Book Review

After the 1987 stock market crash, pundits labeled the 1980s the greedy decade and wondered how the idealistic baby boomers of the 1960s had transformed themselves into the materialistic moneygrubbers of the 1980s. Thomas Frank's answer is that, rather than having been co-opted by the system, 1960s youth had always been bound to consumerism even as they rebelled against conformity.

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Frank takes issue with histories that set up a binary opposition between the gray conformist 1950s and the liberating youth rebellion of 1960s. He argues that in two key industries, advertising and fashion, many creative individuals were keen to shake the shackles of conformity and had developed nascent critiques of mass society before the 1960s revolt. Frank reminds us that such a development should be no cause for surprise given that the 1950s saw works such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William H. Whyte Jr.'s The Organization Man (1956), and Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957). For many in business, conformity shackled creativity, which was a driving force of American capitalism. Frank points to the popularity of Douglas McGregor's managerial text, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), which criticized coercion and direction of workers, favoring instead self-motivation through satisfaction of higher-level ego.

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