1953–1960
AN AFFLUENT SOCIETY
★ CHAPTER 24 ★
FOCUS QUESTIONS
• What were the main characteristics of the affluent society of the 1950s?
• How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and
foreign affairs?
• What were the major thrusts of the civil rights movement in this
period?
• What was the significance of the presidential election of 1960?I
n 1958, during a “thaw” in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet
Union agreed to exchange national exhibitions in order to allow citizens of
each “superpower” to become acquainted with life in the other. The Soviet
Exhibition, unveiled in New York City in June 1959, featured factory machinery,
scientific advances, and other illustrations of how communism had modern-
ized a backward country. The following month, the American National Exhibi-
tion opened in Moscow. A showcase of consumer goods and leisure equipment,
complete with stereo sets, a movie theater, home appliances, and twenty-two
different cars, the exhibit, Newsweek observed, hoped to demonstrate the supe-
riority of “modern capitalism with its ideology of political and economic free-
dom.” Yet the exhibit’s real message was not freedom but consumption—or, to
be more precise, the equating of the two.940 ★