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In the 1950s there was tremendous pressure on Americans to conform to certain values and moral standards. The Second World War and the Great Depression left a whole nation shell-shocked; the meaning of ‘ordinary’ was unclear, but people yearned to find it out. During the height of the Cold War, any one who did not subscribe to these "American values" was often accused of being a communist. In his essay, "The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus," Godfrey Hodgson argues that this common beliefs and values that Americans held in the 1950s were in fact a "liberal consensus" that described America as a perfect society that worked and did not suffer from any major conflicts or problems. Young children, teenagers, and adults were bombarded with cultural and social messages reinforcing these views. They were told that America was free and good and the Soviet communists were evil. Many young Americans even came to believe that if there were problems lurking in American society they must be the result of communist infiltration. One minister, Jack Impe, even charged that Rock-n-Roll music was part of a communist conspiracy to undermine the values of America's youth. Many Americans in the 1950s unquestionably and naively believed in their government, their society, and their culture. Pleasantville, written, produced, and directed by Gary Ross, explores the moral values of democracy. The government of Pleasantville will do anything to avoid change, even going so far as burning books, banning music, and limiting artistic expression in an attempt to keep things “as pleasant as possible”. It is this attitude that hinders the townspeople’s potential to break free from the repressive confines of their society. The rigid controls that religious and political authority figures try to put on them run contrary to the meaning of democracy.
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