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101 4 Critique from Within John Kenneth Galbraith, Vance Packard, and Betty Friedan In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a series of best-selling books transformed the discussion of American affluence. They can be divided into two groups. The first—John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society (1958); three books by Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960); and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963)— launched critiques of American society even as they continued to assume that the affluence of the middle class was the chief problem facing America. The second group—Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960), Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sánchez (1961), Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)—offered a head-on attack against the very notion that middle-class, suburban affluence was itself an urgent issue. Both groups of books, the second more than the first, contributed to unlinking the connection Ernest Dichter and George Katona had made between democracy, capitalism, and consumption. In this chapter I focus on the books by Packard, Galbraith, and Friedan, immensely influential works that critiqued middle-class affluence even as they reaffirmed its centrality as an object of social criticism. Each of the authors made distinctive contributions that set them apart from the writers who preceded them. Galbraith deployed the familiar formula when he gave his book its title, The Affluent Society, but broke new ground by introducing the idea that public policy could counter the excesses of affluence. He called on the federal government to play a key role in addressing what he saw as the imbalance between the prosperity of private households and the poverty of the financially strapped public sector. Packard’s trilogy offered an accessible 102 Chapter Four picture of the way advertisers secretly tricked the public into buying goods, suburbanites sought to assuage their status anxieties through shopping, and manufacturers planned obsolescence which wasted resources. In all three he asserted that the excesses of affluence were undermining a producerist ethic and enshrining a consumerist one. With The Feminine Mystique, Friedan at once worked within the formula Packard and others had established while breaking new ground in her analysis of the impact on women’s lives, a subject other authors had largely neglected in their critiques of suburban affluence.1 Like their émigré peers, Galbraith, Packard, and Friedan focused on middle-class consumers, though they rejected the anti-puritanism that Dichter and Katona had advocated. Their books shared with Potter’s People of Plenty a belief that affluence was a problem, although, unlike Potter, Packard and Friedan linked lessened materialism with psychological self-realization, and Galbraith connected chastened consumption with a revived public sphere. In different ways, they breathed life into the new moralism. Their tone was less ironic and their stance less detached than Potter’s. Their analysis of affluence, its origins and consequences, was more scathing, insistent, even conspiratorial. Their solutions were often problematic; nonetheless, unlike Potter, they more fully positioned themselves as interested in public policy as they went beyond an analysis of affluence to suggest some ways of lessening its cultural and social impact. Between 1954, when Potter’s book was published , and the time when those by Galbraith, Packard, and Friedan appeared, the hold of the cold war on Americans had begun to loosen. The battles over civil rights, the repudiation of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954, and the launching of Sputnik by the Soviets in 1957 were just a few of the many events that, by undermining the complacency that had shaped American politics and culture in the immediate postwar years, began to make room for a more critical assessment. Unlike Dichter, Katona, and even Potter, these three writers strongly dissented from key elements of the cold war consensus. Their writings marked a major turning point in the nation’s response to affluence. Other writers in the late 1950s and early 1960s would turn this shift into a floodtide of skepticism about the benefits of consumer culture and would even call into question their focus on the affluence of the middle class. John Kenneth Galbraith: Private Affluence and Public Poverty Galbraith came to the writing of The Affluent Society after more than two decades of involvement in economics and politics. Born in 1908 to a family of Scottish ancestry on a Canadian farm, he received a degree in agricultural economics from...

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