Pleasantville

In the 1950s there was tremendous pressure on Americans to conform to certain values and moral standards. The Second World War and the Great Depression left a whole nation shell-shocked; the meaning of ‘ordinary’ was unclear, but people yearned to find it out. During the height of the Cold War, any one who did not subscribe to these "American values" was often accused of being a communist. In his essay, "The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus," Godfrey Hodgson argues that this common beliefs and values that Americans held in the 1950s were in fact a "liberal consensus" that described America as a perfect society that worked and did not suffer from any major conflicts or problems.

Young children, teenagers, and adults were bombarded with cultural and social messages reinforcing these views. They were told that America was free and good and the Soviet communists were evil. Many young Americans even came to believe that if there were problems lurking in American soci...