by William Leach
Pantheon Books 1993
The structure of American capitalism has been undergoing significant upheaval the past 80 years. With the recessions of the 70s and early 80s, the advent of global capitalism, the mergers and acquisitions of corporations and consolidation of capital in the 80s, U.S. business has retooled, downsized, and shored up. Now it's ready to kick ass, whether with cigarettes in eastern Europe, cellular phones in Japan, or information technology and textiles worldwide.
Time was, though, when the U.S. was still a vast untapped market, an agricultural tapestry loosely bound by federal law. In the late 19th century most Americans still made their own clothes, bought flour not bread, and whittled toys from wood. The only department stores were in the biggest cities: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia.
But industrialization was coming, was already here in some instances. Industrialization meant efficiency, and efficiency meant more goods, faster. What before the craftsman or artisan made by hand, a machine could now make, and much quicker at lower cost. Suddenly, industrialization pointed to unlimited productivity.
A deluge of goods needed buyers, though, and in Land of Desire, William Leach meticulously shows how, between roughly 1880-1920, American business set out to ensure a continuous stream of hungry consumers. Aligning itself with government, educational institutions, museums and even the church, U.S. business exalted want as the most democratic of values. We've been buying ever since.
Leach argues convincingly that before this time there was no consumer culture. As mass production took over and ambitious men smelled the potential profits, there was a problem: not enough consumers. Or rather, plenty of potential consumers, but no custom or habit pushing them to the stores. The trick was to get people to the stores, and once there, entice them to buy.
The merchants and businessmen undertook to "democratize desire;" to draw people in with newfound enticements, keep them there with dazzling displays and obsequious customer service, and induce them to buy by fostering the cult of the new and offering easy credit. About this cult Leach says: "Americans had been prepared by their own history. Phrases like the 'New World,' 'new heaven on earth,' and 'new nation' were common currency; and everyone seemed to boast of the country's 'innovative ways' . . . Ne wness and change themselves had become traditional in America."
New was better, and the old must be discarded. By democratizing the marketplace, by making fancy goods and slavish service available to all customers, merchants let middle- and lower-class Americans believe that they too could have the newest things, must have them, because to not have them meant to fall hopelessly behind. Also the new buying places, the department stores, created a sumptuous environment far removed from the open-air markets and bazaars that were the old way. In these commercial palaces, like Marshall Fields of Chicago and Wanamakers of New York, glass, bright light and color, huge open spaces, ornate trimmings and floor after floor of the latest products dazzled customers. To the middle- and lower-class shoppers this was luxury, a glimpse of the lifestyle all Americans desired, deep down.
If all this seems played out today, remember that in 1905 it was brand new, and people were blown away. In conjunction with these new merchandising techniques ran the birth of modern advertising, with an explosion of print ads and billboards. One statistic that stands out in Leach's dense book is that in the 1880s there were only two ad copywriters of any significance in the whole country; by 1915 there were thousands.
Merchants and admen didn't do it all alone. Business schools like Wharton and Harvard started teaching the new marketing techniques for new generations of merchandisers. Museums put on exhibits featuring industrial and commercial design, sponsored by the companies. Government on all levels cooperated with tax breaks, favorable land deals; the Hoover administration assisted business through a semi-managed economy and even discussed the importance of helping Americans to fulfill their "needs" and "desires".
The elevation of desire, of want, was and is the principal component of American consumer culture, Leach argues. Then, as now, actual need is irrelevant as new products arrive to fulfill heretofore unknown wants: ice and dry beer, Nike shoes, anything in a Sharper Image catalogue. But also then, as now, exalting want removes the consumer further from the methods of production. How goods are produced becomes irrelevant; what labor or whose is unimportant so long as we get what we want. As Leach points out, in the global economy we're one step further removed from production. No longer is it our neighbor or even fellow citizen working at production; it could just as well be a Mexican, or someone in the Pacific Rim. Where before we might become outraged at the mistreatment of another American at the factory (although probably not), who in America will speak for the Korean women making Nike shoes for $1.03 a day? Is it any concern of ours?
For Leach the gulf between consumption and production is destructive to society. He closes his book with no answers to rampant U.S. consumerism, except to note that the continuing legacy of consumer culture is bland homogenization, bound up by meaningless spectacle. Leach asks readers to heed the critical voices that call for less desire and more community. Consumers must try to bridge the gap between consumption and production, to recover the humanity lost in the marketplace. (Jay Huber)