Postwar America Research Articles

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Sylvia Plath’s reimagination of the Grimms’ fairy tales in postwar American culture

ABSTRACT This article discusses Sylvia Plath’s overlooked juvenilia poems and contextualizes them in postwar American culture. The fairy tales were significant cultural products during the 1950s, that also continue to define the culture today through Disney’s adaptations. Plath loved Grimms’ tales; several of her poems show direct engagement with tales. The first half of my article looks at Plath’s juvenilia poems and their reimagination of fairy-tale narratives. For Plath, the fairy tales functioned as a way to retell her life events. Whilst, the second part of my research uses a psychoanalytical approach to link “momism” in postwar America with the evil witch figure. By close-reading “The Disquieting Muses” poem, I demonstrate Plath’s engagement with the ambiguous mother whose food, similar to the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”, function to deceive the children.

The Nomadic War Machine in Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz and On the Road

This study inquiries into Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz (1968) and On the Road (1957) from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s nomadic war machine. It shifts from a rigorous scrutiny of Vanity of Duluoz for its general account of the Duluoz legend, Kerouac’s alter ego, to the study of On the Road for its more specific narrative of a certain period in Kerouac’s life. Being an iconic figure of rebellion and non-conformity in capitalist America during the postwar era, Kerouac’s literary works have a certain social and political magnitude that falls within the discourse of deconstructing orthodoxy and dogma. The study elucidates how Kerouac’s characters subvert the social norms and the state’s institutions in order to break free from pre-structured beliefs. The thesis of the article is to corroborate that such non-conformity and insubordination, exemplified in Kerouac’s autobiographical works, align with the nomadic characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine. By extension, it aims at presenting Kerouac as the Deleuzeguattarian nomad who creates nomadic characters that deterritorialize post-war America from within.

Race and upward mobility: Seeking, gatekeeping, and other class strategies in postwar America

Race and upward mobility: Seeking, gatekeeping, and other class strategies in postwar America

Review: Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America

Review: <i>Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America</i>

Book Reviews: Spring 2021

Book Reviews, of:&nbsp;Baskin –&nbsp;Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster WallaceÖzcan –&nbsp;Understanding William T. VollmannEve –&nbsp;Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault, AdornoCrews –&nbsp;Books are Made of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary InfluencesEmre –&nbsp;Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America&nbsp;Stephan –&nbsp;Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First CenturyCrosthwaite –&nbsp;The Market Logics of Contemporary FictionSilbergleid and Quynn (eds) –&nbsp;Reading &amp; Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations&nbsp;[a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to&nbsp;reviews@pynchon.net]

We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America

We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America

The Iceman Cometh: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

<i>The Iceman Cometh</i>: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

‘Fate Leads the Willing, and Drags the Unwilling’

In this article, I explore the role that Austrian-born musicologist/composer Eric Werner (1901–1988) cultivated as a representative of musical Wissenschaft des Judenthums in postwar America. I focus here on the diary that Werner kept between 1955 and 1957 – a heretofore untapped resource – which chronicles his efforts to build intellectual refugee networks while simultaneously helping to restart an international network of Jewish music discourse spanning America, Europe and Israel. Music, in Werner’s view, required a scientific basis for study from which authentic practices could be rebuilt. Thus, while Werner relied on revitalising cantors as vessels of Jewish music, he viewed musicology as the core discipline from which Jewish music ‘tradition’ could arise.

Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs

Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution Miglena Sternadori (bio) Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America. E. James West. University of Illinois Press, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95 paperback. The role of magazines in documenting and interpreting history has been aptly explored by Carolyn Kitch, in her 2005 book, Pages from the Past, and by other scholars who have attempted to map the complex intersection between journalism and memory. But magazines’ historical texts are not just about commemoration and nostalgia, as E. James West points out. If they reveal unknown or suppressed facts and stories, they can also serve as textbooks, propel advocacy, or spawn moneymaking ideas. Ebony, the general-interest magazine for middle-class African Americans, is a prime example and the object of West’s recent book, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. In it West traces the contributions of Lerone Bennett Jr., a popular historian who supported the Black Power movement, to a magazine remembered for encouraging conspicuous consumption as a path to racial equality. How did such an unlikely marriage of philosophies survive? The answer lies, implicitly, in the ambivalent nature of the magazine medium, where progressive story lines often serve to ensure the advertising success of large corporations. Bennett, a Morehouse College classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at Ebony in 1954 and relentlessly published Black history articles and series until his entry into senior management in the late 1980s. Despite his lack of academic credentials, he conducted research like a professional historian, spending time in archives and finding primary documents. His efforts were rewarded. Long before universities had Black [End Page 113] studies departments and February was celebrated as Black History Month, readers wrote ecstatic letters to praise Bennett. His work—including series such as Negro History (later released as a book titled Before the Mayflower), Pioneers in Protest, The Making of Black America, and Black Power—filled some of the gaps in the whitewashed school curricula and historicized the struggle for civil rights. He depicted the richness of African heritage, the horrors of slavery, the ingenuities of Black resistance, and the achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. Publisher John Johnson was proud of Bennett’s contributions. Conveniently, their consciousness-raising nature was also useful in deflecting criticisms about Ebony’s apolitical and staunchly capitalist philosophy. For readers who had grown accustomed to reading Bennett’s articles in Ebony, it probably seemed natural in the 1970s to start to see advertisements from companies encouraging them to take leisure trips to Black-history monuments—or even to the South, which was presented as supposedly friendly and open to Black-heritage tourism. These ads appeared especially in the context of the celebration of the US bicentennial, in 1976. But although Bennett himself had helped usher Black history into the mainstream, he was livid about its capitalist co-optations. A number of his articles suggested that history was a tool of advocacy and even revolution, but these viewpoints, which reached wide audiences through the pages of Ebony, in no way stopped or discouraged profiteering from the cause he cared so deeply about. Despite these tensions over the uses of Black history, little changed. Johnson held steady to his capitalist course, while Bennett remained a trusted editor at the magazine—save for a brief, disappointing foray into academia to serve as the first chair of Northwestern University’s Black studies department. Over the years, many other thorny questions about the interpretation of history emerged at Ebony. For example, how was a “moderate” magazine supposed to cover radical activists such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael? Had Martin Luther King been an individualistic hero rallying for the cause of color blindness—as Ronald Reagan had framed him upon declaring his birthday a holiday—or a champion of racial consciousness and equality? Was MLK, in fact, a peaceful martyr or a true revolutionary? While Bennett may have had short-term wins by publishing articles containing some relatively radical viewpoints, in the long run, Johnson invariably steered the magazine’s ship toward more commemorative and middle-of-the-road perspectives. [End Page 114] The book is a useful read not only...

Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West by Jeffrey C. Sanders

Reviewed by: Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West by Jeffrey C. Sanders Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West. By Jeffrey C. Sanders. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xiii + 285 pp. Paper $29.99. Razing Kids, by Jeffrey C. Sanders, is a collection of accounts about the ways in which children's concerns drove various parts of the environmental movement in the American West. This is not a book about children's concerns as imagined and articulated by children; it is told from the viewpoints of adults and their concerns, as these played out in children's lives. The topics Sanders addresses are diverse. He begins with the concerns generated by the World War II–driven development of west coast instant cities. The communities developed by defense contractors were often slapdash and entirely devoid of amenities that would have made life for their young inhabitants more pleasant. From these communities, Sanders moves to the nuclear West and the health problems generated by nuclear testing. Many of the downwinders' fears originated in the miscarriages, stillbirths, and childhood leukemia cases clustered in areas close to blast sites in Utah and other western states. From there, Sanders jumps to the War on Poverty and the Youth Conservation Corps, which took young men, often minorities, out of degraded urban environments and sent them to work the rural West, an environment that was often unwelcoming. At the other end of the environmental spectrum was Sanders's other story from the 1960s, that of youngsters who ran away from their homes and took over Bay Area neighborhoods, wallowing in dirt, disease, and other environmental conditions that shocked and disturbed their elders. Sanders's final story is of agricultural chemicals, and the damage they did to young farm laborers. Urban Americans, however, became more concerned about the issue, however, when pesticides [End Page 315] and other contaminants made their way into the food supply and especially into foods most often served to children. As mentioned, this is a collection of histories rather than a single, unified narrative. There is no central thread tying together the various stories in this volume other than the shared concept that concerns about youth led adults to think about the quality of various environments, sometimes in new ways. It is also a book about adult anxieties about how the various environmental forces at work in the wartime and postwar America West would adversely shape children's experiences and bodies. The degree to which the majority of people worried, however, was often mediated by race. The answer to environmental degradation in urban environments was not necessarily to improve those environments, but to ship young people out of them to have supposedly healthful experiences in other places. The push to remove potentially dangerous chemicals from food was not the greatest when Latinx children were hurt in the fields, but when middle-class children ingested that food in the form of apple juice and apple sauce. Each of the individual stories is interesting and probably worthy of book-length treatment on its own. The chapters about teenagers and young adults would be strengthened by including more of the perspective of the young participants. In some places, stories would be improved by linking the postwar story to pre-war antecedents. For example, in the discussion of Youth Conservation Corps camps, the author often references the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), but in somewhat superficial ways. The CCC was far more problematic than Sanders acknowledges, and many of the complications of poorly constructed camps and disgruntled young men existed in the 1930s as well as the 1960s. The discussion of the history of youth and agricultural labor could also be more fully fleshed out. Concerns about child labor in agriculture were not new in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Children's Bureau and critics of child labor argued, largely unsuccessfully, to get children out of the sugar beet industry and other paid agricultural labor. There, the concern was not pesticides, but labor that bent children's backs and kept them away from school. Although labor laws did eventually come to cover...

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester

Reviewed by: In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester Akira Inoue Katrina Forrester. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Cloth, $35.00. In the Shadow of Justice presents a powerful reconstruction of Anglophone political philosophy. Although the central focus of the book is on the origin and influence of John Rawls's theory of justice, it also uncovers the significance of British political theories (especially Brian Barry's theory) in ways that contrast them with the Rawlsian liberal egalitarian idea. The book is, thus, a work of intellectual history that engages with the traditions of normative political theories. By referring extensively to the literature of philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and the archived materials of Rawls, Katrina Forrester puts forward two provocative theses. First is that the core idea of Rawls's liberalism is framed by the liberalism of postwar America, that is, antistatist, pluralist liberalism; second, it continues to survive as a dominant political ideology to this day by abstracting the intellectual building blocks away from political and socioeconomic realities. According to the first thesis, Rawls's anti-interventionist and republican idea lurking behind his theory of justice reflects postwar liberalism. Although Rawls's thinking went through minor changes, specifically in a more egalitarian direction, the postwar-liberal idea was intact. It was reinforced by Rawls's visit to Oxford in 1952–53. At that time, he encountered the Labor revisionists who attempted to embrace both equality and decentralization in order to reconcile them with market efficiency. In addition, he proceeded to work on justice under the influence of Oxford ordinary language analysis. Since then, Rawls has treated justice implicitly or explicitly as rules of a game that are applied to social practices in an egalitarian manner. The notions of social cooperation and the basic structure exemplify this. This way of understanding justice enabled Rawls (and his followers) to detach his framework from the realities of the 1970s and 1980s. This leads to the second thesis. Forrester provides the following evidence for it: Rawls's justification of civil disobedience in a restrictive way, his (and their) neglect of the acute problems of racism and colonialism, his marginalization of the issues of justice in international politics, his limited treatment of the interests of future generations, and his (and their) underestimation of the impact of the New Right. These issues that Rawls (and his followers) restrictively treated, neglected, marginalized, and underestimated are fundamental issues of justice and legitimacy in contemporary society. However, the Rawlsian framework cannot help sidestepping these issues in order to fend off the collapse of the fair game of a society. Forrester thus concludes that it is time to see the Rawlsian philosophy as a product of its time. Forrester reveals the limitations of Rawlsian philosophy by contrasting it with other political theories: British political theories and the Lockean libertarian theory. Among the former, Barry's theory is pivotal. For example, Barry criticized Rawls's theory of intergenerational justice as tied too closely to moderate economic growth. To include the concerns of later generations about resource depletion and environmental destruction, Barry decoupled intergenerational justice from growth. Forrester opines, "Only Barry tried [End Page 527] to do so" (203). She thus holds Barry's fundamental challenges against Rawls's framework in high regard, but the background of Barry's challenges remains unaddressed. The Lockean libertarian theory also plays an important role in unearthing the problematic features of Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism. Robert Nozick attacked Rawls's vision for games of fair division and presented a historical entitlement theory of justice as a better alternative to liberal egalitarianism. Forrester analyzes how Rawlsians' response to Nozick promoted the abstraction of morality from political realities so as to deny the noninstitutional claims about historical entitlements and defend the forward-looking focus on egalitarian justice in light of the ideal of Kantian moral persons. This, Forrester contends, encouraged the Rawlsian neglect of historical injustices. However, this may be questioned for two reasons. First, Nozick's entitlement theory influenced prominent egalitarian theorists such as G. A. Cohen, his disciples, and leftlibertarians...

The Sculpture of Marshall Fredericks and the Rise and Fall of the Midwestern Mall

The Sculpture of Marshall Fredericks and the Rise and Fall of the Midwestern Mall Janna Jones (bio) On March 22, 1954, Hudson's Northland Center opened to great fanfare in suburban Southfield, Michigan. On the day of its opening, Northfield's architect, Victor Gruen, proclaimed that Northland Center was the world's largest shopping center—with the largest department branch and the greatest number of stores, and located on the largest property site.1 Designed as "a city within a city," Northland's empire included its own power plant, water tower, police force, 8,344 parking spaces, colonnaded walkways, fountains, courtyards, and even some sculptures. During the 1950s, and in the following decades, the mall was designed to work in harmony with automobiles, as any mall parking lot today reveals. Detroit spawned American car culture; not surprisingly, when it opened in 1954, Northland—the largest shopping center, with the largest parking lot in the world—was built in a Detroit suburb. In fact, the Automobile Manufacturers Association exclaimed that Northland Center was "a complete, integrated, one-stop shopping center tuned to the Motor Age."2 On the day Northland Center opened, near the entrance of Hudson's, the shopping center's flagship department store, stood a massive limestone sculpture of a bear with a small boy astride it. The sculpture, Boy and Bear, was created by the metro Detroit-based sculptor Marshall Fredericks. Working in concert with the art-conscious Gruen, Fredericks created the sculpture to bring joy to the cement shopping center. Boy and Bear stood seemingly unchanged, near the Hudson's store entrance at Northfield, even as the shopping center and its flagship store (initially Hudson's, followed by Marshall Fields and eventually Macy's) continued to transform during its six decades as a commercial enterprise. This article explores Boy and Bear, likely one of Fredericks's most beloved [End Page 29] and (literally) embraced works; though the focus here is not solely on the limestone sculpture. Rather, it is also important to understand the transformation of the space around it. This is the story of a sculpture of a bear and a boy in a midwestern mall, but it is also a story of the transformation of the mall itself, the transformation of mall culture in midwestern suburbs, and the transformation of Southfield and even Detroit—a city Gruen's Northland Center attempted to both escape and reconstitute ten miles away. A common mall, the critically overlooked sculptor Marshall Fredericks, and Fredericks's playful and uncomplicated Boy and Bear all matter to the history of the Midwest because they offer a way to make sense of the transformation of everyday life in the region during the second half of the twentieth century. The Mall Matters to the History of the Midwest The Midwest bore the omnipresent mall and the lifestyle that came with it. In fact, Gruen, the architect of Northland, pioneered the suburban mall and its consumer culture. "As a result of his architectural projects," M. Jeffrey Hardwick explains, "it is no overstatement to say that he designed and built the popular environments of postwar America. Americans of all classes and races have encountered Gruen's architectural dreams. Gruen created the spaces that postwar Americans lived in, moved through, and longed for."3 Since Gruen was the pioneer of the mall, and his first architectural designs were located in Michigan and Minnesota, it is important to note that midwesterners were the first consumers in the United States to accommodate and then assimilate the mall lifestyle that began to permeate American culture. The ubiquitous mall and the consumer culture it helped create was a critical chapter in the history of the twentieth century because it helped create a suburban consumer culture that partnered leisure and spectacle with consumption. Gruen explained that Northland, with its ample parking, could meet the cultural, civic, and social needs of Detroit's suburbanites. The historian Delores Hayden explains that the tax laws of 1954 allowed commercial property owners to write off the depreciation of a building after seven years, which created a hidden subsidy for cheap new commercial buildings. "Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation," Hayden writes...

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery by Joseph E. Davis

Reviewed by: Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery by Joseph E. Davis David Herzberg Joseph E. Davis. Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 244 pp. $30.00 (978-0-226-68668-4). It can be difficult for pharmaceutical historians to know as much as we should about the single most important characters in our histories: the people who actually consume medicines. Doctors, drug companies, state regulators, pundits and cultural critics all leave a much bigger paper trail and tend to dominate the archives and thus the stories we tell. Ethnographies and interview-based research provide a crucial resource for filling this gap, especially historically informed works like Joseph Davis's Chemically Imbalanced, which is based on eighty interviews with people who identified themselves as struggling with sadness, anxiety, or concentration and attention problems. While the interviews revealed a predictable wealth of individual detail, Davis argues that they also shared a "general tendency" or a "pattern behind the other patterns of meaning": the emergence of a "neurobiological imaginary" that now dominates how "ordinary people" interpret their suffering (pp. 14–15). Chemically Imbalanced explores this imaginary and its consequences. Davis defines the "neurobiological imaginary" as a mechanistic model that equates selfhood with the brain and that proposes a goal of physically fixing, [End Page 432] rather than reflectively understanding, suffering. People who adopt this imaginary ("socially shared meanings that animate and legitimate common practices" [p. 14]) lack faith in the potential of talk therapy and introspection and believe that "real" problems require (and are confirmed by) medication. The rise of the neurobiological imaginary, Davis argues, was not an inevitable result of widespread use of psychiatric medicines. Synthesizing secondary works by historians, he points out that the pill-popping cultures of postwar America supported a very different attitude toward suffering: a "psychological imaginary" that encouraged complex interiority and self-reflection about anxiety or depression, a process he refers to as "mental life" (p. 14). It was only amidst the broader shifts embodied by the emergence of symptom-based psychiatry in the DSM-III that pills and neurobiology became intimately and complexly linked—and even then, the relationship was not a causal one. By and large, Davis's research subjects embraced the neurobiological imaginary whether or not they personally used psychiatric medicines. Indeed, one of Davis's most important arguments is that people who find the neurobiological imaginary "compelling to think with" (p. 153) are not passive pawns of physicians and drug companies. Instead, his thoughtful, empathic analysis shows his interviewees "appropriating" (p. 74) diagnoses, pills, and the neurobiological imaginary to help them solve their predicaments. They are active agents who mix and match information from medical authorities, drug advertisements, popular media, and carefully selected confidants among family and friends. They adopt (and adapt) aspects of neurobiology that they find useful, such as categorizing unwanted or problematic aspects of their mental life as external to their identity or self, while resisting or working around aspects they find harmful, such as the stigma of mental illness or of being "dependent" on drugs, or the troubling implication that free will does not exist. What's left, Davis argues, is a vision of selfhood as "unencumbered volition" (p. 153) with all unwanted or limiting characteristics externalized as biological, mechanistic impingements that can be easily and inconsequentially "fixed" with drugs. Davis's analysis is insightful and empathic, and historians will find it useful as we work to understand the archivally elusive main characters in our own narratives. There are also elements that may give pause. For example, early on Davis points out that although he ensured diversity in his interview population, "demographic factors" such as race, gender, and class rarely "affect interpretive practice" (p. 24). The neurobiological imaginary is widely shared by "ordinary people" (e.g., pp. 6, 22) regardless of their social location. This is a remarkable finding given the importance of "demographic factors" in U.S. cultural and psychiatric history. How did groups with such disparate and unequal experiences all arrive at the same place? Davis does not attempt to explain this or, in general, to incorporate race...

What’s the Matter with Labor History?

The events of September 11 changed American politics in ways that continue to reverberate today—including the way we think and talk about working-class conservatism. The author describes how the aftermath of 9/11 shaped his own developing interests in American labor and working-class history, and how it continues to shape his research agenda as a scholar of postwar America.

The New Frontier: Religion in America’s National Space Rhetoric of the Cold War Era

The origins and use of national space rhetoric used by NASA, the US government, and the media in America began during the Cold War era and relied, in part, on religious imagery to convey a message of exploration and conquest. The concept of space as a “New Frontier” was used in political speech, television, and advertising to reawaken a sense of manifest destiny in postwar America by reviving notions of religious freedom, courage, and exceptionalism—the same ideals that originally drove expansionist boosters first to the New World and then to the West. Using advertisements, political speeches, NASA documents, and other media, this paper will demonstrate how this rhetoric served to reinforce a culture held by many Americans who maintained a long tradition of believing that they were called on by God to settle New Frontiers and how this culture continues to influence how human spaceflight is portrayed today.

All My Sons

All My Sons

Similarities And Differences Of War Depiction In J.Heller’s Novel “Catch 22” And Shukhrat’s Novel “Shinelli Yillar”

This article is devoted to the similarities and differences of the American writer Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22” and prominent Uzbek writer Shukhrat (Gulom Aminov)’s novel “Shinelli yillar”. While comparing these two novels, we can see some similar war actions at the same time it is clearly evident the differences between works. As a member of the Beat Generation and the post-World War II era, Heller developed a very satirical approach towards institutions, particularly the national government and the military. He was deeply cynical of war, which was best exemplified by the "black humor" of Catch-22, and he explored the difficulties of Jewish experience in postwar America. However, Shukhrat’s involment in the Second World War, seeing the ruined cities and villages, defeat and victory, prompted him to record a great novel by “Shinelli Yillar” in 1958.

Berard Reviews "Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America"

Berard Reviews "Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America"