Nixon in : Appliances, Affluence, and Americanism

he battle began in the morning, with a sharp exchange on the subject of automatic washers in the kitchen of a typical, 1- six-room, $14,000 ranch house put up by a Long Island builder of subdivisions and furnished by Macy's. It resumed in the evening, in a $250,000 RCA Whirlpool "miracle" kitchen controlled by an electronic brain: at the push of a button, the dishwasher scur­ ried to the dining table along an invisible track and a robot cleaner polished the floor. The combatants were two men lacking any prior association with household appliances, and the unlikely venue for their so-called Kitchen Debate was Sokolniki Park, in a leafy quarter of Moscow. But there, in July of 1959, at the height of the , the Soviet Premier and the Vice President of the locked horns over spin cycles, in-house intercom systems, and American domestic gadgetry in general. To , the latest in kitchen consumerism stood for the basic tenets of the American way of life. Freedom. Freedom from drudgery for the housewife. And democracy, the opportunity to choose the very best model from the limitless assortment of colors, features, and prices the free market had to offer. TO , the whole U.S. Exhibition was a display of wretched excess and bourgeois trivia. Where were the scientific dis­ plays, the American Sputniks? "What is this?" asked the newspaper Izvestia. "A national exhibit of a great country, or a branch department store?"' Nixon in Moscow 245 always important Cold War propaganda devices, offering compelling, tangible evidence of the superiority of the economic system that so casually spewed forth labor-saving marvels, frozen dinners (steak and french fries), and tasteful living rooms furnished by House Beautiful. Although official government policy held that displays of consumer goods would inspire businesses in underdeveloped countries to pro­ duce items suitable for the vast American market and open new markets for American firms in nations still recovering from the rav-

The "Mechanical Maid" scrubbed the floor and then put itself away in the RCA Whirlpool Mir­ acle Kitchen at Moscow.

Created under the provisions of a 1958 protocol agreement on the exchange of expositions of "science, technology and culture," the $5 million American show had suffered from congressional parsimony. As a result, many details, including the golden geodesic dome by the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller through which Russian visitors (with hard-to-come-by one-ruble tickets) entered the grounds, were borrowed from successful American outings at international trade fairs. The Whirlpool kitchen, for example, had already appeared at a 1958 product show in Milan, while other planned attractions, like a fashion show presented as a series of vignettes from American life, had been tried out at the Brussels World's Fair of the same year. Model homes and supermarkets dramatized the benefits of mass production for the average American family. As such, they were To Nixon, the appliance store represented American freedom of choice. 246 geen on TV Nixon in Moscow 247 ages of World War 11, these American showrooms also seem calculated to arouse envy and discontent at a basic level of appetite, haptic pleasure, and sensory overload. And the Moscow Exhibition was even more dazzling than most.2 Inside the Fuller dome, a new IBM computer programmed to an­ swer questions about American life was overshadowed by a series of seven giant TV screens that showed in living color and material specificity what printed words on a punchcard could never capture. One twelve-minute show, by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, traced the American workday in 2,000 flashing images. A second, by Hollywood director Billy Wilder, celebrated weekend leisure. Like a Hollywood movie, the America conjured up in Moscow’s multiscreen TV autobiography was pictorial-not logical or spiritual or poetic. It was a look, a dream, something tantalizing to touch kept just beyond

The U. 5. kitchen in Milan: a showroom of Americanism.

the reach of yearning fingers. Behind the dome and the enticing pictures, a glass pavilion with a pleated, fan-shaped roof held a modular ”jungle gym” or rack of metal with inset plastic panels in which more than 5,000 pots and pans, dishes, rolling pins, and small appliances were showcased like so many precious jewels: spectators could see the items from a special viewing balcony, but they remained just out of reach? Ironically, the Soviets themselves may have reinforced the impres­ sion that consumer products were forbidden fruit in the USSR by refusing to allow the distribution of free Coty lipsticks and, after long lines testified to public interest, by denying Russian women access to An earlier version of the Miracle Kitchen, bound for a Milan trade fair to represent the benefits free makeovers at Helena Rubenstein’s model beauty salon. When of American-style democracy. visitors did get close enough to touch, the result was pandemonium. 248 ha G’een on TV Nixon in Moscow 249 In the opening days, they mistook the contents of the model super­ market for samples and nearly cleaned out the stock. They reached over the barriers and fingered the upholstery in the model home. Free glasses of Pepsi, dispensed from a kiosk between the glass pavilion and the model home, were consumed at a rate of 10,000 per hour for the forty-two-day duration of the show? There was a heart-lung machine in the dome, an art show in the pavilion, and a shed housing farm machinery adjacent to the

Model homes and models of American homes were weapons in the propaganda Cold War; when Khrushchev finally came to America, Ike proposed taking him to Levittown.

restrooms and the exit, but the overall tenor of the US. Exhibition in Moscow was as effervescent as a Pepsi-Cola. The ultimate consumer frivolity, Pepsi had taken aim squarely at the housewife in the late 1940s and 50s. Pepsi was the take-home drink in the elegant new “swirl” bottle. Less sugary, less substantial than the competition, it was the light drink, the one that guarded milady‘s slender, youthful image.5 And image-specifically, an image of stylish domesticity, of exuberance and fizz-was the basis of the Moscow show. The American home and the new iconographic center of that house, the kitchen, made up the core of the display, reinforced by the offer­ ings of almost 800 manufacturers of sewing machines (a very popular demonstration), hi-fi sets, convenience foods, and lounge chairs. There were twenty-two cars, representing the latest 1959 models from all Detroit’s leading automakers. There was a circular movie theater developed by Walt Disney. Under a cluster of plastic parasols planted in the park outside the buildings, the rituals of American family lie, from the wedding and the honeymoon to the backyard barbecue and A modular rack in Moscow held alluring American consumer products, including the country club dance, were enacted four times daily by fashion kitchenware. models in typical American outfits;in another outdoor enclosure were 250 4, Seen on TV Nixon in Moscow 2 photographs and miniatures of typical American buildings, including churches, schools, and shopping centers. The Moscow Exhibition was “an American Showcase,“ concluded one business journal? It was also a shopping center on a grand, international scale. And what was for sale was nothing less than “the American way of life.” The items on display in Moscow-the houses, the groceries, the fancy cars, the pretty clothes-came from the everyday experience of individual Americans. They weren’t abstractions or constructs. They were somebody‘s, everybody’s, definition of the good life in the affluent 1950s. As such, they were the decade’s most powerful icons, the things everybody thought about first when that lifestyle came under attack. A bizarre example of such “contested” symbolism comes from a famous Life picture-essay on a Miami couple who spent their two-week honeymoon in a bomb shelter in August of 1959, less than a month after the Kitchen Debate in Moscow. Lured under­ ground by a publicity-hungry builder, Mr. and Mrs. Minison did not go unprepared: their “wedding gifts” included an impressive array of canned goods, brand-name cereals, cigarettes, and assorted doo­ dads spread out on the lawn around them for the benefit of Life’s ph~tographer.~ In her recent book on American families in the Cold War era, the The groceries consumed in a year by a typical middle-class family in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952. historian Elaine Tyler May takes the honeymoon story as a parable of The head of the household worked for DuPont. the nuclear family “isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abun­ dance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology.”8 But the story also highlights many of the spe­ tatoes and ready-to-heat-’n-eat, homestyle, frozen Salisbury steak cific material signs of an American way of life routinely invoked in Life’s underground kitchen was America’s symbolic first line of d moments of crisis. There was no car and fashion was hardly an issue fense against the bombs concealed in Russian satellites. twelve feet below the surface. The fallout shelter was still the private, The America from which Richard Nixon departed on his missic single-family home organized around its kitchen functions, however. to Moscow in 1959 was a jumpy sort of place, ripe for stories aboi Nor was the photographic type an unfamiliar one in the 1950s. Cor­ nuclear honeymoons. Sputnik I, launched by the Soviets in Octobl porations, propaganda agencies, and news magazines alike delighted 1957, had been a blow to national self-confidence. Despite a splasl

in pictures showing American families surrounded by all the groceries “You Auto Buy“ campaign, the recession of 1958 lingered on. One I they would consume in an average year. Like the endless shots taken Ike’s top aides was charged with taking expensive gifts in return fc in well-stocked supermarkets, such photos celebrated abundance, in­ favors. Charles Van Doren, Columbia instructor and intellectual ph sisted on its reality, and served to ward off whatever threatened up of the day, was indicted for cheating on a TV quiz show and thc America’s kitchens of tomorrow, crammed with instant mashed po- lying about it. Said Van Doren in his own defense: “But you kno Nixon in Moscow 253 these are the Eisenhower years; there's money lying around every­ set in when advertising created lethal desires for chrome and color, where." The 1957 musical Silk Stockings showed Russians "swooning on easy credit terms." before capitalist luxuries." The Khrushchev who appeared in a tele­ Neo-Puritan asceticism made good copy in an age of affluence. But vised CBS interview in 1957 was a formidable character, however. even in suburbia, where faith in the promise of a better life (and Several years earlier, the sociologist David Riesman had jokingly colored appliances) seldom faltered, all was not well in 1959, as Nixon suggested a "nylon war" instead of the Cold War: by bombarding the left for Moscow. William Levitt, whose Long Island Levittown (begun USSR with Toni wave kits, lipsticks, stoves, and refrigerators, he in 1947) virtually invented the postwar suburb, built a new social wrote, the United States would force Moscow to forget weaponry and construct there along with 17,400 Cape Cods, colonials, and ranch concentrate on "consumers' goods, or face mass discontent on an houses. Levitt made the owner-occupied, single-family home the increasing scale." But the tough-minded Soviet leader Americans saw American norm. He moved the kitchen to the front of the house, near on their own 'lV sets in 1957 did not seem likely to be toppled by a the door, so mothers could keep an eye on their kids and, in the color-coordinated Bendix washer? process, shifted the domestic focus from the parlors and sitting rooms With their space technology and their truculent resistance to fash­ of old to the work center of the new, servantless household. The ion, the Russians were a constant reproach to bloated American con­ modern technology that made affordable, assembly-line construction sumerism. "It hardly seems worthwhile going to work, when you can possible never asserted itself too blatantly in Levittown's exterior stay home and play bingo for thousands of dollars, . . . or have a go shutters and period roof lines, but in open-plan interiors arranged at a dot game for a refrigerator," Advertising Age complained at the around the kitchen, the appliance acquired enormous visual promi­ height of the quiz show mania. The novelist John Steinbeck, returning nence. In fact, Levitt used appliances as advertising come-ons for to the United States after a long absence in 1959, recorded his impres­ cash-poor home buyers: one easy monthly payment covered the sions for his friend Adlai Stevenson. Steinbeck smelled the "creeping, house, an eight-inch TV set, and a brand-new Bendix washer. Such all-pervading nerve gas of immorality" and moral flabbiness. "If I houses, the developer believed-a home of one's own-separated wanted to destroy a nation," he concluded, "I would give it too much American capitalists from Russian communists. "No man who owns and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick." An his own house and lot can be a Communist," Levitt joked. "He has editorial in a special Life issue on "The Good Life" published in too much to do."'l December of 1959 wondered aloud if high living in the form of credit The rows of virtually identical $10,000 dream houses that marched cards, overdecorated, gas-guzzling Cadillacs, and an incessant bar­ across the once-rural landscape in the 1950s made suburbia an easy rage of hedonistic advertising had begun to sap the national purpose. target for nay-sayers quick to equate stylistic sameness with middle- According to presidential candidate John Kennedy ("Mr. Nixon may class conventionality and intellectual conformity. William H. Whyte, be experienced in kitchen debates," Kennedy would shortly quip, Jr., who studied the suburbs for Fortune, quoted with wry approval "but so are a great many other married men I know!"), the long slide the description of a newcomer to the new community of Forest Park, into decadence had begun: 'We have gone soft. . . . The slow corro­ Illinois: "a Russia with money." The apparently classless suburb ran­ sion of luxury is already beginning to show." According to John kled with some observers because it seemed to doom traditional Kenneth Galbraiths influential The AlCfluent Suciefy (1958), America's hierarchies of wealth and class; if anybody could afford a house, and legitimate material wants had been satisfied but the system depended all houses were pretty much the same, what distinguished the occu­ on perpetual consumption of things that nobody needed. Corruption pants of one little box from their next-door neighbors? Surely not the Nixon in Moscow 255 contents of the living rooms and the adjacent, pass-through kitchens hold gadget^.'^ Frustration was a particular problem for housewives, framed in every picture window, since moving to the suburbs meant the experts concluded. Whether there was too much repetitious work acquiring a “standard package of consumer goods”-appliances were to do, or too little to fill the time created by labor-saving appliances, high on the list-that varied little from one address to another.12 women were not thriving in their push-button, dream kitchens, Once upon a time, in movies and TV series, the upper crust moved The American Dream was the topic of one of the Saturday Evening to the country. With half the nation suddenly comparing notes on Post’s smugly archetypal covers in the summer of 1959. As a young crabgrass, however, the old lines were harder to draw. Suburbia, USA, couple dreams of their future lie together, its operative symbols represented the breakdown of an established order, and as such it was appear in the starry sky above them, like signs of the zodiac retooled a worrisome proposition for the guardians of American values. In by Madison Avenue.14A split-levelhouse. His and hers automobiles- 1959 it was also a headache to many of those who lived there. That one sports car, one station wagon. A boy and a girl. Two dogs. A hi-fi, was the year of the “suburban jitters,” when paradise on the com­ a TV, and a nifty little transistor radio. Power tools. But most of all, muter line became “Ulcerville”and the American Medical Association electrical appliances: a giant refrigerator-freezer, a washer-dryer com­ issued stern warnings about the stresses associated with upward bination, a toaster, a Hoover Constellation vacuum cleaner (in the mobility and keeping up with the Joneses in the acquisition of house- shape of a space satellite),a portable mixer, a steam iron, a percolator, an immersible fry-pan, and a rotisserie with a see-through window. If the whirring, purring appurtenances of the suburban good life were driving women mad, they were nonetheless central to the definition of an American way of life. In the 1950s the United States bought fully three-fourths of all the appliances produced in the world. Along with cars and Levittowns (which Ike wanted Khrushchev to see if a planned state visit ever materialized), they stood for something fundamental to the postwar understanding of national identity: a sense of freedom, of effortless ease, of technological mastery, modernity, and access to conveniences formerly reserved for the very rich. A panel of thinkers assembled by the New Republic to ruminate on Steinbeck‘s disgust with American materialism suspected that the jitters of 1959 actually stemmed from fears of Soviet advances on the consumerist front, that “what we are really worried about is that the whole kit and caboodle of our Ameri­ can way of life-missiles and . . . pop-up toasters, our freedoms, fun, . . . and foolishness-is about to go down the drain.” And if home appliances were really a litmus test for the American lifestyle, then why were there so many big, clunky, Communist-made refrigerators and washing machines in the Soviet Exhibition which debuted at the The open kitchen was at the front of this 1955 house, which a Soviet building expert bought New York Coliseum in June of 1959?15 with all its appointments and shipped back to Moscow for study. Khrushchev’s ebullient deputy Fro1 Kozlov, was dispatched from Wixon in Moscow 257 256 Seen an TU

The American Dream of limitless appliances and power tools, 1959. Illustration by Alajilov. Shopping for major appliances, circa 1957-58.

Moscow to open the show and to promulgate a new coda to the which he insisted must be a phony, set up to impress foreigners.Not doctrine of ”.” Kozlov was one of the first Soviets so, replied his tour guide, Richard Nixon. Besides, hadn‘t the Russians to be seen at close quarters by the American media, and his reactions picked their prettiest girls to model at the New York exposition? to normal features of American life were carefully studied. Reporters Indeed, like the personable Kozlov himself, that display was meant noted his astonishment that a shipyard hand could own a home and to put an attractive, human face on . So, when Dwight trailed the skeptical sightseer to a suburban Washington supermarket, Nixon in Moscow 2! Eisenhower and his vice president toured the Coliseum with Kozlov, they saw Sputniks and space capsules, heavy machinery, a model of a nuclear ice-breaker (“That’s what we use atomic power for!”), and lots of Social Realist art glorifying the regime, but they also saw fashions, furs, dishes, and glasswear, a worker’s apartment furnished in an ultra-modern style, console model TVs, Moskvich cars with more chrome than the average ’59 Buick, and row upon row of washers and fridges.16 In official statements explaining the choice of exhibits, the Russians seemed almost apologetic for bringing so many displays of the Sput­ nik-and-steel-mill sort to New York in the first place, since the focus was on the future, in which an agrarian country proposed to trans­ form itself into a consumer heaven. “By 1965,” an embassy press release predicted, “88 billion rubles will have been spent on the production of household goods and appliances that take the drudgery out of housework.” Nineteen sixty-five was the target date of a seven- year plan unveiled in Moscow by Nikita Khrushchevon June 29,1959, in a long speech to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. ”We

U.S. propaganda agencies delighted in pictures of Russian women wear­ ing fashions that looked dated and dowdy in comparison to American finery.

have launched a rocket into space,” he shouted. How hard could i be to make washing machines? To match or better the United State in industrial output? Several days later, as Kozlov arrived in Ne% York aboard a TU-114 turbo-prop plane said to be the biggest passen ger airliner in the world, Khrushchev announced substantial pric, cuts aimed at getting existing supplies of consumer goods-nylon: hi-fi sets, watches-into the hands of citizens as quickly as possible.’ Soviet-made refrigerators on display in New York, 1959. Veteran Soviet-watchers weren‘t swayed by talk of nylons, tradc 260 .%en an TV Nixon in Moscow 261 and peaceful competition. They dismissed the show at the Coliseum can put your whole dinner in the range, turn on the oven, toss away as a propaganda ploy calculated to soften up the average America's your apron, . . . and take the afternoon off." By the time the war prudent suspicion of the USSR. According to Max Frankel, the New ended, civilians expected a flow of consumer products with almost York Times's man in Moscow: "Many a Russian would agree with the miraculous properties to transformthe business of daily living. A steel one who expressed a desire to come to the New York exhibit to find strike slowed production in the 1949 model year, but Westinghouse out how he lives. . . . [It] strives for an image of abundance with an and its competitors stockpiled materials and pressed forward with apartment that few Russians enjoy, with clothes and furs that are plans to hike their output by 15 percent per annum. Demand stood rarely seen." The New Yorker, on the other hand, found the Russian at an all-time high." display captivating and, appalled by the dismissive attitude of the The hankering for ranges and home freezers (subject of a major experts, offered a parody of the standard, sour-grapes commentary Truman administration scandal of 1951) struck some observers as on what had turned out to be a very popular local attraction in the symbolic of a whole new spectrum of possibilities open to the average summer of 1959: "All these exhibits may strike poor, innocent you as American in a world of peace and plenty. "Here is a partial list of absolutely wonderful, but they don't fool us for a moment. No matter America's new frontiers," wrote Look with perfect seriousness in 1945: how grand and shiny they are, we have something grander and "The modern house .. . the automatic washer . . . express highways shinier . . . [and] in any event, it makes no difference how wonderful . . . television . . . quick freezing." Because the expectations were so they are, because the ordinary Russian doesn't have them." The cur­ high, because the desire was so strong, appliance design tended to be rent exchange program was tolerable, Time allowed, only because in blatant, sculptural, and iconic. A big appliance, with an overall shape Sokolniki Park, American know-how would finally have the chance dependent on complex curves across the surface, dominated a room, to "make Russians more restlessly aware of the gulf between U.S. and intruded upon it, and showed that the customer had bought some­ Soviet standards of living."18 thing significant. By covering the working parts of the mechanism in Under the terms of the agreement on reciprocal exhibitions, the a smooth, polished carapace of glistening porcelain, designers also Soviets were allowed to sell a percentage of the goods on display to enhanced the magic and mystery of appliances, deemphasizing the Americans after the New York show was over. But there is no indica­ human agency required to make them fulfill their advertised destiny. tion that buyers lined up to take home white, porcelain-finish appli­ The "gorp" or chrome ornamentation that sprouted on many appli­ ances that looked like circa 1949 Sears Roebuck models, with bulbous, ances in the early to mid-50s further identified a deluxe product on streamlined shapes and a crust of heavy chrome ornamentation in the which no expense had been spared, much as a tail fin or a plated form of aggressive handles and brand-name plates. They were hope­ bumper connoted a car worth a long second look?' lessly out of date. Appliances were squared-off nowadays. In fact, the formal differences between a Chevrolet sedan and a The curvaceous, New Look styling popular in American durable Frigidaire refrigerator were often all but undetectable. General Motors goods of the late 1940s and early 50s connects appliance design to sent its cars and its home appliances on a joint forty-four-city tour in that of cars, similarly dependent on the use of large, unbroken areas 1950 and continued the practice throughout a decade in which the of sheet metal. Since metal was tightly rationed during World War 11, market for automobiles and kitchen equipment seemed fated to reach cars, stoves, and refrigerators were all in short supply. But that did the saturation point simultaneously. In both cases, once the basic not prevent manufacturers from advertising peacetime models of demand for the product was satisfied, surface appearance was prov­ tomorrow and making extravagant promises for their performance. ing more important to continuing sales than improvements in perfor­ In 1945, for instance, Westinghouse anticipated the day when "you mance. Other bankable intangibles included iconography, social 262 $‘seen on 7-V Nixon in Moscow 26 symbolism, and the way a given form made the consumer feel-or the sorts of problems that drove industrial designers to despair. ”Once something becomes easier to make than it is to sell, its style assumes a paramount importance,” wrote the design critic Eric Larrabee, in a fit of disgust with the commercial aesthetic in America. Yet there was a case to be made for style and for the attention-grabbing, Jell-0-like forms of appliances (and automobiles) in the early 1950s. Their exu­ berance matched the mood of the new suburbanite. Besides, stripped- down tract houses lacked architectural distinction; it was the furnishings that lent the standardized Cape Cod its character, and appliances functioned like large, expensive pieces of furniture for the kitchen in both placement and ornamental quality. As more and more market analysts began to predict a flat sales curve by 1954, however, advertisers and manufacturers turned to radical design changes, new- product development, and heavy doses of psychology to keep the wheels of commerce turning?’ Motivational researchers told clients that “in the minds of the con­ sumer most . . . appliances have a definite masculine connotation.” By that logic, housewives saw appliances as substitutes for men who did heavy work, or the man who paid for them, and felt vaguely Appliances were furniture for the kitchen. Front-loading washers guilty and lazy around certain not-strictly-necessary items, like appealed on the basis of the TV-screen window. clothes driers and dishwashers. Freezers, on the other hand, repre­ sented “the assurance that there is always food in the house; [and] food in the house represents security, warmth and safety.” While with an unbroken flow of countertopsand counter fronts over modu­ psychologists could explain the reasons underlying consumer prefer­ lar appliances that conformed to standard measurements and iden­ ences, it took designers to change their minds about them. Resistance tified their electrical and mechanical components only by discreef to all the second-tier appliances-freezers, dishwashers, dryers, and rows of pushbuttons. The age of the square appliance had dawned.2: air conditioners, or what the industry began to make when it became The appliance-as-box was a byproduct of the integrated kitchen. apparent that everyone already owned a range, a fridge, and a Since one box looked pretty much like another, with the same, unob­ washer-melted away only when the integrated, ensemble kitchen trusive flat front and control panel, it was easier to sell more of them; began to dominate women’s magazines at mid-decade.= freezer, dryer, and dishwasher sales rose when they no longer stuck Integrated kitchens spelled the end of gorp-covered, look-at-me out like sore thumbs, accusing the housewife of sloth by their bulky refrigerators; all the component parts, from cabinetry to plumbing, presence. Color-coating also gained ground in ensemble kitchens. from appliances to dinette sets, were carefully matched in color and While stoves, refrigerators, and steel cabinet units had been available form to create a total environment with a strong suggestion of an in a variety of hues since the late 40s, color tended to be just one more expensive, custom-built room. The new kitchen had a unified look, extra. Unless all the major appliances were purchased at once, and Nixon in Moscow 265 from the same manufacturer, a match was hard to achieve, too. And, until 1955 or so, curtains, canister sets, shelf paper, and other decora­ tive accessories for kitchens generally came in white with contrasting touches of bright primaries, especially red, blue, and green. This fact suggests that most Americans played it safe by buying white appli­ ances and adding color in the details. But the integrated kitchen depended on a single, monochromatic finish-one color intrinsic to all its basic functional components. Everything was pink, from the terrycloth towels and the plastic wastebasket to the new dishwasher and the counter-top range.24 More than any vaguely functional selling point of home appli­ ances-more than new control panels or easy-to-use features, for instance-square corners and pink exteriors sparked debate about planned obsolescence. At a 1955Museum of Modern Art symposium

New, box-like appliances on sale alongside older curvilinear models, 1956.

on American taste, the famed industrial designer Walter Donvin Teague argued that an appliance with a predicted life of ten years should satisfy the homemaker for every last one of them and send her back to the same manufacturer for a replacement. The designer’s job was merely to provide an efficient, convenient cover-up for the working parts. As motivational research had already suggested, how­ ever, appliances were more than tools to cook a meal or do the family wash. They were complex statements about a household’s character and aspirations. As such, they were subject to psychological obsoles­ cence long before the coils burned out and the motors failed, espe­ cially if the designer could be persuaded to join the manufacturer and the advertiser in a campaign to discredit existing kitchenware by making the latest models look as different as possible. Within the limits imposed by washer-ness and stove-hood, color, applied deco­ ration (or the lack thereof), and angular vs. curvilinear shape became Early dishwashers were a harder sell. They made housewives lee1 the weapons of the “merchants of di~content.”~’ lazy. Critics of obsolescence by design deplored the prodigal wasteful- Nixon in Moscow 2

ness and the cynicism of a system predicated on imagery a system in family snack without running into the kitchen and missing the bett which ads were more important than performance. “Color properly part of I Love Lucy. Give-away recipe booklets suggested dining c merchandized to the public,” admitted one executive at the height of fingerfoodsand “dips“ (madein a new blender) during one’s favori the pink appliance boom, ”will . . . enable us to reduce significantly shows. Plug-in tools freed women from the kitchen, or held out th, the trade-in span from eleven years to perhaps seven, or even lower.” possibility even when it was plainly impractical to roast turkeys an

Big, expensive household machinery was being sold Like cheap, bake cakes wherever fancy dictated. And more than other kinds ( ready-to-wear clothing, good for the current season only. The new appliances, they were unabashed luxuries, at relatively low cost. Spc Fridigaire “Sheer Look line was introduced to the public by fashion cialized machines to make chip dip and ice-cream drinks at the fli models holding their hands at stiff, right angles to match the lines of of a switch weren’t necessities in any sense of the word, but the the merchandise, and dressed in the same snooty shades: Mayfair made life sweeter and provided cheap, dramatic fulfillment of th pink, Sherwood green, Stratford yellow, and a charcoal gray derived promise of fingertip ease made by every dream kitchen constructe from men’s flannel since World War ILZ8 If the pink refrigerator-freezer was a pathetic status symbol, a Osaka. Izmir. Poznan. Home appliances big and small so dom warning sign of cultural decadence, a mark of deadening suburban nated lists of American products considered representative of postwa sameness-there sat the heirs of Jefferson, wrote a bitter Lewis Mum- life that they also dominated trade show exhibits prepared for foreig ford, “witnessing the same television performances, eating the same consumption. Europeans inspecting the comprehensive collection c tasteless pre-fabricated foods from the same freezers”-in other quar­ housewares in the American pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair o ters it was also a token of personal achievement, of an adventurous 1958, for example, might have been forgiven for concluding that th willingness to try something new. Or, according to the predilections United States had undergone some fundamentalshift in values. “Nov of the observer, a snare for greedy housewives, in whom too great a people no longer have any opinions; they have refrigerators,” wrotl longing for advertised novelties was often followed by disappoint­ a German critic of creeping American consumerism. “The only wa! ment, boredom, and discontent. “The Pushbutton Way to Leisure” to catch the spirit of the times is to write a handbook on homc promulgated by Beffer Homes and Gardens in the middOs, sometimes appliances.” Given the ubiquity of US. cars and home appliances ii led straight to the psychiatrist’s couch.27 such international venues, American critics realized how easy it wa Pushbutton strategies for maximizingleisure were premised largely to confuse their country with its mechanical pets. Eric Larrabee re on third-tier appliances, or tabletop models. Toasters and electric membered D. H. Lawrence’s call for dishwashers to take care of life’: percolators weren’t new products: they had been heavily promoted dirty work. Yet now that American industry had obliged, he felt surf in the 1920s. But as manufacturers faced the possibility of a market “Lawrence . . . would be the first to damn it as an example of OUI glut of big-ticket items in 1954 and 1955, and as the lucrative trade soul-less, gadget-ridden rnaferiali~rn.”~~ tempted smaller firms into the appliance derby electric blankets, deep “Gadget” was the epithet of choice for appliances among most fryers, fry pans, blenders, detached ovens, warmers, and the like intellectuals, expressing their sense that freezers and blenders really came into their own. Many tabletop appliances performed a single, amounted to so much trivia, on a par with Rube Goldberg’s comic specialized task done as well or better on a stovetop. The advantage devices for doing simple jobs in the most complicated ways imagin­ was mobility. able. In an essay on American art published in 1953, Louis Kronen­ Ads for toasters in the early 50s showed them in use in the living berger found the ”gadget aspect” rampant throughout a culture room, in front of the TV set: the lady of the house could prepare a obsessed with anything useless atid ferociously up to the minute. But 268 Seen on TV Nixon in Moscow Russell Lynes, in his appraisal of 1950s suburbia, reckoned that look- International Style architects together with the word ”Commun alike, shoebox Cape Cods became homes mainly by virtue of “the creating the impression that modernism and Communism were : gadgets that go into such houses”: the freezers and the washer-driers onymous. Gordon never actually accused Mies van der Rohe 01 were what had created the good life, American style?O Corbusier of party affiliation. But she did link their “stripped-dc Gadget-haters thought them self-indulgent, soul-destroying, and emptiness . . . and lack of possessions”-their spare, square, vi: fatal to American gastronomy. They were compensatory devices-the austerity-to social regimentation and un-American tendenc housewife’s sorry reward for staying at home with the kids. In Point Everything looked just the same in a modernist house, she argi of No Return (1949), the novelist John Marquand shrewdly described and that lean look was antithetical to the ethos of the cozy, cod a suburban wife at the breakfast table, cautioning her husband not to filled American home. Furthermore, a person who bought a sqi trip over the extension cords: ”Instead of a typewriter she was ma­ appliance was in mortal danger of undermining the moral fiber of nipulating a toaster and an electric percolator.” But they were, in the nation, ”for if the mind of man can be manipulated in one great pl end, what separated us from the Russians. ”Do Communists ever eat of life to be made willing to accept less, it would be possible to g( ice cream?” asked a cookbook writer, celebrating the sheer joy of and get him to accept less in all phases of life.” Fewer gadgets, wolfing down ice-cream desserts made by somebody else straight chrome, less democracy.33 from the home freezer. Where but in the USA were the mysteries of Elizabeth Gordon’s distaste for modernism was common eno atomic energy about to be unlocked in the average, suburban kitchen, in the early 1950s when developers tacked superfluous shutter so that busy cooks could serve up three-year-old gamma-radiated houses specifically to make them seem unmodern and automa chicken dishes in less than four minutes, straight from a new micro­ added chrome sculpture to cars to give the customer some visible wave oven?31 Indeed, the wonders of the American kitchen were of having gotten a good deal. But an ideological justification for ha profoundly interconnected with the military hardware of the Atomic plain square shapes was uncommon. It came from a 1952 boo1 Age. The same technological might that kept the armed forces poised Lyman Bryson, The Next America: Prophecy and Faith, which advai to do battle against Godless atheism also kept the kitchens of America two central theories: first, that aesthetic issues have consequencc squared off and squared away. If there was any reason for worry, it the world of politics and ideas; and second, that “the act of chi was only that we seemed equally committed to appliances and rock­ the experience of seeing several ways of expressing a need and etry whereas the Soviets, a jittery market researcher mused, could sidering them, and taking one that appeals to some trait of . . . c ”organize all their efforts in such a way as to make a moon shot acter” is the linchpin of democracy, even when choice is exercise p~ssible.”~’ seemingly trivial matters, like picking an angular pink refriger But to the staff of House Beautiful there was a distinct possibility over another model. By exerting an iron control over the forms that the rectilinear refrigerator was part of a Communist plot to strike reach the marketplace, Bryson observed, the Russians were stir at the very roots of the American way of life. In the spring of 1953 the very possibility of intellectual and political freedom.34 editor Elizabeth Gordon bought space in other journals to announce In House Beautiful, side by side with Gordon’s architectural 1 a special issue revealing the ”current threat to the next America.” baiting, Bryson too waved the flag and smote the Communist enc ”Something is rotten in the state of design,” Gordon’s April article At best, the modernists were misguided: ”They may be expres boldly declared, and that something was “so-called modern things.” ideas that fit the spirit of some Europeans who are weary of tr As other design professionals were quick to point out, the page lay­ for freedom and are seduced by totalitarian simplicities.” Real At out of Gordon’s rambling diatribe boxed the names of well-known can culture demanded diversity, comfort, a lush cornucopia of n Nixon in Moscow 2 rial goods responsive to human needs and desires. "We must expose dent liked was real art-Andrew Wyeth's Moscow-bound, hyperre, the mechanistic forms, reject the authoritarian dogmas of the cult of ist portrait of the pediatrician Dr. Margaret Handy (Woman Doct stark, sterile modernism," Bryson thundered. "Liberty means choos­ 1949), for example. In future, he opined, juries to select overse ing. . . . Men cannot choose what they have never heard of; ignorance exhibitions ought to include fewer experts and more ordinary Ame is the greatest obstacle to freedom. In politics, we call the danger cans, folks who "are not too certain exactly what art is but we knc . . . . In the arts, we call it rigidity of taste. . . . We do what we like, and what America likes."38 not suspect political or ideological invasion of our homes by way of In the end, the exhibition was not censored. But it was decontan design or decoration. Yet it is indeed possible."35 nated by the addition of twenty-six older, more traditional picturt While appliance design had never figured in the equation before, including a still life of a dead duck hanging against a green wall le the charge that modern art was a weapon of the international Com­ by Ike from his personal collection. The art critic Frank Getlein, wl munist conspiracy was a clichC of Cold War politics. Congressman was opposed to censorship but sick to death of the splatter-and-dr George A. Dondero of Michigan, the McCarthy of aesthetics, regularly school of American modernism prevalent in touring shows for expo published lists of artists suspected of ties to subversive organizations went to Moscow expecting not to like the U.S. paintings much. I and pilloried federal agencies, like the USIA, for sending suspect came away impressed, despite himself, because the pictures had thc works abroad on official government tours. Modern art, he theorized oughly alarmed the Soviet audience. "A lot of them," he notice (apparently including all nonrepresentationaland abstract styles from "failed as completely as Eisenhower to understand why a paint Van Gogh on up), was painted solely to "addle the brains of decent, should poke fun at generals." They were disconcerted by the Pollock innocent Americans." Dondero retired before the paintings for the and shocked by the lack of idealism or prettifying in the canvas Moscow exhibition were selected by a jury of distinguished artists with recognizable themes. After all the fuss and feathers, the a and curators, but his crusade against modernism was taken up by section turned out to be the best illustration in the park of the Amei Chairman Francis Walter of the House Committee on Un-American can virtues of diversity, self-criticism, and individual liberty.39 Activities. Of the sixty-seven artists represented in the display of Nixon treated the show like a time bomb, of course. As the offici American art mounted for Sokolniki Park, no fewer than thirty-four party approached the exhibition space, he veered abruptly and turnt of them had past or present Communist affiliations, Walter declared. his entourage downstairs, back into the displays of shoes and linger The poison in many of the pictures was subtle stuff. In at least one and appliances, avoiding a discussion with Khrushchev of satirize case, however-Jack Levine's Welcome Home-the anti-American sen­ American generals. He was on surer ground among the washers an timents were as plain as the noses on the crepe-faced generals gorging dryers that embodied diversity in less alarming ways. But the san themselves at a patriotic banquet?6 As for Levine himself, he was a disordered, unsorted, uncensored profusion of style defined both tl member of "at least 21 Communist fronts and causes."37 art exhibition and the display of consumer goods, and it made litt The controversy over the paintings for the USSR came to a head at sense to Soviets used to hearty helpings of ideology on such occ, President Eisenhower's White House press conference on July 1,1959. sions. What could this welter of stuff possibly mean? "I see no pla What did Ike think about the unflattering depiction of an American in all this," cried a sophisticated Russian guest. "The whole exhibitic general, asked May Craig of the Portland Press Herald? "Well," replied appeals only to bourgeois interests. . . . Your whole emphasis is o the former general and spare-time amateur painter, choosing his color, shape, comfort. We are more interested in the spirit behin words carefully, it "looks like a lampoon more than art, as far as I am things."40 concerned. But I am not going . . . to be the censor." What the Presi- Nixon's meeting with Khrushchev in Sokolniki Park should ha\ 212 Seen an W Nixon in Moscow 271 been a bland ceremonial affair; the Vice President had come to Mos­ cow to do the same honors Comrade Kozlov had performed so ami­ ably at the New York Coliseum. And Ike pointedly reminded his second-in-command that he had no authority to negotiate with the Russians. What turned the encounter from a formality into an atten­ tion-grabbing debate was the Resolution. Passed by a Republican Congress every session since 1953, the legislation re­ quired the President to proclaim a week of prayer for people living under Communist tyranny. The document for 1959 was issued by the White House just as Nixon boarded his flight, and the coincidence enraged Khrushchev. With millions of Americans praying for the overthrow of his government, along came the US. Vice President, trying to stir up discontent with his TV sets and automatic washers! From their first meeting at the Kremlin, in which the Soviet leader used language that shocked the translators, it was clear that this was going to be no ordinary morning at the fair?' Things began innocently enough in the Glass Pavilion, just before noon. The art show sparked no fireworks; Nixon adroitly guided the Premier past the greedy generals and downstairs, into the display of consumer products. For days the Soviet press had sniped at this particular portion of the exhibition, calling it unrepresentative of the life of the average American, and a "traditional Moscow fair" had suddenly opened to sell comparable items, rarely seen in Russian stores. As the party passed RCA's mock television studio, an engineer called out an invitation. Would Khrushchev and Nixon like to see Khrushchev had already appeared on American Tv before Nixon went to Moscow. The Kitchen De­ themselves on the new color monitors and try out a system for bate over household items made him seem somewhat less menacing. recording and replaying programs? With the tape rolling, a truculent Khrushchev resumed discussion of the Captive Nations issue, throw­ ing his arms around a nearby worker and asking whether the man The next stop was the Pepsi-Cola booth, where the emerging theme looked like a slave. Nixon tried to divert his attention to the TV sets. of competition was taken up again. Originally the State Departmenl Khrushchev dismissed them with a flick of the wrist: "In another had suggested a nose-to-nose clash between Coca-Cola and Pepsi a1 seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch the Moscow Exhibition to illustrate the free enterprise system at work, you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you," he blustered, but Coke had declined to participate. Instead, Pepsi presented twc wiggling his fingers at the camera once more. How about color tele­ versions of its product, one imported from the United States and the vision? Nixon replied. The Soviets were ahead in rockets, but wasn't other made with Moscow water and, through Ambassador Llewellyr the United States in the lead in this technology? "Nyet!" his adversary Thompson, begged the Vice President to nudge Khrushchev toward shot back, conceding nothing!' the kiosk. The company's new advertising slogan was "Be Sociable, 274 kd Seen on W Nixon in Moscow 2 Have a Pepsi!” What better ad than a picture of America’s foremost adversary (and the scourge of Coca-Cola, which the Party in Europe equated with capitalist decadence) acting sociable over a Pepsi made in the USSR? “Don’t worry,” Nixon is said to have told Pepsi’s CEO. ”I’ll bring him by.“ It wasn‘t hard to arrange, as things turned out: the contest suited Khrushchev’s bellicose mood to a tee. He expressed a predictable disdain for American Pepsi, but the Russian version, he growled, was “very refreshing.” And he drank seven bottles for the company photographers before the clutch of journalists and officials tromped off toward the exit, just beyond the model home.43 Richard Nixon would later insist that the Kitchen Debate was all an accident, that the domestic setting, sure to rivet the attention of his American audience, had not been chosen for political effect. But

The famous Kitchen Debate, over an automatic washer.

it is worth noting that , a future Nixon speechwrit, was doing public relations for Macy’s and the model house in Mc

cow and that photographer Elliot Erwitt was ready to shoot ~ exchange, moment by moment.& Erwitt recalls that Khrushchev w in high dudgeon by the time the entourage reached the viewing air that ran down the center of the bifurcated “Splitnik,” as the Russia dubbed the three-bedroom house. He was spewing earthy profaniti in all directions and Nixon, sensing an opportunity, was grandstan ing for the press, citing facts and figures about home building. Su denly, the Vice President pulled up short at the kitchen area ai leaned over the railing in front of an automatic washer. “I want show you this kitchen,” he said. “It is like those of our houses Nixon and Khrushchev in a mock TV studio. The debate probably began only because the cam­ California.” “We have such things,” Khrushchev shot back. But an eras were rolling. one can afford a $14,000 house in the United States, Nixon conti Nixon in Moscow ued-any steelworker, for instance: “This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract running twenty-five to thirty years.” The house won’t be standing then, the Premier scoffed. In America, build­ ers want to sell everybody new houses every few years: “We build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren.” ”You Americans think that the Russian people will be astonished to see these things,” he cried, in sheer frustration, gesturing toward the washer. “We hope to show our diversity and our right to choose,” Nixon retorted, on a note of triumph. “We do not want our decisions made at the top by one government official that all houses should be the same. . . . [And] is it not far better to be talking about washing machines than machines of war, like rockets? Isn’t this the kind of competition you want? . . . Let the people choose the kind of house, . . . the kind of ideas they want. We have many different manufactur­ ers and many different kinds of washing machines, so that the house­ wives may have a choice.” “Let’s thank the housewife for letting us use her kitchen for our argument,” Khrushchev countered, bowing to the American guide, and shot out the door, ending the second phase of the c0nfrontation.4~ That evening, at the formal opening of the American Exhibition, The robotic kitchen, operated by a TV-like computer at left. Nixon took Khrushchev on another tour of the premises, and led him straight into a second kitchen, a futuristic display of household robots in the Glass Pavilion. ”In America, these are designed to make things In The Culture of the Cold War, the historian Stephen Whitfield ta easier for our women,“ he noted sanctimoniously. “Ha! These are the press corps on the scene to task for failing to understand mere gadgets!” huffed Khrushchev: ”Don’t you have a machine that causal relationship between the and American prosperit puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?” A product demon­ and for discounting Khrushchev’s righteous “anger at competitioi strator pushed a button, sending a dishwasher careening toward him both defense hardware and domestic software.” Richard Nix( like some creature out of science fiction. ”This is not a rational ap­ opening address at the Exhibition, as well as his unprecedented t proach. These are gadgets we will never adopt!” Khrushchev bel­ vised speech to the Soviet people, lauded the American standarc lowed. Oblivious to his scorn, the uniformed guide in her pastel living, depicted the Russian space program in strictly militari shirtwaist turned on a closed-circuit TV system designed to monitor terms, and called for peaceful competition to raise the global stand activities in every corner of the house. Khrushchev’s mood bright­ of living, all without more than a passing mention of U.S. bases I ened visibly. ”This is probably always out of order,” he told Nixon, weaponry.47As political theater his carefully staged skirmishes v laughing. “Da,” chortled the Vice President. And the Kitchen Debate Khrushchev, intensified by Nixon’s one-sided rhetoric, were mas ended on a note of bogus good humor with both sides in apparent pieces of the genre. But there was more going on in Sokolniki F agreement over the silliness of household than a political pus de deux performed by a calculatingAmerican I Nixon in Moscow his long-suffering Soviet host, goaded beyond the limits of good as the principle connecting idle consumer fetishism to ideology. ‘ manners. There was the matter of the multiple kitchens sent to Mos­ historian David Potter, in his influential 1954 study of the relations cow to stand for the United States. between abundance and the national character,posited that Ameri In any other setting, a day-long wrangle between representatives goods were the real force for change in the postwar world: “It 1 of the superpowers over fundamental issues of war and peace would not our ideal of democracy but our export of goods and gadgets have been just an argument: the kitchen raised the temperature of the cheap . . . magic-working machines, which opened new vistas to debate by reminding those who saw the photos that what was at stake human mind and thus made us ‘the terrible instigators of so in an era of atomic bombs was existence-home, hearth, all the most change and revolution.”’ Or, as Richard Nixon attempted to dem basic human functions. Moreover, the kitchen was especially prob­ strate in Moscow, the housewife‘s choice of a new appliance-p lematic for the Soviet government. In a collective state, the private square, nonsensical, irrational: whatever-was a choice nonethe home was, at best, a matter of housing; Nixon brought up the func­ and the habit of making them was a good working definition of tional, hard-edged worker‘s apartment he had seen at the Coliseum American way of life. The public virtues of democracy were wo by way of contrast with the single-family model house in Moscow, into the fabric of private life, into the brand new, 1959-modeltexh full of labor-saving devices and consumer comforts. The Russian and colors and shapes of the suburban kitchen. Pink porcelain, er Exhibition in New York showed rows of refrigerators as products of copper, or ”the Platinum Look-the cool billion-dollar look‘ state industries. At the American Exhibition in Moscow, appliances brushed aluminum and everyday elegance:style meant leisure, pl were contextualized, as part of somebody’s make-believe house. By ure, convenience, and the USA?* concentrating on the private life of the family-their kitchen, their On the left, elitism often takes the form of disdain for pop home, their new washer-the American Exhibition virtually denied culture and mass enjoyment combined with a purist preferencc the public claims of the state. It was this aspect of the show that led production over consumption. That, in essence, was Khrushch the Soviet press to wonder if Nixon had come to open “a national response to the American kitchen. It was also a fashionable attil exhibit of a great country” or a department store and led the Soviet among what Galbraith called ”the more censorious social levels intelligentsia to deride the glut of housewares betraying a single- America itself, where gadget had become a pejorative term for d minded “emphasis . . . on color, shape, comfort.” The washers and ble goods. “In such circles,” Galbraith noted shortly before home freezers were effective propaganda devices, as the throng of Kitchen Debate, ”shiny rumpus rooms, imaginative barbecue : enchanted visitors proved, but in ideoIogica1 terms, the American expensive television screens, and magnificent automobiles no lor show seemed casual, soft, personal, and flaccid. win acclaim.” To this list of suburban basics, he might have ad Khrushchev was utterly baffled by Nixon’s enthusiasm for product home appliances. “But American suburbia, in global terms, ma) redundancy, too. When confronted with the automatic washer and the the functional equivalent of what most peoples of the world se Vice President’s smarmy assurance that this was only one of many nowadays, to want,“ wrote a dissenting scholar in 1958. “For sul styles from which the American housewife could make her selection, bia” with its color TVs and matching washer-dryer sets, ”may be he argued for a single model, providing it worked. But Nixon wasn’t highest reach of civilized life. ..within the grasp of common hun interested in function, or rather, like the housewife he invoked, he ity.”49 trusted the machine to wash clothes (most of the time, at any rate). Common humanity as defined by the small, incremental detail Instead, he was interested in style as a manifestation or a symbol of daily life was the theme of exhibition also inch difference and in difference, multiplicity-the possibility of choice- in the American compound in Sokolniki Park. According to cur 280 Seen on TV Nixon in Moscow 2 Edward Steichen, the collection of photographs (originally assembled K. "Let's drink to the ladies!" in 1955for the Museum of Modern Art) was "a mirror of the universal N: "We can all drink to the la die^.''^' elements and emotions in the everydayness of life-. . . a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world." By present­ There were lots of American women attached to the Moscow Exhit ing images of home life drawn from many cultures, the show under­ tion in an official capacity: seven pretty girls at the Pepsi countt scored one subtext of the model kitchens: at the level of the family several bilingual home economists in the RCA kitchen, forty-od unit, political differences were meaningless, even dangerous abstrac­ fashion models, and twenty-eight guides. The models were a speci tions. A record-breaking success in New York and the five other cities case. After adverse reaction to racially integrated scenes in a Ne on its American circuit, the show had already toured Europe and Asia York runthrough and objections to some expensive garments "i under USIA auspices before its stop in Moscow. Dwight Macdonald being not representative of the American way of life," an amende dismissed The Family of Man as so much "high-falutin"' twaddle and fashion show in which clothes were shown in action at teen rock 't other critics found it repetitious, obvious, or politically naive, but the roll parties and patio barbecues proved very popular (although th collection struck a responsive chord in audiences everywhere. Except young women in the Bermudas and playdresses were regarded a for the Soviet journalist Victor Gorokhov, who wanted fewer sad entirely "too skinny"). But the women who were actually doing th pictures and more textual explication, the Russians loved it, too?' work of the Exposition were also expected to model "the type c In fact, the style of the show was particularly well suited to the clothes worn by everyday Americans." For the home economists, thi direct, personal confrontation between Nixon and Khrushchev. De­ meant pastel shirtwaists that could be washed and ironed in thei spite the genuine animosities evident in their serial conversation, it model kitchens. For the guides, it meant a choice of five on-dut was in the face-to-face mode of The Family of Mait that dCtente be­ costumes (with coordinated hats and gloves) also based on the shirt tween Moscow and Washington seemed most likely to occur. And if waist line, the uniform of the suburban housewife. In effect, then the pair could agree on nothing of diplomatic substance, they were whatever her profession, whatever her job at the Exhibition, thc both willing to admire a bathing beauty, pay deference to a housewife, American woman became an attribute of the kitchen. The mode and drink a toast to "the ladies" in the course of their discussion. In kitchen was also a model of appropriate gender roles.52 swimsuits, ballgowns, or aprons, women were the common denomi­ But just as the accomplished, Russian-speakingguides dressed likf nator, the human universal of the Kitchen Debate. When the day was housewives reflected a kind of double vision of women, so the kitchen over, when the posturing and fuming were all but done, Nixon and itself signaled changes in their social status. By the end of 1959 fully Khrushchev stood before the microphones on the darkened grounds 34 percent of the American workforce was made up of women, and of the Exhibition, glasses of California wine in hand. economists believed it was the addition of a second breadwinner that gave families the discretionary income to remodel their kitchens and replace their appliances. The very structure and contents of the room K: "We stand for peace [but] if you are not willing to elimi­ also hinted at a shift in the homemaker's routine. A kitchen laid out nate bases then I won't drink this toast." by a woman architect on the basis of suggestions voiced by house­ N: "He doesn't like American wine!" wives at a 1956 forum sponsored by the Federal Housing Administra­ K "I like American wine, not its policy." tion, for example, dissolved the existing open plan into a control N: "We'll talk about that later. Let's drink to talking, not center or island of major appliances entirely integrated with the rest fighting." of the ground floor. No longer a gendered space in any sense of the Nixon in Moscow 2 word, the kitchen became just another part of the family living room, dollops of increased leisure promised by ads for household apy the dining area, and the playroom. an~es.5~ By reducing the room to a few essential parts scattered across the As early as 1954, designers examining trends in kitchens saw floorplan, Margaret King Hunter’s radial kitchen gave architectural environment rife with contradictions:built-in appliances vs. the nr expression to women’s diversity of roles and to the concept of physi­ generation of portables; mammoth, showy models vs. the more mc cal freedom inherent in the smaller, portable appliances of the later est miniatures; quickie meals from packages vs. creeping gourmar 1950s. Although framed with a different purpose in mind, the open­ ism. But analysts at Interior Design also found a single, unifymg fad to-view model kitchens in Moscow, from which whole walls had been in the open kitchen layout ”which takes efficiency-and appliances removed to permit direct access to the appliances, represented this pretty much for granted and concentrates on social values. It is oper new ideal of multiplicity, dispersal, and personal freedom. When disintegrating into the rest of the house because it is an all-purpc Anastas Mikoyan, the ’s First Deputy Premier, visited the room, an elegant headquarters for all the things the housew United States in 1958, he professed great admiration for the pushbut­ chooses to get involved with. So what does she do,” the study cc ton appliances he was shown. “We have to free our housewives like tinued, ”but pick up and leave.”54The color of next year’s refrigerai you Americans!” he said. At Moscow in 1959, the shattered bounda­ was a fashion imponderable. The serious, discussable issue for t ries of the kitchen portended a freedom that went far beyond the future was the clash of housewife vs. appliance, or an emergi demand for home machinery that matched the consumer‘s new ser of self in both practicaland symbolic terms. If she was bent on leavi the kitchen, then a dishwasher that followed her into the dining roc and a floor polisher that did its job after she had gone made per6 sense. So did the kitcheniess kitchen, the cluster of burnished a tinted electronic gadgets, the room without walls where Nixon n Khrushchev in 1959. The American kitchens in Moscow-toda: kitchen and tomorrow’s-provided a working demonstration oj culture that defined freedom as the capacity to change and to choc and dramatized its choices in the pink-with-pushbuttons aesthetic everyday living.

The open-plan kitchen gradually merged into the total floorplan.