One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue

"There is no doubt about it," House and Garden proclaimed in 1951, "America is barbecue minded."¹ Barbecues dotted the news, advertising, and suburban landscapes of postwar America—evidence of what had become a $30 million industry by 1955 and a $100 million industry four years later.² Popular periodicals like Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post announced America's embrace of outdoor cookery, exploring its role in promoting "the good life."³ Look's feature article "America Is Bit By the Barbecue Bug" announced "the taste for charcoal cooking has spread, moving eastward from the West Coast" such that "everyone is cooking outside."⁴ Evidence of barbecue's "spread" in the cultural consciousness of 1950s America too could be seen in other print venues. "High-brow" periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker published not only short stories, poems, and satires detailing America's love affair with the barbecue, but also pieces on the construction and execution of successful barbecues.⁵ News magazines Time, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and Business Week too examined barbecue's place in postwar America, counting corporate barbecues and a barbecue mob bust among newsworthy events.⁶ While women's magazines like McCall's, Good Housekeeping, and Parents' Magazine explored the domestic implications of barbecue, magazines targeting men, like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, offered a wide array of building plans to help the American male construct his own barbecue.⁷ What these and scores of other articles touted was barbecue's role in creating a sense of home for individuals after World War II—as American Home put it, in postwar America, "home is home no longer sans a barbecue."⁸

Although barbecue had long been part of American foodways—or as one critic of the "charcoal cult," John Willig, put it, "cooking outdoors is, of course, as old as man and a couple of dry twigs"—1950s Americans ravenously embraced barbecue.⁹ Barbecue was written about more in this decade than any other—over one hundred ninety-three articles appeared between 1950 and 1960—and these texts reveal a postwar people trying to understand itself and its "home sweet home" in an uncertain world.¹⁰ If, as Roland Barthes argued in "Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption" (1961), food is "a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior" that reflects a "collective imagination showing the outlines of a certain mental framework," then postwar barbecue's images, practices, and philosophy can be read as indicators of American values, aspirations, and fears as they influenced ideas of self, nation, and other during this time of sociopolitical and cultural change.¹¹ From 1945 to 1960, America faced continued conflicts abroad with Europe's reconstruction, the emerging Cold War, and hot wars like Korea. The threat of communist infiltration undermined conventional notions of "us versus them" as the "them" were no longer readily recognized by nationality or uniform. "Them" could be anyone—it even could be "us"; thus, "Americanness" was a less stable marker of "friend" and "foe" than it had been, therein complicating efforts to identify others and one's self. The home front too witnessed significant changes as class lines shifted, educational and housing opportunities increased under the GI Bill, women continued to join the workforce, and racial divides became sites of conflict. Furthermore, within homes traditional gender divisions were troubled as women challenged conventional domesticity and heterosexuality became a fluid identity construct.

Understandably, many Americans struggled to find a source of stability or security among all of these changes, and barbecue appeared to offer just that. Barbecue extended a ready-made analogy to those seeking national fortification, for just as red meat's protein and iron nourished and strengthened the individual body, so too could its consumption fortify the body politic. On one level, domestic meat consumption was a propagandistic weapon in America's global war against communism as a symbol of democracy's bounty, fortitude, and might. Access to and selection of "choice" meat signaled capitalism's fruits—folk could own their own...