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79 3 A Southerner in Exile, the Cold War, and Social Order David M. Potter’s People of Plenty George Katona and Ernest Dichter believed that middle-class consumers would make their adopted nation safe for democratic capitalism. In the 1950s and early 1960s a series of native-born writers cast a more skeptical eye on the effects of affluence. In the mid-1950s the most influential of these critiques was People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954) by the historian David M. Potter (1910–1971). His book differed from the celebrations that Dichter and Katona offered as well as from the more insistent and forceful critiques that John Kenneth Galbraith, Vance Packard, and Betty Friedan would soon provide. A southerner by upbringing, a northerner by residence, and a historian much of whose life’s work focused on the coming of the Civil War, with People of Plenty, Potter offered an analysis of abundance whose cold war celebrations were tempered by an acknowledgment of the costs Americans paid for their headlong embrace of prosperity. What shaped Potter’s view was a complex of factors that included his southern heritage, his life in the North, and his generational experience as an academic. As a white, upper-class, uprooted southerner, he had an appreciation of the virtues of a cohesive, ordered society which in turn gave him a distinctive outlook on the disorderly, anomie-provoking consequences of a society of plenty.1 Potter’s outlook rested on a set of traditional values that stood in opposition to the emphasis that Dichter and, later, Betty Friedan placed on psychological self-realization and national prosperity. He believed in human weakness , expressed skepticism toward unbounded individualism, and remained horrified by the power of unbridled capitalism to dissolve traditional social 80 Chapter Three relations. Instead, he preferred the organic ties of family and community, accepted social stratification, and recognized the distinction between moral and material progress. In some ways his views resembled those of certain northern-born peers of his generation—academics turned public intellectuals , such as Richard Hofstadter, Oscar Handlin, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and Edward Shils. In other ways his southern heritage gave his ideas a distinctive cast. The most significant difference between Potter and his northern-born contemporaries was that his commitment to traditional values developed earlier and ran deeper than theirs. Though related to his southern origins, his traditionalism was more Burkean than anything else.2 In the mid-1950s, without claiming the tradition as his own, though in fact describing his worldview, Potter explored aspects of what he called “the conservative position.” He talked about “the importance of experience over theory,” of “organic growth over logic,” and of “the whole complex of existing values over the promise of potential.” Opposing individualism, the conservative saw people as “beings in relationship.” The conservative, for Potter, defended not the status quo but “status” itself, along with “social habits.” What killed status in the United States between 1800 and 1830, Potter wrote, was “the double impact of polit.[ical] demand for equality & economic demand for mobility.” From the Jacksonian era on, he noted regretfully, “conservative thought had to go underground.” “A great conservative,” Potter remarked, referring to Edmund Burke, “will accept change, and will even sympathize with revolution.” Like Benjamin Disraeli, a true conservative “will accept democracy.”3 Potter’s task was to bring these values aboveground, use them to criticize society rather than to defend vested interests, and in the process underscore the importance of experience, tradition, status, leadership, and responsibility. As he defended these values, Potter stood in sharp contrast to major southern conservatives of the twentieth century such as Donald Davidson, William Watts Ball, Richard M. Weaver, Lewis Simpson, and M. E. Bradford. Unlike Potter, they never left their beloved South to live in the North. Unlike the more extreme among them, Potter defended neither the master class as a bulwark against the rabble nor a southern way of life with segregation at its core. Like northern academics, and unlike true southern conservatives, Potter avoided dogma and relished irony and paradox. In the 1950s he offered a qualified celebration of American democracy and prosperity as he made clear his opposition to the Soviet way of life. Yet he did not let his appreciation of life in America prevent him from criticizing advertising, the growth of suburbia , and mass culture. He worried about rootlessness and anxiety and yearned for...

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