Over time and in context
Jodi Larson Hearts and minds and dishwashers

Chapter 47

Hearts and minds and dishwashers Jodi Larson

In 1959, leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, two world super- powers locked in a Cold War, held an informal debate. The debate is taught in history courses, written about by scholars, and was about the global poli- cies and techno-politics of . . . the kitchen. Dubbed the “kitchen debate,” this friendly pop-culture battle on the world stage was the culmination of decades of machinations that used the discipline of interior architecture as a means to debate not just modern living, but life as we know it. Interior architecture, often labeled a new discipline, was in fact the tool of choice in fighting for philosoph- ical dominance in the Cold War. While design as a whole has always been key to social and political maneuvers, the post-WWII years focused specifically on the design of home interiorities and the layout of space and infrastructure in the domestic arena. It was interior architecture that was chosen as the way to the hearts and minds of Cold War participants. The “kitchen debate” did not became an iconic showdown of world power on its own. Reshaping the home and its interiors had been a constant theme throughout the twentieth century, with American Taylorism meeting German Wohnkultur (dwelling culture), and produced such results as the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926).1 After World War II, how- ever, design collaboration became design competition.

By 1948, while Germany still struggled with consumption at the most basic levels of food and shelter, the U.S. State Department responded to Soviet propaganda in Germany against the “American way of life” with some counter propaganda of its own, emphasizing living standards and suggesting that Europe “try it our way.” The Office of the Military Government in U.S. occupied Germany (OMGUS) busied itself with the planning of a design exposition of American hous- ing trends. Opening in 1949 in Berlin, So Wohnt Amerika (How America Lives) presented eight scale models and 150 display panels featuring designs and pho- tographs from architecture schools at Harvard, Columbia, and MIT (featuring, of course, designers and architects who had been heavily influenced by European design and institutions such as the Bauhaus).2 As a series of Cold War crises erupted in the late 1940s around the Marshall Plan and the European Recovery Program, how America lived became a weapon in the war of domestic space.

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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Berlin was again the ground zero of these consumption wars in 1950 as the America at Home exhibit debuted at West Berlin’s annual German Indus- trial Exhibition (and just as a national election was happening in East Berlin). Among other exhibits, a prefabricated suburban home shipped from Minne- apolis was constructed by carpenters working around the clock. The resulting home, complete with carport, embodied the American promise that citizens benefitted more by supporting innovations than by pushing against them. John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, responded to the exhibit by calling it a living monument. An internal government memo praised it as a “patriotic reaffirmation of our way of life” and a symbol of a “struggle as vital to the peace and prosperity of the world as any military campaign in history.”3

A similar exhibition a few years later, at the 1952 German Indus- trial Exhibition, again pitted two political systems against one another by using interiorities. U.S. State Department documents clearly delineate “consumer goods designed to raise the standard of living” as the primary directive of the unified display in order to have the maximum effect on the average East Ger- man visitors. The title chosen for that year was We’re Building a Better Life. This optimistic statement echoed the East German productivity slogan of “Produce More – Live Better.”4 Each of these optimistic titles strove to convince the pub- lic that a certain political and economic system of household consumption and design was the right way to achieve a higher standard of living.

At some level, both industrial design and interior architecture were seen as a way to charm consumers into choosing which economic and politi- cal system to align with. Governmental policy, however, went even farther. In the United States, interior architecture was used to set official civil defense policy during the early decades of the Cold War. In 1951, the U.S government officially formed the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in response to the Atomic Age. Immediately, this organization began to militarize the Amer- ican home and the families that dwelled in them under the guise of anti-war safety. Civil defense planner John Bradley wrote a memo to his superiors that equated the possibility of a nuclear bombing to recent winter storms, asking “how self-sufficient would the average urban home be following as atomic attack?”5 This simplistic view of an atomic attack paved the way for American homes to be judged and politicized as agents of patriotism and survival.

On that front, FCDA administrator Katherine Graham Howard also espoused a homeward-looking strategy and helped to develop official policy that centered on the nuclear family’s own home and actions to survive a bomb- ing attack. She helped to draft policy that, by 1954, led Americans to believe that keeping their own homes safe and then returning to those homes within a few days of a blast was the most effective way to maintain lives and soci- ety.6 Perhaps the most repeated images of this campaign were those of the 1953 Operation Doorstep. Ostensibly to test structures and food products in the event of nuclear exposure, “Operation Doorstep” staged, in the Nevada desert, a family of mannequins in a variety of interior rooms, interacting with interior space in a variety of activities. Mannequin families that did not adhere to FDCA guidelines appeared in the resultant photographs in a jumble of parts amid the chaos of a messy home (Figure 47.1). Going further, the FDCA created a film titled The House in the Middle, in which the very homes these manne- quin families lived in were put on nuclear trial. The three houses were filmed

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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as a nuclear bomb test was carried out in the nearby desert (Figure 47.2). The house in the middle survived the blast (or was the least damaged). The houses not in the middle were shown to be unmodern and ill-kept by their occupants, positing that a modern (and neatly kept) home with modernized infrastructure could save lives.7 The official government policy on the Cold War was clear: your home and how you live matters. Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism.

With a decade and a half of exhibition and policy, it is no surprise, then, that the meeting between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon that became forever known as the “kitchen debate” became the iconic flashpoint that thrust interior architecture further onto the world stage. Each country represented a large swatch of the world and each evangelized its economic model and political backing of that model as an essential ingredient to the good life. Whether that good life was borne from

Figure 47.1 In Operation Doorstep, a family of mannequins helps to demonstrate how some behaviors and housekeeping practices contributed to civil defense and survival rates in the face of an atomic attack. At the top of the photo, dinner party guests do not seek shelter. Below, the party’s unpatriotic behavior leaves the scene a shambles. 1953. Image credit: author

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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socialism or capitalism came down to an informal series of comments in the kitchen of a model home. The “kitchen debate” wasn’t necessarily planned as a debate at all. The 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park was another of the design exhibitions that had become an annual showing in countries with a large stake in the Cold War. In this iteration, multiple home interiors, kitchens, and floor plans were shown. In Sokolniki Park’s suburban setting, the exterior context was set for a much anticipated six-week extrava- ganza of cultural exchange. Soviet visitors were ushered into an entrance pavil- ion with large screens showing the abundant American way of life. Then came 50,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling consumer goods in what one historian called a “combat of commodities.”8 It was, however, kitchens that dominated the show. One RCA/Whirlpool kitchen was populated by labor-saving technol- ogy and push-button ease, including a floor-cleaning robot and little need for the cook to even rise from a chair. Another showcased convenience foods and demonstrations of ready-made cake mixes with representatives from large American food conglomerates. An up-to-date apartment interior provided a rare glimpse into a non-suburban interior. The big finish, however, was an entire prefabricated suburban home bifurcated with a ten-foot aisle through which millions of visitors would pass in a mass consumption of, well, consumption.

The prefab home with its middle passage was dubbed “Splitnik” in reference to the Soviet satellite Sputnik that had pushed the Soviet Union to the forefront of the space race. The ranch-style home was replete with the American infrastructure that marked the middle class: a dishwasher, a combination freezer and refrigerator, a garbage disposal, and a countertop cooking range. Very little is ever mentioned of the other rooms of “Splitnik”; it is the kitchen that is dissected. It is into this sunny, bright yellow kitchen that Vice President Nixon pulled Premier Khrushchev close and said, “I want to show you this kitchen.” The exchange that followed was the climax of interior architecture’s role in the Cold War, and was often dubbed a turning point in the Cold War.

Figure 47 2 This film still from The House in the Middle is the shame- ful house (not in the middle) that was ill-kept and unmodernized. The message was clear that a family that did not subscribe to the trappings of modernism and of modern life was an unpa- triotic threat to the safety of all. Later in the film, a nuclear test blast set this supposed eyesore on fire whereas the house in the middle, well-kept and modern, survived with minor fire damage. 1954. Produced by the Federal Civil Defense Adminis- tration & the National Clean-Up-Paint-Up-Fix-up Bureau. U.S. Archives.

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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The exchange, despite the name history has given it, was hardly a debate. It was a series of remarks, perhaps even a series of barbs and witty rejoinders. It was entirely informal except for the presence of a horde of media and interpreters. Taking place during a brief thaw in the Cold War, the lost-in-translation humor and jibes lend the entire affair an awkward joking air. While no comprehensive transcription exists of all that was said between the two leaders (audio and television cameras did not record every part of the mobile exchange), the discussion of the interiorities of Splitnik and all it entailed was to offer, at several points, strong connections between domestic home infrastructure and world conflict. To a modern scholar, the way in which food and domestic labor was connected to the home’s interiors and then to world peace seems surreal. At the time, however, when the food politics of agricul- ture, airlifts, and post-WWII price control of food and farm commodities were still hot topics, the kitchen was, perhaps, the exact right place to exchange ideas on the interiorities of two rivaling political and economic ways of living and governing.9

Khrushchev turned the United States’ ban on shipping strategic goods to the Soviet Union into a barb about the United States inability to trade now that it has grown older (and presumably lazier about such things). Khrush- chev called for the U.S. to seek some trade “invigoration.” Consumer goods and interior amenities were quickly turned into a political gambit. Nixon later tried to compare the two countries’ technological advancement, conceding the Soviet domination of the Space Race by saying,

There may be some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example in the development of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space; there may be some instances in which we are ahead of you – in color television, for instance.10

The almost hilarious comparison of color TV to rocketry hammers home the idea that consumer goods and the home interiorities in which they were couched were viewed as equally important to the cold-warring nations.

Throughout the stilted staccato exchange in the bright yellow prefab kitchen, each leader attempted periodically to steer conversation to lighter top- ics or more serious topics in turn, depending on how ready or willing they were to speak extemporaneously in a given area. Nixon’s invitation to see a typical “California” kitchen (his home state) seemed to hover on the fence of seri- ous. On the surface, Nixon wanted to point out that labor-saving devices (mere “gadgets” according to Khrushchev) had become a standard, built-in facet of the average home’s infrastructure. Taking it a step further, Nixon then wanted to highlight the role that these so-called gadgets held in liberating the housewife from home-slavery. Khrushchev wasted no time in refuting that idea and bring- ing his comments back to a dishwasher-to-dishwasher comparison.

The discussion of gadgetry, then, quickly morphed into an applied example of economic models using the typical home as a starting point. Khrushchev pointed out that “we have such things” when Nixon insisted that the built-in technology was a highlight. Khrushchev pointed out that the Soviet Union did not support a “capitalist view of our women.”11 The subsequent mac- roeconomics lesson was not about gadgets and comfort, per se, but used the

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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home’s interiorities as a starting point for a detailed comparison of income, personal choice, quality of life, and consumerism, noting workers’ salaries, industrialization, and how all of these facets were different or similar under capitalism and socialism. As the two men leaned over the exhibit rail of a mod- ern kitchen of tomorrow, they were in fact speaking frankly about the actual results of each grandiose economic model and how it would trickle down into the dishwashers and bedrooms of an average family.12

This, in short, is the meat of the “kitchen debate.” It was never really about consumer goods at all, but instead about the economic systems that governed and manipulated the acquisition of those consumer goods. It also emphasized that the home and its interiorities were at the heart of every discussion about the superiority of either of these systems. In the “kitchen debate,” the world finally saw the top leadership of the great nations discussing their lives and their homes. The idea of the home interior, both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appli- ances, was instrumental in the waging of the Cold War.

Interior architecture is often touted as an emerging discipline, but in a sense it has been at the forefront of scholarly debates throughout at least the twentieth century. In the early decades of the Cold War, interiorities became the best-used and most often deployed tool for both explaining and waging the Cold War through consumerism and applied economics. Interior architec- ture, before being recognized as a discrete scholarship, was responsible for the grunt work of winning the hearts and minds of the people in a battle of global politics that affected much of the life we live today. Given the power that inte- rior architecture wields in everyday life, it has been instrumental in familiarizing people with political and economic strategies and in swaying public opinion. In the Cold War, this meant that home infrastructure was the linchpin of whether free-choice capitalism or a more state-controlled home design system resulted in a better quality of life – and a better nation. In the present, interior architec- ture is still doing the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion through interiorities. Important issues of building reuse, space conservation, and his- toric preservation are being addressed through a so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before.

Notes 1 Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 9.

2 Ruth Oldenzeil and Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and Euro-

pean Users (Cambridge, MA: Mass. Institute of Technology, 2009), p. 38.

3 Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front, p. 26.

4 Ibid., p. 61.

5 Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 11.

6 Ibid., p. 4, 48.

7 Ibid., p. 85.

8 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity Press, 1996).

9 The political importance of agriculture and food came to a head just five years later as the Soviet

Union’s crop productions fell short and the U.S.S.R. was forced to ask permission to buy Ameri-

can grain.

Marinic, G. (Ed.). (2018). The interior architecture theory reader. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:18:46.

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10 “The Two Worlds – a Day Long Debate”, New York Times, 25 July 1959.

11 Ibid.

12 Throughout the debate, both leaders had occasion to call out the other on exactly what was

meant by “average” when speaking of the average family and an average income. Actual num-

bers were bandied about with several examples, but it can be assumed that the actual figures

that each used were slightly blurred in the spirit of propaganda, and each leader seemed to take

the other’s figures with a grain of salt.

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