Post WWII America: The beginning of the era of Mass Consumption and the promotion of Mass Consumption

Important Quotes from this period:

    Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off (FDR 1933 Inagaural Speech).


    The question that I will ask you to consider today is this: When the war is over, are we likely, and do we want to keep this attitude to work and the results of work? Or are we preparing and do we want to back to our old habits of thought? Because I believe that on our answer to this question the whole economic future of society will depend. Sooner or later the moment will come when we have to make a decision about this. At the moment, we are not making it - it is being made for us (by the machine). (Dorothy Sayers 1942 College Lecture) ( i.e. do we intentionally turn the war production machine off and go back to our former means of production )


    Only if we have large demands can we expect large production. Therefore, it is important that in planning for the postwar period, we give adequate consideration to the need for ever-increasing consumption on the part of our people as one of the prime requisites for prosperity. (Robert Nathan 1944 - an economist).



    Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals , that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status , of social acceptance, of prestige , is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives is today expressed in consumptive terms (Victor Lebow 1955 - The Journal of Retailing)

From the 1948 Pamphlet "The Miracle of America"

  • The mainspring of the American standard of living is High and Increasing Productivity!

  • We take abundance for granted as we consume more than half of the world's coffee and rubber, almost half of the steel, a quarter of the coal and nearly two-thirds of the crude oil ( At this time the US had only 1/15th the population of the world ).

The 1946 Employment Act named "purchasing power" as one of the things government was meant to promote.

Thus prompted, Americans of the late 1940s got down to the business of buying things. In the first five years of peace, consumer spending increased by 60 percent. People bought cars and boats and clothing. They bought furniture and appliances. They bought Tupperware. Most of all, they bought houses. Housing starts went from 142,000 in 1944 to 2 million in 1950.

The Ad Council cheered them on, casting consumption as what distinguished happy capitalists from those poor benighted souls living under the communist boot.




American in the 1950s: The Decade that Changed Everything: The Atomic Age; Prosperity for All; Interstates; Suburbia; Television; Rock N Roll; The Age of Advertising; The Happy Homemaker and the Origin of Sexism; The Origin of the Perceived American family unit - two happy white kids ...

Visual themes:

  • consumption/buying = freedom
  • freedom makes people happy
  • Men wear hats and smoke pipes
  • Women wear skirts/dresses and are always happy
  • Kids are spoiled because they get stuff and this is the American Way

    The Point: This approached completely worked and by the end of the 1950s Americans were total consumptive pigs, urged on by the government, and the most consumptive/entitled society on the planet was born (and by in large still exists). All of this is encouraged through subversive advertising and the development of technological gagdets as the principal way we manifest American Exceptionalism.



    Slogans R Us





    Leisure Time:





    Atomic Energy is Fun, Safe

    The Happy Homemaker

    You will buy a TV; You will buy a TV

    You will especially buy a New Car!!

    And don't forget about the wide spread social convention of Smoking ...

    WTF

    And even Future Presidents:

    1950s conversion to Suburbia and Conformity:

    And Networks of Freeways:

    As a result of suburbia + interstates the US built the most energy intensive transportation economy that could be built. But since the price of gas was so low, and America produced 50% of world oil during the 1950's, any problems with this approach in the longer term were wholly ignored.




    And so set the stage for every increasing production and consumption. American prosperity required dominating the world in trade and products and for a long time we did and in the short term, it certainly did pay off. Life the 1950s and 1960s was a lot better than life in the 1920's and 1930's - personal prosperity and personal productivity were very high and the free market society was borne without boundaries. But what will life be like in 2040 compared to 2010?