The Twilight of the Middle Class

MORRIS DICKSTEIN POSES his recent study of post–World War II American fiction Leopards in the Temple (2002) as a corrective to the by now standard tendency to emphasize the cold war in accounts of this period. But while Dickstein takes the critics of cold war culture to task for what he sees as their oversimplification of both art and politics, he concurs with them on at least one major point. “If social suffering, poverty, and exploitation topped the agenda of the arts in the 1930s,” Dickstein writes “neurosis, poverty, and alienation played the same role in the forties and fifties when economic fears were largely put to rest.” The idea that postwar culture abandoned the economic for the psychological has likewise been central to studies of cold war culture, where it underwrites the argument that postwar culture was characterized by a (deeply political) rejection of the more overtly political concerns of the thirties. Thus Thomas Hill Schaub argues in American Fiction in the Cold War (1991) that postwar authors, participating in “the anti-Stalinist discourse of the new liberalism,” prioritized “psychological terms of social analysis . . . over economics and class consciousness as the dominant discourse of change.” While they differ on how to interpret the shift from economics to psychology—from capitalism and class struggle to “psychological nuance and linguistic complexity” (Dickstein 20)—Dickstein and critics like Schaub agree that this shift is the defining characteristic of postwar fiction. It is perhaps for this reason that critics of cold war culture themselves downplay the very questions of “economics and class consciousness” for whose omission they take postwar writers to task. We might expect these critics to see Dickstein’s more neutral, and at times even celebratory, account of this shift as continuous with cold war triumphalism—a latter day version of Richard Nixon’s economic boosterism in his 1959 “kitchen debate” with Nikita Kruschev. Yet when they mention the postwar economy, it is often in similar terms. In his account of the postwar vogue of wide-screen movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments, for instance, Alan Nadel reads these films as visual analogues of “the expansive economic and technological growth of America in the 1950s.” Nadel’s brief mention of the economy is rare, moreover. Often critics of cold war culture simply bracket the economy, restricting their analyses to the political and cultural realms. Even the Marxist critic Barbara Foley succumbs to this tendency, © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.