The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work

Introduction
THE TWILIGHT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
". . . privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing."
--Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)
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.1 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."2 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."3 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.4 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."5 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, arguing that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) engages in the red-baiting endemic to postwar anticommunism but nowhere addressing the economic framework within which--we might expect a Marxist to believe--the novel's politics are embedded.6 "If Ellison's own experiences with the left during the years represented in the Harlem section of Invisible Man was not one of unremitting bitterness and betrayal," she asks, "what then might have been the source of the novel's overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the Brotherhood?" (541). Foley's answer is political bad faith and careerism. While Ellison's successive revisions of the draft certainly support this contention,7 Foley does not consider that Ellison might also be responding (as I will argue in my own chapter on Invisible Man) to economic issues relevant to the world of the fifties rather than the thirties. Her essay on Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," by contrast, exhaustively describes the economic and class issues that rove New York City during the period of the story's composition.8 The implication is that such issues mattered during the antebellum period but were less important, or even unimportant, in the 1950s. Despite their helpful attention to the political backsliding of the cold war era, accounts like Nadel's and Foley's either explicitly or implicitly accept Dickstein's assertion that following World War II "economic fears were largely put to rest."9
This book argues, by contrast, that economics and class remained central to postwar writing, belying our standard assumptions about the irrelevance of such matters in the postwar period. Of course, there is good evidence for these assumptions. Statistics compiled by the business historian Jeffrey Madrick make it clear that the postwar years were indeed prosperous ones, and not just in comparison with the lean years of the Depression. Along with the fact that "family incomes doubled . . . between 1947 and 1973,"
By 1970 four out of five American families owned at least one car, two out of three had a washing machine, and almost all families had a refrigerator.