ABSTRACT
1950s Americans participated in “containment” culture, which drew its name and character from the high Cold War period and America’s foreign policy aim to limit the spread of communism and to grow American influence, ideology, technology, and business markets. Containment also operated at home in the guise of conformity—in corporate culture, in the nuclear family ideal, in suburbia, in consumption, and as a value unto itself. The label derives from the 1947 “containment” essay written by George Kennan, a State Department official, which spun a story about America that became a privileged narrative during the Cold War.
The story of containment had derived its logic from the rigid major premise that the world was divided into two monolithic camps, one dedicated to promoting the inextricable combination of capitalism, democracy and ( Judeo-Christian) religion, and one seeking to destroy that ideological amalgamation by any means. 1
Containment culture included disparate venues and processes that became linked in producing an America distinct from the U.S.S.R. in economic, political, and social aspects. Under the common label of “containment,” numerous and often contradictory stories were generated, each claiming its authority from being part of containment. Containment, thus, was not a single policy or strategy, but a “mobile infinity of tactics.” 2 Containment tactics, thus, came to include international economic support, treaties, a network of covert military actions, but also “corporate production and biological reproduction, military deployment and industrial technology, televised hearings and filmed teleplays, the cult of domesticity and the fetishizing of domestic security, the arms race and atoms for peace.” 3