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20 1 Chastened Consumption World War II and the Campaign for a Democratic Standard of Living During World War II, millions of American consumers began to put depression conditions behind them and started to look forward to a peace that would enable them to extend their experience of prosperity by spending what they had saved. Government officials and molders of public opinion called on citizens to curtail their expenditures so the nation could dedicate its full effort to winning the war. Some influential social critics went even farther, hoping that the nation would learn from wartime conditions to turn away permanently from the chase after materialistic satisfactions. Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) led the fight for curtailed consumption. Embracing the new moralism, he called on his fellow citizens to sacrifice their standard of living, not only for the sake of wartime exigencies but also for the health of postwar democracy. In the end, he found his hopes for influence over public opinion and policy dashed. The war imposed on him a grave personal sacrifice; in addition, before long he realized that excess rather than restraint would mark the postwar world. Mumford was fighting an uphill battle. As the historian Thaddeus Russell has demonstrated, during the war the labor leader Walter Reuther unsuccessfully tried to persuade the nation’s workers to curb their drive for a more materialistic way of life. Robert Westbrook, Mark H. Leff, and Amy Bentley have noted that during the war, government officials and Madison Avenue typically called on Americans to sacrifice their standard of living by defining war aims, as Bentley has noted, “in private, individualistic terms that digni- fied and promoted consumption.” Indeed, historians have come to identify in the 1930s and 1940s what Jean-Christophe Agnew has called the strength- Chastened Consumption 21 ening of “a far-reaching ideological redefinition of polity and society” which later came to fuller fruition with “the promotion of the social contract of cold-war liberalism.” This involved “a state sponsored guarantee of private consumption” that found its clearest expression in the way corporations promoted household appliances, packaged goods, and new forms of leisure. Corporations themselves learned to speak a new communal language, as Mark Weiner has shown in his study of the marketing of Coca-Cola, in campaigns that took advantage of the war to connect purchasing their products with protecting the American way of life by supporting the war effort. Opposition to this identification of social good with private consumption and private enterprise came from several quarters. As Bentley has demonstrated, some Americans, particularly women, faced with government programs for rationing , worked toward a communal vision that linked wartime sacrifice with obligations that were both democratic and patriotic. Although his perspective was hardly gendered in the ways these historians have noted, Mumford also spoke of consumption in terms of democracy and community rather than private satisfaction and corporate gain. The postwar period undermined his efforts and those of others to make a convincing link between democracy, the reform of capitalism, and lessened consumption.1 The Depression of the 1930s and Consumer Expectations In the 1920s, millions of Americans believed that they lived in an era of longlasting prosperity. In the 1930s, they assumed they were in the midst of a long-term if not permanent economic depression. Looking ahead, few if any observers foresaw the dimensions of the nation’s development as a consumer society over the next several decades. The return of sustained economic prosperity seemed always beyond the foreseeable future. Millions of households used short-term measures to hold on to the standard of living they had attained in more prosperous times. Yet for most in the working and middle classes, there was no ignoring how thin was the line between a marginally comfortable and a hopelessly impoverished way of life.2 During the 1930s, many influential social critics strengthened their commitment to a moral vision of consumption, believing the nation would turn away from what they saw as corrupt, commercialized patterns of living and opt instead for simple comforts and refined but liberating “culture.” Foremost among these heralds of permanently curtailed consumption was Robert S. Lynd. In 1929, Lynd, along with his wife, Helen M. Lynd, had authored Middletown, a classic community study in which they expressed their concern with the way radios, automobiles, and movies were undermining face-to-face contact in communities.3 [18.119.107.161...

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