Galbraith was troubled by society’s double standard: “Anything which increases production from given sources is good and implicitly important; anything which inhibits or reduces output is, pro tanto, wrong.” The prophets of self-indulgence and accumulation applauded private goods but recoiled from public services—education, public health, crusades against urban blight. According to that reasoning, Galbraith contended, it was “unquestionably more rewarding, in purely pecuniary terms, to be a speculator or a prostitute than a teacher, preacher or policeman.” The younger generation was being “prevulgarized,” Louis Kronenberger wrote, “as materials are said to be preshrunk.” Edmund Wilson wrote: “Production, consumption and profit have come to play the role that religion played in our grandfather’s generation.” Such things, he said, could not even be discussed, since “they have taken the place of the Book of Genesis and the divinity of Jesus Christ.” To some observers the admen seemed to be stockbrokers in neuroses. Walter Lippmann scorned them as “new barbarians,” and Galbraith, in a striking passage, indicted consumerism and at the same time provided later writers with a bench mark against which to measure the very different society of the late 1960s and early 1970s:
These are the days in which even the mildly critical individual is likely to seem like a lion in contrast with the general mood. These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the scriptural parable, the bland lead the bland.
An understanding of the social revolt that came fifteen years later is impossible without some grasp of the 1950s life-style which arose from the new prosperity. Here, as elsewhere, the character of the time is most easily discerned in the new suburbs. They were not representative of all America (hardly anyone ever died there, for example, and there were almost no unmarried adults) but they did represent what America was becoming. It was there that junior executives unwound after each day, there that their wives honored what Betty Friedan would call the “feminine mystique”—and there that future hippies and straights roamed the community playgrounds.
The vast internal migration of the early 1940s had continued, in a somewhat lower key, in the postwar period. Throughout the 1950s over a million farmers were leaving their farms each year—17 million altogether for the postwar era by the 1960s. At the same time the centers of the cities, once so splendid, were being deserted—to become ghettos of the poor and bastions of the rich. The rest fled and camped outside. Even in so settled a prewar suburb as Stratford, Connecticut, commutation tickets had doubled and then tripled, and in the new cities the figures comprised virtually the entire male population. Every weekday morning now hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers rode or drove into Manhattan; every evening they returned home. At the end of the 1950s the population of the island south of City Hall was over a million by day—and about two thousand at night. During the decade more than a million New Yorkers left the city to live in the postwar communities ringing it. The suburbs, John Brooks wrote, were “draining downtown of its nighttime population, except for night watchmen and derelicts; it was becoming a part-time city, tidally swamped… when the cars and commuter trains arrived and abandoned again at nightfall when the wave sucked back—left pretty much to the thieves, policemen, and rats.”
It was the same in all American metropolises. Of the thirteen million new homes which were built in settled areas in the ten years before 1958, about eleven million—85 percent—were outside the inner cities. Refugees from both the farms and the central cities were converging on townships which hadn’t even existed on V-J Day. The loss of metropolitan vigor was especially significant. In the past it had served as a magnet for the young and ambitious. Now it was flowing into the rising communities on the perimeters of the cities, to the curving superblocks, garden duplexes, and red brick labyrinths and manicured lawns of suburbia. There stood the dormitories of the new people, the swing generation and its younger cousins. In these developments the new life-style flourished.1
Its most conspicuous quality was a tremendous emphasis on social skills. Rural and small-town America had been strongholds of what David Riesman called “inner-directed” men and women. The source of their direction—he compared it to a gyroscope—was planted early in life by parents and never wavered afterward. The classic example of inner direction was the Englishman who dressed for dinner in the jungle. In the suburbs an entirely different type was gaining ascendancy: the “other-directed Americans.” Their impetus came from an insatiable need to be liked. Riesman likened this to radar picking up impulses. The response was an adjustment to what the group wanted. In the Hillendales and Gardenvilles the accolade was to be called “well-adjusted.”
These characteristics were not new to the postwar United States. Seymour Martin Lipset argues persuasively that Americans, with their lack of an autocracy and their emphasis on egalitarianism, have always been other-directed, and Alexis de Tocqueville found supportive evidence more than a hundred years ago. Though Americans took great pride in talking about their individualism, he noted, their special genius—and the source of their greatest potential weakness—lay in their ways of cooperation with each other. If America ever lost that drive, he predicted, it would be through strengthening social virtues at the expense of all others, creating a dictatorship of the majority. “In times of equality,” he wrote, “no matter what political laws men devise for themselves, it is safe to foresee that trust in common opinion will become a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet.” The danger in this was that the individual might be “overwhelmed by the sense of his insignificance and weakness.”
This is precisely what such critics as William Whyte thought they saw emerging in the suburbs of the 1950s. The great stress on behavior acceptable to the team was inhibiting to the individual, they believed; it was thwarting natural leaders and creating a new breed of yes-men. In some ways that was inevitable. Small business was going under everywhere. Americans increasingly were employed by bureaucracies, both private and public. In 1956 the country passed a milestone as important, in its way, as the closing of the frontier in 1890: the number of blue-collar workers (people producing things) was surpassed by that of white-collar workers (in middle-class, service occupations). Increasingly the representative wage earner became the pencil pusher working for a large, impersonal entity. In the newly developed areas it sometimes seemed that everyone was employed by a vast floating cooperative. The swing generation had become a generation of technicians, of interchangeable parts. It members knew it—and for the most part they liked it.
To be sure, they often spoke of life as a treadmill, but their despair was a mock despair; if they felt imprisoned, their prison was the most comfortable in history, as they would have been the first to point out. Paternalism had become benevolent. The most modest example was RCA’s issuance of company neckties. Other corporations went farther. Richfield Oil erected model homes and IBM built country clubs; Reynolds Tobacco engaged company chaplains and Eastman Kodak and Do Pont employed staff psychiatrists. To junior executives who spent their weekdays in such corporate wombs, a carryover of organizational principles in the home neighborhood was only natural.
“It seemed to me,” John Steinbeck wrote of the newly organized, “that they looked at me for a place to insert a coin.” That was unfair. There was nothing inherently wrong in Park Merced’s employment of uniformed attendants to cut the grass, or in Drexelbrook’s annual Christmas decoration contest for its 1,223 garden apartments, in which the rivalry between garden courts became so imaginative that a hundred thousand Philadelphians drove out every year to see it. Life in the developments was in many ways an improvement over the life its dwellers had known as children in the 1930s, and not just because everyone was now prosperous. Even as modern business kept all ways of advancement open in order that any junior execut
ive might graduate one day to Westchester, Bull Valley, or Bloomfield Hills, so were the new suburbs free, unstructured, and genuinely hospitable to anyone from any background except blacks, whose time had not yet come. Families moving in found that their new neighbors were eager to help them unpack, take care of their children, and feed them until they had settled down. Even William Whyte conceded that the young suburbanites had achieved “a pretty high quotient of kindliness and fundamental decency.”
They owned their own homes, and that was important; it satisfied an old American yearning. Their sense of community was rooted in the American past, too; the pioneers had also been generous and hospitable. The new people were relaxed and informal, almost to a fault. Sport shirts and denim pedal pushers replaced collars and hose. Mother wouldn’t have dreamed of going downtown without dressing; now her daughter went with her hair in curlers, and if anyone thought the kerchief over it suggestive of the babushkas worn by the peasant women of eastern Europe, she didn’t care. Her concern was the attitude of the other girls in her neighborhood. They did the same thing and would have been disappointed in her if she had done anything else.
Children in the developments exchanged toys and clothes almost as though they were community property, which they almost were. If little Bobby had outgrown his playsuit, it went to little Billy across the way. It wasn’t unusual for a mother to recognize a familiar garment on a strange child long afterward; since she had given it away it had passed through several households. Bikes and scooters were also exchanged. Front doors were unlocked; neighbors felt free to enter without knocking. Doors inside were disappearing. So were the massive overstuffed chairs of the Thirties, the heavy rugs and the inside walls; the formal dining room mother had dusted every day and used only for big meals had been replaced by a single living-dining-kitchen area, and the suburbanites saw little reason to mourn its loss, even when guests came. The sitdown dinner had been succeeded by casserole dinners, served buffet style. Sometimes they were awkward, but no one seemed to mind. This way a hostess could enjoy her own party.
The host usually mixed the drinks beforehand, which in 75 percent of the dwellings were martinis. If there was an uprising in the nursery he hurried off to suppress it. Suburban fathers took a livelier interest in their children; home had become a place for companionship and recreation. Nearly two-thirds of all American husbands were helping with housework by 1954, and in the developments the percentage was higher. In addition, and to a degree which often amazed their own parents, the young fathers there were pitching in to help with the dishes, the cooking, and the diapering of the babies. Russell Lynes complained that the young wives were beginning to treat their husbands as part-time servants or as the latest new appliance, but to the new men there was nothing emasculating about stopping at the supermarket for extra groceries on the way home from work, or filling in at the laundromat, or pushing the stroller around the block. They believed it was good for them and good for their families. Spock was the grandfather clock by which the new fathers set their watches, and he approved, and that made it right.
Suburban mothers, in the togetherness vanguard, seemed very young and often were. During the 1950s the age at which U.S. women married dropped from twenty-two to twenty and into the teens. High school marriages became an accepted phenomenon. Children began going steady in junior high school. Girls began thinking about their weddings then or even earlier; a New York Times advertisement for a child’s dress said, “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
Being a successful man-trap entailed being desirable—a good lay, in Wylie’s phrase; ideally, a great lay. To achieve this happy state females of all ages invested in wardrobes, cosmetics, and exotic perfumes whose makers claimed that they incited rape. Since 1939 the average woman had shrunk three or four sizes. Instead of shopping for a dress her size, she now found one she liked and then dieted to fit it. Metrecal made its appearance and found an eager mass market. So did a new Clairol slogan: “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde.” Some social scientists and aging suffragettes worried about women’s reckless haste to abandon their hard-won independence, but their voices were muffled. Life applauded the mass movement of girls into the home, and in a cover story on the suburban wife Time reported that wives were “having too good a time… to believe that they should be unhappy.” The truth, Carl N. Degler wrote, was that “American society in general, which includes women, shuns like a disease any feminist ideology.”
By the late 1950s the U.S. birth rate was approaching India’s. The number of U.S. mothers who had given birth to three or more children had doubled in twenty years. The increase was most spectacular among college women; they were abandoning careers to bear four, five, and six or more children. The percentage of females in the American college population (35 percent) was lower than that in any European country and smaller than the prewar figure on U.S. campuses (40 percent). Nearly two-thirds of matriculating girls dropped out before graduation, while more than half the men stayed. Many coeds left the classroom to take menial jobs, supporting their partners, who remained on campus; this was called the degree of “Ph.T.” (Putting Husband Through). Other women quit because they had not acquired spouses. Deans’ offices found that coeds were leaving at the end of the first year or two because they had found the pickings slim and wanted to try their luck elsewhere.
To ambitious junior executives hanging their hats in Levittown and casting covetous eyes on Westchester, the right spouse was as important as a hearty chuckle and a sincere necktie. Corporations set up training programs to show company wives what they should and should not do, and Fortune found in interviews that the wives, especially the young ones, approved of the idea. They felt that women should become gregarious if they were shy, and, if they were smarter than men, learn to hold their tongues. Several movies of the time dramatized their situation, among them Executive Suite and Woman’s World. The theme in each was a corporation’s search for the right man to fill a big job and how a wise mate could help her man by wearing the right dress, hiring the right interior decorator, choosing the right friends, and serving the boss his favorite menu when he came to dinner.
The very anonymity of the big corporation served to sap confidence and independence in men and women dependent on it. So did their own lack of roots. In the front office, where employees were so many pins on a map, personnel chiefs seemed to move them about with reckless abandon. Each relocation meant farewells to friends and the search for new ones elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Montgomery Ward executive and his family had been moved twenty-eight times in twenty-six years of marriage. Growing mobility was a fact of suburban life. According to Atlas Van Lines, the average corporate manager now moved fourteen times in his lifetime, once every two and a half years. For him the ability to adjust to new circumstances was important to a degree beyond the comprehension of men who live their lives in one place. Though the premium on socialization in the developments sometimes became excessive, the alternative—a family dependent upon its own emotional resources—was considered worse.
Suburbia was superbly equipped to meet the needs of newcomers. Its inhabitants had little reason to feel lonely. The American compulsion to join every association on sight found its ultimate expression there. Meetings were scheduled by one organization or another at every hour from breakfast to late in the evening. Partners were always available for bridge, canasta, poker and bowling. Camera, bird-watching, gun, embroidering, archery, and ping-pong clubs flourished; so did PTAs, the League of Women Voters, the ADA, the Minute Women and, beginning in 1958, the John Birch Society.
Many Americans who would later rise in public life began to acquire their political expertise in suburbia’s constant shuffle of adjustment. Here they were likelier to be Republican than in their old neighborhoods. Socially ambitious couples arriving from the inner cities switched their party affiliations—much as they abandoned other lower-class ways. Their parents had contributed to the Democratic party’s huge gre
at urban majorities. They didn’t. Now that they had made it, they wanted to pull the ladder up behind them. In Europe the postwar expansion of labor unions was leading to the formation of a large, militant, class-conscious force. Not here; although eighteen million industrialized U.S. workers were now unionized, their craving for middle-class status, and the frequency with which it was being satisfied, created instead a large new middle group. Uneasy in their new roles, distrustful of liberalism, and deeply hostile toward further social reforms, they constituted a neoconservative force which would become increasingly significant as the old Roosevelt coalition faltered.
The most common indictment of suburbia’s life-style was that it was oppressive. Its passion for informality was so intense that preference for privacy was treated almost as a sign of malaise. Picture windows became windows for looking in. Couples who wanted to lock out the neighbors occasionally were expected to provide an explanation afterward. The group felt it had a right to know everything—“Did you have your period yesterday?” or “Who was that woman you were talking to at Stop and Shop?” or “Your Roger was looking daggers when he left for the office this morning. What’s his problem?”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 117
