Shopping for America, Or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Pemberton Mall

Ted Ownby. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture 1830-1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiii + 228 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

On the evening of December 22, 1874, the white folks of Vicksburg, Mississippi, lined Washington Street to cheer the parade that brought Santa Claus to town. Actually, this was a Santa Klaws parade, organized by a group of merchants and civic leaders known as the Santa Klaws Klan. The Constitution Fire Company Cornet band led the procession, followed by several floats depicting lawyers, bankers, merchants, mechanics, and grangers all fallen on hard times--a lesson in the history of Reconstruction Vicksburg. His Majesty, the Santa Klaws Chief, rode a chariot drawn by four horses, dispensing gifts to the crowd along the way. There could be no mistaking the symbolism here. Santa was bringing what white Vicksburgers wanted most for Christmas--the end of the Carpetbagger regime and the restoration of white supremacy. Only two weeks previous, Vicksburg and surrounding Warren County had been the scene of one of the bloodiest episodes of mob violence in U.S. history, as white Democrats recently restored to power in the city attacked and killed perhaps 300 black Republicans who still held control of several rural neighborhoods. Small wonder shoppers from west central Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana had been avoiding Vicksburg, taking their business instead to Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. Now they were being asked to return to spend their money in the shops along Washington Street as freely and easily as they had before General Pemberton surrendered the city to General Grant. "In our own city there has existed a feeling of indifference towards our general prosperity for too long a period." This must end, as it will, opined a newspaper editorial, "if the proper encouragement is given to the Santa Klaws Klan." ¹

In recent times, Santa Claus has held court at the Pemberton Mall, near Interstate 20, several miles south of the old Washington Street commercial district, now mostly abandoned storefronts, although tourism and casino gambling have brought some new life to the old downtown. The mall Santa dresses in the familiar red suit and white beard, and just like thousands of mall Santas around the nation, he beckons shoppers, black and white, to bring their children and their money to his shopping center. For the Pemberton Mall Santa, the weekends and evenings must get lonely. The much larger malls of Jackson are less than an hour's drive away, and they draw many shoppers from Vicksburg. What the Pemberton Mall did to Vicksburg's downtown, the malls of Jackson threaten to do to the Pemberton Mall.

During Reconstruction, black and white consumers and their money, dreams, and desires were key figures in the struggle to create a new social order within Mississippi. Although civil rights issues continue to divide Mississippians, much has changed over the last century and more. These days white and black shoppers together figure prominently in a new battle, this one over Mississippi's place within the nation. Of course, battles old and new are linked. Mississippi's history of aloofness from many national trends encouraged the persistence of a rather unique society. But the Walmarts and shopping malls indicate Mississippi is no longer so different from the rest of the country. It is no coincidence that as Mississippi shoppers have conformed to a national consumer culture, the state's racial problems and successes have become those of the nation.

Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, consumption tended to divide Mississippians. By the 1920s consumerism was bringing people together. This is the thrust of the argument Ted Ownby makes in American Dreams in Mississippi, and he is utterly convincing. This is an imaginatively conceived book with tremendous implications for our understanding of...