Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

It was in the period of postwar boom that the social policies postulated and initiated in the twenties began to make their most effective inroads upon the social landscape of American society. During this period of broad commercialism and suburbanization, the idea of a free world characterized by goods established itself as a pacific social ethic. Yet even then, in the “good times” of the fifties, social discontent remained. Coincident with the pacified imagery of suburban life stood a more traditional and compulsory ethic to enforce it: the strict rule of conformity maintained by the patriotic imperatives of anti-communism, the cold war, and McCarthyism.