Preface

o write a book about consumer goods in the twentieth-century

United States is to write about a lot. Inevitably, this book has a personal 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 personal life has straddled the second half. I have long believed that an understanding 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 private, yet relatively widely distributed, wealth in the Western world. Past
ages have built monuments to empire and the fortuitous blessings of nature, 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 clothing, entertainment, and much else. This private, widespread, and ephemeral commodity culture has changed nearly everything in everyday life,
especially how people relate to nature and to one another. Its transformations have been so frequent and common that we find this world of fleeting things natural. We think that this particular mode of affluence is inevitable. 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 ourselves 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 influenced by those sociologists and anthropologists who understand goods
and their uses as means of creating personal identity and social participation. I am thinking of a wide range of writers, from the early twentiethcentury German social theorist Georg Simmel to the 1970s American cultural 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 consumer society has not necessarily produced passive people alienated from
their true selves, as regularly assumed by traditional critics. Indeed, a central 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 critique, I still find consumer culture problematic. My earlier work drifted toward its ragged edge, in explorations of alternatives to consumerism (reduced work time) and the ambiguous impact of goods on personal
relationships (especially toys on parents and children). This approach reflects 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
mothers bookshelf copies of Vance Packards 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 Marcuses One-Dimensional Man and,
judging from my nearly indecipherable comments in the margins, found
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this critique of consumer culture meaningful. And like many from my generation, I read Huxleys Brave New World and 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 movements. 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.

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