The domestic culture of Americans after World War II was dominated by the escalating cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Americans after the end of World War II were looking to come home, start families, and enjoy domestic life. After experiencing war on the battlefront and the home front, both men and women looked forward to settling down, purchasing a home, and starting a family. The number of marriages increased, and those entering into postwar nuptials were younger than they had been in several decades. All of these components combined to create a new culture, one based on the nuclear family, suburbanization, consumerism, and in light of international relations, fear.
The threat of communism invading the home and corrupting the nuclear family of mother, father, and children was ever present throughout the cold war. No person contributed to this fear more than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. McCarthy held a series of televised hearings to ferret out possible communists within American society. Through his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy entered the homes of everyday Americans with accusations of the communist leanings of some of their favorite movie stars, writers, singers, and television personalities. From Arthur Miller to Pete Seeger, Americans witnessed nightly interrogations of public figures, all in an effort to keep the country safe from communist ideologues. Americans, in love with the innovation of television, were surrounded by anticommunist messages and the unremitting threat of Soviet infiltration.
The threat of nuclear invasion and attack created a constantly vigilant society. Civil deeense drills and airraid sirens were signals that men, women, and children alike understood and feared. School-aged children were instructed in proper “duck and cover” techniques, which directed the children to crouch under their desks and remain quiet until the drill or danger had passed. Even people walking in the street were attentive enough to know that once they heard the alarm, they should dive into the nearest ditch or take cover in a similar natural shelter. Families with the means to do so also built their own shelters, known as “fall-out” or simply “bomb” shelters. These shelters were built underground and stocked with canned food, water, and air purification systems, in case of a prolonged Soviet attack.
The American home of the 1950s and 1960s was a refuge from the Soviet threat. Suburban subdivisions offered families, especially those who wanted to leave urban centers yet still maintain a connection to the city, the opportunity to purchase their own homes. The simply designed Levittown homes in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey as well as imitators throughout the nation were sold to American families eager to buy a small plot of land and a piece of the “American dream.”
These communities were filled with young couples and their children. The neighborhoods were also filled with consumer goods. Televisions, automatic washing machines, and kitchen appliances neatly matched in color and style made each ranch-style house a home. In the 1950s and 1960s as people moved from urban to suburban communities, their shopping wants and needs changed as well. Shopping centers replaced downtown “Mom and Pop” stores and designed their window displays and advertising efforts on their key demographic, women. With each purchase, consumers took a stand against communism by supporting the free-market economy.
After World War II, Americans reverted to traditional gender roles as a way to promote safety and stability within the home. Women as mothers and housewives solidified the traditional feminine gender role during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959 at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon praised the American housewife. Nixon, in his now-famous “kitchen debate” with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, highlighted the freedom American housewives were afforded with the variety of appliances and modern conveniences. With the international crisis of the cold war, a constant threat of attack, and communist suspicions at every turn, the home was to be a constant reminder of the nuclear family as the American ideal.
Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s were also able to escape their fears through the new sensation of television. Reinforcing the sense of safety in the home and family, traditional gender roles were emphasized on the small screen. With the mother in the kitchen and the father in the workplace, life seemed ordered and uncomplicated. Family comedies like I Love Lucy and The Ozzie and Harriet Show were popular as well as quiz shows like The $64,000 Question and Twenty One. These shows and similar programs, some of which were holdovers from radio programs, were family-friendly and provided entertainment for family enjoyment.
Television, with its three major broadcast companies of ABC, CBS, and NBC, was also a source of information, beginning to replace newsmagazines in the American home. Instead of reading The Saturday Evening Post, people were tuning into news broadcasts and commentaries. The television set was a double-edged sword of family-oriented entertainment and critical and shocking news stories.
Within the film industry, movies with cold war themes were commonplace. Films like High Noon (1952), My Son John (1952), On the Waterfront (1954), Salt of the Earth (1954), and Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) crossed the genres of western, drama, and comedy, all with the undercurrent of political satire. These films and others like them made the film industry as a whole one of the target groups for McCarthy’s hearings. The increased number of moviegoers made this medium and the messages of cold war conflict it contained quite prolific.
The cold war and the domestic American culture it created constituted a balancing act between the need for privacy and community, innocence and information, fear and reality. The men and women who lived through World War II were eager to move on with domestic life and make the world safer and better for their children. These young parents sought to provide a safe and secure environment in the nuclear age, and in doing so they promoted traditional family values and tried to retain innocence in a world rocked by violence.
Further reading: David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 1999); Stephen J. Whitfield, Cold War Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
—Beverly Kendall Gordon
World History
