Never were American Dreams more potent or more seductive than in Post WWII America, when the USA stood united and confident at the apex of global power and consumer abundance. The myth making machines were working overtime.
This buoyant optimism stands in sharp contrast to the current gloom and downsizing we are living today. National pride has diminished along with the hopeless feeling that America is on the decline. While pundits and columnists vie with one another offering where the 21st century is headed, I take a look back at our collective past, when our trust in the government, technology, business and science as forces that will eventually change all the rules in our favor were at their zenith.
Consuming Passions
Like most Americans I have consumed a vast amount of advertising and pop culture imagery, and as an artist and a collector I have amassed a formidable collection. As an archivist of the flotsam and jetsam from the New Deal to the New Frontier, I offer a curated collection of vintage advertising and illustrations that permeated the American Twentieth Century media in mass market publications that helped define the American Dream and the possibility if its attainment.
In today's digital information age it is difficult to imagine the role that magazines played in society quite different from our own, in which radio and telephones and eventually television offered the only technological connections between our home and the larger world.
I grew up living my parents Post War dreams of tomorrow. I felt lucky to be born when I was. Born in the afterglow of Hiroshima-I had missed WWII by a full decade, the Depression by more than 2 which in a child's mind seemed an eternity, yet the spillover from both events would continue to inform my childhood.
An ardent consumer I would grow up promising to preserve and protect The American Way of life taking an oath of loyalty to adhere to the directives from a contingent of Generals-General Mills, General Electric and five star, billion dollar grossing General Motors. My own military industrial complex.
Yes mine would be a charmed life- a sugar frosted world of frost free fun and abundance that would only increase with each passing year.
Set To Defrost
In our new globalized world, America's role in it has changed at lightening speed and old notions have not adjusted accordingly. Victorious after WWII America saw itself as the model for the world and American dreams were to become global ones.
With all its cliches and gender stereotypes distinctive to Mid Century America, the fallout from the fictions, fabrications and facades that flourished during this time, are, like the effects of radioactive fallout, still felt decades later.
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| Defrosting the Cold War Collage by Sally Edelstein |
