The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone
conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the
most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including
Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and
the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first
century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even
an "ism" left to challenge it. An All-Consuming Century is a rich
history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that
remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first
time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism.
By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in
which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new
meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale
ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the
introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man
making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in
selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self
service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for
spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance
halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism--with
reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the
counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made
Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and
offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The
conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of
self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism
of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and
communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates
Americans.
Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful
alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled
extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find
ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and
control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.
