The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (review)

The high point of Daniel Horowitz's discussion of the anxieties ofAmerican affluence is the fateful appearance of Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Bellah at a working dinner with the President of the United States. Jimmy Carter, encouraged by Rosalyn Carter and his aide, Patrick Caddell, sought both ideas and confirmation of his interpretation of the despair into which he believed the nation had fallen into during 1979. With the energy crisis, high interest rates, inflation, and high unemployment—plus the Iranian hostage crisis—as the realities that hung over the meeting, Carter wanted inspiration for a speech that blamed American excess consumption and self-absorption for the diminished prospects that seemed to shadow the horizon. As Horowitz shows, this was a theme—an element of style—that the President had initiated with his resolutely plain-style inauguration.

This was also a low point of sorts, for after Carter's speech and the electoral triumph of Ronald Reagan a year later, criticism of affluence, environmentalism, and a whole host of liberal ideas beat a forced retreat. This moment also is the best part of Horowitz's chronicle and perhaps the most effective demonstration of the interaction of intellectuals and policy makers. For much of the rest of the book, such a relationship remains necessarily vague or assumed.

Horowitz's purpose in this narrative is principally to explore the ideas of best-selling authors whose work contributed to the unfolding exposition of ideas appraising a growing American affluence. Beginning with a survey of the sober years of the Great Depression and World War II, he then introduces two optimistic observers, both of them émigrés—George Katona and Ernest Dichter. While each man depicted the postwar consumer society in optimistic terms, Horowitz quickly leaves these very positive visions aside and turns to the critics and pessimists. These he divides into four sequential groups. The first consisted of figures like John Galbraith, Betty Friedan, Vance Packard, and historian David Potter, all of whom focused "on the perils of middle-class affluence" (p. 129). The second group, appearing slightly later, expanded and deepened the analysis of affluence. These authors, including socialist Michael Harrington, environmentalist Rachel Carson, and Paul Goodman and Oscar Lewis, broadened the scope of analysis to focus on poverty, destruction of the earth, and the creation of a "culture of poverty." The next group, he argues, put many of these ideas into political practice, particularly Ralph Nader and Martin Luther King, Jr. The final group included the three moral/ cultural critics, Bell, Lasch, and Bellah, who dined with the President in 1979 before he delivered his notorious "Malaise Speech."

The most important contribution of the book is Horowitz's assemblage of characters and his largely successful effort to show their frequent focus on issues of affluence. He is also persuasive in identifying an important strain of moralism, which, as he would argue, revealed an underlying critique or impatience with the commitment of many Americans to the pursuits of affluence.

There are nonetheless several problems in the author's presentation. Among them are several passages that are either difficult to interpret or questionable. Speaking of Michael Harrington's The Other America, for example, he says: "His work inspired two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, to focus on poverty as a public policy issue even as, with some equivocation he embraced the problematic notion of a culture of poverty." Were both Kennedy and Johnson "inspired" to focus on poverty by Harrington? I doubt very much that the complexities of the politics of poverty can be reduced to the inspiration of reading this book. Or, as he says of Ralph Nader, "He combined the muckraker's ability to make boring and technical details compelling with the lawyer's knowledge of details of legislation that proved critical in changing the balance of power between corporations and consumers" (p...