A national conversation about television and the common good fostered public broadcasting. In context of the United States, the year 1950 was a revolutionary period. Consumerism: The theory that a country that consumes goods and services in large quantities will be better off economically. Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels. In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful U.S. consumer binge after World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this gargantuan and growing appetite might need to be curtailed. Also, new ideas emerged, changing the look of families both then and now. In 2008, a similar unravelling began; its implications still remain unknown. Edward Cowdrick, an economist who advised corporations on their management and industrial relations policies, called it the new economic gospel of consumption, in which workers (people for whom durable possessions had rarely been a possibility) could be educated in the new skills of consumption.. The Czech writers darkly humorous novel, published in 1936, anticipated our current reality with eerie accuracy. marketing strategy convincing American consumers they need new and better products. There, especially in the US, consumption continued to expand through the 1920s, though truncated by the Great Depression of 1929. 3. As the popular historian of the time Frederick Allen wrote, Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as progress, promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. The people became comfortable on how they were living their lives. . Working in the 1950's, however, was prohibited and deplorable because that meant you were not cooperating with the American system. The non-settler European colonies were not regarded as viable venues for these new markets, since centuries of exploitation and impoverishment meant that few people there were able to pay. The twentieth century was a period of struggle in which the socialist countries, largely influenced by the former USSR, provided stiff competition to the united states, but Nevertheless, America has not been immune to pitfalls and struggle during its journey of success and it is by the dint of hard work, keen foresight and sharp business acumen The 1920s bonanza collapsed suddenly and catastrophically. Cars were. The stage was set for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined. Coontz explains that the sexism, As I mentioned previously, the sixties were a time of change. Usually that new thing in culture is associated with young people and perceived threats to its cultural identity. Electricity sparked a whole new wave of consumer product possibilities (Credit: Getty Images). The great corporation which is in danger of having its profits taxed away or its sales fall off or its freedom impeded by legislative action must have recourse to the public to combat successfully these menaces.. In accordance with Rule 1950.122.6 of the CRMLA (Cal. It would be the most influential youth movement of any decade - a decade striking a dramatic gap between the youth and the generation before them. This first wave of consumerism was short-lived. At the beginning of the 1950s, after all, Britain had been threadbare, bombed-out, financially and morally exhausted. Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed. In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, Traci Parker offers a historical link between the current struggles and the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century. Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s. It was an idea also put forward by the new "consumption economists" such as Hazel Kyrk and Theresa McMahon, and eagerly embraced by many business leaders. The fifties was a period of civil rights groups, feminism, and change. Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff. Also Political battles centred around communism and capitalism dominated the decade. Television and radio super-charged advertising, directly into people's homes (Credit: Getty Images). In 1930 the U.S. cereal manufacturer Kellogg adopted a six-hour shift to help accommodate unemployed workers, and other forms of work-sharing became more widespread. Additionally, disagreements and rebellions. The proliferating shops and department stores of that period served only a restricted population of urban middle-class people in Europe, but the display of tempting products in shops in daily public view was greatly extended and display was a key element in the fostering of fashion and envy. such as the early civil rights movement's demand for access to public accommodations in the 1940s and 1950s and the consumer and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s . Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels; the traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement. In 1955, he opened KCOR-TV, expanding his broadcasting business and community-centered media vision to television. But postwar industrial enterprise stoked the expansion nonetheless. In the 1950s, the relatively new technology of television began to compete with motion pictures as a major form of popular entertainment. While the decades were similar in heightened . People were encouraged to board an escalator of desires and progressively ascend to the luxuries of the affluent (Credit: Getty Images), Charles Kettering, general director of General Motors Research Laboratories, equated such perpetual change with progress. "Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a 'quality market'. Galbraith was alert to the way that rapidly expanding consumption patterns were multiplied by a rapidly expanding population. The main thing Americans miss about the those days is the stability. The concept came about . Although the shorter workweek appealed to Kelloggs workers, the company, after reverting to longer hours during World War II, was reluctant to renew the six-hour shift in 1945. The 1950s was a decade most do not pay much mind to due to it typically being seen as untroubled and quiet, although many things both good and bad, were growing under the surface. Jobs were secure and came with great benefits. This research paper briefly gives examples from advances in technology, transportation, and entertainment while discussing their benefits to the United States. The television was one of the most popular home appliances in the 1950s. It didnt last long (Credit: Wikipedia). The labour struggles of the 19th Century had, without jeopardising the burgeoning productivity, gradually eroded the seven-day week of 14- and 16-hour days that was worked at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. The historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, who examined the mainstream press of the 1920s, along with the publications of corporations, business organizations, and government inquiries, found extensive evidence that such fears were widespread in business circles during the 1920s. Watch on. The United States had appeared to be dominated by consensus and conformity in the 1950s. WANN, a white-owned radio station in Annapolis, Maryland, cultivated African American consumers and demonstrated their buying power by connecting their audience to retailers and manufacturers who hoped to expand sales. Attempts to promote new fashions, harness the propulsive power of envy, and boost sales multiplied in Britain in the late 18th century. On every side of American life, whether political, industrial, social, religious or scientific, the increasing pressure of public judgment has made itself felt, Bernays wrote. Bernayss views, like those of several other analysts of the crowd and the herd instinct, were a product of the panic created among the elite classes by the early 20th-century transition from the limited franchise of propertied men to universal suffrage. Though the television sets that carried the advertising into peoples homes after WWII were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays. The DuMont Companys Revere model wrapped modern technology in colonial revival cabinetry. Children were precious assets and the center of the family. Energy prices increased at a slower pace, while there was a pickup in prices for manufactured goods and services. The Roaring Twenties were full of dramatic, social, political, and economic changes ("The Roaring Twenties,1). Americans purchased homes, cars (sometimes two), television sets, new home furnishings, modern refrigerators, clothes for work and their new found leisure time, barbeque grills, lawn mowersthe list is endless. This improvement in food variety did not extend durable items to the mass of people, however. Founded: 1950 in Quincy, Mass. The 1950s ushered in an era of consumerism that has rolled on virtually unopposed to the present. It was seen as the calm before the storm of social chaos that swept over the country in the more contentious 1960s. It was indeed a time we perceive as innocent, wholesome, and peaceful. While some of the youth became politically active, others escaped into the counterculture disbanding their faith in government and the ideals, In her essay, What We Really Miss About the 1950s, Stephany Coontz talks about the myth of the 1950s. In 1960, more than 70 percent of families still looked much like the family of the 1950s, with a man who brought in the family 's sole income, children and a stay-at-home wife and mother. Key Points. Consumerism - The 1950's: An age of affluence Consumer Demand Spurs Economic Growth Rising incomes, easy credit, and aggressive marketing helped create a culture of consumption in the 1950s. The front-line thinkers of the emerging advertising and public relations industries turned to the key insights of Sigmund Freud, Bernayss uncle. The introduction of time payment arrangements facilitated the extension of such buying further and further down the economic ladder. We publish thought-provoking excerpts, interviews, and original essays written for a general reader but backed by academic rigor. Print advertisements allowed the consumer to read the ad more than once, and so it could include more specific details on the product than a television or radio advertisement (Young 39). Kentucky Fried Chicken weathervane, 1960s. Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. In late 19th-Century Britain a variety of foods became accessible to the average person, who would previously have lived on bread and potatoes consumption beyond mere subsistence. Here began the slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts, write historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Kerryn Higgs is an Australian writer and historian. This was followed by a rapid proliferation of radios, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators. Though it has become fashionable in recent decades to brand scholars and academics as elites who pour scorn on ordinary people, Bernays and the sociologist Gustave Le Bon were long ago arguing, on behalf of business and political elites, respectively, that the mass of people are incapable of thought. The consumer revolution that occurred in the 1920s gave Americans prosperous hope for the future of the United States of America. In the 1950s, the greater geographic diversity in designers meant more styles from which to choose. It made possible for people and families to watch live events in the comforts of their drawing room. In fact, the American consumer was praised as a patriotic citizen in the 1950s, contributing to the ultimate success of the American way of life. Bernays and his colleagues were anxious to offer their services to corporations and were instrumental in founding an entire industry that has since operated along these lines, selling not only corporate commodities but also opinions on a great range of social, political, economic, and environmental issues. One of the most present and critiqued societal phenomena of the time was the rise of American consumerism. If you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. Consumerism and innovations had a large role throughout the time periods. He argued that business "cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable". Electrification was crucial for the consumption of the new types of durable items, and the fraction of US households with electricity connected nearly doubled between 1921 and 1929, from 35 to 68%. But business did not support such a trajectory, and it was not until the Great Depression that hours were reduced, in response to overwhelming levels of unemployment. A thing may be desired, not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success. examples of traditional American TV. TV ads evolved with the creative revolution and the civil rights movement, embracing hip consumerism and incorporating more underrepresented consumers. In late 19th-century Britain a variety of foods became accessible to the average person, who would previously have lived on bread and potatoes consumption beyond mere subsistence. The years of the 1950s and 60s was a time where many hardships occurred as global tension was high and as a result many wars occurred as well as movements. According to Le Bon, A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first; crowds can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas, leading to the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment. Bernays and his PR colleagues believed ordinary people to be incapable of logical thought, let alone mastery of abstruse economic, political and ethical data, and saw the need to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it; PR could thus ensure the maintenance of order and corporate control in society. Television is the first audiovisual device that changed the way people see entertainment. Consumerism In The 1950's. The 1950s was an exciting time for many, the war was over and the economy began to flourish once more. Consumerism is the concept depicting the belief that happiness and well-being depends to a significant degree of personal consumption. The economy was booming. While it was a lot less in gross terms than the burden of debt in the US in late 2008, the debt of the 1920s was very large, over 200% of the GDP of the time. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into peoples homes.. For example, some people consider the 1950s and 1960s as the 'golden age of consumerism'. While some of them would emerge as critics of consumerism and the unsustainable use of natural resources, overall the first generation raised in post-war prosperity helped entrench planned obsolescence as an engine of the American . Coontz also explains that the social society during the 1950s was different than the social society we have today. Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. "The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratisation of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society," Leach writes in his 1993 book "Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture". Post World War I, the era marked the beginning of modern times with new and worthy developments. Consumerism further developed in the 20th century. First we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth, the report maintains, specifically endorsing ever more luxurious standards of consumption. To Galbraith, who had just published The Affluent Society, the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment; he identified the beginnings of a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity, a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. After the stock market crashes in 1929, people were left jobless and hungry. The Vietnam War was widely seen as a controversial conflict and opened insight to Australians as to what was actually happening through music and television which in turn swayed the public opinion of Australias involvement with the war. . A steady-state economy capable of meeting the basic needs of all, foreshadowed by philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill as the stationary state, seemed well within reach and, in Mills words, likely to be an improvement on "the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress". In 1959 the Mattel toy company introduced Barbie. mass media forms of communication, such as newspapers and radio, that reach millions of people Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Government agency that grants licenses to radio and television stations and sets regulations on them. "The good purchaser devoted to 'more, newer and better' was the good citizen," Also Political battles centred around communism and capitalism dominated the decade. Basically, it means that purchasing certain material goods is likely to increase the level of satisfaction with life. "What of the appetite itself?" After working in a Spanish-language newspaper, he founded a radio station, which became the voice of the Spanish-speaking community in San Antonio. African American and Latino families received no support from the government. This department store took window shopping to a new level with a machine called the "Tell-it-to." The Consumer Era, 1940s-1970s Postcard of Eichler home, 1950s During the Consumer Era, production boomed and consumerism shaped the American marketplace, which spread from cities to suburbs. This new burst in debt-financed consumerism was, again, incited intentionally. Even if a shorter working day became an acceptable strategy during the Great Depression, the economic systems orientation toward profit and its bias toward growth made such a trajectory unpalatable to most captains of industry and the economists who theorized their successes. Consumer Spending, 1950-1960. Post-war consumerism reflected the traditional values promoted by politicians and popular culture. . ", Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.". Notwithstanding the panic and pessimism, a consumer solution was simultaneously emerging. Notions of meeting everyones needs with an adequate level of production did not feature. US consumer credit rose to $7 billion in the 1920s, with banks engaged in reckless lending of all kinds. Consumerism in the 1950s Following the conclusion of World War II, the American economy experienced an incredible economic boom incomparable to most other stimuli of this nature. Here began the "slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts," write historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J H Plumb in their influential book on the commercialisation of 18th-Century England, when the pursuit of opulence and display first extended beyond the very rich. Between 12th and 14th Streets critics claimed americans were becoming a ----- society. The capitalist system, dependent on a logic of never-ending growth from its earliest inception, confronted the plenty it created in its home states, especially the US, as a threat to its very existence. As television grew, Americans worried about its effect on children. [6] The consumer movement is the social movement which refers to all actions and all entities within the marketplace which give consideration to the consumer. Quite the reverse: frugality and thrift were more appropriate to situations where survival rations were not guaranteed. Observing her daughter, Barbara, playing with paper dolls, Ruth Handler (19162002) had the idea that dolls could be styled as adults. TV became the driving force for advertising. Galbraith quotes the Presidents Materials Policy Commission setting out its premise that economic growth is sacrosanct. planned obsolescence. In Australia, too, the trend could be observed; there, however, the base was tiny, and even though car ownership multiplied nearly fivefold in the eight years to 1929, few working-class households possessed cars or large appliances before 1945. As the economic engine slowed in the 1970s, productivity waned, wages flattened, and Americans faced an energy crisis that reshaped consumer expectations. It would be feasible to reduce hours of work and release workers for the pleasurable activities of free time with families and communities, but business did not support such a trajectory. The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the present day, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, "people recognise themselves in their commodities". Families had 30% more spending power in 1959 compared to 1950 figures. The American home was at the center of post-war stability. Motor car registration rose from eight million in 1920 to more than 28 million by 1929. The fifties were the decade of reform to the better led by president Eisenhower. In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful US consumer binge after WWII, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this "gargantuan and growing appetite" might need to be curtailed. he asks. Overall, products such as the washing machine and dishwashers made life easier and more efficient for families at home. Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as "planned obsolescence". In fact, most still embraced traditional gender roles men were tasked with working in a career, and women were tasked with keeping the home in order and taking care of the children. The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as progress, promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. However, over the course of the 20th Century, capitalism preserved its momentum by moulding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for its "wonderful stuff". This era marked a high point of American productivity and a high standard of living. During the 1950s, the automobile industry saw growth and change, particularly in its design departments. Franchising increased after 1950 and offered Americans the opportunity to own a small business. In the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a war economy followed, so it was almost 20 years before mass consumption resumed any role in economic life or in the way the economy was conceived. More and more people were abetted to live in the cities, most people had jobs, therefore money to spend, and they spend it by having a good time (McNeese,88).