An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (review)

An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. By Gary Cross. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+320. $27.50.

An All-Consuming Century assesses why Americans have so fervently embraced consumerism and why challenges to its dominance have so often failed. This broad, synthetic study charts consumerism's flowering in the first third of the twentieth century, its consolidation in the second third despite the crises of depression and war, and its victorious reign over the final third. Gary Cross boldly argues that it was consumerism, not political democracy, that won the ideological wars of the century. And he laments that, while admittedly less destructive and destabilizing than other ideologies, consumerism triumphed at the price of declining political participation, a shrinking civil society, environmental devastation, and the increasing fragmentation of social life.

Cross has written widely in consumer culture studies, and this book is less a vehicle for original research than a sweeping narrative that skillfully and intelligently synthesizes a rich and extensive literature. As such, it is especially useful for lay and undergraduate audiences seeking a well-written introduction to the field but somewhat less gratifying for specialists. Cross's own voice emerges most strongly in the second half of the book, when he accounts for the waning influence of the "jeremiad tradition" denouncing consumer excess. Tracing the roots of this critical tradition from Puritans and Prohibitionists to advocates of simple living, hippies, environmentalists, and consumer rights activists, Cross argues that the advocates of constraint proved a feeble match for consumer culture's promises of comfort, status, personal liberation, adventure, and democratic freedom. Marred by elitism and internal contradictions and vulnerable to co-optation, consumer culture's critics failed to present compelling alternatives that could transcend "the logic of consumerism" (p. 142). Ironically, the ostensibly anticonsumerist counterculture of the 1960s easily gave way to "a new, fragmenting, individualistic consumption" that the "unfettered market ideology" of the Reagan era only further reinforced (p. 193).

Of particular interest to historians of technology is Cross's assessment of how new consumer technologies have fostered such fragmenting individualism. During the early twentieth century, automobiles, movie palaces, and radios all privatized leisure-time experiences, diminishing the spirited interactivity of the consuming crowd. As car culture spread, teenagers spent less time at home and more time with peers, suburban homeowners sacrificed front porches to accommodate attached garages, and the primacy of family and neighborly ties eroded further. The mass-produced affluence of the 1960s and 1970s invited a more aggressive quest for individuality, exemplified by the purchase of second and third cars and the rise of new consumer research techniques that targeted "values and lifestyle" rather than income.

With the advent of the consumer credit card in the inflation-ridden 1970s, barriers to self-seeking were dramatically reduced just as a new crop of consumer technologies emerged to satisfy individual wants. Personal televisions and personal computers, electronic video games, single-serving frozen dinners, and niche marketing on cable channels all accelerated the growing isolation of Americans from their families and from broader communities. Worse still, the rise of telemarketing, home shopping channels, and more aggressive children's advertising made it virtually impossible to cordon off the home from the market's invasive reach.

Cross's story of fragmenting markets and fragmenting individualism has much merit but sometimes underplays contradictory trends that might temper his narrative of declension. Portraying the personal computer user as a "supremely isolated participant in an ephemeral global culture" (p. 224), Cross fails to consider how the Internet has fostered new opportunities for correspondence and community building.

More problematic are the analytical categories that lie at the heart of Cross's study. Boldly framed as an analysis of why consumerism was the "ism" that won the century, the book devotes relatively little space to discussions of political ideology. Cross attempts to debunk the conventional wisdom that liberalism was the triumphant ideology of...