Cold War: A History From Beginning to End (The Cold War) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2016-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

The Culture of the Cold War

“The reason we have such a high standard of living is because advertising has created an American frame of mind that makes people want more things, better things, and newer things.”

—Nikita Khrushchev

In large part, because victory in the Cold War was so hard to define, it permeated every aspect of life in the United States and the Soviet Union especially. This included elements of culture: movies, television, music, literature, how people dressed and lived their lives, and much more.

Many Americans remember the Cold War as a battle between freedom and oppression on many levels, including culture. Ostensibly, Americans enjoyed freedoms of expression that were not open to Soviet citizens because the government kept tight control over what was produced and what people were exposed to. They were not completely wrong about that: The Soviet Union did strictly control the cultural creations in its country, and other Eastern Bloc and Communist countries (like China) did as well. In the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, the government largely owned the media outlets and often pre-screened the products that they did not produce.

However, cultural expression was not as free and open as most Americans would like to have believed. While the American government did not own movie studios or dictate what could and could not be said directly, they did have their own means of controlling the cultural atmosphere. We have already read about the House Un-American Activities Committee, but America policed itself in subtle ways also. Americans adopted what historians call a “culture of conformity.” In essence, being different was dangerous, and men, women, and children all had strict expectations about how they should look and behave and live.

America saw itself as nothing if not the opposite of the Soviets. As Communism was on the far left of the political spectrum, America took a conservative turn in the wake of World War II that would last until the 1960s. Domestically, the “traditional” family became the ideal. Men were expected to work full-time jobs and provide for their families. Women were responsible for caring for their homes and raising happy, healthy, “normal” children. Finally, children were expected to represent their parents’ work honorably: be obedient, and grow up to fulfill their appropriate roles as men and women, husbands and wives.

As you have read, the end of World War II brought a renewed boom in the economy. War production turned into consumer production, and as white Americans returned to work, they were expected to buy. Since Communism was supposed to disregard materialism and consumer culture, America began to emphasize it. Happiness, in America, was expressed by what you owned. Consumerism was directly tied to the ideal of the “perfect” family described above: A successful husband provided his wife and children with a home in the suburbs, the newest appliances, two cars, mass-produced foods, and all of the things not available to Soviet families. Thus, that perfect family expressed itself as much by what it owned as how its members behaved.

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