Cold War Hot Kitchen

• In Event: The Kitchen Debate 1959-2009: Containment Culture and the Good Life

Abstract

In 1959 when Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon debated the relative merits of appliances in the kitchen of a one-track house shipped to Moscow, it became clear that American domesticity had everything to do with politics. Indeed, American domesticity became a particularly potent kind of cold war weapon. Examples of American domestic bliss—from the pantry to the pot roast—were sent to Moscow as part of a propaganda campaign known as “The American Exhibition.” Aimed at Soviet viewers, this exhibition advertised mechanized living as a way of being. It sought to stem anxieties about nuclear war through images of a streamlined domestic environment, displacing the spatial frontier with the frontier of suburbia. Masterminded by American architects hired by the United States Information Agency (USIA), the exhibition’s planned environment became a stage for the spectacle of everyday life. Yet within these displays, emotionality was as manicured as the proverbial Jones’s lawn.
My paper will examine the connections, evidenced in Moscow, between affect and architecture in the early cold war period. I am interested in establishing the ways in which the streamlined emotionality exhibited by U.S. mid-century modernism in Moscow corresponded to the management of racial difference in the planned environment in Southern California. Because of the correlation during this period of the west with an alternative spatial frontier, the development of the Los Angeles area set the standard for an idealized domestic landscape. Increased middle-class access to homeownership during this period and the partitioning of land into planned subdivisions placed Southern California as the vanguard of this lifestyle. While much has been written about this landscape in terms of white, middle-class female containment, little has been said about the contours of race, and how, in fact, against the backdrop of suburban development racial divisions were another facet of erased sociality and emotional management. A key question for my paper will be: what are the connections between aesthetics, affect, and race? How did the creation of a mid-century modernist aesthetic contribute to racial containment during this period?

Author

• Kate Baldwin, Northwestern University