When automobiles, telephones, and radios were still new during the 1910s and 1920s, they were regarded as inventions that would individualize and fragment American life. They would separate rich from poor, facilitate privacy, and allow people to travel and vacation anywhere. And so they did—for a while. Then, with the army convoys and propaganda machines of World War II, these same technologies symbolized unified civic purpose. By the 1950s, they helped standardize a middle-class lifestyle. And by that time they were joined by television, broadcasting the soothing consensus messages of Walter
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