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I n 1902, Marshall Field’s opened its new, twelve-story department store on State Street in Chicago. “We have built this great institution for the people,” Field’s announced, “to be their store, their downtown home, their buying headquarters.” For opening day, Field’s adorned its one million square feet of retail space with “cut flowers on every counter, shelf, showcase, and desk,” six string orchestras, great “bulbs of electricity,” as well as banners, streamers, and blooming plants. Although management permitted no purchases the first day, huge crowds swamped the store—not just “the swagger rich,” but the “masses of shoppers” who flooded the new bargain basement. The “opening was one of the grandest events that has ever been known in Chicago,” a young woman enthused , “in a word, simply Wonderland.”1 The growth of productive capacity at the end of the nineteenth century set commercial leaders to work on the problem of distribution. New tools and assembly line techniques and new sources of energy produced an avalanche of goods awaiting buyers. The growth of the railroad network and the rise of a national market generated a merchandising web of wholesalers and retailers, hotels and restaurants, capped by the department store. With more than a hundred departments, the great retail palaces presented a world defined by goods. As “investment for gain” superseded “commitment to industry and workmanship ,” finance capitalists poured money into retailing. Encouraging a trend toward consolidation and national chains, they aimed to “get from the buyer all the buyer can be induced to pay.”2 Commercial leaders described the rise of the consumer culture as natural and inevitable. The new culture “speaks to us,” a merchant explained, “only of ourselves, our pleasures, our life. . . . It whispers, ‘Amuse thyself, take care of CHAPTER 10 Constructing a Consumer Culture B Redirecting Leisure from Civic Engagement to Insatiable Desire 216 • A DEMOCRACY OF CONSUMERS yourself.’ Is not this the natural and logical effect of an age of individualism?” But the architects of the consumer culture knew better. The consumer culture demanded a transformation of personal character from the Victorian emphasis on delayed gratification, prudence, and accumulation to a new focus on instant gratification, short-term thinking, and spending. Merchants and industrialists, investment bankers and retailers, advertisers and university professors, museum curators and government officials all helped craft new strategies of enticement—from advertising and decoration to fashion, design, and consumer service—that made the United States the land of desire.3 The consumer culture intersected with and depended on a popular demand for leisure that animated the most successful labor movements in the nineteenth century.“Eight hours for what we will” transcended divisions of craft, ethnicity, and gender and expressed working people’s interest in self-improvement and civic engagement. Demanding for workers “more of the leisure that rightfully belongs to them,” the Knights of Labor defined leisure as one of “those rights and privileges necessary to . . . enjoying appreciating, defending, and perpetuating the blessings of good government.”4 Absorbing civic energies and values, the consumer culture redirected them and gave them new meanings. Democracy, once associated with political equality and participation, refocused on individual opportunities for amusement and luxury. Religious and civic meanings of service gave way to a rhetoric of customer satisfaction. Even the idea of the new, once linked to civic regeneration, became just another means of hyping the goods. The values of the consumer culture were neither “natural” nor “normal,” sociologist Charles Cooley recognized , and “by no means the work of the whole people acting homogeneously.” But as the consumer culture reshaped character, insatiable desire came to seem humanity’s natural and normal condition.5 The Popular Demand for Leisure and the Rise of the Saloon Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new emphasis on consumption crept into the agitation for an eight-hour day. Workingmen began to see leisure as a separate sphere that compensated for the growing regimentation of the workplace .“A workingman wants something besides food and clothes in the country,” a labor leader told a Senate committee in 1883. “He wants recreation. Why should not a workingman have it as well as other people?” Increased productivity also focused attention on consumption. Future employment, labor leaders argued, would “depend upon a more expensive style of living,” for “wealth cannot be consumed sparingly by the masses and be produced rapidly.”6 In combination with more disciplined workplaces, shorter hours and rising incomes made the saloon the preeminent commercial recreation for workingmen . The “modern...

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