Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War [Paperback]

If you are a student or fan of Postwar American Popular culture, then this book is for you! May compiles a scintillating and surprising set of essays, on topics ranging from ranch-house architecture to Jackson Pollock. These essays make the life and culture of the 1940s and 1950s come alive. Film critic William J. Palmer coined the adjective "holographic" to describe the ways in which different layers of social history can combine to create a hazy, but strikingly 3-dimensional picture of times past and this is exactly what May and his co-essayists accomplish.

At the turn of the century, travelling with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi to the New Continent where he was to deliver introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud famously declared: "We are bringing them the plague, and they don't even know it." By mid-century, Americans had realized they were sick. They couldn't put a name on their illness, though: their pathological condition arose amid plenty, when America had at last turned the page of the Great Depression and entered a period of unprecedented growth. The American Way of Life came to be defined as the rise of suburbia, the integration of individuals into organizations, the expansion of corporate culture, and the triumph of the consumer society. Still, the anxiety lingered, and people were very self-aware of it. As a famous jazzman put it, "It was a period of being very bugged. Why, I'll never know, but we were."

In 1960, Eric Goldman could write with confidence that America had just experienced a "crucial decade". Others talked about living in an age of anxiety, characterized by a search for personal identity. The habit of counting time by decades structuring the flow of history had caught on before, but the fifties were identified by contemporaries as a time quite unlike other periods. Many ages, of course, develop collective representations, but few have done it so self-consciously as did the particular decade and a half following World War II. Self-awareness was most evident in the performing arts, where playwrights such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller created drama, particularly A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, which portrayed family disintegration and self-destruction. Other works of fiction developed the anxious vein. Mickey Spillane had his hardboiled detective Mike Hammer bust villains and seduce dames with a black-and-white morality, giving rise to the film noir genre. Comic books sold by the millions and were filled with sex, violence, racial stereotypes, and crimes against persons (particularly against women).

The postwar predicament was also made clear in the writings of social scientists who captured the zeitgeist in insightful essays. Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who shed his earlier commitment to progress and optimism, now portrayed mankind caught in sin and irony. The sociologist David Riesman found in The Lonely Crowd a generation turning from "inner directed" individuals to "other directed" anonymous figures. William H. Whyte, an editor of Fortune, expressed that same idea in his enormously influential The Organization Man, which described the displacement of the Protestant Ethic by a Social Ethic emphasizing conformity and "belongingness". Still another current emerged when C. Wright Mills discovered a "new middle class" trapped in large organizations and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse critiqued the ensuing "one-dimensional" men. Perhaps the bleakest picture of the omnipotent organization encasing the fragile private self was provided by the sociologist Erving Goffman in Asylums, focusing on "total institutions" such as prisons, mental hospitals, monasteries, ships at sea--places where behavior was closely monitored and where the inmates developed theatrical role-playing strategies as a mean of adjustment to the loss of autonomous selfhood.

This postwar pessimism contrasts with the mood prevalent during the thirties and early forties. This raises a paradox: why in the Depression did hardship and conflict yield expressions of unity and optimism, while in the affluent fifties a widespread consensus was characterized by fragmentation and anxiety? The authors of Recasting America offer several answers. The first one is straightforward: it is just human nature that in hard times people band together and feel optimistic, but in the following good times prosperity arouses fear and anxiety. The second reason is more sophisticated, but develops the same line of reasoning: the theory is that humans, by their very nature, repress certain things that must be denied if culture and civilization are to flourish. In a society that developed conformism and put a taboo on issues such as sex and originality, the repressed came back.

Other reasons for the postwar gloom can be invoked. As the Cold War crept deep into the American heartland, people were living under the shadow of the atomic bomb. The atomic mushroom, along with the picture of women clad in bikinis, were the defining images of the period, and these two "explosive issues"--sex bombs and real ones--were closely interrelated. Here the surprising thing is not so much the amount of terror and anxiety caused by the atomic threat but, on the contrary, the quiet acceptance and integration into everyday life of radioactive concerns. As Stanley Kubrick put it in his black humor comedy, people learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Far from retreating into Malthusian shelters, they married and made babies. Indeed, scholars have long noted the unprecedented rise in the marriage rate and the dramatic decline in the marriage age that occurred after World War II. T the same time, the birthrate climbed to a twentieth-century high, yielding an equally well-noted baby boom. Yet there is no universally agreed set of explanations for these surprising trends. If the causes remain obscure, the consequences may be linked to the climate of anxiety that defined the age: America as a whole may have suffered from post-maternity blues.

Although some of the contributors were trained as historians, Recasting America is a contribution to the American Studies curriculum, and therefore differs from what mainstream historians would offer as a synthesis of the period. American studies and American history differ on several counts. The first focuses on key texts, the second on archives. American studies builds upon self-representations and the terms of the actors themselves, not underlying trends or contextualizations. American studies tends to be more politically correct than American history, to the point of distorting the past with the concerns from the present.

However, the late forties and fifties are a period that particularly fits the American studies agenda, and classical historians are often happy to leave the age to their colleagues in cultural studies departments. It was a time of intellectual renewal, with a significant number of milestone books that are still influencing contemporary public debates. As mentioned, the "crucial decade" was very self-conscious about itself, and provided a golden age for social science studies that can still be used to analyze the period. And lastly on political correctness, the early Cold War period was so marked by intellectual bigotry and social conservatism that switching the pendulum to the opposite side of the political spectrum still provides a valuable viewpoint. For students unfamiliar with modern American intellectual history, this volume is a point they can start from.