Hearts and minds and dishwashers

Author: Jodi Larson Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 47 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge; pp. 407–413) Raw file: raw/chapters/larson-2018-hearts-minds-dishwashers.md

Summary

Larson's chapter argues that interior architecture — often "labeled a new discipline" — was in fact "the tool of choice in fighting for philosophical dominance in the Cold War": the design of home interiorities and domestic infrastructure was the medium through which the United States and the Soviet Union spent the late 1940s and 1950s competing for "the hearts and minds" of the world's populations. The chapter traces three registers of that competition: the exhibition campaigns (OMGUS's So Wohnt Amerika, Berlin 1949; America at Home, West Berlin 1950; We're Building a Better Life, 1952; the American National Exhibition, Moscow 1959), in which model homes, kitchens, and consumer goods were deployed as counter-propaganda "emphasizing living standards"; the civil-defense policies of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (formed 1951), which "militarize[d] the American home… under the guise of anti-war safety" through Operation Doorstep's mannequin families and the film The House in the Middle; and the "kitchen debate" itself — the informal Nixon–Khrushchev exchange of 1959 in the bright yellow kitchen of the "Splitnik" prefab house — read as "the climax of interior architecture's role in the Cold War." The chapter's terminus is disciplinary: the home interior, "both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appliances, was instrumental in the waging of the Cold War," and interior architecture "is still doing the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion through interiorities" — a "so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before."

Key Claims

The kitchen debate was a debate about interior architecture: "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" (kitchen-debate).
The disciplinary-status claim: "Interior architecture, often labeled a new discipline, was in fact the tool of choice in fighting for philosophical dominance in the Cold War" — the discipline predates its own academic recognition (historiography-of-the-interior, interior-architecture).
The lineage claim: "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). After World War II, however, design collaboration became design competition" (taylorism, frankfurt-kitchen).
The 1948 counter-propaganda program: 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'" (propaganda).
The Office of the Military Government in U.S. occupied Germany (OMGUS) planned So Wohnt Amerika (How America Lives), opening in Berlin in 1949: "eight scale models and 150 display panels featuring designs and photographs 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)" — European-derived modernism re-exported to Europe as American propaganda.
The weaponization thesis: "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" (soft-power).
America at Home (1950, West Berlin's annual German Industrial Exhibition, timed against a national election in East Berlin): "a prefabricated suburban home shipped from Minneapolis 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" (prefab-interior).
The state's own vocabulary: U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy called the exhibit "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."
The 1952 German Industrial Exhibition was explicitly calibrated for its audience: "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 German visitors." Its title, We're Building a Better Life, "echoed the East German productivity slogan of 'Produce More – Live Better'" — competing systems each claiming that their "political and economic system of household consumption and design was the right way to achieve a higher standard of living."
The persuasion thesis: "At some level, both industrial design and interior architecture were seen as a way to charm consumers into choosing which economic and political system to align with" (hearts-and-minds).
Civil defense went further than exhibitions: "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 American home and the families that dwelled in them under the guise of anti-war safety" (civil-defense).
Civil defense planner John Bradley 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?" — a "simplistic view of an atomic attack" that "paved the way for American homes to be judged and politicized as agents of patriotism and survival."
FCDA administrator Katherine Graham Howard "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 society" — a homeward-looking civil-defense strategy centered on the nuclear family's own home.
Operation Doorstep (1953, Nevada desert): "Ostensibly to test structures and food products in the event of nuclear exposure… 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" — housekeeping staged as survival behavior.
The FCDA film The House in the Middle put "the very homes these mannequin families lived in… on nuclear trial": "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" — the moral: modernization and tidiness as survival strategy.
The policy's moral formula: "The official government policy on the Cold War was clear: your home and how you live matters. Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism" (ideology).
The American National Exhibition (1959, Moscow's Sokolniki Park): "multiple home interiors, kitchens, and floor plans were shown"; an entrance pavilion with "large screens showing the abundant American way of life"; "50,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling consumer goods in what one historian called a 'combat of commodities.'"
"It was, however, kitchens that dominated the show": one RCA/Whirlpool kitchen with "labor-saving technology 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 finale: "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" — a ranch-style home "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."
The kitchen-centered gaze: "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's true genre: "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" — with no comprehensive transcription in existence.
The era's plausibility: "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 agriculture, 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."
The scale-inversion: "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" (Nixon conceding Soviet rocketry while claiming color television).
The gender gambit: "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 bringing his comments back to a dishwasher-to-dishwasher comparison… Khrushchev pointed out that the Soviet Union did not support a 'capitalist view of our women'" (gender-and-the-interior).
The applied-economics thesis: the leaders' "macroeconomics lesson was not about gadgets and comfort, per se, but used the 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 modern 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."
The chapter's core claim: "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" (consumerism, hearts-and-minds).
The double register of the Cold War interior: "The idea of the home interior, both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appliances, was instrumental in the waging of the Cold War."
The disciplinary terminus: "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… Interior architecture, 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."
The continuing claim: "Given the power that interior 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."
The present-day coda: "In the present, interior architecture is still doing the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion through interiorities. Important issues of building reuse, space conservation, and historic preservation are being addressed through a so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before" (interior-architecture, adaptive-reuse).
The historiographic caution (note 12): "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" — the debate's statistics as propaganda instruments.

Connections

Concepts: kitchen-debate (this chapter's central event-concept), hearts-and-minds (its master concept — the interior as the instrument of persuasion), soft-power (Castillo's frame via the chapter's exhibitions), propaganda (the exhibition program), civil-defense (the militarized home), taylorism (the Taylorism/Wohnkultur lineage), frankfurt-kitchen (the lineage's canonical product), cold-war (the theme page); kitchen (the room where the systems clashed), domestic-interior (the home interior as "an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods"), consumerism ("combat of commodities"; consumerism and applied economics), ideology ("Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism"), exhibitionary-complex (design exhibitions as state apparatus), gender-and-the-interior (the housewife as ideological battlefield), mechanization (labor-saving gadgets), machine-for-living (the prefab kitchen's infrastructure), prefab-interior (the Minneapolis prefab and Splitnik), politicizing-the-interior (the interior's political register, historically anticipated), historiography-of-the-interior (the "not an emerging discipline" thesis), interior-architecture (the discipline's geopolitical register), adaptive-reuse (the present-day register of the same persuasive work).

Authors: Jodi Larson; Gregory Marinic (editor). Cited in the notes without pages (see log): Greg Castillo (Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, 2010), Ruth Oldenzeil & Karin Zachmann (Cold War Kitchen, 2009), Laura McEnaney (Civil Defense Begins at Home, 2000), Stephen J. Whitfield (The Culture of the Cold War, 1996); named in the text: John McCloy, John Bradley, Katherine Graham Howard, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev.

Debates: power-and-space (the home as geopolitical weapon — the debate's soft-power position), spectacle-vs-function (consumer goods as spectacle-promise against functional provision), everyday-vs-iconic-architecture (the ordinary kitchen, not the monument, as the superpowers' chosen weapon — the everyday interior winning the strategic centrality the wiki's iconic cluster assigns to buildings).

Related source notes: Teston 2018 (the interior as "both spatial and political" — Larson supplies the historical proof that the interior's political power was state doctrine before the discipline theorized it); Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006 (the domestic-economy program whose planned kitchen Taylorism rationalizes and the Cold War politicizes); Lupton & Miller 1992/2006 (the continuous-kitchen infrastructure whose push-button form Splitnik showcased); Lawrence 1987/2006 (the fitted kitchen's mass-housing history — the domestic-technological base of the "modernized infrastructure" civil defense rewarded); Schneiderman 2018 (the prefab register: the Lustron's built-ins and Splitnik's appliance wall as the same machine-house program); Madigan & Munro 1996/2006 (the housekeeping judgment Larson's mannequins stage as civil defense); Marinic 2018 (the other consumerist interior — the icon's atrium — against Larson's kitchen: two eras of consumption's built politics); Stokes-Rees 2018 (the exhibitionary complex — Larson's expositions are its Cold War, state-propaganda form); Chase 1991 (consumerist architecture's American genealogy, whose domestic-political prehistory Larson supplies); Hadjiyanni 2018 (the other geopolitical interior register: interiors in a world of movement vs interiors as movement's weapon).

Direct Quotes

(The wiki's OCR copy carries no page numbers; the chapter spans pp. 407–413 of the Reader. Quotes are located by section. Quoted phrases inside the chapter — from Castillo, McEnaney, and the debate transcript — are marked with their source where the chapter gives one.)

"In 1959, leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, two world superpowers 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 policies and techno-politics of … the kitchen." (opening)

"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 philosophical 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."

"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). After World War II, however, 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.'"

"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."

"The resulting home, complete with carport, embodied the American promise that citizens benefitted more by supporting innovations than by pushing against them."

"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.'"

"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 German visitors."

"Each of these optimistic titles strove to convince the public 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 political system to align with."

"Immediately, this organization began to militarize the American 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?' This simplistic view of an atomic attack paved the way for American homes to be judged and politicized as agents of patriotism and survival."

"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."

"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." (The House in the Middle)

"The official government policy on the Cold War was clear: your home and how you live matters. Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism."

"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." (Figure 47.1 caption)

"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."

"Then came 50,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling consumer goods in what one historian called a 'combat of commodities.' It was, however, kitchens that dominated the show."

"One RCA/Whirlpool kitchen was populated by labor-saving technology and push-button ease, including a floor-cleaning robot and little need for the cook to even rise from a chair."

"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."

"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."

"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 agriculture, 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."

"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." (Nixon, quoted)

"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."

"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 bringing his comments back to a dishwasher-to-dishwasher comparison."

"Khrushchev pointed out that the Soviet Union did not support a 'capitalist view of our women.'"

"The subsequent macroeconomics lesson was not about gadgets and comfort, per se, but used the 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 modern 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."

"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."

"The idea of the home interior, both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appliances, 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 architecture, 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 interior 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 architecture is still doing the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion through interiorities. Important issues of building reuse, space conservation, and historic preservation are being addressed through a so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before."

"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 numbers 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." (note 12)

Open Questions

The chapter's sources (Castillo, Oldenzeil & Zachmann, McEnaney) carry the deep archive the chapter summarizes. Which of the three exhibitions registers — display-panel exposition (1949), built prefab demonstration (1950), East-German-targeted unified display (1952) — proved most effective as persuasion, and is there an exhibition design history that measures this?
The chapter names the kitchen "the exact right place" for the systems debate because of contemporary food politics (agriculture, airlifts, price controls). Would the debate's staging survive without that food-political context — or is the kitchen's geopolitical centrality historically contingent rather than structural?
If "Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism" (FCDA) and simultaneously as prosperity (State Department), did the two campaigns conflict — a home judged for its blast-survival tidiness and a home judged for its labor-saving abundance make different demands on the same housewife?
The chapter claims interior architecture "has been down this road before" — is the discipline's contemporary persuasive work (building reuse, conservation, preservation) a continuation of hearts-and-minds politics, and if so, whose hearts and minds, and for which system?
No comprehensive transcription of the kitchen debate exists (the chapter's own caveat). What does the debate's historiography — "taught in history courses, written about by scholars" — rest on, and how would an interior-architectural reading of the surviving fragments change it?
The mannequin families of Operation Doorstage (Figure 47.1) "did not adhere to FDCA guidelines" and were punished in the photographs "in a jumble of parts" — what does it mean that the state's model occupant was never a person at all, and that the unpatriotic home was a mess rather than an ideology?