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American Futurism in the Atomic Era

Figure 34: Ad from Boys Life magazine, August 1967

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Marketed Audiences               Futurism heavily influenced Cold War culture and impacted American perceptions of product consumption. However, government agencies, consumer businesses and creative futurists presented their visions of tomorrow by exploring methods of audience targeting. The rise in popularity of the automobile facilitated the migration of middle class families from cities to suburban neighborhoods. This created new markets for companies to essentially advertise new trends in home ownership. Post-war shifts in jobs, population, and redefined gender roles also aided in this directed form of marketing.  Additionally, businesses embraced the growing impact of marketing towards the youth demographic in the baby boom era through consumer goods, popular culture, and Cold War propaganda. Finally, marketed futurism had a strong appeal to those involved in science and technology industries. The promotion of futurism was done both through the consumer good marketing and the recruitment efforts into these businesses promising prospective employers that the work they could achieve at their respective companies would write the course of the future.

            Suburban American
            During the Cold War the average middle-class American was assaulted with futurist imagery from multiple fronts such as television broadcasts, radio transmissions, and print media as well as through popular entertainment mediums that were gaining traction like film and literature. The idea of the world of tomorrow was steadily promoted in the interwar years, but prosperity, consumerism, and communication advancements facilitated these images in the 1950s and 1960s, increasing the impact of the collective future vision. These audiences involved the potential workforce, the housewife, but above all the rising middle class.[1] The G.I. Bill aided American men returning from the war to gain an education, an avenue that may likely have been closed to them depending on their families’ economic backgrounds. Education also opened up interest in that demographic moving into the sciences or at least having an interest in technical processes.
            The television and the automobile had a significant impact on middle class families. Both concepts facilitated in altering the sense of space and community.[2] Additionally, post-war efforts encouraging women back into the home sphere heavily evolved through consumer marketing. The 1950s focus on women’s stories in the home in science fiction marked both a change in perceptions on the genre but had the added consequence of pushing an interest in gadgetry and new technology onto women in a traditional role.



             Youth
            The post-war baby boom meant the younger generation were significant targets of pop futurism imagery and marketing during the late 1950s through the 1960s. The new generation born at the tail end or following the war were targeted particularly for what they could contribute to American society. With growing science industries, youth were susceptible to the imagery of the space frontier explorer that was being promoted by space industries. Additionally, the increase in disposable income from their parents made the post-war generation a lucrative target audience to encourage consumer spending. The youth-influenced marketing is particularly important because that generation has been significantly impactful on representing issues with the historical memory of the reality of space exploration during the Cold War.[3] One explanation for the decline of public interest in space travel advancements and the decline in the progress of that conquest can be attributed to the youth targeted marketing.[4]

           Cold War propaganda had a prominent impact on youth culture. Red Scare tactics and the proliferation of atomic culture imagery emphasized the dystopian theme by the 1960s. With those themes in place children were asked to predict the future in schools in time capsules left for future generations.[5] While children of a certain socioeconomic background were targeted for particular avenues of interest and potential careers with the technology that would one day be realized, they were receiving mixed messages of the future. During the 1950s they were presented with propaganda in the form of “Our Friend the Atom,” among others, a child –friendly explanation of the benefits of nuclear power and research. Langdon Winner describes the film as a “Disneyesque friendly atom in the same classrooms that instructed them in the ‘duck and cover’ drills and primed them for nuclear war.”[6] The emphasis on nuclear technology shifted to aspirations for space exploration with the formalization of NASA through the 1960s. The children of yesterday, raised in the height of the space age, were part of this targeted marketing and are often the ones left wondering what happened to those visions and continue to question their memory of the era and the failures of the present.[7]


             Specialized: Scientists, Technologists, Industrial
            Magazines such as Popular Science and Popular Mechanics utilized futurism to target those more interested in the hard sciences, which included engineers and more enthusiastic hobbyists. This kind of promotion involved marketing more directly from NASA and adjacent aerospace companies. Advertisements from companies, such as Lockheed, Goodrich, Douglas Aircraft, and Hoffman Electronics used futurism to promote how their technology was going to propel man to new frontiers.[8] Additionally, various industries used magazine ads as a form of recruitment for new talent while heavily relying on futurism to convince potential workers that their businesses would have longevity and significance in producing greater innovations. Specific industries, such as agriculture, embraced growing technology in their field to encourage forward thinking, and a cultural community centered on futurism.[9]

[1] The 1950s saw the creation of the subgenre of science fiction, housewife science fiction, which depicted various domestic woes being solved through technology. Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication, Lisa Yaszek, “On Women in Science Fiction” from Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast #346.
[2] However, the tie to mobility with a positive association is regulated to the white middle class during the era. Highways marketed as improvements to society harmed minority communities. Spigel, “Portable TV…” 133.
[3] Such as why space travel did not go further and why certain marketed technologies did not come to fruition in an accessible format. See Jesse Lee Kercheval, Space: A Memoir, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Press, 1998); Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (New York: Free Press, 2003); Megan Prelinger, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, (New York: Blast Books, 2010).
[4] Michael Scheibach, Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945-1955 (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2003) 204.
[5] Matt Novak, Paleofuture.gizmodo.com, (accessed February 20, 2017).
[6] Winner, “Sow’s Ears…” 36.
[7] Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams.
[8] Megan Prelinger, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, (New York: Blast Books, 2010) 10-40.
[9] Curtis Marez, Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.csusm.edu/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1c2crhk.