So Out It’s In: The History and Revival of Thrift in America

There are four obvious points to make at the outset about this collection of essays. First, it is timely, turning attention to the idea of thrift during a recession. Second, it is interdisciplinary, putting the work of historians, sociologists, economists, and scholars of religion, gender, and the environment in conversation with one another. (Historians, however, dominate the list of contributors.) Third, it is comparative across periods, sweeping through Americans’ uses and experiences of thrift from the seventeenth century to the present, unabashedly measuring the experience of the present against other eras. Fourth, this collection is attempting to jumpstart a new field of studies that one might term thrift studies. Though the editors do not give it this name, thrift studies seems a good term for this interdisciplinary focus on the idea of thrift and the condition of thriving, and suggests this field as a counterpart to the recent historical interest in failure studies.

The editors spend much time defining thrift and want readers to understand the term in its broadest possible sense. It is not merely frugality, they argue, but also an idea, a value, a virtue. It can be both personal and collective (p. 4). It can be both an enabler and a restraint on the culture of capitalism (p. 5). The “subtext” of thrift is thriving, the authors contend, meaning that thrift is ultimately about what it takes to thrive or prosper (p. 11). In short, thrift is a capacious and dynamic thing, which has served as “the primary language Americans have used for articulating the normative dimensions of economic life throughout their history” (p. 10). These last two points—that thrift is a big and ever-changing idea, and that it is an idiom, central to Americans’ economic lives in all periods of history—are the editors’ attempts to impose an overarching argument on the twenty-two essays that follow their introduction.

To their credit, the editors acknowledge up front that not all of the essays—especially the one by the two environmental historians—will conform to their overarching argument or the super-narrative that they posit in the introduction. It is nevertheless admirable that the editors sketch out a basic argument and narrative, then let the other scholars do what scholars do so well: flesh out, branch off of, complicate, and, of course, dispute one another’s conclusions. This review, then, will summarize the editors’ attempts to make sense of all this work, and then describe the different essays, organizing them into thematic clusters.

The editors argue that thrift was not a celebrated virtue among ancient Greeks, Romans, or Jews, nor among early or medieval Christians. Only in the early modern period, with the growth of the market economy and the theology of John Calvin, did thrift emerge as an important virtue for many (pp. 6–9). It is at this point that the editors narrow their scope to colonial North America and the United States. There, they track the changing idea of thrift through several transformations. Calvin’s followers, of course, brought the virtue of thrift to America as puritan thrift. This was transformed into classic thrift, a secularized version of puritan thrift that, while used in different ways by different people, dominated the United States from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. With the growth of the industrial economy, classic thrift was reformulated into consumer thrift, in which spending money on consumer goods was called “thrift,” if wisely done. The world wars and the Great Depression brought collective thrift, government-led efforts to refrain from consumption for the greater good. After World War II, the older forms of thrift were eventually cast aside: Americans dramatically reduced their savings and embraced consumption and easy credit. Still, thrift persists, and the editors identify two major strains of it in the present day: free-agent thrift...