I've Been Thinking

It’s not unusual to hear people talk about some mythical time, in the past, when the world was comprehensible, when most levers of culture and society seemed to function as they were supposed to. More often than not it’s our conservate brothers and sisters who hold this view. They lament that the times have changed, things are different, not quite as understandable as they once were; “if we could only get back to the way things were we would be so much better off.”

A book on my reading list is entitled “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” The author examines not just our mythologizing the 1950s but two centuries of myths and half-truths about the American family. There never was a “golden age” or summit of society and culture from which we fell . There is no time we could go back to when life would be understandable and predictable.

But if there were such a time, I think we would find that it’s further in the past than we imagine. There was a shift or change in the U.S., but it wasn’t the result of some “liberal conspiracy” or leftist movement. The shift began in the late 1800’s. In his book, “Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the rise of a New American Culture,” William Leach describes, what I think, is an American that many folk yearn for, wistfully:

For at least the first half of nineteenth century , most American white men were self-employed voters, owners of landed property, and producers of foodstuffs and raw materials for a prosperous Atlantic trade largely free from the dangers of manufacturing that relied on disciplined work rhythms and a dependent workforce to churn out goods.¹

I think many folk yearn for the type of independence existent in this bygone era. What happened?

In a word what happened was industrialization.

Industrialization enabled businesses to produce goods on a scale never seen before, which they did. Now the economic law of supply and demand states that when supply exceeds demand prices will decline. Oscillations in prices were disruptive to producers. As a result, they sought something beyond the laws of supply and to ensure turnover of existing inventory.

Businessmen would have to intervene more aggressively, not only by controlling prices, output and labor or by establishing alliances with others…but also by persuading and changing minds, by producing a new consumer consciousness, by transforming the imagination. [This] required a diffusion of desire throughout the entire population…²

To ensure a turnover of goods now produced on a massive scale “desire” had to be manufactured, created. People had to be made to want, indeed made. The need for the creation, or manufacture of desire gave rise to “new methods of marketing and to the dissemination of strategies of enticement-advertising, display and decoration, fashion, style, design and consumer service.”³

The early 1900s, following on the rapid industrialization of the late 1800s, gave birth to, what William Leach refers to as a “New American Culture” in his title, a consumer culture, which is the dominant culture in the United States to this day. That’s how it happened.

1. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the rise of a New American Culture (New York, Vintage Books, 1994). 5. ↩︎
2. Leach, 37 ↩︎
3. Ibid ↩︎