LAND OF DESIRE: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture [Hardcover]

Consumer credit starts in late 1800s, along with advertising, along with the whole notion of "customer service," (borrowed from Christian service and debased by capitalists), bogus "profit sharing" programs to mollify workers (but only under the threat of union organizing). The turn of the century store owners created consumption palaces (like today's malls) to facilitate profligacy (moving seamstresses off the main selling floor so as not to interfere with the fetishistic fantasy goods, a strategy which finds its current expression in sweat shops well off the premises in the Third World). They spread the Parisian idea of fashion from the realm of clothing to every kind of consumer product. And marketing hasn't changed one bit since then either. One department store used a kind of "Sprint Friends and Family" promotion in 1910 to get people to volunteer likely friends for charge accounts.

Leach identifies three matters he believes are central to the why and how the culture of consumer capitalism came to be the way it is: 1) the development of a new commercial aesthetic (the visual materials of desire such as lights, color and glass), 2) the collaboration among economic and non-economic institutions (an interlocking circuit of department stores, investment banks, hotel chains, and the entertainment industry, but also museums, and universities, 3) the growth of a new class of workers he calls the "brokers: admen, lawyers, investment bankers, museum curators, magazine editors, and experts of all sorts. By 1895, in Leach's words, they had "injected a new 'amorality' into American life, indifferent to virtue and hospitable to the ongoing inflation of desire." According to Emily Fog Mead, an ad expert (and mother of Margaret), writing in an economics journal in 1901: "Accompanying all the early stages of innovation is a fear of wrong-doing, of disloyalty to ideals, and of the coming destruction of the foundation of society; but the next generation has no conscientious misgivings."

Leach notes that this new regime required new ideological underpinnings. Simon Patten, a turn of the century economist, provided them. As the leading light of Wharton's new school of business (yet another invention of this era), he argued that in the new world of mass-produced consumer goods, economic theories of scarcity were anachronistic. This effectively scuttled the writings of Ricardo and Smith, and allowed the new view that mass-manufactured goods and their ready availability would serve to create a standardized set of desires, a common language of aspiration, and thus ameliorate the small differences between immigrants, the poor, the Negro. In other words, Patten equated material "goods" with the social "goods." This blurring of the two has been going ever since. Quoting Leach, quoting historian of religion Joseph Harountunian on this point: "The 'good' is not in goods. The good is in justice, mercy, and peace. It is in consistency and integrity, in living according to truth and to right. It inheres in men and not in things. It is other than the goodness of goods and without it goods are not good."

Leach also identifies elements of America's earlier civic mythology that were appropriated by the new consumer ideologues: 1) The cult of the New. Phrases like New World, New Heaven on Earth, New Nation (conceived in liberty) were common currency in American since its founding (Emerson, Whitman, Douglass espoused versions of the New) As Leach notes: "By the end of the century, however, commercial capitalism had latched onto the cult of the new, fully identified with it and taken it over." "Fashion and style were at the center, expropriating folk design and image, reducing custom to mere surface and appearance."..."Market capitalism [esp. this most radical aspect of it] subverted whatever custom, value or folk idea [that] came with in reach. No religious tradition had the power to resist it, no immigrant culture."

2) "The Idea of Democracy, like the idea of the New and the idea of Paradise (also part of the American mythos and contained within America's millenialist yearnings), began to change under the influence of the new industrial economy. "Gradually, wealth lay less in land and more in capital or in the money required to produce new goods. This pecuniary wealth was owned by a small minority; but at the same time, growing numbers of Americans were losing control of their work, becoming dependent on others --on the owners of capital--for their wages and well-being." "This fostered a double-sided conception of the democracy of desire. It stressed the diffusion of comfort and prosperity not merely as a part of the American experience, but instead as its centerpiece." "...The 'free-market' would allocate to Americans an infinitely growing supply of goods and services. American culture after 1880 -- children as well as adults, men and women, black and white -- would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased."

There was resistance to these appropriations, but eventually "material desires and pecuniary values came to constitute the base measure for all other values, even for ''the dim inner world by which men judge what is for them worthwhile.' Eventually, everyone signed on: Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce in the Twenties greatly expanded the Department of Commerce to help business, to provide "statistics" and "strategies" for the spread of consumer capitalism all over American and all over the world. Sadly, since then, the business of America has become its only business. A truly remarkable book.