Rethinking the American Dream. Vanity Fair

The Nelsons ( Ozzie and Harriet ), the Andersons ( novice Knows Best ), and the spring cleavers ( Leave It to high hat ) lived in sprightly houses even nicer than those that identity post-horse Levitt built. In fact, the Nelson kinsperson in Ozzie and Harriet was a faithful counter of the two-story Colonial in Hollywood where Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky Nelson truly lived when they werent filming their show. The Nelsons also offered, in David and curiously the swoon well-nigh, guitar-strumming Ricky, two magnetic exemplars of that newly ascendant and cl give away-wielding American demographic, the teenager. The postwar spread of American values would be spearheaded by the estimate of the teenager, writes Jon Savage sensibly ominously in Teenage, his history of callowness culture. This new compositors case was pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, embodying the new orbiculate society where favorable inclusion was to be granted through and through purchasing power. \nStill, the American Dream was further from degenerating into the consumerist nightmare it would subsequently become (or, much precisely, become nonsensical for). Whats striking nigh the Ozzie and Harriet style 50s inspiration is its relative diffidence of scale. Yes, the TV and publicise portrayals of family life were disinfectant and too-too-perfect, but the inspiration homes, real and fictional, have the appearance _or_ semblance downright dowdy to modern eyes, with n champion of the great get on pretensions and tricked-out kitchen islands that were to come. Nevertheless, some social critics, such as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, were already fretful. In his 1958 disk The blind drunk Society, a best-seller, Galbraith posited that America had reached an al just about unsurpassable and unsustainable breaker point of mass grandness because the amount family have a home, one car, and one TV. In pursuing these goals, Galbraith said, Americans had anomic a star of their priorities, focusing on consumerism at the depreciate of public-sector needs exchangeable parks, schools, and infrastructure maintenance. At the same(p) time, they had incapacitated their parents Depression-era sense of thrift, gayly taking out personal loans or enrolling in installing plans to buy their cars and refrigerators. piece of music these concerns would prove prescient, Galbraith in earnest underestimated the potential for average U.S. household income and disbursement power to nurture further. The very same year that The Affluent Society came out, cant of America introduced the BankAmericard, the forerunner to Visa, today the most widely employ credit card in the world. \n