History Questions 1865-1945
Consumerism
Consumerism in American studies typically connotes a relationship between industrial or modern systems of marketing, on the one hand, and the consumption of goods and the rise of mass culture, on the other. Although consumerism may be used in the political sense to denote a social movement and the policy of monitoring products and services in the interest of buyers, it refers in American studies to the cultural web of shoppers, manufacturers, sellers, and advertisers, and the ways in which their social visions, material environments, and models of action enter into everyday life and expressive forms such as architecture, literature, and art. The term consumer culture is frequently used in American studies to address such concerns and to emphasize the influence of institutions and behaviors associated with mass consumption. Acknowledging a historic shift from a preindustrial producer society to a consumer society, cultural approaches interpret ways that craftlike skills are applied to shopping, display, and marketing viewed as learned experiences that form cultural traditions, rituals, and communities. In relation to this societal shift consumership can be used to suggest buyers' distinctive orientations. The implication of this focus on mass culture is that the wide economic system of consumption can be transnational while cultural forms of consumership can display national as well as regional characteristics. Further, the system of consumption is central to the material reproduction of social identities, relationships, and experiences. Several areas of concern are apparent in approaches to consumer culture within American studies:
history and material change
control and the rhetoric of persuasion
meanings, expressions, and values.
History and Material Change
Consumer culture emerged out of the mercantile, colonial system of exploiting the Americas for raw material that was manufactured into finished goods in Europe. The argument proceeds that settlers therefore became reliant on consuming goods from abroad, and conflicts arose between colonizers and colonists for control of the production and flow of goods. A class structure emerged with the feature of a new American middle class of merchants brokering a consumer system that allowed growth of local markets. Pressures to expand manufactures and to build a transportation network of canals and roads came at least in part from the call for ready-made goods that would facilitate easy movement into the American frontier.
Although the extent of consumership during the colonial period and its influence on emerging national and regional societies has received attention from scholars, the emphasis in assessing consumer culture has been on the coincident rise of industrialism and mass culture during the latter part of the nineteenth century. During that time social and material environments changed in response to consumer demands caused by a shift from a producer to an industrial economy. Industrial wage earners relied on consumer goods and services for subsistence. From the secure but limited range of local markets and elite consumers, business imagined the growth and profits made possible by coast-to-coast distribution via mass transportation of ready-made, nonessential goods to the ordinary consumer in the hinterlands. These changes involved risks, for they demanded speculation on future orders, which meant possible overproduction and loss. Many Americans needed advice and reorientation—“ object lessons,” as they were called in the rhetoric of the day—in the new institutions of advertising, department stores, metropolitan newspapers, photography, installment plans, and mail-order catalogs. New figures also arose—“drummers” promoting special brands, “admen” specializing in rhetoric of persuasion, department store “moguls” exerting public influence and developing name recognition, “counter girls” offering hospitable receptions for shoppers, and “designers” creating shop windows and interior displays.
Into the twentieth century consumer culture advanced. The social and material changes it inspired, some distinctive to the United States and others cutting across modern industrial nation-states, raised issues for exploration in American studies, such as the relationship of department stores to the expansion of urbanization, as well as the growth of fast-food establishments along the routes of first railroad and later highway travel. Other material changes that illustrate social and cultural shifts resulting from growing consumerism include: spaces in the family home to store and display accumulated goods; the desire for souvenirs and trinkets to savor the experience of travel and special events; the reorientation of public institutions such as galleries and museums toward “collectible” goods; the rise of “collecting” badges and pins in youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts; the evolution of mail-order and brand-name strategies in the age of the Internet; and construction of total consumer environments with connected communities in the forms of malls, centers, and expositions.
Control and the Rhetoric of Persuasion
An issue of debate is whether the spread of consumer culture was in the best interests of Americans. How were the masses convinced to embrace the system, especially during economically unstable periods of the 1890s and 1930s? A theory of cultural hegemony holds that elites used such popular venues as world's fairs, pageants, and museums to persuade an uneasy populace that the future of progress through industrial growth and ease of life in “labor-saving” consumer goods outweighed the loss of intimacy, security, and community. Advertising, packaging, and exhibiting of commodities, therefore, became essential to conveying a persuasive rhetoric of future abundance; luxuries appeared accessible to the masses, changing fashion became desirable for everyday life, and household goods became symbols of achievement. Although promising prosperity, critics argue that these features of consumer culture created more inequities of class, race, and ethnicity. They point to a “therapeutic” rhetoric in marketing that caused insecurities about individuals' status and worth in order to generate demand for products that could help them conform to popular standards of cleanliness, appearance, and behavior.
The rhetoric of persuasion could translate into a competitive system generating increased consumption in exchange for social status. At the end of the nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to identify the rise of a new, upwardly aspiring group he dubbed the leisure class. By this class's ability to display goods, particularly those that required excess labor to maintain, their leisure was conveyed to an envious public. The new fashion of a clean-shaven face, he mused, evidenced the ample time that a man could spare for the unnecessary chore, and his ability to afford the many accessories needed for the task. The model of conspicuous consumption created an ideal of fashion for others to follow. The model designated a hierarchy from the leisure class downward; those below would strive toward the position and display of wealth demonstrated by the leisure class, which because of its vested interests would profit further from expanding consumption.
Although cultural hegemony theory emphasizes the hidden exertion of influence by elites, buyers can also exert power to shape consumer culture and, occasionally, social structure. Boycotts during the civil rights movement and consumer protection movements utilized purchasing power to effect change. Daniel Boorstin in his popular histories of America extended this argument by citing consumer culture as a prime democratizing and nationalizing force in industrial America. In addition to creating national “brands” recognizable and accessible to all, consumerism encouraged the rise of what Boorstin called “consumption communities” outside of place, whose overlapping interests, connected by shared tastes and goods, clustered Americans into multiple overlapping social networks that diversified the American social landscape and therefore prevented the tyranny of large special interests. The rise of an elastic middle class, encouragement of innovation and invention for a mass-consumer market, affordability of fashionable goods for the masses, and use of consumer power as entrance into the national arena by immigrants, women, and minorities were, for him, evidence of a distinctively American version of mass consumerism with the result of democratization. Such consumer institutions as credit cards, rural free delivery, and money-back guarantees that developed in the United States were facilitated by American conditions of rapid economic expansion and social mobility over a wide expanse of land. The expectation of a democratic ethos in consumer culture was implicit in the revelations and subsequent outcry during the 1990s over Asian “sweatshops” using child labor to create consumer goods for an American market, particularly when those goods were represented by the all-American figure of a television talk-show host.
Meanings, Expressions, and Values
Beyond the development of consumer institutions is the question of how consumer experiences are interpreted by and for the public in cultural expressions. In what ways do aesthetic and value systems related to consumerism become embedded in art, architecture, literature, and folklore? Children's humor, in the form of parodies of jingles and slogans, commonly refer to product advertising. Often the parodies critically comment on the control exerted by adults over children, or they use consumer symbols to mark their worldly awareness of popular culture as a stage beyond the expression of childhood fantasy in “innocent” rhymes and narratives. Among the verses entering American oral tradition, for example, was “McDonald's is your kind of place/Hamburgers in your face/French fries up your nose/Two pickles up your nose/Ketchup running down your back/I want my money back/Before I have a heart attack.” In folklore as in literature, consumerism is often related to questions of the moral value or sentiment in acquisitiveness, the temptation of material appearances, and the depth of emotion possible through mere material things. Theodore Dreiser's central character in Sister Carrie (1900) finds the “lure of the material” as she wanders around a Chicago department store, and the prose used to describe it reflects the realistic attention to detail characteristic of an industrial, consumer age. The pivotal theme of Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, a best-seller of 1896, is the downfall of a Methodist minister who succumbs to various worldly temptations. The name Theron Ware is a clue to the theme of consumption in the novel (Theron is usually linked to an ancient tyrant; Ware suggests salable, often manufactured, goods). Imitating Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle,” Bradford Peck's Percy Brantford, in the utopian novel The World a Department Store (1900), falls asleep and wakes up years later to encounter a world where all productive activities, even cooking, are ordered out. In a utopian landscape based on the layout of a department store, services are paid for and regulated by a credit system.
In addition to novels, comics, and films emphasizing the theme of the “lure of the material,” cultural forms arise for interpretation that are geared toward a consumer model. It is possible to see the rise of the novel as the preferred literary form in America, replacing poetry, as evidence of consumer culture. Many books became available in collectible sets, including Horatio Alger stories and Nancy Drew mysteries, that repeated themes in prescribed formats. The formulaic “dime novels” of the nineteenth century, often featuring Western dramas, were popular, disposable sources of entertainment, as were the comic books of the twentieth century. With books becoming artifacts of consumption, consumer goods were expected to be predictable, reliable, and disposable.
In American holiday celebrations, consumer spending as a form of emotional exchange became predominant. While American consumer culture promised a perfection of design and taste to inspire all Americans, it was the rough-hewn spirit of preindustrial America, the “old-fashioned value,” that still suggested human depth and sentimental meaning. The depth came from a feeling of rooted community and compassion associated with an older system of exchange. The surface quality of consumer goods expanded the form and variety of community, of belonging to a mass society, while at the same time flattering the self of the person who owned the goods.
Having read and interpreted various texts on consumerism, American studies scholars ultimately posed the question of whether the modern everyday role of “consumer” meant being an active participant or a passive spectator in the production of culture. Scholars explored the theme of American materialism in the global triumph of American consumerism; and American studies became an international concern, following the exportation of cultural products to other countries. In a variety of settings, they question the meanings of goods as values and structures in the ways in which they have been consumed and adapted.
