The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979

Introduction

1 Introduction Why does affluence cause so much anxiety? This book examines how American writers worried about affluence from the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s through the late 1970s, from a time when prosperity seemed uncertain to one when it expanded into a mass expectation and then to the point where millions of people took it for granted. It begins as wartime conditions were forcing the nation to consider the relationship between consumer spending, democracy, and the struggle against fascism. It ends with the energy crisis that sparked a discussion about an era of diminished expectations . Focusing on major books, as well as on the contexts in which they appeared, this study illuminates how key twentieth-century thinkers came to terms with consumer culture. The emphasis is on the persistent but shifting tension between a commitment to self-restraint and the achievement of satisfaction through commercial goods and experiences. Affluence raised troubling issues of individual authenticity and social equality even as it promised the achievement of personal satisfaction in ways that strengthened the link between democracy and capitalism. It prompted questions about the political implications of defining American superiority in the language of consumer acquisition. Challenges posed by the growth of consumer culture after the late 1930s compelled the attention of many of America’s most influential writers. They struggled with problems that connected affluence with a series of larger issues: the spread of mass culture; the meaning of the cold war; the implications for politics of a world that seemed increasingly privatized and controlled. They also pondered the challenges that the spread of wealth posed to national 2 Introduction character, to the environment, and to people who did not share in the nation’s bounty. Throughout the six decades under consideration here, authors struggled to find meaning in a society suffused with affluence and consumer culture , terms used interchangeably in this book. If they were not always successful in resolving thorny issues, they nonetheless help us understand the importance of using critical intelligence to identify values that survive in a world where commercial goods and experiences are everywhere to see and to be concerned about. Watching them grapple with these dilemmas illuminates the struggle to find ways of guiding people through a world saturated by commercial goods and experiences.1 Five major themes animate this work. First, I explore the persistence of highly charged, moralistic attitudes to consumer culture and then sketch the emergence of a post-moralist outlook beginning in the 1970s. Second, I show how certain writers, out of a desire to reject or reformulate Marxism, embraced psychology as an explanation for and a solution to social problems. Third, I focus on the factors that determined the power of books in this era to set the terms of public discussion. Related to this is a fourth issue, the role of intellectuals in shaping social movements, public conversations, and policy considerations. Fifth, this book charts the hegemony of the cold war consensus in the 1950s and shows how, beginning in the 1960s, new events and ideas challenged its legitimacy. Also deserving of attention are the influence of émigré intellectuals on American cultural criticism, the relationship of academic debates to national discussions, the emergence of women and African Americans as writers and as subjects of concern, and the globalization of the understanding of affluence. The relationship between morality and affluence, the book’s first major theme, brackets this study and reminds us of the persistent hope among intellectuals that Americans would curtail their spending habits and turn to loftier goals. From early in the nation’s history, writers worried about the moral implications of consumers’ self-indulgence and the consequences of changing patterns of comfort and luxury. Opposed to excessive commercialism and what they saw as the corruptions of luxury, they proposed instead varying combinations of genuine work, self-control, democracy, public welfare , high culture, meaningful recreation, and authentic selfhood. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social critics articulated what I call traditional or conservative moralism. Those who expressed this deeply embedded sentiment focused their anxieties on workers and immigrants, especially their consumption of alcohol and their participation in expressive ethnic traditions that stood in opposition to the “proper” behavior of bourgeois Americans. Around World War I there emerged the new or modern moralists (for whom we can use the colloquial word “puritans”), who were concerned Introduction 3...