American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (review)

Regina Lee Blaszczyk concludes her wide-ranging and vivaciously written study with a statement that seems at once bold and commonplace: “[T]here is no better lens to examine what it means to be an American than the lens of American consumer culture.” (p. 275) It is a measure of her success that she imbues the almost-clichéd equation of American and consumer with an original and thoughtful substance.

One of the great strengths of American Consumer Society is its attention to what Americans actually consumed. The book is full of nuggets of information about piano ownership and phonograph sales, the onset of television, and the growing prevalence of personal computers, smart phones, and other electronic gear. At the same time, she is attentive to the ways that business firms supplied the goods consumers purchased, stressing the value of close attention to customer desires and interests. This is expands of her previous scholarship on glassware and pottery, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning, which showed the importance of taking the pulse of the customers regularly and shaping innovations to fit their interests.

Another virtue is Blaszczyk’s concern for periodization. She delineates three eras—Victorian (1865–1900), Modern (1900–1945), and Boomer America (1945–2005)—each with its own notions of appropriate consumer “identity kits.” Chapters on the home, dress, and retailing develop the themes of Victorian era. Late nineteenth century homes, she argues, were meant to display middle-class respectability through the appropriate array of possessions—pianos, bric-a-brac shelves, dining ware, and much more. Since the home and the family’s possessions were on view by others, women’s domesticity was no longer a purely private matter. Fashion was all the more a matter of public presentation. In Blaszczyk’s reading, it reflected sharp divisions in gender expectations and a society where Americans of different income levels strived for middle-class status. In the department stores, mail order houses, and other retailing institutions of Victorian America, she de-emphasizes the efforts to mold and dominate consumer tastes and stresses their responsiveness to consumer desires.

The second era, the Modern, was “guided by the concept of personality. Modern consumers came to see reinvention, individual expression and subcultural influences as an expected part of their lives” (p. 98). Drawing heavily on Robert and Helen Lynd’s classic studies of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), she traces the ways that new technologies and institutions of communications, entertainment, and mobility (mass circulation magazines, phonographs, radios, automobiles) permitted Modern identities to emerge. As in the previous chapter, the emphasis is on consumer agency rather than corporate manipulation or technological determinism. Advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson, with the formidable Helen Resor, sought to understand “Mrs. Consumer” rather than to recast her. The successful firms were those (like General Motors under Alfred Sloan) that probed to find what consumers wanted and designed their products to meet those demands. Henry Ford’s producerist stubbornness, by contrast, led to decline.

Part 3, on Boomer America, contains chapters on suburbia, style, and the reshaping of consumer lifestyles through electronics. Though conceding the powerful constraints of poverty and exclusion on many Americans, Blaszczyk posits affluence and the democratization of consumption as the norm. As the production of goods gave way to a service economy, consumer satisfaction became unmoored from physical possessions. “Treasures” became “throwaways” (p. 273). That eminent Victorian Karl Marx saw industrial capitalism as the great solvent of tradition: “All that is solid melts into air.” Blaszczyk updates and redates this, perhaps unconsciously: “The Victorians . . . would have been stunned to see their knickknacks melt into thin air” (p. 263). Remote though contemporary consumption values and patterns may be from earlier eras, once again consumers, not producers, led the way. “Baby Boomers broke all the rules: they were the largest consumer group in history, and their constant redefinition of what goods were meaningful befuddled marketers”(p. 180). Nevertheless, there are tensions, if not contradictions...