jan 1, 1940 - Summary

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kitchen debate: A 1959 debate over the merits of their rival systems between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of an American exhibition in Moscow.


A family eats breakfast at a campground in Zion National Park, Utah. Americans embraced a middle-class, nuclear family ideal in the postwar decades.

In July of 1959, the American vice president Richard Nixon met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev for a rare face-to-face debate. This historic meeting did not take place at the Kremlin, or the White House, or even the United Nations, but in the kitchen of a model home at the American National Exposition in Moscow. They did not discuss ongoing tension in West Berlin, or some other Cold War flashpoint. Instead, they clashed over the merits of Pepsi-Cola, TV dinners, and electric ovens — perhaps appropriate subject matter for the setting, a showcase for the American way of life. As the two politicians walked through the exhibition, Nixon explained to Khrushchev the huge variety of goods available to American consumers. Through an interpreter, the vice president joked that the Soviet Union may have superior rockets, but the United States was ahead in other areas, such as color television.

The model home became a symbolic Cold War contest over the standard of living in the real homes of both nations. A key element of the so-called kitchen debate was Nixon’s insistence, to a disbelieving Khrushchev, that a modern home filled with a shiny new toaster, television, and other consumer products was accessible to the average American worker. “Any steelworker could buy this house,” Nixon told the Soviet leader. The kitchen debate settled little in the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the USSR, but it speaks across the decades. By the late 1950s Americans had come to see themselves as home owners and consumers. For many, the middle-class American dream was increasingly a commercial aspiration — a lifestyle to be purchased as much as a life to be lived.

In the two decades following the end of World War II, a new and influential consumer class was born in the United States. Fortune magazine estimated that in the 1950s, the middle class — which Fortune defined as families with more than $5,000 in annual earnings after taxes (about $50,000 today) — was increasing at the rate of 1.1 million people per year. Riding a wave of rising incomes, American dominance in the global economy, and Cold War federal spending, this ascendant middle class enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. That class fervently embraced a long-standing American ideal centered on home ownership, domestic fulfillment, and traditional morality. However, the success of the middle class could not mask the nation’s complex contradictions. The postwar era saw challenges to conformity and mounting social strife. The persistence of racial inequality, diverging expectations for women, a rebellious youth culture, and changing sexual mores were only the most obvious sources of social tension. Suburban growth came at the expense of cities, hastening urban decay and deepening racial segregation. Nor was prosperity ever as widespread as the Moscow exhibit implied. The suburban lifestyle was beyond the reach of the working poor, the elderly, immigrants, Mexican Americans, and most African Americans — combined, nearly half of the country. The lopsided nature of postwar prosperity would become a focal point of debate and unrest in the 1960s.

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