During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production
of America's consumer culture was centralized in midtown Manhattan
to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United
States. Within a few square miles of skyscrapers were the
headquarters of networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of
book publishers and mass circulation magazines such as Time and
Life, numerous influential newspapers, and major advertising
agencies on Madison Avenue. Every day tens of thousands of writers,
editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other
white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content,
and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While
this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly
running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers
challenged the managers and executives who directed their labors.
In this definitive history, The Making of the American Creative
Class examines these workers and their industries throughout the
twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to
attract consumers' attention, their advertising expenditures
financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of
culture, which in turn provided employment for an increasing number
of clerical, technical, professional, and creative workers. The
book explores employees' efforts to improve their working
conditions by forming unions, experimenting with alternative media
and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative
patronage, and expanding their opportunities for creative autonomy.
As blacklisting and attacks on militant unions left them destroyed
or weakened, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and
broadcasting in the late twentieth century were constrained in
their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat
discrimination in the culture industries. At once a portrait of a
city and the national culture of consumer capitalism it has
produced, The Making of the American Creative Class is an
innovative narrative of modern American history that addresses
issues of earnings and status still experienced by today's culture
workers.
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