The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

17. Disney and Domestic Security

17 Disney ana Domestic Security 'D,E COLD WAR, as it grew in intensity throughout the 1950S, compelled Americans to define their fundamental social and political values. As one historian has put it, "The search to define and affirm a way oflife, the need to express and celebrate the meaning of'Americanism,' was the flip side of stigmatizing Communism." Literature and pulp fiction, movies and radio, intellectual essays and popular magazine pieces all contributed to this search. From Partisan Review's 1952 symposium on "Our Country and Our Culture" to the Saturday Evening Post's string of Norman Rockwell covers depicting innocent village life, from the cinematic cult of the western to publisher Henry Luce's pronouncements on "the American Century" in the pages of Life and Time, a welter ofimages and words tried to articulate the meaning ofAmerica.' In overarching fashion, numerous cultural commentators stressed the pragmatic, nonideological nature of the American political tradition. "The genius of American politics;' historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in 1953, lay in its historical devotion to problem-solving and democracy and its aversion to theory. The contrast with communism could not have been clearer. Within a happily constituted civic life of utilitarianism and common sense, many observers argued, a cluster of characteristically American traits had flowered.2 Abundance and material prosperity appeared to many as an article of 324 I Disney and the American Century faith in 1950S America. Intellectuals such as David Potter, in People ofPlenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954), and John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society (1958), offered powerful reflections on this theme, while Vice President Richard Nixon wielded statistics about American production ofautomobiles, televisions, radios, and washing machines as he slashed away at Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the famous "kitchen debate" in Moscow in 1959. From the first credit card, offered by Diners' Club in 1950, to the debut of the Barbie doll in 1958, with her carefully packaged array of dresses, casual outfits, sports cars, wigs, and jewelry, consumption described an essential part of American life. It also promised a self-fulfilled personality. Advertising claimed that the purchase of consumer goods would boost status and romantic possibilities; childrearing literature enjoined parents to cultivate their children's natural curiosity ; success manuals such as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People instructed eager readers to develop a winning style in interpersonal relationships. Cultural messages urged Americans to promote, in the words ofone historian, "psychic and physical health defined in sweeping terms."3 A warm, comforting blanket of nondenominational spirituality was draped over the consensus of pragmatic politics, abundance, and personal fulfillment. Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed from the White House that American government must be "founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is:' Cecil B. DeMille released a popular string of biblical epics and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover urged Sunday school attendance in his best-selling book, Masters of Deceit. Urged on by immensely popular preachers such as Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, pious Americans pictured themselves standing shoulder to shoulder against the forces of godless communism.4 Yet this powerful Cold War consensus masked an array of internal tensions . From Dwight Macdonald's warnings about "the tepid, flaccid middlebrow culture that threatens to engulfeverything in its spreading ooze" to the critiques of crass, corporate commercialism offered by William H. Whyte and Vance Packard, to David Riesman's analysis of the corrosive effects of mass society on individual initiative and integrity, many intellectuals presented stinging criticisms of America's culture of abundance. The stirrings of the civil rights movement in the South and sporadic wildcat strikes in northern factories hinted at the racial and class fault lines beneath the imposing structure of material progress. A bohemian rejection ofAmerican consumerism flourished among urban Beats, while the growing popularity of country music, blues, and rock-and-roll suggested s.ubmerged alienation. Women's discontent over their tightly restricted roles slowly simmered in suburban subdivisions. Perhaps most pervasively, solid Middle Americans worried that the nation's social tranquillity was in danger from juvenile Disney and Domestic Security I 325 delinquency, rock-and-roll, manipulative advertisers, and beatniks. In a tense setting, such internal moral and social divisions posed no small threat.5 In the early 1950S, McCarthyism succeeded in silencing criticism and stifling debate over national values. Yet the very success of McCarthyism demanded a receptive populace...