. vulnerable. The self-contained home held out the promise of security in an insecure world. It also offered a vision of abundance and fulfillment. . . . The young postwar Americans were homeward bound (3).
The photograph, then, provides a summary snapshot of the ambivalent position of the American family in the midst of the Cold War. It is composed of five people who are clean, healthy, strong, with provisions and conveniences, well-protected, and yet appearing strangely unhappy, or at least anxious. The war had ended sixteen years before the photograph was taken, but that hot war had resulted in a Cold War, in which the two major superpowers---the United States and the Soviet Union---confronted one another over a stockpile of nuclear weapons, both seeking to dominate the world ideologically and militarily. At the center of this confrontation, from the American perspective, was the nuclear family, a symbol of all things dear to the American way of life, the American Dream, and, at the same time, all things threatened by that confrontation. Thus, the photograph reflects both abundance and anxiety, both togetherness and the unspoken but hugely present threat to that togetherness in the Bomb which the shelter was created to protect against.
The family itself was seen as a kind of reward Americans gave themselves for the struggle and victory of World War II, and a symbolic wall built to keep out the insecurities created by the horrible war and by the Cold War which ensued. Marriage and birth rates climbed after the war, and divorce rates dropped. Although many studies conclude that the rise in marriage and parenthood in the United States after the war was "the result of a return to peace and prosperity," or a desire to recover traditional values, but May argues that such a conclusion is inadequate.
The legendary family of the 1950s, complete with appliances, station wagons, backyard barbecues, and tricycles scattered on the sid...