Wheels and Deals: Negotiating Privacy through the Cold War Car

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar II
  In Paper Session: The Kitchen Debate 1959-2009: Stability and Change in the Cold War

Abstract

In the 1959 Kitchen Debate, Vice President Nixon’s promotion of the “easy life” introduced suburban domesticity onto a political platform. Such reordering of public and private was readily associated with the car, which had for decades been marketed in terms of privacy on wheels. This paper investigates the image of the American car as it is deployed in public culture first as a means of transportable privacy and more broadly as a container of Cold War anxieties about domesticity, freedom and surveillance.

The American car performs political work which promotes the consumer lifestyle and aesthetic of Cold War containment policies. Present in a variety of public texts, including advertisements, literary fiction and film, the car operates by rhetorical ambivalence. Like other iconic images of the era, the car both supports and challenges the reorganization of public and private space articulated in the Kitchen Debate.

The car served the national agenda by offering the atomic citizen a means of escaping nuclear disaster via the new Interstate Highway system. But although it was marketed and remembered in terms of promised freedom, the suburban car also emerged as a domestic trap and gendered site of violence.

The mobile privacy offered by the car, and sought-after by the consumer, has come under mounting attacks by developments in the law and technology, which exploit lingering Cold War concerns related to privacy and spying. These issues, along with increasingly fraught energy concerns and recalibrated ideas of the American Way of Life, challenge the nostalgic gaze cast on early Cold War cars in public memory.

Author

• Elisabeth Ross, Northwestern University