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3 Family Circles, Racial Others, and Suburbanization In the imaginations of cold war Americans who defined themselves as “white,” the contained image of the Family Circle contracted and expanded to meet their fears and hopes for the present and future. At one extreme, the business class pictured the nuclear family as a fortress protecting family members from the evils of urban blight, teenage crime, and racial Others. At the other end of the continuum, the Family Circle in their minds expanded to include all of humankind in a warm embrace of Others who were “just like us under the skin.” The realities of the nuclear age pushed imagination to both Platonic extremes; for many, either the world would agree to ban the Bomb or the bunkered family would have to survive atomic warfare on its own. Most white, business-class American families tried to ignore these realities, however, and relied on friendships, neighbors, and religious and civic institutions to locate themselves somewhere in the middle of this imagined continuum between survival in a fortress and the Family of Man. Nonetheless, few doubted that the nuclear family must center their lives. The cold war politics of race and the contained image of the family reinforced these choices; it was difficult for white Americans to imagine adult life outside of a normative family circle or beyond a continuum connecting its survival to all humanity. The purity of both polarities exerted a continuing fascination during the early Cold War. In 1961 Time ran a story entitled “Gun Thy Neighbor ” in its religion section. The article reported the growing number of owners of fallout shelters who were arming their bunkers with machine guns to repel their neighbors after the Blast. Responding to the general problem of shelter selfishness, anthropologist Margaret Mead underlined the idealization of suburban family life that had backed Americans into this ethical cul-de-sac. She also pointed to several “dread[s]” that had led to this contraction of the spirit: “dread of the strain of living always related to distant and still alien peoples,” “dread of the surging mass of young people . . . turning to drugs and crime,” and “dread of our crumbling, dangerous cities.” Consequently, said Mead, many Americans turned inward to protect their families: “Drawn back in space and time, hiding from the future and the rest of the world, they turned to the green suburbs, protected by zoning laws against members of other classes or races or religions, and concentrated on the single, tight little family. They idealized the life of each family living alone in self-sufficient togetherness, protecting its members against the contamination of different ways or others’ needs. . . . The armed, individual shelter is the logical end of this retreat from trust in and responsibility for others.”1 In the atomic age, the image of the bunkered family turned togetherness into dystopia. Widening the Family Circle to embrace the Otherness of Mead’s “alien peoples,” while ethically ennobling, seemed nearly impossible to many Americans. Edward Steichen understood this difficulty when he assembled the photographs for “The Family of Man” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. He insisted that all 503 of the exhibit’s images, many culled from the archives of Life magazine, represent the universal human condition so that viewers could form an immediate , empathetic response to the pictures without stumbling over historical, national, and racial Otherness. Steichen had borrowed the phrase “family of man” from Carl Sandburg’s epic poem The People, Yes, his paean of Whitmanesque praise for human diversity and potential. MOMA’s installation of international humanity was organized around such themes as courtship, marriage, child-rearing, education, strife, loneliness , and war, with a preponderance of images depicting family life from around the world. Near the end of the exhibit and occupying a separate space, Steichen placed a large color photograph of an exploding hydrogen bomb—the only color image in the show. No one at this immensely popular exhibit could miss the point: the Family of Man could perish unless humanity worked together to prevent nuclear war. As American Studies scholar Eric Sandeen remarks, Steichen hoped that people’s emotional response to the installation would encourage them to “form a compensatory community to combat the impersonalized, highly technological conflict of the Cold War. This assumption was both the Family Circles, Racial Others, and Suburbanization 127 exhibit’s strength and its weakness.” Steichen’s Platonism was heavily influenced by...

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