946 ★ CHAPTER 24 An Affluent Societygreatly from traditional urban centers in the East. Rather than consisting of
downtown business districts linked to residential neighborhoods by public
transportation, western cities were decentralized clusters of single-family
homes and businesses united by a web of highways. The Los Angeles basin, the
largest western suburban region, had once had an extensive system of trains,
trolleys, and buses. But local governments dismantled these lines after World
War II, and the state and federal governments replaced them with freeways
for cars and trucks. Suburban growth spilled into farm regions like the San
Fernando and San Bernardino valleys. By one estimate, one-third of southern
California’s land area (presumably not including mountains and deserts) was
paved over with roads and parking lots. Life centered around the car; people
drove to and from work and did their shopping at malls reachable only by driv-
ing. In other sections of the country as well, shopping shifted to suburban cen-
ters, and old downtown business districts stagnated. The spread of suburban
homes created millions of new lawns. Today, more land is cultivated in grass
than any agricultural crop in the United States.
A Consumer Culture
“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 a sense, the 1950s represented the culmination of the long-term trend
in which consumerism replaced economic independence and democratic par-
ticipation 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. 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