Following WWII the United States entered into a period of significant transition.  Beginning in the late 1940s, Americans were faced with two major, seemingly paradoxical developments. Domestically, broad economic changes led to an economic boom. Internationally, the new domestic affluence was framed by and overshadowed by a generations-long Cold War.

The postwar American “consensus” held great promise. Despite the looming threat of nuclear war, millions experienced unprecedented prosperity and increasingly proud American identity. Consumer confidence seemed justified by an ever-higher standard of living. However, the contradictions of this prosperity also defined the decade: unrivaled economic growth alongside persistent poverty, life-changing technological innovation alongside social and environmental degradation, expanded opportunity alongside entrenched discrimination, and new, more liberated lifestyles alongside stifling conformity.

Many of these paradoxes came into focus in the postwar period. By 1947 a society that was looking to demilitarize and return to normal life was presented with the falling “dominoes” of Eastern Europe and Asia as communist powers exerted their influence and challenged American supremacy in an expanding arms race. Various doctrines and plans emerged that all loosely fit into the policy of containment. Increasingly, international spending programs supported nations fighting communism, and in the case of Korea, military force would eventually be applied as well. At home, as some Americans were experiencing economic growth and financial mobility, they also experienced a political and ideological war characterized by McCarthyism and other, more dispersed and long-lived anti-communist sentiments. Debates over capitalism and communism were framed by the rhetoric of freedom versus tyranny, yet many Americans found themselves attacked, blacklisted, and ostracized for failing to conform.

Fear and consumerism: Two Sides of an Era

The postwar years were characterized by many stark contradictions. While the suburbs expanded and purchasing power grew for most American workers, millions lived in a largely invisible form of poverty in what the sociologist Michael Harrington called “the Other America.” Tidy tract housing dotted the rural outskirts of numerous cities, even as those very cities saw their economic foundations hollowed out and their resources shrivel. Women suddenly found a new autonomy in the wartime economy and then just as abruptly saw those work opportunities disappear as men returning from war reclaimed their old jobs. Young White Americans poured into excellent public universities; Black Americans struggled against Jim Crow and the many institutions closed to them. Politics offered the amiable, steady hand of the immensely popular Dwight D. Eisenhower, reelected in a landslide, and the cynical demagoguery and character assassination of Joseph McCarthy. On the technological front, there was both the fear of atomic weapons and “Mutually Assured Destruction” and the optimism of newly empowered consumers presented with a diverse array of novel products.

In the images juxtaposed here, note the tension between two examples of paranoia and contentment in Cold War America: the McCarthyite fear of communist infiltration, all the more insidious because of its concealment in the pleasures of Hollywood’s entertainments, and the freedom of the open road as our three motorists take the air in a stylish convertible, speeding happily into the future.

 

For many, full freedom was still a goal to be achieved. Segregation and Jim Crow had stifled and restricted Black American life since the close of the Civil War. The contradictions of fighting World War II with a segregated military, and opposing the tyranny of the U.S.S.R. while actively continuing and expanding a range of restrictions at home, was not lost on many Americans. Improvements began gradually but with each success in advancing Civil Rights, future gains became more likely. Just as Sweat vs. Painter helped pave the way for Brown v Board of Education, new progress built upon past success. However, the struggle for full equality and participation in American life would prove an arduous, and as of yet incomplete, journey.