Waxing eloquent on the 1950′s. Why must we be nostalgic about the fifties? Does it make sense that Americans tend to think of that decade as a reassuring, serene and happy time, as, in short, a sort of Golden Age? …
The fear of Russian nuclear attack, which grew gradually into a form almost of nationwide paranoia during the early fifties, also led President Truman, on January 31, 1950, to order American scientists to go ahead with the construction of the hydrogen bomb. Earlier, scores of the nation’s most prominent scientists, including Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, had urged Truman not to allow the H-bomb to be built, but counterarguments from the Pentagon, Congress, the Atomic Energy Commission, and such atomic physicists as Edward Teller persuaded Truman finally to build the bomb. But, of course, not long after the United States successfully tested its first H-Bomb, on November 1, 1952, the Russian built an H-Bomb of their own, and the arms race between the United States and Russia was begun in earnest.
—Better Homes and Gardens… identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.
Thomas Hine, Populuxe
The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:
…in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. … The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.—Read More:http://beachpackagingdesign.typepad.com/boxvox/politics/
A number of historians and political analysts believe today that America in 1950 took Russia’s sword rattling threats of world domination somewhat too literally. And that a less jittery nation might have been able to have established a detente with the Russians. In any event, the ever-present danger of a nuclear holocaust is a long-term legacy to our own time from the frightened fifties. ( to be continued)…
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