How to Save the Middle Class

Today’s vision of the good life is rooted in twentieth-century ideals. It’s time to reinvent it

- MAX FAWCETT

IN 1939, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation commissioned a fifty-five-minute film about the Middletons, a fictional Indiana family who travel to the New York World’s Fair, where they are dazzled by the company’s futuristic vision of “a new Tomorrow.” It’s a consumer paradise that includes everything from television to a photoelectric bike called the Phantocycle to a towering voice-controlled robot named Elektro. The movie’s highlight is a staged dishwashing competition between “Mrs. Modern,” who is armed with a new Westinghouse dishwasher, and “Mrs. Drudge,” who works furiously at a sink. To no one’s surprise, the gleaming labor-saving device wins.

The contest was more than smart product placement. It presaged the postwar financial boom that ushered in the dramatic expansion of the middle class. Indeed, the ideals of prosperity and success that shape much of how we still understand the middle class can be traced largely to this period often referred to as the golden age of capitalism. From 1950 to the early 1970s, governments across the Western world managed to both build their economies and strengthen the social safety nets that underpinned those economies. Incomes rose, households grew wealthier, and values like thrift and sacrifice, which had guided previous generations, were replaced with indulgence as consumers coveted the ever-widening array of household items and goods that flooded the market. According to Frederick Elkin’s 1971 book,