“The consumer is the key to our economy,” declared Jack Straus, chairman of the board of Macy’s, New York City’s leading department store. “Our ability to consume is endless. The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow.” The roots of the consumer culture of the 1950s date back to the 1920s and even earlier. But never before had affluence, or consumerism, been so widespread. In a consumer culture, the measure of freedom became the ability to gratify market desires. Modern society, wrote Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, may well have reduced freedom “in the workplace” by subjecting workers to stringent discipline on the job, but it offered a far greater range of “goods and services,” and therefore “a greater scope of freedom” in Americans’ “personal lives.”
In this 1950 photograph, television sets move through an assembly line.
In a sense, the 1950s represented the culmination of the long-term trend in which consumerism replaced economic independence and democratic participation as central definitions of American freedom. Attitudes toward debt changed as well. Low interest rates and the spread of credit cards encouraged Americans to borrow money to purchase consumer goods. Americans became comfortable living in never-ending debt, once seen as a loss of economic freedom.
Consumer culture demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life to communism and virtually redefined the nation’s historic mission to extend freedom to other countries. From Coca-Cola to Levi’s jeans, American consumer goods, once a status symbol for the rich in other countries, were now marketed to customers around the globe. The country’s most powerful weapon in the Cold War, insisted a reporter for House Beautiful magazine, was “the freedom offered by washing machines and dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, automobiles, and refrigerators.”