Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America

Introduction: Situation Normal

1 Introduction Situation Normal SNAFU In the 1955 best seller The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the protagonist, Tom Rath, a white, middle-class, suburban commuter, experiences multiple flashbacks to his time as a paratrooper in World War II. His first recovered memory raises the notion that “normality” was something the war itself had destroyed: “It had been snafu from the beginning—situation normal, all fouled up, only they hadn’t used the word ‘fouled’ in those days; no word had been anywhere near bad enough to express the way they felt. They had jumped at the wrong time at the wrong place, and a quarter of the company had been killed by rifle and machine-gun fire before they hit the ground.”1 The expression “SNAFU” was taken up widely during World War II: the War Office produced a series of animated short, educational/morale films starring an inept soldier named Private SNAFU; the Glenn Miller Service Orchestra released an infectious little number called “SNAFU Jump”; one hastily assembled combat force of the 9th U.S. Armored Division—culled from cooks, clerks, drivers, and other noncombatants —christened themselves “Team SNAFU” before going off to join the bloody Battle of the Bulge.2 The term permeated civilian and postwar lexicons as well. But it is ironic to consider that during wartime, “situation normal” referred not to an absence of war but to a temporary suspension of mayhem within a constant state of warfare. This detail emphasizes the inextricable links between “normality” and war, as well as the utter relativity of the term itself.3 Normality was, and remains, situational: it is an idea that reveals more about when it describes than about what it describes. Introduction 2 What, then, does normality reveal about postwar America? The immediate postwar decades constitute a moment when normality was most fully articulated and deeply inscribed into everyday American life. Although the “regime of the normal” certainly did not begin in 1943 nor end in 1963, I propose that normality was reified and entrenched in national discourse during this pivotal time.4 The embrace of normality was a post-traumatic response to World War II, with Cold War consequences. Even as it was being employed at this time, however, normality was also being questioned and critiqued. The concept shifted from describing an average to prescribing an ideal; from claiming the authoritative discourse of scientific rationality to voicing a contradictory discourse of popular psychology; from offering a source of security to being a metonym for conformity and danger to “progress.” But despite such contradictions, normality functioned to soothe wartime and emergent Cold War anxieties through the construction of a new “ideal for which to strive.”5 Although the term normality emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, World War II was a critical moment for its linguistic redeployment.6 The war itself had been experienced as a kind of snafu (to understate the matter ), and so the pervasive felt need was to construct “situation normal,” whatever that was, after decades of depression and war. Between the years 1943 and 1963, normality thus emerged as a “keyword” of American culture ,7 broadly disseminated through the increasingly porous domains of science, medicine, and psychiatry and an increasingly nationalized popular culture. In the postwar decades, the convergence of wartime statistics, mass media, and a pressing need to reconstitute the “social body” made normality no longer something innate or inborn, but rather a quality to be actively pursued. Normality was a condition that anyone could (and should) strive to achieve.8 The painful irony was that for all Americans normality proved to be not only highly desirable but also completely beyond reach, no matter how close to it they seemed. Normality presented an impossible combination of the typical and the ideal: to achieve it, one would have to become perfectly average. “Normal person: See Normality.” The hefty green library reference books known as the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature are a product of their time—the 1945 volume was compiled and published in 1946, the 1946–47 volume appeared in 1948, and so on. As such, its pages document some of the significant keywords of 3 Situation Normal cultural history. In 1945, the word normality began to appear as a regular subject heading in the Readers’ Guide for the first time. From then on, it is continuously listed, with varying numbers of articles cited, virtually every year until...