Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (review)

In 1913, Arthur R. "Pop" Momand began publishing his comic strip Keeping Up with the Joneses in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. By the 1920s, newspapers across the country carried this strip, which ran for twenty-eight years, and the phrase became a part of popular culture. Momand got the idea when he moved, as a newlywed, to Cedarhurst, New York, a fancy suburb on Long Island. Though the Momands lived well, they found themselves in a constant race to live up to the standards of their even-better-off neighbors. They soon quit the suburban lifestyle and moved back to Manhattan, where Momand began his comic strip. The Joneses appeared in the strip as occasional references for the main characters—the McGinnises, their daughter Julia, and the housekeeper Belladonna. Mrs. McGinnis towers over her husband, and her fixation on fashion and high society dominates their domestic life. In a typical cartoon, she remarks, "Wait'll the Joneses hear we were at this swell dinner! Think of it, the Swedish Ambassador is here tonight."

Susan J. Matt writes about this sort of consumer behavior in her monograph on envy in American culture, charting a change in emotional styles between 1890 and 1930 from restraint to indulgence. As new technologies enabled mass production and mass distribution, Americans no longer had to just be content with what they had; they could act on their desires. No longer a sin, envy was now a staple of the new consumer economy. In five chapters, Matt looks at middle-class urban women and men, rural women and men, and children, showing a change from moral condemnation of covetous feelings to general acceptance and even promotion. She points to the spread of new technologies and the rise of consumer culture to explain this cultural shift. And she argues that among a wide variety of opinionmakers, envy became more socially acceptable as Americans became consumers in the 1920s.

Because she looks at a broad range of social groups, Matt's study of cultural change is mostly persuasive. She is ambitous in charting how widespread envious feelings were throughout American society in the 1920s. Yet both the causes and extent of the change are not so clear, or at least not as straightforward as Matt suggests. If one considers two novels (neither of which Matt discusses), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922), the story of envy and its relationship to social practices looks a bit more complex.

Sister Carrie, driven by consumer desire, quit the countryside to take up residence in Chicago, where her unyielding quest to have the latest fashions left her alone and unhappy. Dreiser framed Carrie's story as a morality tale, but even as he was writing, women were already using the new consumerism to assert their independence. Indeed, Carrie was successful—she met her material goals not by working hard and being thrifty, but rather by exchanging sex for nice clothes and then becoming a star on the stage. Dreiser's realism was so shocking that Nelson Doubleday's wife sought to prevent her husband from releasing the book. Matt correctly observes that in the late nineteenth century, covetous behavior was suspect. But moral condemnations were shrill because envy, and the consumption it spurred, was already an established fact.

Two decades later George Babbitt led an even emptier and lonelier life precisely because he had so many material possessions—the lighter he purchased even though he had quit smoking, his ultramodern alarm clock, and of course the most important status symbol, his automobile. Lewis's was a biting satire of consumer culture, a moral critique of envy that would continue to influence public intellectuals from the Frankfurt School to the New Left to the New Right.

Matt is of course right that as mass consumption spread so too did new cultural norms concerning acceptance of the idea of technological progress and...