Introduction
During the 1920s, American consumerism increased due to technical advances and innovative ideas and inventions in communication, transportation, and manufacturing. Americans moved from the avoidance of debt to the concept of buying goods on credit. The operating assumption was that the more items people purchased, the happier and more fulfilled they would feel. Americans were willing to buy new devices and inventions, and spending increased dramatically. The U.S. supported a consumer culture as capitalism and materialism molded the average person to buy more goods and improve their standard of living. Political and business leaders claimed consumerism was more than shopping as it defined the benefits of capitalism. The basis for a capitalist society is an insatiable appetite for goods and services. The United States government wanted to develop lifelong consumers to develop needs, wants, and product preferences to expand the economy for a prosperous postwar nation.
When President Franklin Roosevelt delivered his annual message to Congress in 1941, he gave his "Four Freedoms Speech," describing extending American ideals worldwide. Roosevelt expressed his concern about human rights and freedom. His famous speech proposed "four essential human freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear." When Western Europe lay under Nazi domination, Roosevelt presented a vision in which America should spread those ideals worldwide. In his State of the Union Address, he told Congress that "four freedoms," including "freedom from want," would define the post-WWII international era. After years of wartime rationing, American consumers were ready to spend money, and factories switched from war to peacetime production.
During the Cold War period of the late 1940s and 1950s, winning the "contest for the hearts and minds" of the American people became a challenge in the battle of mobilizing societies for a new geopolitical rivalry. After the containment of the Soviet Union on the military front during the Cold War, economics and consumption played a significant role in swaying public sentiment toward higher living standards, political freedom, and social mobility. The United States used government-sponsored efforts to persuade European people that democracy and capitalism were superior to Soviet alternatives. The lengthy battle between the economic systems of capitalism and Communism would set the stage for the eventual fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 1959, the "kitchen debate" is a prime example of a pivotal economic discussion on consumption at a heated debate in Moscow. U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev traded barbs at the American kitchen exhibit as they illuminated the deep socio-political and cultural divide between the two superpowers in the 1950s. These kitchen debates were about standards of living and technological advances in the U.S./USSR. They showed how Americans were buying these consumer goods as they needed to have a "good life." The exhibits aimed to develop better mutual understanding and friendlier relations between people in the East and West. This attention to consumerism became central as America countered the ideology of the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union competed fiercely to prove superiority. While the Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. in rocket technology, the U.S. was winning in consumer products. The contest was on as Khrushchev decided to enter a competition to catch up and overtake America. Using the kitchen debate to highlight these efforts, students will learn how the U.S. government manipulated its citizens through consumption, propaganda, and advertising to buy consumer goods. The unit will combine concerns of the Cold War and elaborate on how consumerism and propaganda were tools used to convince Americans to increase their consumption and living standards.
Comments: