Conformity in the Post-War United States

The immediate post-war era in the United States is popularly considered to be an era of conformity. Think of how often “the Fifties” are identified by a photograph of rows of identical suburban houses or identically dressed commuter businessmen. In fact, conformity and adjustment were hotly debated topics at the time.

Many commentators did indeed consider the fifties to be an era of conformity and were greatly disturbed by it. According to Erich Fromm, “It is hardly necessary to demonstrate to the reader the degree which this submission to anonymous authority by conformity has reached.” (154) “Whereas in the nineteenth century, tradition governed American life, now the keynote is conformity,” wrote Frederick Meyer. (35) Robert Lindner was nearly hysterical about the subject: “Adjustment, that synonym for conformity…is the theme of our swan song, the piper’s tune to which we dance on the brink of the abyss, the siren’s melody that destroys our senses and paralyzes our wills.” (167)

For centrists, conformity, rather than unifying society, was laying the foundation for its dissolution. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. thought ideological conformity could be used to keep fellow travelers of communism and fascism out of government service but posed dangers to the rest of us. “Popular ignorance about civil liberties…is threatening to turn us all into frightened conformists; and conformity can only lead to stagnation.” (208) He also feared that anti-communist feeling, “will boil over into a vicious and unconstitutional attack on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our democratic strength.” (210)

According to George B. Leonard, Jr., “…when you teach a child undue conformity to the group, when you take away his respect for the unique characteristics that make him different from all other human beings, then you create an automaton, ideal fodder for a juvenile gang—or, later, a totalitarian mass movement.” (40-41) William H. Whyte worried, “In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an authority that would resolve the burden of free choice.” (59)

Moving further to the left, noxious conformity was not intrusive, but inherent to the American Way. For Betty Friedan, “adjustment” was one of the keynotes of defenders of Feminine Mystique, the general social ideology which confined women to the wife-mother-homemaker role. “So, in the name of adjustment to the cultural definition of femininity [sociologist Mira Komarovsky] ends up virtually endorsing the continued infantilization of American woman…” (133) Paul Goodman scolded the nation thusly; “Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system with.” (182)

A more radical perspective held that contemporary American society was not worth conforming to. For Norman Mailer, “One is Hip or one is Square…one is a rebel or one conforms…one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian issues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” (155).

Conservatives attacked conformity from a different angle. William F. Buckley, Jr. saw conformity as a defining tendency of then-dominant New Deal Liberalism; “In actual practice, the choices, under applied Liberalism, are limited by the pressures of an overarching and highly repressive conformity.” (155) He implied that the real problem was a lack of conformity to the right ideas; “I think she [America] is in danger of losing her identity—not on account of some orthodoxy that we are being told in some quarters threatens to suffocate us; but for failure to nourish any orthodoxy at all.” (xiii)

John A. Stormer warned that the battle against Communism will be lost, “…not when freedom of speech is finally taken away, but when Americans become so “adjusted” or “conditioned” to “getting along with the group” that when they finally see the threat, they say, “I can’t afford to be controversial.”” (228)

Conformity and adjustment were not dirty words to the psychologically oriented. Rather than undermining society, David Riesman saw conformity as necessary and inevitable. “[T]he link between character and society…is to be found in the way in which society ensures some degree of conformity from the individuals who make it up…However, while societies and individuals may live well enough—if rather boringly--without creativity, it is not likely that they can live without some form of conformity…” (5-6) Dr. Benjamin Spock observed, “When asked what we want for our children we are apt to fall back on such general aims as happiness or good adjustment…” (290)

A few claimed that conformity was actually on the decline. Dr. Spock observed that college students of the fifties were less conformist than those of the twenties. (282) Similarly, Daniel Bell argued that “…in historical perspective, there is probably less conformity to an over-all mode of conduct today than at any time in the last half century in America.” (34) Bell even defended much-abused suburbia: “Americans…in building the postwar suburbs sought to create fraternity, communality, togetherness, only to find themselves accused of conformity.” (36)

Sources

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press: 1960, 2000)

William F. Buckley, Up From Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959)

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, London: W.W Norton & Co., 1963)

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955)

Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960) in Nicolaus Mills, editor, Legacy of Dissent; 40 Years of Writing from Dissent Magazine (New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1994)

George B. Leonard, Jr “Why is He Afraid To Be Different?” in The Decline of the American Male (New York: Random House, 1958)

Robert Linder, Must You Conform? (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1956)

Norman Mailer, The White Negro, Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957) in Nicolaus Mills, editor, Legacy of Dissent; 40 Years of Writing from Dissent Magazine (New York:Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1994)

Frederick Meyer, Our Troubled Youth: Education Against Delinquency (New York: Bantam Books, 1960)

J. Robert Moskin, “Why Do Women Dominate Him?” in The Decline of the American Male (New York: Random House, 1958)

David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1961)

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949, 1962)

Benjamin Spock, M.D, Problems of Parents (Greenwich: Crest/Fawcett Publications, 1955) quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978)

John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

William H. Wyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956, 2002)