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the mobility that had been denied to them during hard times.
Thus what began seemingly as a world of fantasy, a denial of the
Depression, was in fact a response to it, an effective antidote to it.
Perhaps the most far-reaching legacy of the Depression was the consumer
culture, the automotive culture, the suburbanized one-family house cul–
ture that followed the war. But this brought new problems in its wake .
With the decaying central cities, the traffic jams, the polluted environ–
ment, America discovered that, along with poverty, prosperity too had
its price. Even before the huge migrations to the Sunbelt and California,
the social critics of the fifties (like William H. Whyte) suggested that
America was becoming a much more rootless society. After the priva–
tions of depression and war came the stupefaction of affiuence, the bore–
dom and anomie of suburbia.
So in the end, the dream of mobility could turn into a terrible dis–
appointment for some who succeeded and others who were left behind,
and the Depression era, like the wartime, would come nostalgically to
seem more authentic, more genuine, a time when life seemed more real
and Americans lived much closer to the bone .
