An all-consuming century: why commercialism won in modern America

333 Pages·2000·1.27 MB·English

by  Gary S. Cross

An All-Consuming Century

GARY CROSS
An All-Consuming Century
Why Commercialism Won
in Modern America
C
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2000Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frontispiece:This car of 1939promised everything new, from an automatic transmission and
a plastic dashboard to streamlining at its best, “airflow styling” (Collier’s,Oct. 22, 1938,
p. 30).
Cross, Gary S.
An all-consuming century : why commercialism won in modern America / Gary
Cross.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0–231–11312–9(cloth)
ISBN 0–231–11313–7(paper)
1. Consumer protection—United States. 2. Consumers—United States. I. Title.
HC110.C6C762000
306.3(cid:2)0973(cid:2)0904—dc21 99–087282
I
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Lisa Hamm
c 109876543
p 10987654321

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Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
CHAPTER 1
The Irony of the Century 1
CHAPTER 2
Setting the Course, 1900–1930 17
CHAPTER 3
Promises of More, 1930–1960 67
CHAPTER 4
Coping with Abundance 111
CHAPTER 5
A New Consumerism, 1960–1980 145
CHAPTER 6
Markets Triumphant, 1980–2000 193
CHAPTER 7
An Ambiguous Legacy 233
Notes 253
Index 307

Preface
T o write a book about consumer goods in the twentieth-century
United States is to write about a lot. Inevitably, this book has a per-
sonal perspective that focuses an otherwise immense topic. It
probably reflects more than I might wish of my lifestyle as a male
professional with a family living in a small college town far from the coasts.
I certainly come to this topic as a historian who has devoted most of his
professional life to the study of the first half of that century and whose per-
sonal life has straddled the second half. I have long believed that an un-
derstanding of the twentieth century must include, but go beyond, the
world wars and their impact. In years ahead, we may conclude that one of
the most important facts of the century is the astonishing creation of pri-
vate, yet relatively widely distributed, wealth in the Western world. Past
ages have built monuments to empire and the fortuitous blessings of na-
ture, serving mostly tiny elites and surviving today as pyramids, forums,
cathedrals, and palaces. The twentieth century in the United States has
produced very different things in quantities and varieties never before
seen. This has been an age of “auto-mobility,” dispersed family houses
with electronic access to the world, and rapid-changing fashion in cloth-
ing, entertainment, and much else. This private, widespread, and ephem-
eral commodity culture has changed nearly everything in everyday life,
especially how people relate to nature and to one another. Its transforma-
tions have been so frequent and common that we find this world of fleet-
ing things natural. We think that this particular mode of affluence is in-
evitable. And yet we have hardly begun to understand its impact on human
PREFACE
personality and society. A history of that consumer culture can help us all
understand what a new and challenging world we have created for our-
selves and our descendants.
My interest in consumption is rooted in a fascination with the concrete
interrelationships between people and things. That means not only how
technology and business organization have affected society and culture but
also how family, ethnicity, and class have shaped material life. Like most
historians, I have mostly embedded my “theory” in the concrete story of
why and when, for example, cars became fashion statements and candy
bars replaced ethnic foods for many immigrants. Still, I have been influ-
enced by those sociologists and anthropologists who understand goods
and their uses as means of creating personal identity and social participa-
tion. I am thinking of a wide range of writers, from the early twentieth-
century German social theorist Georg Simmel to the 1970s American cul-
tural anthropologist Mary Douglas. I have come to accept that the act of
consumption is far more interesting and important than once commonly
assumed by intellectual critics of consumer culture. It cannot be reduced
to economic manipulation or social emulation. Economists and business
pundits who see consuming as merely the personal inclination and desire
of shoppers also miss the point. Modern people, and especially Americans,
communicate to others and to themselves through their goods. The con-
sumer society has not necessarily produced passive people alienated from
their true selves, as regularly assumed by traditional critics. Indeed, a cen-
tral thesis of this book is that consumerism—the understanding of self in
society through goods—has provided, on balance, a more dynamic and
popular, while less destructive, ideology of public life than most political
belief systems in the twentieth century.
Yet unlike others who have abandoned or rejected the traditional cri-
tique, I still find consumer culture problematic. My earlier work drifted to-
ward its ragged edge, in explorations of alternatives to consumerism (re-
duced work time) and the ambiguous impact of goods on personal
relationships (especially toys on parents and children). This approach re-
flects my age and personal response to having been a teenager and youth
in the 1960s and 1970s. When I was about fifteen years old, I found on my
mother’s bookshelf copies of Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers and The
Waste Makers, which resonated with my frustration at the conformity and
materialism that seemed to engulf the early 1960s. Five years later, I pored
over the dense prose of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and,
judging from my nearly indecipherable comments in the margins, found
viii
PREFACE
this critique of consumer culture meaningful. And like many from my gen-
eration, I read Huxley’s Brave New Worldand other futuristic indictments
of a manipulated, passive society of consumption. Only later did I learn to
appreciate the classics of the environmental and consumer-rights move-
ments. Despite the collapse of the counterculture and the ebbing influence
of the environmental movement in the 1970s, I retained an emotional and
intellectual attachment to this critical tradition. Yet it was impossible to live
through the 1980s and 1990s and not see both the failure of the jeremiad
tradition and the real appeal of consumption among millions of seemingly
rational Americans.
In part, this book is an attempt to sort through and reassess why that
tradition failed and what, if anything, can or should be salvaged from it. At
the beginning of the new century the problem remains: how to sort out
the promises and problems of consumer culture. This approach is not the
only approach. It reflects the age and experience of one author. Readers of
a different age and experience will, I hope, find something of their world
and memory in it.
ix