The American Century

The main tenets of the American Century were laid out in a manifesto written by Henry Luce and first published in 1941 in Life magazine. In Luce's view America, its political system, corporations and culture would become the dominant force in the postwar world. To a large extent it represented the viewpoint of the right wing of the original New Deal coalition, much of which had broken from FDR in the 1940s to take a more pro-business and anti-Communist stance. It differed from the conservative wing of the Republican Party through its rejection of isolationism and its abandonment of much of the rhetoric of rugged individualism. It also rejected the racism of the Southern Democrats as well the collectivism of the Left . It embraced a moderately liberal social policy that had come to terms with the welfare state.

This was the philosophy of the "Eastern Establishment." While Marxists were its most vocal opponents in the immediate postwar years, Southern segregationists.Libertarians, social conservatives and Goldwater/Reagan Republicans also would target it as the enemy in the decades that followed. It was the guiding principal of the Organization Man. It preached corporate and social responsibility while upholding the existing social and economic hierarchy. It dominated the media and the mainstream Protestant churches. It was adopted by most moderate Northern Democrats as well as by Republican moderates and liberals in the major urban centers. It was the governing philosophy for much of the next few decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations although electoral politics forced occasional concessions to the Left or the Right. The New York Times and The Herald Tribune were its official journalistic voices in New York. The weekly news magazines promulgated its perspective nationwide.

In contemporary Marxist theory the first quarter century after the Second World War marked the triumph of Fordism. This concept has been adopted by some non-Marxist economists, historians and social scientists as well. Fordism was marked by the rapid expansion of mass production and mass consumption. It was a period that saw sustained economic growth and a rise in general prosperity in the industrial world. Among the period's markers were economies of scale, giant corporations, protected markets, minute divisions of labor and functional specialization, and Keynesian economics. It was not limited to capitalist economies. Fordism also drove the Soviet economy. In the western democracies the steady growth in the standard of living greatly diminished the appeal of the radical economic and social policies that had seemed attractive during the Depression.

The era of Fordism is generally thought to have ended in the late Sixties/early Seventies, although there is disagreement over the extent to which this was a major break or an evolutionary progression. The post-Fordism economy is marked by slower growth, greater income inequality, the globalization of financial markets, economic domination by multi-national corporations, the proliferation of new information technologies, flexible production schedules, an emphasis on targeted marketing to narrow consumer groups, the growth of service industries and white collar jobs, the decline in manufacturing employment in the developed world, the two-income family and rise in female employment, diverse product lines rather than mass production of generic goods, the proliferation of smaller firms serving specialized markets and increased outsourcing, first of production and then of services. to developing nations.

In the arts, Fordism was dominated by the mass media which presented professionally produced escapism intended for wide audiences of passive consumers. The mass media was not much interested in highbrow art intended for a cultural elite nor in participatory folk culture. Michael Denning in The Cultural Front noted that most of the successful Popular Front artists worked within the framework of the mass media including Dashiell Hammett, Orson Welles, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Some of the most dedicated "proletarian" artists complained that the works of the artists produced for the commercial media lacked "authenticity" while the aesthetes felt much of the work lacked "artistic integrity." Some of the advocates of highbrow culture, such as critic Dwight Macdonald, could tolerate, even appreciate, lowbrow culture. It was middlebrow, commercially produced art that proclaimed itself "important" because it supposedly addressed serious subjects, that made the hair rise on the back of their necks. These critics felt that these works often trivialized, sentimentalized or oversimplified issues for the sake of entertainment or propaganda. To them much of the work produced by the Popular Front fell into this category.

Interestingly the post- Fordism world is marked by declining audiences for mass media, growth in audience for niche entertainment and the rise in self-produced, participatory media including blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter,

During this period, which actually began at the beginning of the century, the Bohemian artist and freelance intellectual progessively were becoming relics of a bygone era as artists and writers became employees of institutions and corporations. In many cases they could find salaried jobs on magazines and newspapers, at colleges and universities, in advertising and public relations agencies, in radio or movie studios, This increased opportunities individuals from working and lower middle class backgrounds to pursue creative careers but it also limited their freedom of expression. They were, after all, salaried employees who could be fired. This in turn made these institutions fertile ground for labor organizers. The AFL-affiliated unions-American Federation of Musicians, Actor's Equity and IATSE-- were a longstanding part of the labor picture while journalists formed the CIO-affiliated Newspaper Guild in the 1930s. The Depression, when many of these people found themselves without jobs or immediate prospects, radicalized many of these artists and the witch hunts that followed underscored the lack of creative and intellectual freedom for artists and scholars dependent on corporations or institutions for a living..