Book excerpt: These postwar discourses indexed anxiety about a series of well-noted economic, social, and geographic transformations reorganizing the post-World War Two United States, especially the rise of both economic and social forms of massification. This growing presence of the mass in postwar U.S. culture clashed with the rhetoric advanced by Cold War containment politics: with individualism deeply entrenched as the U.S. grounds for thinking subjectivity--as the individual constituted the economic (self-interested, choice-making actor), the political (autonomous, rational actor), and the ethical (self-conscious moral actor) subject--mass culture seemed to point toward the threats of Soviet communism, ideological conformism, and scientific determinism. The prevailing response to such anxiety was mythologization of the self-sufficient, autonomous, and rational individual.