520 The American Century: Literature since 1945population, yet it consumed 40 percent of the world’s energy, 60 percent of its
automobiles, 80 percent of its refrigerators, and nearly 100 percent of its televisions.
This, evidently, was the society of abundance, appearing to prove an earlier president,
Calvin Coolidge’s claim that the business of America was business.
The business of America was also, perhaps, to dictate the terms of modern culture,
at least to its Western allies, and to other parts of the globe where it claimed a right
of intervention and control. As the 1940s passed into the 1950s, America seemed to
set the style in everything, from high art to advanced technology to popular culture.
In Eisenhower, the president from 1952 to 1960, Americans also had someone at the
head of state whose main aim seemed to be to preserve this economic abundance
and cultural hegemony through a strategy of masterly inactivity. Gone were the
frenetic commitments of the New Deal; and in their place was an administration
that seemed intent on stopping things happening – on maintaining equilibrium by
vetoing any legislation that seemed likely to promote radical change. To some
commentators, it seemed a case of the bland leading the bland. Like Ronald Reagan
thirty years later, Eisenhower made a dramatic exhibition of not working too hard;
as he apparently saw it, his job as president was to leave Americans alone to go about
their business, and to discourage the state from any interference in the day-to-day
life of the individual. If self-help was to be encouraged, then citizens had to be left to
themselves, to work hard and then to enjoy the material comforts thereby earned.
“These are the tranquillized Fifties,” observed the poet Robert Lowell; and for many
Americans they were – a period when, after several decades of crisis, it was evidently
possible to enjoy the fruits of their labor and exploitation of the earth’s natural
resources without any fear that, some day, those resources might run out. Many
intellectuals and artists – although by no means all of them – participated in this era
of consensus. This was the period of so-called value-free sociology; much of the
liberal intelligentsia acted on the assumption that it was possible to exercise the
critical function untouched by social or political problems; and many writers
withdrew from active involvement in issues of public concern or ideology into
formalism, abstraction, or mythmaking. One notable dissenter, Irving Howe
(1920–1993), complained about this in an essay appropriately entitled “This Age of
Conformity” (1952). “Far from creating and subsiding unrest,” Howe observed,
“capitalism in its most recent stage has found an honored place for the intellectuals;
and the intellectuals, far from thinking of themselves as a desperate ‘opposition,’
have been enjoying a return to the bosom of the nation.” He concluded: “We have all,
even the handful who still try to retain a glower of criticism, become responsible and
moderate. And tame.”
No consensus, however, is quite as complete as it seems, just as no society – not
even the most totalitarian one – is without its areas of dissent. Abundance breeds its
own anxieties, not least the fear of losing the comforts one enjoys; in many ways, the
calm society is the one most susceptible to sudden, radical fits of panic. This
uneasiness that hovered beneath the bland surfaces of the times found its expression
in many forms. In popular culture, for instance, it was expressed in a series of
“invaders from space” movies that uncovered a dark vein of public paranoia aboutGGray_c05.indd 520ray_c 05 .indd 520 8 8/1/2011 7:31:28 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 28 PM