Americans born in the years following World War II—the so-called Baby Boomers—had grown up amid an American consumer culture more dominated by chain retailers, national brands, and advertising than ever before. By the mid-1960s, television—what one historian has called the “first exclusively commercial medium in history”—made its way into 94 percent of American households and urgently beckoned young viewers to consume. From 1950 to 1970, businesses’ total expenditures on advertising in the United States nearly tripled. Especially for those who grew up in the suburbs, the dominant form of public space was the corporate shopping center, which had replaced the public square as the center of life beyond the city limits. In the quarter century following World War II, chains came to dominate American retail as their share increased sharply from about half to nearly three-quarters of all of general merchandising sales. With the help of a powerful new communications medium and the growth of chains, “big business” became much bigger in the postwar years.
Government, labor, economists, and industry appeared to reach a consensus that bigger businesses produced better products, sold them more effectively than smaller firms, and provided more benefits to consumers than small companies could. Meanwhile, the idea that a mass marketplace could produce shared abundance and reduce social inequalities—what Lizabeth Cohen has called the “Consumers’ Republic”—held incredible sway for millions of American adults.
Yet at almost the exact moment that tremendous postwar prosperity was reaching unprecedented numbers of Americans, some critics began to question the impact of this culture of abundance on the country’s stated values of freedom, democracy, and equality. In the second half of the 1950s, best-selling liberal writers such as Sloan Wilson, William Whyte, and Vance Packard depicted American business and consumer culture as unfulfilling, conformist, and manipulative. Leftist writers—careful readers of Karl Marx, if not necessarily Marxists—took these criticisms even further. They condemned modern American businesses and consumer culture for fueling a form of psychological estrangement much deeper than simple dissatisfaction. They called this condition “alienation,” a term they borrowed from Marx. Alienation, Marx argued, was a profound form of spiritual discontent and dehumanization that workers experienced in their lives as they sought to comply with the dictates of industrial work, class hierarchy, and capitalist bureaucracy.