Shop till you drop

As the 1950s began, the US had seven per cent of the world's population, 42 per cent of its income and accounted for half the world's manufacturing output. The average American earned - and ate - twice as much as his counterpart in other Western countries. The war had pulled the US out of the doldrums and the low price of oil helped to keep the economy growing. There were 39 million US families who owned 49 million cars. The landscape began to be carved into highways dotted with shopping malls (the self-service supermarket was another new development).

There wasn't much to buy during the war, but the 1950s brought mass production of a host of manufactured goods: fridges, TVs, cars, vacuum cleaners, clothes and toys. Americans shopped till they dropped: the economy was built on consumption, and advertising made you feel if you could just buy that fancy car with the fins, all your dreams would come true. In 1951 CBS began television transmissions in colour.

Everything was apple pie: divorce and crime rates went down, happy couples got married young, bought houses with all the necessary mod cons, and had several children (the baby boom meant new niche marketing for the young). There was plenty of work, and a job was for life. The burgeoning middle class were eager to climb on to the conveyer belt of conformity, to believe in "one nation under God" (the phrase which Eisenhower added to the Pledge of Allegience which children recited at school). It was an amiable version of the totalitarianism Americans had gone to war to defeat. Erich Fromm believed that people could not handle the freedom of democracy and so shed their mental burdens by conforming. Fleets of American men and women worked at desks in offices wearing identical clothes and performing drab clerical duties that computers now look after. They slavishly listened to advertisements and imitated their screen heroes. The two world wars had brought women into the workforce, giving them new expectations of equality and opportunity. In the 1950s women, once married, were expected to while away the hours spending their husband's salaries on goods they saw advertised on TV. Only by non-stop consumption would the economy keep growing. In Britain, prime minister Harold Macmillan's election-winning phrase "we've never had it so good" reflected a growing sense of affluence in other Western economies, fast on the road to recovery thanks to post-war Marshall Aid from the US.

Britain had its own breed of conformity, one with a fascist underbelly. There was a rise in political groups with names like the White Defence League, whose aim was to rid British society of blacks, Jews, communists and the Irish. Not everyone went with the ultra-right flow. In the US, Lillian Hellman refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, indignantly insisting that she would not cut her conscience to suit the current year's fashion. And Elias Canetti said consumerism was the last of the universal religions.

Eisenhower made consumption a duty with his slogan "You Auto Buy". By the 1970s Andy Warhol quipped: "Buying is much more American than thinking". Meanwhile the children of the 1950s, force-fed on full freezers, began to suffocate in the squeaky clean stability of it all. James Dean became the figurehead for the Angry Young Man, the Rebel without a Cause. Elvis's pelvis in particular and rock 'n' roll music in general worried parents that their children were becoming delinquents. In London, disaffected Teddy Boys hung around coffee bars listening to juke boxes.

In the US Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg broke loose and howled against the materialism and conformity of their world. The Beats were born, along with casual sex, drugs, rock and liberation. The 1960s were about to explode.