The Shifting Ground of the American Dream: An Examination of the 'Good Life' in Public Texts

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

Abstract

On July 24, 1959 in the historic encounter between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and American Vice-President Richard Nixon Nixon asked Khrushchev: “Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?” The two were visiting the kitchen displayed in the United States National Exhibition set up in Moscow.

Almost thirty years later Alexander Solzhenitsyn would deliver a scathing critique of American consumer culture and his own Russian culture of political ideology when he concluded:

"We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections."

For the Russians, the dream was constructed in messages of social equality and a government provided basic guarantee of material necessities. For Americans the dream became manifest in the “good life” evident in individual home ownership, disposable income and the lifestyle evident in consumer goods, popular culture and the “cult of domesticity.”

This essay examines visual, audio, and written texts that depict the American Dream to see how they have changed in the 50 years from the post war “good life” to the mortgage and employment crisis.

Authors

• Kathleen Farrell, St. Louis University

• Robert Krizek, St. Louis University