Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (review)

Charles Eames, Florence Knoll, Eero Saarinen—these names are synonymous with America's heyday in modern design. Yet, as Greg Castillo convincingly argues in Cold War on the Home Front (2010), these designers also were key weapons in America's Cold War arsenal. While foundational studies like Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound (1988) and Karal Ann Marling's As Seen on TV (1996) demonstrate how Cold War foreign policy trickled down and into suburban America's domestic spaces, Castillo's captivating text contends that domesticity was a central mechanism for and front upon which the United States and Soviet Union struggled to sell their respective ideologies abroad. Focusing on Berlin, Castillo demonstrates how postwar Germany was a key test market for American and Soviet propaganda with design typifying Cold War struggles to define and delimit "home"—literal domiciles, national identities, political systems, and individual selves. Yet, Castillo's book argues that design's propagandistic efficacy coupled with the frenetic rebranding of "democratic" and "socialist" design ultimately came back to haunt both Americans and Soviets, such that this book offers "a cautionary tale" on the power of the ideological soft-sell (xxiv).

Castillo's book begins with Nixon and Khrushchev's much discussed "Kitchen Debate" (1959), but then moves back in time to illustrate how that moment was but a late incarnation of a long-standing foreign policy debate over design. The book exposes the roots of the Kitchen Debate in the Marshall Plan's efforts to design a democratic ideal abroad; in the planning of postwar Germany's reconstruction; in West and East German design schools as they wrestled with movements among and between Bauhaus, minimalist, modernist, and social realist design; and in ideologically driven design shows—shows like the United States' "We're Building A Better Life" (1952) and the Soviet Union's "Live Better—More Beautifully" (1953). National and international leaders equated particular modes of consumption with political affiliation—how one lived signaled who one was. Yet, Castillo demonstrates that West Germany's Hochschule für Gestaltung and East Germany's Bauakademie schools' distinctive aesthetics (modernism and Stalinist neo-traditionalism/ social realism, respectively) increasingly blurred as the U.S. and Soviet Union perpetually repackaged their design philosophy. Things like America's "People's Capitalism" exhibit (1956), targeting the working-class and the Soviet Union's argument that mass consumption and "Abundance for All" was the fulfillment of Marx's vision, complicated efforts to ideologically restructure Germany as a model of "Democracy" or "Communism." Indeed, as Castillo reveals, these battles succeeded in creating not political but consumer republics—on the one hand, manufacturing feelings of entitlement and raising consumer expectations that planted the seeds for the economic implosion bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the U.S.S.R. in 1991, and on the other hand, undermining American ideals of "freedom" by so successfully linking such with consumption so that self-indulgence became a mark of national identity and pride.

Greg Castillo's well-researched and written book successfully compliments and extends existing studies of domesticity's politics during the Cold War. In so doing, it offers a new way to understand American and Soviet efforts to design ideal structures within which to house competing ideologies. Castillo's archival research is extensive, his scope is sufficiently narrow, and his tone is balanced as he recognizes the victories and limits on both sides of the Cold War divide. While those interested in design will benefit most from this study, its interdisciplinary scope and accessible language make it a pleasure to read for all those interested in the form of ideology and ideology of form as it dominated the Cold War.