966 ★ CHAPTER 24 An Affluent Society
had made political democracy obsolete. Freedom, Mills insisted, meant more
than “the chance to do as one pleases.” It rested on the ability “to formulate the
available choices,” and this most Americans were effectively denied.
Even as the government and media portrayed the United States as a beacon
of liberty locked in a titanic struggle with its opposite, one strand of social anal-
ysis in the 1950s contended that Americans did not enjoy genuine freedom.
These critics identified as the culprit not the unequal structure of power crit-
icized by Mills, but the modern age itself, with its psychological and cultural
discontents. Modern mass society, some writers worried, inevitably produced
loneliness and anxiety, causing mankind to yearn for stability and authority,
not freedom. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), the decade’s most influential work of
social analysis, the sociologist David Riesman described Americans as “other-
directed” conformists who lacked the inner resources to lead truly independent
lives. Other social critics charged that corporate bureaucracies had transformed
employees into “organization men” incapable of independent thought.
Some commentators feared that the Russians had demonstrated a greater
ability to sacrifice for common public goals than Americans. What kind of
nation, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith asked in The Affluent Society
(1958), neglected investment in schools, parks, and public services, while
producing ever more goods to fulfill desires created by advertising? Was the
spectacle of millions of educated middle-class women seeking happiness in
suburban dream houses a reason for celebration or a waste of precious “woman
power” at a time when the Soviets trumpeted the accomplishments of their
female scientists, physicians, and engineers? Books like Galbraith’s, along with
William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) and Vance Packard’s The Hidden
Persuaders (1957), which criticized the monotony of modern work, the empti-
ness of suburban life, and the pervasive influence of advertising, created the
vocabulary for an assault on the nation’s social values that lay just over the
horizon. In the 1950s, however, while criticism of mass society became a minor
industry among intellectuals, it failed to dent widespread complacency about
the American way.
Rebels without a Cause
The social critics did not offer a political alternative or have any real impact
on the parties or government. Nor did other stirrings of dissent. With teen-
agers a growing part of the population thanks to the baby boom, the emer-
gence of a popular culture geared to the emerging youth market suggested
that significant generational tensions lay beneath the bland surface of 1950s
life. J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye and the 1955 films Blackboard
Jungle and Rebel without a Cause (the latter starring James Dean as an aimlessly