UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title By the Numbers: Confidence, Consultants, and the Construction of Mass Leisure, 1953-1975 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pr4p7bw Author Skee, James Dalgoff Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California By the Numbers: Confidence, Consultants, and the Construction of Mass Leisure, 1953-1975 By James Dalgoff Skee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Cathryn Carson, Chair Professor Kerwin Klein Professor Greg Castillo Summer 2016 Copyright 2016 by James Dalgoff Skee All rights reserved Abstract By the Numbers: Confidence, Consultants, and the Construction of Mass Leisure, 1953-1975 by James Dalgoff Skee Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Cathryn Carson, Chair This dissertation describes how, in the decades after World War II, a new cohort of outside experts helped build confidence among their clients in particular visions of American democratic capitalism. This moment in American history is, as the historian Daniel Horowitz has called it, an era of the “cold war consensus” among social scientists, industry leaders, and policy makers, in the idea that mass affluence would bring social well-being to the many, especially vis- à-vis communism. I add, however, that especially among members of America’s business and financial establishments, there was a lack of confidence in how this particular future could be achieved. Thus, there was an ongoing need to build confidence to move America in new directions that to contemporaries seemed foreign and new, and with no certainty of their ultimate success.
[Show full text]