By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
In the 1950s, America was becoming a wealthy society. According to writer Tom Wolfe, this was the century “in which America became the richest nation in all of history, with a wealth that reached down to every level of the population”. And yet, the American intellectuals worried that it was becoming excessively conformist. They felt that it was losing the distinctive individuality that had made America great in the first place.
Relying on a Single-wage Earner
In the 1950s, high employment and high wages enabled most home-owning families to rely on a single wage earner. It was now a realistic possibility for a large part of the American workforce to have dad go off to work and mom stay home with the kids. The sort of social normal assumption in a lot of 1950s literature was that mom would be home looking after the baby-boom kids, of whom there were often five or six or seven.
As Tom Wolfe describes the ordinary working people’s prosperity in the middle of the century:
This is the century in which America became the richest nation in all of history, with a wealth that reached down to every level of the population. The energies and animal appetites and idle pleasures of even the working class, the very term seemed antique, became enormous, lurid, creamy, preposterous. The American family car was a 425 horsepower 22-foot long Buick Electra with tailfins in the back, and two black rubber breasts on the bumper in front. The American liquor store deliveryman’s, or cargo humper’s, vacation was two weeks in Barbados with his third wife. The way Americans lived made the rest of mankind stare with envy or disgust, but always with awe.
He was really onto something there. The scale of it all, and the way in which it was so widespread really was something new in the world.
Consumer Credit: The New Affluence
It was Singer, a sewing machine manufacturer that had begun the idea of consumer credit. Consumer credit was extended again in the 1920s for instalment payments on things like cars and washing machines.
It was vastly extended further in the 1950s as the United States started to depend almost entirely upon credit. It expanded 800 percent between 1945 and 1957, with the result that nearly every family could live beyond its means, at least for a while.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
But, There Was Anxiety
Now, of course, all kinds of anxieties accompanied the new affluence. Of course, the shadow of nuclear war, which seemed very, very close in the late 1940s and early 1950s, tempered the national optimism.
Children at school were required to practice civil defense drills, that is simple techniques of trying to shelter themselves in the event that a nuclear bomb went off, not close enough that they’d be instantly vaporized, but close enough that perhaps the windows would shatter and they might be able to protect themselves, subsequently being much parodied as a pointless activity.
Fallout Shelters
In the early 1960s, there was a great craze for building individual fallout shelter. Many mail-order companies made a fortune by selling prefabricated fallout shelter kits. In ones’ suburban back garden, one could dig a big trench, install a fallout shelter, and fill it with nonperishable canned food, so that when the nuclear war came, their family could get in there and survive.
Then, however, the question came up: What happens if ones’ neighbors didn’t bother to build one of their own? Are they ethically right if they defend their own fallout shelter with a gun against their desperate neighbors’ attempts to get in? That’s one of the questions that disturbed the press and the nation for a while in the early 1960s.
American Individualism
Perhaps the most influential book to make this case is called The Lonely Crowd by sociologist David Riesman, which argued that American individualism was in decline.
Riesman used a kind of social psychology model, saying, if one looks at people in traditional societies, individuals are tradition directed. They take the view, this is what we do, this is what we’ve always done, and this is what we’re going to continue to do. In other words, one fits into a tradition with the expectation that life will always carry on the way it does now.
By contrast, said Riesman, the Industrial Revolution created the inner-directed personality. That is the person who, guided by what Riesman called his ‘inner gyroscope’, is highly directed towards changing the world in particular ways, has a very high degree of self-confidence, and goes after his goals single-mindedly. That’s the personality type that created this amazing abundant America.
Conformity: A Normal Characteristic
Now, though, Riesman argued, the inner-directed personality is being displaced by the other-directed personality, the kind of person who doesn’t have the absolute self-confidence of one of the great entrepreneuring pioneers, but who instead is weak in internal resources, and instead gets his or her validation by looking outside to others, the reassurance that comes from being part of a group or part of a team.
Conformity, Riesman argued, was becoming the normal characteristic of the American other-directed personality.
Common Questions about Conformity and American Individualism
It was Singer, a sewing machine manufacturer that had begun the idea of consumer credit. Consumer credit was extended again in the 1920s for instalment payments on things like cars and washing machines.
The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman argued that American individualism was in decline. Riesman used a kind of social psychology model, saying, if one looks at people in traditional societies, individuals are tradition directed.
Conformity, David Riesman argued, was becoming the normal characteristic of the American other-directed personality.
