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  • Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design
  • Barry M. Katz (bio)
Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. By Greg Castillo. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. xxiv+278. $75/24.95.

One of the truly promising developments of recent years has been the shift within the literature of design from coffee-table displays and celebrity monographs to works of genuine scholarly merit. Greg Castillo's Cold War on the Home Front is exemplary of this trend.

The book opens with an account of the famous "Kitchen Debate" between [End Page 221] U.S. vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. This event is as well-known to students of the cold war as Sputnik and the U-2, but Castillo makes a novel and arresting claim about it: the exchange that took place against the background of a supposedly modern American home was not the opening salvo in a clash of ideologies, but the conclusion. Although it would drag on for another thirty years, the fateful decision by the Soviet-and Eastern-bloc leadership to challenge the consumption-driven West on its own terms effectively sealed the fate of socialism as a qualitatively different historical formation. Rather than demonstrating the superiority of a collectivist way of life, it ignited a revolution of rising consumerist expectations it could not possibly meet, and that proved to be its downfall.

Nor did the iconic 1959 debate come out of nowhere. Although the hastily arranged American National Exhibition, organized by design luminary George Nelson and executed by celebrities of the stature of Charles and Ray Eames and Buckminster Fuller, is certainly the best known, it marked the end of nearly a decade of trade shows, fairs, and exhibitions that were as integral to the State Department's anticommunist campaign as the Marshall Plan. Collectively, they represent an exercise in what Castillo, borrowing a term from the political scientist Joseph Nye, calls the "soft power" of cultural persuasion, as opposed to the "hard power" of fortified borders and ICBMs. The central importance of design in this account—its products, personalities, institutions, and above all its consumers—lies at the heart of his argument, and it is entirely convincing.

Among the most valuable aspects of the book is the recounting of the series of cross-cultural exhibitions that marked the decade of the 1950s and through which the American and Soviet empires battled for supremacy. These have received relatively little attention in cold war historiography, and almost none in the object-obsessed histories of midcentury modernism (the recent book by Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects [2004], is a notable exception). At the beginning of the '50s, as Castillo shows, the Eastern-bloc nations paraded their technological prowess by displaying rocket engines, particle accelerators, and other products of heavy industry, as compared with the kitchen gadgets and lawn furniture displayed by the West. Increasingly, however, the emphasis shifted to the field of consumer goods, and these domestic exhibits and cultural exchanges became a demilitarized battleground over which the combatants advanced their claims about the superiority of their respective way of life—a battle the Soviets were destined to lose.

Castillo devotes the greatest amount of attention to the debates that took place within the East German design academies, government ministries, and manufacturing firms regarding the ideological valence of modernism in its various aspects. This seems appropriate, insofar as both sides regarded divided Germany, and above all divided Berlin, as the central theater [End Page 222] in this ideological campaign. Inevitably, there is relatively less attention to the politics of design and the domestic in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and other nations to the east of the iron curtain.

More notably, however, one wonders whether the central argument of this wonderful book goes a bit too far. Castillo has helped to rescue design from the margins of serious history by demonstrating that state socialism fatally undermined itself by stimulating among its deprived citizens a consumption ethos it could not satisfy, as opposed to helping them to imagine a qualitatively different route to modernity. In doing...

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