The measure of America: The rise of economic thinking and changing ideas about American identity, 1945--1965

Between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s, a new ideology of rising abundance was articulated by opinion-shapers that linked American greatness and "identity" with quantitatively defined prosperity and economic growth. As economics assumed a newly prominent role in American thinking, the messages that these opinion-shapers conveyed about what were valued and core qualities of "Americanness" shifted to economic virtues such as the country's high, rising, and broadly diffused standard of living, and its economic dynamism and growth. The development of this ideology occurred as economic ideas and an economic style of thinking were popularized, competing with older political and moral lenses, and languages, for viewing society. Economics increasingly became a principal language and lens through which America understood and defined itself.; While "abundance" was hardly a new concept in U.S. history, Americans were urged to think of their country and their lives in economic terms, and a historically new conception of America as an "abundant society" emerged between the late 1940s and 1960s. This ideology had antecedents in the late 1920s and early 1940s, began to gain traction in the late 1940s, but only came into its own as a leading vision of America from the end of the Korean War to the Great Society. This ideology included: a belief that American supremacy and exceptionalism were founded in the country's wealth, productive capacities, and economic growth; economics, wealth, and consumption were the principal measures of social value; optimism and thinking about the future were defined in economic terms; the language of growth, prosperity, free enterprise, and consumption increasingly replaced the language of political liberalism and religion; and individual psychological fulfillment and meaning were to be found in prosperity, growth, and consumption.; In this study, I explore the relationship among culture, economics, and politics to understand changes in ideas about the United States that elites conveyed to influence the American people. While this work crosses paths with existing scholarship on the consumer society, the postwar political consensus on growth liberalism, and the post-Depression resuscitation of business, I focus on how ideas about the United States were increasingly framed in the new key of economics and quantitative abundance. I examine business public relations and advertising campaigns; political rhetoric; the changing role, influence, and priorities of the economics profession; financial journalism; K-12 education; and U.S. Cold War propaganda, to seek congruent patterns that speak to how Americans were guided to define themselves during the two decades after World War II. Finally, I consider what became of this ideology of abundance after the mid-1960s---why it declined and the ways in which it has left a lasting mark on American culture.