The Garden of Earthly Delights

You’re probably not thinking about the history of consumerism as you jostle for that last talking doll on the store shelf. But those Christmas dollars of yours slipping into the cash register are adding to a Promethean American story that continues to transform our world. Certainly this year’s numbers alone are staggering: Retail Christmas sales are expected to pass the $51-billion mark, with an estimated $490 spent on gifts per household.

Even if we’ve only recently scaled the holiday buying heights, the process of turning sacred “seasonal transitions and annual renewals of faith and family” into commercial opportunities was well underway 100 years ago. By the 1920s, in fact, Christmas displays at the Grand Court of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia had already reached majestic proportions. As Gary Cross tells us in his groundbreaking book, “An All-Consuming Century,” it’s been a long journey to consumer heaven.

The fan, the iron and the kettle were electrified in the early 1890s; waffle irons, toasters and hot-plates shortly after 1900; the Hoover vacuum cleaner hit the floor running in 1908, and in 1914, the first home washing machine was plugged in. The ice box, Cross reminds us, was the last major appliance to be electrified and yet, between 1929 and 1935, as the Great Depression deepened, sales of refrigerators rose by a multiple of seven until by 1937 half of all electrified homes had them.

The velocity of rising numbers was, it turns out, the music of the American Century, a never-ending jazz of productivity and desire. Whatever had gone before, the 1950s represented a flood tide of consumerism. Dammed up, though never (Cross assures us) dried up by the Great Depression and World War II, desire burst forth as products beyond imagining, backed by entertainment beyond measure, all within the bounds of the suburban family, where each ranch house became “a center of shared consumer goods.”

I was a city kid in those days, and in our relatively bare apartment you could still feel the strength of the Depression and war-deprived yearnings like so many ghosts at the feast. You could turn on your TV set, that “window on the world” and catch an episode of some early family sitcom like “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.” In that realm, where life seemed relaxed, amusing, well-appointed and manicured, you could move effortlessly from the small problems of organizing a husband and sons in Harriet’s living room to the glories of organizing your own life thanks to her Hotpoint All-Electric Kitchen. Her glistening refrigerator with “72% of all storage space within fingertip reach” was so sleek, spacious and ice-free it seemed unbelievable that “you, too, can easily afford it!” What an Arabian nights vision of technological well-being, even if in your kitchen you were still taking a screwdriver to your minuscule freezer, where ice built up in mountainous white lumps as if in preparation for a new glacial age.

In those years when my life, at least, lay somewhere between an under-decorated past and dreams of commercial utopia, I spent hours devouring the Landmark Books, a multivolume series of histories for the young. There were volumes on conquerors, world-altering battles and figures like Ben Franklin and Wild Bill Hickok, who had, we were assured, made American history a march of freedom across a continent. At that moment of commercial transformation, history was still imagined as a triumphant processional on a landscape filled with communally agreed-upon “landmarks.”

But in the late 1960s, landmarks of our recent past came into dispute, and from then on, a couple of assassinations and the fall of the Berlin Wall aside, nobody could agree on the salient features of the second half of the American Century--unless, that is, it was to be thought of as the century of consumerism. Cross’ “An All-Consuming Century” may, in fact, be the only kind of traditional narrative capable of spanning the hundred years in question. Carried on a rising tide of capitalist productivity and popular desire that, he argues convincingly, couldn’t be staunched even by depression and war, consumerism ultimately swept all before it and “won” the century, from the various other “-isms” and from democracy itself. Few would now dispute its landmarks, from Ford’s flivver to Gates’ Microsoft operating system. In fact, you might say the history of the ice-less icebox, the horseless carriage, the instant meal, the self-service grocery store, the telephone, VCR and computer is the only history left standing in the year 2000.

And, as this book demonstrates, that’s no small thing, even if what the past looks like in consumerist terms takes some getting used to. Imagine World War II, without Pearl Harbor or the atomic bomb, as essentially a deferred shopping event; or the ‘60s without the Bay of Pigs or a single Kennedy; or the Richard Nixon not of Watergate but of the “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Still, Cross has done prodigious work on the era that redefined the pursuit of happiness as the unbounded desire for goods. Building on an impressive range of scholarship, he lays out the sinews of a dazzling 100 years of American productivity chock full of the economic equivalents of flying rugs and magic lamps.

His account begins in a country “largely constructed on the market,” short on “rituals and traditions” and with weak, if vociferous, “cultures of constraint.” Starting with turn-of-the-century German sociologist Werner Sombart’s suggestion that access to “roast beef and apple pie” saved Americans “from the extremes of class war,” it ends with the extension of the shopping week into the wee hours via 24-hour stores like Ralphs supermarkets and WalMart; that is, with the disappearance of the last moments in our society free of the commercial impulse.

Tucked away in mid-book is a short, canny history of the impassioned jeremiads and movements of opposition to commercial culture that litter our past. For a fascinating sampler of the jeremiad tradition from Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption to critiques inspired by the recent Seattle protests, check out “The Consumer Society Reader” edited by Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt. Unfortunately, as Cross makes abundantly clear, neither scathing critiques nor consumer protection movements, neither the left nor the right, ever fully grasped how capable consumerism would be of breaking all boundaries of time, space and desire. As a consequence, none was long successful in imposing restraints on the sale of pleasure or in offering meaningful alternatives to consumerism.

Even the popular urge to “fence off time and space from commerce” by making sanctuaries of childhood and domesticity collapsed once the home became “a market terminal.” What’s left of this tradition are distressed parents incapable of wielding that pathetic brake, the V-chip, installed in the machine selling their children a triumphal version of the good life.

Cross tiptoes carefully around the corpses of the many critiques of consumerism. He knows an old-fashioned jeremiad history of consumer culture, attacking the “false consciousness” of Americans, won’t change a thing and, given the way our all-consuming century seems to be snacking on the world, wouldn’t be good history either. Unfortunately, he tiptoes so lightly at first that his introductory chapter on how consumerism met genuine American needs and became our national “language” is as thin as the patty in a Big Mac. The reader might consider jumping directly to the next chapter where the real meat, the history, begins.

And yet, Cross’ vision of how the century worked commercially is neither simple nor celebratory. At the heart of his account lies a tension between the way corporations, goods, services, advances in technology, design, entertainment, advertising and research on buying habits combined into ever more complex, organic and powerful networks of selling and the ways they have become ever more focused on disassembling public life and civil society. Cross shows how, in the early part of the century, the boisterous, consuming crowd (already disengaging from neighborhood and community) was tamed and transformed into an audience. In the movie theater, for instance, sound moved into the screen with the coming of talkies and the crowd, which once talked back to that screen, fell silent. In the 1950s, the audience repaired to the suburbs to view ever more elaborate goods in the privacy of the home and soon enough, with the explosion of the youth market, the sharing family proved too large a unit for the burgeoning marketplace. Didn’t Sis need her own radio? Junior, that second car to flee the family on a moment’s notice?

By the ‘70s each family member was increasingly consuming goods, entertainment and fantasies in private. The crowd, along with that earlier dream of producers, the unified American marketplace, had dissolved into a mass of consuming individuals who could be re-imagined as, and recombined into, more focused mini-consuming publics. Like the cheese of nursery rhyme fame, the consumer stood alone, a fragment of a fragment in a world of boundary-free desires. “By 1985,” Cross tells us, advertisers had divided “women into eight consumer clusters, up from four in the early 1980s. They found some 40 lifestyle groups, often identified by ZIP Codes.” From public to crowd to audience to family to the consuming individual, this is a new way of understanding the history of privacy in our time.

In the context of such “fragmentation” (which was also a strengthening) of marketplace society, the shadows of older communal ties and pasts--from which Americans had once been in flight--suddenly became yet another way to personalize goods and create identity-communities through spending. This is the subject of Marilyn Halter’s “Shopping for Identity,” which, despite its edgy title, represents a more celebratory strain in recent scholarly work, a consumer studies lite. Halter enthusiastically takes up a fascinating topic largely ignored by Cross, “ethnicity by acquisition,” describing how, from the 1970s on, marketeers and advertisers re-conceived a term meant for immigrant communities and once largely anathema to an Americanizing marketplace. In an era in which all “sacred spaces and times,” as Cross indicates, were being commercialized, an “ethnic revival” involving a romantic search for a past identity proved capable of spurring remarkable sales while creating new subnational senses of belonging. The 12% annual growth of kosher food sales, including kosher imported artesian spring water and He’Brew, the Chosen Beer, for example, became part and parcel of a new Judaism. Unfortunately, despite its amusing examples of ethnic marketing, “Shopping for Identity” is a book crying out to be a magazine piece.

“By century’s end,” Cross concludes, “highly individualized commodities separated people from the past and future and divided them from each other.” By the time you get this far--to the individual stripped to desire facing a market built on a planetary scale--his book stands revealed for what it is: a secret jeremiad. His history of a history-less world ends on a seemingly unavoidable point: A successful consumer society can be assembled only by the breaking down of a civil one and of previous communal cultures of every sort. A secondary conclusion lurks at the provisional end of this unending tale, though Cross hardly knows how to deal with it. Barring unexpected technological breakthroughs, in order to create a true consumer planet you would need the resources of several planets like ours, not just this fragile place we call our own.

A hundred years from now, will “All-Consuming Century II” be ending, as the latest jeremiads are relegated to history’s dustbin, where that classic oxymoron “late capitalism” already resides? Or some time in the coming decades, will we quite literally shop till we drop? On such questions, Cross is not revealing. Writing inside the fast-beating heart of our global pax consumerism would cripple anyone’s vision. A landscape without alternate historical landmarks isn’t exactly conducive to getting a bead on our moment. How are we even to assess whether the protests in Seattle, the anti-sweatshop movement and the Ralph Nader’s presidential run mark the start of a new global anticonsumerism or are just more failures-in-the-making? Cross is, to steal a phrase, trapped in the context of no context. For alternative visions, you might turn to the final essays in “The Consumer Society Reader,” where thoughtful polemicists like Schor consider the desperate need for a future less contingent upon consumption and for politics that will get us there.

Still, Cross vividly lays out the basic topography of our all-consuming world, the landscape held in common from New York to California, Beirut to Beijing. In a new set of Landmark Books, to judge by “An All-Consuming Century,” the conquerors would take our time, communities, purses and emotional valences; the great battles would be for market share and property rights; the freedom-givers would offer that most modern of freedoms, the right to choose among many channels, catalogs, brands and the shifting identities that go with them. Of course, the landmarks of the year 2000 aren’t to be found in books but in the swooshes on our sneakers, the apples on our computers, the mouses on our hats and the golden arches that soar over our heads. What the landmarks of the coming century may be, no history can yet tell us.