras, surfboards, Seventeen magazine, and Pat Boone movies.
Most teenagers had far more discretionary income than previous
generations. "Today," explained a corporate executive in 1957,
"the teenager's income runs to $10 to $15 a week as opposed to
$1 or $2 fifteen years ago." Teens in the postwar era knew noth-
ing of depressions or rationing; they were immersed in abun-
dance from an early age and took the notion of carefree
consumption for granted.
THE cRAncRAss FRONTIER The population increase of the 1950s
and 1960s was an urban as well as a suburban phenomenon. Dra-
matic new technological advances in agricultural production re-
duced the need for manual laborers and thereby accelerated the
flight from the farm in the postwar years: 20 million Americans
left the land for the city between 1940 and 1970- Much of the
urban population growth occurred in the South, the Southwest,
and the West, in an arc that stretched from the Carolinas down
through Texas and into California, diverse states that by the
1970s were being lumped together into the "Sunbelt." The dis-
persion of air conditioning throughout these warm regions dra-
matically enhanced their attraction to northerners. But the
Northeast remained the most densely populated area; by the
early 1960s, 20 percent of the national population lived in the
corridor that stretched from Boston to Norfolk, Virginia.
While more concentrated in cities, Americans were simultane-
ously spreading out within metropolitan areas. In 1950 the
820 Through the Picture Window A Conforming Culture 821
Census Bureau redefined the term "urban" to include suburbs as
well as central cities. During the 1950s suburbs grew six times
faster than cities. By 1970 more Americans lived in suburbs (76
million) than in central cities (64 million). "Suburbia," pro-
claimed the Christian Century in 1955, "is now a dominant social
group in American life."
William Levitt, a brassy New York developer, led the subur-
ban revolution. In 1947, on 1,200 acres of flat Long~sland farm-
land, he built 10,600 houses which were immediately sold and
inhabited by more than 40,000 people —mostly adults under
thirty-five and their children. "Everyone is so young," one Le-
vittowner noted, "that sometimes it's hard to remember how to
get along with older people."
Within a few years there were similar Levittowns in Pennsyl-
vania and New Jersey, and other developers soon followed suit Moving Day, 1953. A new subdivision opens its doors.
around the country. The federal government aggressively fos-
tered this suburban revolution. "If it weren't for the govern-
ment," a San Francisco developer explained, "the boom would the North and Midwest. And as they moved in, white residents
end overnight." By insuring loans for up to 95 percent of the moved out. Those engaged in "white flight" were usually eager
value of a house, the Federal Housing Administration made it to maintain residential segregation in their new suburban com-
easy for a builder to borrow money to construct low-cost homes. munities. Contracts for homes in Levittown, Long Island, for ex-
Veterans were given added benefits. A veteran could buy a Le- ample, specifically excluded "members of other than the
vitt house with no down payment and monthly installments of Caucasian race." Such discrimination, whether explicit or im-
$56. plicit, was widespread; the nation's suburban population in 1970
Expanded automobile production and highway construction was 95 percent white.
also facilitated the rush to the suburbs as more and more people
were able to commute longer distances to work. Car production
soared from 2 million in 1946 to 8 million in 1955, and a "car A CONFORMING CULTURE
culture" soon emerged. As one commentator observed, the pro-
liferation of automobiles "changed our dress, manners, social As evidenced in many of the new look-alike suburbs
customs, vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer pur- sprouting up across the land, much of American social life during
chasing patterns, and common tastes." Widespread car owner- the two decades after the end of World War II exhibited an in-
ship also necessitated an improved road network. Local and state creasingly homogenized character. Fears generated by the Cold
governments built many new roads, but the guiding force was War initially played a key role in encouraging orthodoxy. But
the federal government. In 1947 Congress authorized the con- suburban life itself encouraged uniformity. In new communities
struction of 37,000 miles of highways, and nine years later it of strangers people quickly felt a need for companionship and a
funded 42,000 additional miles of interstate freeways. sense of belonging. "Nobody wants people around who criticize
Such new roads provided access to the suburbs, and Ameri- and sit off by themselves and don't take part," observed one resi-
cans—mostly young middle-class white Americans—rushed to dent. Changes in corporate life also played an important socia-
take advantage of the new living spaces. Motives for moving to lizing role. "Conformity," predicted an editor in 1954, "may
the suburbs were numerous and frequently mixed. The availabil- very well become the central social problem of this age."
ity of more spacious homes, as well as greater security and better
educational opportunities for children, all played a role. Racial CORPORATE LIFE During World War II big business grew bigger.
considerations were also a factor. After World War II blacks in The government relaxed anti-trust activity, and huge defense
record numbers migrated from the rural South into the cities of contracts tended to promote corporate concentration and con-
822 Through the Picture Window A Conforming Culture 823

solidation. In 1940, for example, 100 companies were responsi-

ble for 30 percent of all manufacturing output; three years later
they were providing 70 percent. In such huge companies as well
as in similarly large government agencies and universities, the
working atmosphere began to take on a distinctive new cast. The
traditional notion of the hard-working, strong-minded individual
advancing by dint of competitive ability and creative initiative
gave way to a new managerial personality and an ethic of collec-
tive cooperation and achievement.

WOMAN'S PLACE Increasing conformity in middle-class business

and corporate life was mirrored in the middle-class home. A spe-
cial issue of Life magazine in 1956 featured the "ideal" middle-
class woman, a thirty-two-year-old "pretty and popular"
suburban housewife, mother of four, who had married at age 16.
Described as an excellent wife, mother, hostess, volunteer, and
"home manager" who made her own clothes, she hosted dozens
of dinner parties each year, sang in the church choir, worked
with the PTA and Campfire Girls, and was devoted to her hus- The Ideal Woman. A 1956 Life magazine cover story pronounced the
band. "In her daily round," Life reported, "she attends club or ideal woman a "pretty and popular" suburban housewife who "attends
charity meetings, drives the children to school, does the weekly club or charity meetings, drives the children to school, does the weekly
grocery shopping, makes ceramics, and is planning to study grocery shopping, makes ceramics, and is planning to study French."
French." She also exercised on a trampoline in order "to keep
her size 12 figure."
Life's ideal of the American middle-class woman was symp- Throughout the postwar era, educators, politicians, ministers,
tomatic of a veritable cult of feminine domesticity that devel- advertisers, and other public spokesmen exalted the cult of do-
oped in the postwar era. The soaring birth rate reinforced the mesticity and castigated the few feminists who were encouraging
deeply embedded notion that a woman's place was in the home women to broaden their horizons beyond crib and kitchen. Even
as tender of the hearth and guardian of the children. "Of all the a liberal politician and self-styled progressive intellectual such as
accomplishments of the American woman," the Life cover story Adlai Stevenson preached a similar doctrine. He reminded Smith
proclaimed, "the one she brings off with the most spectacular College graduates in 1955 that their heroic purpose in life was to
success is having babies." "influence man and boy" in the "humble role of housewife."
So even though millions of women had responded to intense
wartime appeals and joined "Rosie the Riveter" in the tradition- RELIGIOUS REVIVAL Another illustration of the conformist ten-

ally male workforce, afterwards they were encouraged—and
even forced—to turn their jobs over to the returning veterans
and resume their full-time commitment to home and family. An
article in House Beautiful in 1945, entitled "Home Should Be
Even More Wonderful Than He Remembers It," lectured
women on their postwar responsibilities. The returning veteran
was "head man again. . . . Your part in the remaking of this man
is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way,
forgetting your own preferences." Women were also to forget
any thoughts of continuing their own careers in the workplace.
"Back to the kitchen" was the repeated refrain after 1945.
dencies of middle-class life during the 1950s was the spiraling
growth of membership in social institutions. Americans, even
more than usual, became joiners; they joined civic clubs, garden
clubs, bridge clubs, car pools, and babysitting groups.
They also joined churches and synagogues in record numbers.
The postwar era witnessed a massive renewal of religious partici-
pation, and the Cold War was a strong impetus behind the awak-
ening. "Since Communists are anti-God," FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover advised, "encourage your child to be active in the
church." Many American parents heeded his warning. In 1940
less than half of the adult population belonged to institutional-
 824 • Through the Picture Window
ized churches; by 1960 over 65 percent were official communi-
cants. Bible sales soared, and books, movies, and songs with
religious themes were stunning commercial successes. Holly-
wood glamor girl Jane Russell, hitherto noted more for her
buxom bosom and sultry smile than her spiritual intensity, was
one of many celebrities who promoted the religious revival. "I
Love God," she confessed. "And when you get to know him, he's
a livin' doll."
President Eisenhower also repeatedly promoted a patriotic
crusade to bring Americans back to God. "Recognition of the
Supreme Being," he declared, "is the first, the most basic, ex-
pression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no Amer-
ican form of government, nor an American way of life." Not to be
outdone in professing piety, Congress in 1954 added the phrase
"one nation under God" to the pledge of allegiance. The follow-
ing year it made the statement "In God We Trust" mandatory on
all American currency.
The prevailing tone of the popular religious revival during the
1950s was upbeat and soothing. Many ministers assumed that
people did not want "fire-and-brimstone" harangues from the
pulpit; they did not want their consciences overly burdened with
a sense of personal sin or social guilt over such issues as segrega-
tion or inner-city poverty. Instead they wanted to he reassured
that their own comfortable way of life was indeed God's will. As
the Protestant Council of New York City explained to its corps of
radio and television speakers, their addresses "should project
love, joy, courage, hope, faith, trust in God, good will. Generally
avoid condemnation, criticism, controversy. In a very real sense
we are 'selling' religion, the good news of the Gospel."
By far the best salesman of this gospel of reassuring "good
news" was the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, the impresario
of "positive thinking" and feel-good theology. No speaker was
more in demand during the 1950s, and no writer was more
widely read. Peale's book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
was a phenomenal bestseller throughout the decade—and for
good reason. It offered a simple "how to" course in personal
happiness. "Flush out all depressing, negative, and tired
thoughts," Peale advised. "Start thinking faith, enthusiasm, and
joy." By following this simple formula for success, he pledged,
the reader could become "a more popular, esteemed, and well-
liked individual."
Peale's message of psychological security and material success
was powerfully reassuring, and many Americans stood in need of
reassurance. That tranquilizers were the fastest growing new
Cracks in the Picture Window • 825
commodity in the country suggested the anxiety accompanying
America's much-trumpeted affluence. Many Americans were
profoundly anxious about the meaning of their lives and of life in
general in the nuclear age. Peale offered them peace of mind and
peace of soul, assuring them that everything was fi ne and for the
best as long as they believed in God, the American Way, and
themselves. "Stop worrying and start living" was his simple
credo.
NEo-ORTHODOXY But was it too simple? The "positive thinking"
psychology promoted by Peale and other feel-good ministers
struck some members of the religious community as shallow and
dangerously misleading. These spokesmen for "neo-orthodox"
theology charged that such consoling religiosity lacked genuine
conviction and commitment.
The towering leader of the "neo-orthodox" movement was
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1970). A brilliant, penetrating, ironic,
and erratic preacher-professor at New York's Union Theological
Seminary, Niebuhr repeatedly lashed out at the "undue compla-
cency and conformity" settling over American life in the postwar
era. He found the popular religion of self-assurance and the psy-
chology of material success promoted by Peale and his followers
woefully inadequate prescriptions for the ills of modern society.
"They cannot be taken seriously by responsible religious or sec-
ular people," he warned in 1955, "because they do not come to
terms with the basic collective problems of our atomic age, and
because the peace which they seek to inculcate is rather too sim-
ple and neat." True peace, Niebuhr insisted, entailed the reality
of pain, a pain "caused by love and responsibility" for the well-
being of the entire human race, rather than to be solely con-
cerned with one's tortured self. Self-love, he reminded smug
Americans, was the very basis of sin.
CRACKS IN THE PICTURE WINDUw
Niebuhr was one of many impassioned disturbers of the
peace who challenged the moral complacency and social con-
formity that he and others claimed had come to characterize
American social life during the 1950s and early 1960s. As the
philosopher and editor Joseph Wood Krutch recognized in
1960, "the gap between those who find the spirit of the age con-
genial and those who do not seems to have grown wider and
wider."
826 Through the Picture Window
THE LONELY CROWD The criticism of postwar American life and.
values began in the early 1950s and quickly gathered momen-
tum among intellectuals, theologians, novelists, playwrights,
poets, and artists. Social scientists, too, attacked the prevailing
optimism of the time. In The Affluent Society (1958), for exam-
ple, economist John K. Calbraith warned that sustained eco-
nomic growth would not necessarily solve America's social
problems. He reminded readers that for all of America's vaunted
postwar prosperity, the nation had yet to confront, much less
eradicate, the chronic poverty plaguing the nation's inner cities
and rural hamlets.
Postwar cultural critics also questioned the supposed bliss of-
fered by middle-class suburban life. John Keats, in The Crack in
the Picture Window (1956), launched the most savage assault on
life in the huge new suburban developments. He ridiculed Le-
vittown and other such mass-produced communities as having
been "conceived in error, nurtured in greed, corroding every-
thing they touch." In these rows of "identical boxes spreading
like gangrene," commuter fathers were always at work and
"mothers were always delivering children, obstetrically once
Commuters on the 5:57, Park Forest, Illinois. Postwar social critics
commented on the overwhelming conformity of middle-class corporate
and suburban life.
Cracks in the Picture Window 827
and by car forever after." Locked into a deadly routine, hounded
by financial insecurity, and engulfed by mass mediocrity, subur-
banites, he concluded, were living in a "homogeneous, postwar
Hell."
Social critics repeatedly cited the huge modern corporation as
an equally important source of regimentation in American life.
The most comprehensive and provocative analysis of the docile
new corporate character was David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd
(1950). Riesman, a social psychologist, detected a fundamental
shift in the dominant American personality from what he called
the "inner-directed" to the "other-directed" type. Inner-di-
rected people, Riesman argued, possessed a deeply internalized
set of basic values implanted by strong-minded parents or other
elders. This core set of fixed principles, analogous to the tradi-
tional Protestant ethic of piety, diligence, and thrift, acted, in his
words, like an internal gyroscope. The inner-directed person
was kept on a steady course by the built-in stabilizer of fixed
values.
Such an assured, self-reliant personality, Riesman claimed,
had been dominant in American life throughout the nineteenth
century. But during the mid-twentieth century a new, other-
directed personality had displaced it. In the huge, hierarchical
corporations that abounded in postwar America employees who
could win friends and influence people thrived; rugged individu-
alists indifferent to personal popularity did not. The other-
directed people who adapted to this corporate culture had
few internal convictions and standards; they did not follow their
conscience so much as adapt to the prevailing standards of the
moment. They were more concerned with being well-liked
than being independent.
Riesman amassed considerable evidence to show that the
other-directed personality was not just an aspect of the business
world; its characteristics were widely dispersed throughout
middle-class life, One source of this may have been Dr. Benjamin
Spock's influential advice on raising children. Spock's popular
manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, sold an
average of one million copies a year between its first appearance
in 1946 and 1960. Although Spock never endorsed the anarchic
permissiveness attributed to him by later critics, he did insist that
parents should foster in their children qualities and skills that
would enhance their chances in what Riesman called the "popu-
larity market." Reisman charged that this made the middle-class
mother a "chauffeur and booking agent," determined to "culti-
vate all the currently essential talents, especially the gregarious
828 Through the Picture Window
ones. It is inconceivable to some that a child might prefer his own
company or that of just another child."
ALIENATION IN THE ARTS Many of the best novels and plays of the
postwar period reinforced Riesman's image of modern American
society as a "lonely crowd" of individuals, hollow at the core,
groping for a sense of belonging and affection. Arthur Miller's
play Death of a Salesman (1949) powerfully explored this theme.
Willy Loman, an aging, confused traveling salesman in decline,
centers his life and that of his family on the notion of material
success through personal popularity, only to be abruptly told by
his boss that he is in fact a failure. Loman repeatedly insists that it
is "not what you say, it's how you say it —because personality
always wins the day," and he tries to raise his sons, Buff and
Happy, in his own image, encouraging them to be athletic, out-
going, popular, and ambitious. As he instructs them: "Be liked
and you will never want." Happy followed his father's advice but
was anything but happy: "Sometimes I sit in my apartment —all
alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But
then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and
plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely."
Such vacant loneliness is the play's recurring theme. Willy, for
all his puffery about being well-liked, admits that he is "terribly
lonely." He has no real friends; even his relations with his family
are neither honest nor intimate. "He never knew who he was,"
Biff sighs. Indeed, when Willy finally realizes that he has been
In Arthur Miller's Death of
a Salesman, Willy Loman
(center, played by Lee J.
Cobb) destroys his life and
family with the credo "Be
liked and you will never -
want."
Cracks in the Picture Window • 829
leadin--, a counterfeit existence, he yearns for a life in which "a
man is not a piece of fruit," but eventually he is so haunted and
dumbfounded by his predicament that he decides he can endow
his life with meaning only by ending it.
Death of a Salesman and many other postwar plays written by
Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams portray a
central theme of American literature and art during the postwar
era: the sense of alienation experienced by sensitive individuals
in the midst of an oppressive mass culture. In the aftermath of
the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, and in the midst
of the nuclear terror, many of the country's foremost writers,
painters, and poets refused to embrace the prevailing celebra-
tion of modern American life and values. The novelist Philip
Roth observed in 1961: "The American writer in the middle of
the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand,
and then describe, and then make credible much of American re-
ality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a
kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination."
Roth's gloomy assessment was typical of the revulsion felt by
other writers and artists, many of whom were determined to lay
bare the conceits and illusions of their times.
While millions were reading heartwarming religious epics
such as The Cardinal (1950), The Robe (1953), and Exodus
(1957), literary critics were praising the more unsettling and so-
bering novels of James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever,
Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joyce
Carol Oates, J.D. Salinger, William Styron, John Updike, and
Eudora Welty. There were few happy endings here—and even
fewer celebrations of contemporary American life. J.D. Salin-
ger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) was a troubling exploration of a
young man's search for meaning and self in a smothering society.
Holden Caulfield finally decides that rebellion against conform-
ity is useless. "If you want to stay alive," he concludes, "you
have to say that stuff, like 'Glad to meet you' to people you are
not at all glad to meet."
This brooding sense of resigned alienation dominated the most
powerful imaginative literature in the two decades after 1945.
The characters in novels such as Jones's From Here to Eternity,
Ellison's Invisible Man, Bellow's Dangling Man and Seize the Day,
Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, and Updike's Rabbit, Run, among
many others, tended to be like Willy Loman—restless, tor-
mented, impotent individuals who are unable to fasten on a satis-
fying self-image and therefore can find neither contentment nor
respect in an overpowering or impersonal world.
 830 • Through the Picture Window
Office in a Small City (1953). In his paintings, Edward Hopper captured
the sense of the individual's isolation and alienation within the
urban-industrial world of the postwar era.
PAINTING The artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) adopted a
similar outlook in his paintings. From the start of his career at the
turn of the century, Hopper explored the theme of desolate lone-
liness in urban-industrial American life. But his concern grew
more acute in the postwar era. Virtually all of his paintings depict
isolated individuals, melancholy, anonymous, motionless. A
woman undressing for bed, a diner in an all-night restaurant, a
housewife in a doorway, a businessman at his desk, a lone pas-
serby in the street —these are the characters in Hopper's world.
The silence of his scenes is deafening, the monotony striking, the
alienation absorbing.
A younger group of painters centered in New York City were
convinced that postwar society was so violent, irrational, and
chaotic that it denied any attempt at literal representation. As
Jackson Pollock maintained, "the modern painter cannot express
this age—the airplane, the atomic bomb, the radio—in the old
form of the Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age fi nds its
own technique." The technique Pollock adopted came to be
called Abstract Expressionism, and during the late 1940s and
1950s it dominated not only the American art scene but the in-
ternational field as well. In addition to Pollock, its adherents in-
Cracks in the Picture Window 831
eluded Robert Motherwell, William de Kooning, Arshile Gorky,
Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko. "Abstract
art," Motherwell declared, "is an effort to close the void that
modern men feel."
In practice this meant that the act of painting was as important
as the final result, and that art no longer had to represent one's
visual surroundings. Instead it could unapologetically represent
the painter's personal thoughts and actions. Wyoming-born Pol-
lock, for example, placed his huge canvases flat on the floor, and
then walked around each side, pouring and dripping his paints,
all in an effort to "literally be in the painting." Such action paint-
ings, with their commanding size, bold form, powerful color
contrasts, and rough texture, conveyed the whole spectrum of
aesthetic qualities: they were vibrant, frenzied, meditative, diso-
rienting, provocative. Needless to say, many among the general
public found them simply provoking. One wit observed that "I
suspect any picture I think! could have made myself." And many
of the artists intended to provoke the public. One of the abstract
expressionists claimed their message to the public was: "'You're
stupid. We despise you. We don't want you to like us—or our
art."
THE BEATS The desire to liberate self-expression and reject mid-
dle-class conventions energized the abstract expressionist
painters. These values also animated a small but highly visible
and controversial group of young writers, poets, painters, and
musicians known as the Beats. These angry young men —Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, and
Gregory Corso, among others—were alienated by the mundane
horrors of middle-class life. Time called the Beats "a pack of
oddballs who celebrate booze, dope, sex and despair." The Beats
were not lost in despair, however; they strenuously embraced
life. But it was life on their own terms, and their terms were
shocking to most observers.
The Beats grew out of the bohemian underground in New
York's Greenwich Village. They were all unique personalities.
Ginsberg was a skinny, bearded poet who, as a boy in New Jer-
sey, had declared that "I'll be a genius of some kind or other,
probably in literature. Either I'm a genius, I'm eccentric, or I'm
slightly schizophrenic. Probably the first two." Probably all
three, some thought. Kerouac, his "romantic, moody, dark-eyed
friend," was a handsome, athletic, working-class kid from Lo-
well, Massachusetts, who went to Columbia University on a foot-
ball scholarship.
 832 Through the Picture Window
Ginsberg also studied at Columbia, where a perplexed dean
directed him to undergo psychotherapy. The moody poet chose
William Burroughs as his therapist. Burroughs, it turned out, was
the most eccentric of the trio. A man of dark humor, violent en-
ergy, and unsettling vision, Burroughs graduated from Harvard
in 1936, then studied medicine in Vienna, and later worked as an
advertising copywriter, detective, bartender, and vest extermin-
ator. In his spare time he was a petty thief and junkie. He also cut
off one of his fi ngers during a "Van Gogh kick." Later he would
become a heroin addict, kill his wife while trying to shoot an
apple off her head, and write the influential experimental novel
Naked Lunch (1959).
This fervent threesome found its hero in Neal Cassady, a 20-
year-old ex-convict who arrived in New York from Denver hop-
ing to enroll at Columbia. Cassady was pure physical and sensual
energy. He could throw a football seventy yards and run a
hundred yards in less than ten seconds. He claimed he had stolen
over 500 cars and had slept with almost as many different
partners. Ginsberg and Kerouac were enthralled by Cassady's
frenzied presence and vital force. He was in their view a mythic
cowboy turned "cool" hipster, utterly free and rootless because
he defied both maturity and reason. Soon this quartet attracted
others in quest of real life, and the Beat culture was born.
Essentially apolitical throughout the 1950s, the Beats sought
personal rather than social solutions to their hopes and anxieties.
As Kerouac insisted, they were not beat in the sense of beaten;
they were "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved." Their
road to salvation lay in hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol, relent-
less sex, a penchant for jazz and the street life of urban ghettos,
an affinity for Buddhism, and a restless, vagabond spirit that took
them speeding back and forth across the country between San
Francisco and New York.
This existential mania for intense experience and frantic mo-
tion provided the subject matter for the Beats' writing. Gins-
berg's long prose-poem Howl (1956) featured an explicit
sensuality as well as an impressionistic attempt to catch the
color, movement, and dynamism of modern life. In this it bore a
marked resemblance to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. But
Howl lacked Whitman's celebratory tone; its mood was bitter
and critical. Ginsberg howled at the "Robot apartments! invinci-
ble suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic indus-
tries!" Kerouac published his autobiographical novel On the
Road a year later. In frenzied prose and plotless ramblings it
portrayed the Beats' life of "bursting ecstasies" and maniacal
833
A Paradoxical Era
traveling. At one point Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) has the fol-
lowing exchange with Sal Paradise (Kerouac): "We gotta go and
never stop going till we get there." "Where we going, man?" "I
don't know, but we gotta go."
Howl and On the Road provoked sarcasm and anger from many
reviewers, but the books enjoyed a brisk sale, especially among
young people. On the Road made the bestseller list, and soon the
term "beat generation" or "beatnik" was being applied to al-
most any young rebel who openly dissented from the comforta-
ble ethos of middle-class life. Defiant, unruly young actors such
as James Dean and Marlon Brando were added to the pantheon of
Beat "anti-heroes." In The Wild One (1954) a waitress asks
Brando what he is rebelling against. He replies: "Whattaya got?"
Acid-tongued comedians Mort Sahl and Lennie Bruce displayed
affinities with the Beats, and a young folk-singer from Minnesota
named Bob Dylan was directly inspired by Howl and On the
Road. In this sense the anarchic gaiety of the Beats played an im-
portant role in preparing the way for the more widespread youth
revolt of the 1960s.
A PARADOXICAL ERA
For all their color and vitality, the Beats had little impact
on the prevailing patterns of postwar social and cultural life. The
same held for most of the other critics who attacked the smug
conformity and excessive materialism they saw pervading their
society. The public had become understandably weary of larger
social or political concerns in the aftermath of the Depression
and the war. Instead Americans eagerly focused their efforts on
personal and family goals and took great pride in their material
achievements.
Yet those achievements, considerable as they were, eventually
created a new set of problems. The benefits of abundance were
by no means equally distributed, and millions of Americans still
lived hidden in poverty. For those more fortunate, unprece-
dented affluence and security fostered greater leisure and inde-
pendence, which in turn provided opportunities for pursuing
more diverse notions of what the good life entailed. Yet the con-
formist mentality of the Cold War era discouraged experimenta-
tion. By the mid-1960s, however, tensions between innovation
and convention would erupt into open conflict. Ironically, many
members of the baby boom generation would become the
leaders of the 1960s rebellion against the corporate and con-
834 • Through the Picture Window

sumer cultures. Even more ironically, the person who would

warn Americans of the 1960s about the mounting dangers of the
burgeoning "military-industrial complex" was the president
who had long symbolized its growth—Dwight D. Eisenhower.

FURTHER READING
The best overview of the Eisenhower period is Charles C. Alex-
ander's Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1951-1962 (1975).° For
the manner in which Eisenhower conducted foreign policy, see in partic-
ular Robert A. Divine's Eisenhower and the Cold War (1981).° On the
conservatism of the 1950s, see George H. Nash's The Conservative Intel-
lectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (1976).°
For the buildup of American involvement in Indochina, consult James
P. Harrison's The Endless War: Fifty Years ofStruggle in Vietnam (1982)°
and George C. Herrings America's Longest War: The United States and
Vietnam, 1950-1975(1979).' How the Eisenhower Doctrine came to be
implemented is traced in Stephen Ambrose's Rise to Globalism: Ameri-
can Foreign Policy, 1938-1980(1981).'
Two introductions to the impact wrought by the Warren Supreme
Court during the 1950s are Alexander Bickel's The Supreme Court and
the idea of Progress (1970)° and Paul Murphy's The Constitution in Crisis
Times (1972).' Also helpful is Archibald Cox's The Warren Court: Con-
stitutional Decision as an Instrument of Reform (1968).' A masterful
study of the important Warren Court decision on school desegregation is
Richard Kluger's Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975).°
For the story of Montgomery, see David L. Lewis's King: A Critical Bi-
ography (1970)° and Juan Williams's Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil
Rights Years, 1954-1965(1987).' William H. Chafe's Civilities and Civil
Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Strugglefor Freedom
(1980)° examines how one community dragged its feet on the Brown
implementation order.

These books are available in paperback editions.