A system of visions, practices, and institutions in which people give meaning to their roles in society and define their personal identity by the purchase, ownership, use, and display of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods and services.
Many intellectuals and critics of contemporary society argue that consumerism was the defining “ism” of the twentieth century and it will likely remain so in the twenty-first century.
According to historian Gary Cross and others who study this pervasive phenomenon, consumerism is the ultimate victor in the global ideological contest waged through much of the twentieth century. The world underwent two devastating world wars in the first half century, the first waged primarily among contending imperialist powers and the second fought between forces subscribing to visions of democratic capitalism and those resorting to varied forms of totalitarianism. In the roughly half century following World War II, the world was then consumed in the prolonged Cold War between an alliance of nations upholding capitalism and the international communist camp that challenged the capitalist world order. But the real worldwide winner, which emerged by the last decade of the century, argues Cross, was not the American political cannon of free democratic citizenry pursuing self-determining political activism, as some Cold War triumphantists hold. What emerged truly victorious from the century-long ideological contestation was visions and realities of societies made up of consumers who tend to passive reception of what the market delivers and construction of their identities through purchased products.
It is not customary to see consumerism as the winning contestant over other ideological “isms” and political doctrines in defining public life and structuring human society. It is commonly assumed that consumerism is innately apolitical because it is driven by decisions made and actions taken by private individuals, not by public authority. According to this widely held view, predicated as it is on a narrow definition of what constitutes politics, consumption is what can take place and thrive when individuals are free of war and other forms of violence, political instability, and coercive ideological controls. Fascism, communism, and other forms of totalitarianism that sought global ascendancy in the twentieth century stood in the way of this desired “normalcy” in the human condition.
The real victor in the twentieth century, it follows from this view, was not consumerism but liberalism in its classic sense of individual rights free from autocratic political rule, self-directed civic institutions, religious tolerance and political pluralism, unrestricted markets, and limited states. Some label this strand of thought neoliberalism, and its adherents generally render positive judgment on the extent to which contemporary society has come to organize and define itself around the acts of commodifying and consuming goods and services.At the same time, consumerism lacks a systematic philosophy articulated by an identifiable school of intellectuals and is not promoted by any particular political parties or leaders. It has, however, emerged as the only ideology, with accompanying practices and institutions, that can command popular allegiance on a truly transnational scale.
Consumerism has come to command such pervasive and staunch allegiance across national boundaries in the twentieth century partly because it permits its practitioners to pursue such hallowed ideals as equality, freedom, and democracy largely irrespective of the formal political structure under which they live. Material consumption also enables people to experience and express the key political creeds of the twentieth century without having necessarily to resort to overtly self-destructive behavior, violent acts against others, personal humiliations, or denial of bodily comfort. Consumer products and commodified services have allowed Americans and many others in the contemporary world to break out of the old, relatively stable, and protected but closed communities to which they previously belonged. Purchased goods allow people to venture into the world of expressive individualism as participants in a dynamic and ever-changing mass society.
Historians note that, in the United States, the paramount engine of modern consumerism, people began to embrace consumption and invest positive meanings into it in the late nineteenth century. Commodities and marketed services gave the American people a sense of freedom and autonomy and provided them with a painless substitute for the independence, both physical and emotional, of the shop, craft, or farm that began to disappear as the United States underwent industrialization with the attendant urbanization and bureaucratization of society.
An accelerating pace of immigration and a loss of social cohesion also marked nineteenth-century America as it was traditionally conceived. Consumer goods gave the American people, whether of old stock or newly arrived, the means with which to construct new personal or group identities and part with previous connections without completely relinquishing existing ties with family and friends or their shared ethnic heritage. Chil dren of immigrants, for instance, used commercialized public entertainment such as amusement parks and movie theaters, new types of food, and fashion to distance themselves from their parents and relatives while maintaining those ties. At the same time, consumer goods, made affordable through mass production and more efficient distribution, became a common language that defined and redefined relationships between friends, family members, and strangers who came into greater contact as a result of industrialization and urbanization. Goods people purchased and displayed, such as antiques, novelties, and seasonal decorations, themselves not essential to human existence, also helped define concepts of the understandable past and future, gave a new yet comforting cadence to the rhythms of daily life, and remade social rituals to meet the needs of the present.
The acts of consuming goods and services also redefined democracy in twentieth-century America and other nations in the industrialized world. It helped create social solidarities, emotional cohesion, and opportunities for participation and self-assertion in the public sphere that transcended and often supplemented suffrage rights or binding political ideologies. By the early twentieth century, the notion of a world of mass-produced goods made affordably available to the American people largely replaced the traditional vision of a republic made up of self-reliant producers. This new political ideal also challenged, if not replaced, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity as principles of political solidarity and mobilization. In other words, the promise of a democracy of citizens, free to choose and buy goods supplied by unrestricted markets, in large part reconfigured (some may say eroded) class-based identity. The notion of a democracy of consumers in turn created new social needs and fulfilled those needs largely without the disruptive and violent redistributive political conflict common to older forms of social solidarity.
Simply put, it was, and still is, relatively easy to buy one’s way into a community of consumers. Similarly, it became easier for capital to coopt labor by appealing to the workers’ perceived needs and identities as consumers, thus “milling the class conflict of labor strife” into bread-and-butter issues.
In the context of consumerism, liberty is thus no longer an abstract right to participate in public discourse or practice free speech and expression of conscience. It has come to mean expressing oneself, situating oneself vis-à-vis others, and realizing personal pleasure and comfort in and through purchased goods. Democracy does not mean universal equal rights under the law or guaranteed access to the political process. Instead, it has come to embody sharing with other individuals and groups access to particular commodities. By this definition, democracy is reinforced and expanded each time new and improved products enter the market and the means for acquiring and enjoying them become widely available. If one pushes this vision of consumers’ democracy further, however, consumerism can pose a threat to the notion of individual responsibilities, civic virtues, and social solidarities that made political democracy work in the past. A narrow fixation on personally obtained goods and comfort has removed the necessity of sacrifice or commitment beyond the family and relatively small groups to which individuals belong. It allows little room for social conscience and confines human aspiration to the personal realm and to targets that can be achieved merely through acquisition of concrete material objects.
Some critics bemoan that consumer society has replaced civil society, but others counter that the phenomenon has not been exclusively detrimental. The latter group argues that communities of shoppers and spenders have served as effective counterweights to the kind of political and cultural solidarities that produced Nazism in the past and make for ethnic or religious bigotry at the present time. Consumerism has provided emotional and social outlets for human energies that politicians and ideological movements could otherwise exploit for demonic or at least hostile purposes. As C.B. McPherson notes, the “possessive individualism” or “personal acquisition” regarded as a vice in the seventeenth century became a peaceful alternative to the more destructive passions of vengeance, millennial glory, and domination in the twentieth century. Similarly, modern consumerism, some argue, has kept affluent industrial societies with immense technological power from such destabilizing, destructive, and pain-causing forms of collective behavior as ethnic feuds, racial bigotry, and aggressive militarism. Mass consumption combines hedonism and egoism with work and fantasy with hard-nosed realism and rational calculation of cost-effectiveness.
Since the late nineteenth century, Americans have led the world in moving toward a mass consumer society, but Americans are not the sole creator of consumerism. Neither is consumerism the American national character incarnate, as many critics of American society are prone to charge. Despite the great uniformity in consumptive styles in the contemporary world, other societies have also created different types of consumerism. For example, Europeans have been noticeably slower than Americans and Canadians to abandon small-scale, class-segmented stores in favor of large discount/department stores and nationally uniform franchises. But they have often spent more freely on food, travel, and aesthetic activities than the average American. Americans, on the other hand, have led the way in private consumption of relatively large homes and cars. Japanese and other East Asians in the postwar period distinguished themselves in the wholehearted consumption of household electrical appliances and consumption related to mutual gift giving.
Generally speaking, modern consumerism has mirrored broad structural transformations experienced by members of industrial societies worldwide. As an aspect of industrialization, science and technology became inextricably linked to the pursuit of human happiness, comfort, and subjective contentment. Human yeaning and desire for comfort, freedom from pain and want, and greater variety in life’s options are not unique to the twentieth century. Before the twentieth century, however, people and societies possessed limited means to achieve these desired goals. Humans had only limited ability, for instance, to harness natural energies, to catalyze or manipulate chemical processes, or to mold and assemble labor-saving or energy-enhancing machines. This stricture also curtailed the parameters of shelter, clothing, and nourishment. People were thus at the mercy of nature to a greater degree. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the industrialized world liberated large portions of humanity from many of these natural restrictions through scientific discoveries, inventions, technical innovations, and development of new techniques and organizational philosophies that encouraged the distribution of such information to a wider audience.
Consumer society also emerged when, as a result of industrialization, the economy of mass subsistence/deprivation and elite opulence gave way to an economy capable of producing and delivering vast and diverse hordes of goods and materials to larger segments of the population. The introduction of Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line in the United States in 1913 and the system of mass production and surrounding managerial technologies associated with the term “Fordism” opened the door to this paradigmatic shift in the relationship between humans and material goods and the role of acquisition and consumption in the formation of social hierarchies. In this respect, America’s historical experience is highly suggestive of consumerism’s implications for other societies.
The new production system ushered in by Ford allowed industrial output to exceed demand for goods on a sustained basis, thus accelerating the needs for systematic advertising to create new demand where none existed. New transportation and communications technologies and visual media, developed since the late nineteenth century but more purposefully harnessed in the twentieth for mass commercial pursuits, aided the reciprocal growth of production and advertising.
Pictorial catalogues and visually appealing shopping centers helped to create wants to match the growing supply of products. The words, conceptual schemes, and concrete visual images concocted by new types of professionals such as advertising agencies and display designers helped generate human physical needs, impulses, and fantasies and assigned them to packaged goods through symbolic association. A symbiotic relationship between consumption and work kept the economic system going and structured daily life. The emergence of this codependent society of producers, marketers, and purchasers, however, was not an inevitable consequence of mass production or the manipulative hands of merchandisers. This development represented a human choice, although seldom consciously made, to define self and community through the ownership and display of goods.
More than any previous century, the twentieth century opened with a great promise of scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. What people took for granted by the end of the twentieth century—automobiles, airplanes, motion pictures, radio, electric lights, appliances, bottled soft drinks, canned food, and synthetic fibers—all came into existence in the century’s first decade. The real genius of American industrialism lay less in these great inventions than in the way in which American prosperity and the national political myth of classless society combined to give ordinary American workers the cars, electric appliances, telephones, and fashionable clothes that European masses and the vast majority of the world population would have to wait until midcentury to obtain.
The increase in leisure time created by mechanization, discretionary personal income, and new products helped make that unprecedented “democratization” of goods possible in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in other industrialized countries. In turn, new spending opportunities helped Americans cope with the profound social change that began to take place in the late nineteenth century. Americans had previously tended to define themselves through possession of land, job skills, and private businesses. Those markers of self-worth and independent citizen status had become out of reach for many by the turn of the nineteenth century, and Americans in growing numbers took industrial and service jobs in which incomes were often higher than agricultural work and trades, but individual autonomy was forever lost.
New consumer products furnished more than physical comfort, sensory pleasure, and physical mobility. They introduced new lifestyles and outlooks, especially new ways of coming to terms with the societal changes that enveloped turn-of-the-century Americans. New products helped smooth Americans’ transition to a changing world of work and home and eased the pain of increasingly monotonous work typical of the industrial economy. For new immigrants who supplied the bulk of the expanding industrial labor, commodities were tools for coping with an alien culture and finding new meanings of democracy at a time when the political process was becoming more bureaucratized and thus ever more removed from average voters. Consumer products were often useful components in the construction of different identities and new communities when the old ones no longer served. Through their innovative packaging, display, and advertising, consumer goods came to embody a visible and handy alternative to political and even religious visions of an American life of liberty and freedom. New white-collar corporate employees, not possessing the workplace autonomy once enjoyed by independent farmers, small business owners, and craftsmen, increasingly sought to achieve status and a sense of control through their consumption and leisure activities rather than their work. A strategy of substituting consumer aspirations for producer dreams expanded beyond the ranks of the native blue-collar or immigrant workers.
In America’s consumer-oriented democracy, management succeeded in maintaining control over work and output by promising personal (not class-wide) access to the material fruits of increased industrial production. This bargain, perhaps scarcely perceived as such at the time, was largely possible when labor relinquished, or at least moderated, its claims of control over the workplace and the production process in general in exchange for higher disposable incomes and shorter working hours, which allowed them to enjoy their status as consumers. Henry Ford’s assembly line was the most prominent example of this strategy of labor cooptation. Ford maintained rigorous managerial control over production by offering a $5/eight-hour day for workers, a generous offer by the day’s standards. Ford thus gave its employees a sense of shared well-being and contentment as consumers enjoying the benefits of a “living wage.”
Beyond the politics of labor control, other ramifications of industrialization fed into the ex panding infrastructure of consumerism in American society in the early twentieth century. Increased amounts of free time available to the average worker and a steady decline in family size between 1900 and 1930 freed parents from the tyranny of constant work and gave them more time for child rearing and leisure activities pursued in family units. The development of Coney Island and similar amusement parks in large population centers reflected these intertwined demographic and social trends. The proliferation of mandatory education and the government regulation of child labor gradually released children from the dictates of the household economy or the rigors of wage labor.
By the early 1920s, American children began to have more playtime and spend it with their age group cohorts, giving rise to relatively self-contained youth peer cultures. Much of children’s newly conferred autonomy and right to self-expression was played out through goods designed specifically for their needs. In the increasingly age-segmented markets, new types of toys, candies, and forms of entertainment were created. The age-segmented consumer culture helped further blur ethnic and class divisions in America. The diversification of consumer markets became apparent even for more costly items such as cars. General Motors both seized on and accelerated this trend by producing a full range of cars to cater to divergent tastes and needs of the target population.
Purchase of an expanding range of merchandise became supported by new marketing techniques. One such tool was credit, such as the method of installment payments pioneered by Singer Sewing Machines. By the 1920s, credit buying came to be applied to other big-ticket items such as cars and pianos. This purchase scheme bred an expectation, or reinforced a social myth, that nothing was, or should be, beyond the reach of the average working family if it had a steady income. Many scholars of American consumptive behaviors agree that Richard Sears, who launched a mail order business in 1886, did for retailing what Henry Ford did for manufacturing. The pictorial merchandise catalogues, which could be mailed anywhere in the country, delivered concrete visual images of, and thus acquisitive desires for, new or improved products even to people living in the remote countryside. In 1916, self-service stores began to appear, and prospective purchasers no longer needed the “expert” intercession of retailers at the store counter to obtain new product information. As consumers acquired direct contact with products, manufacturers became more dependent on systematic advertising to publicize and promote their products. Advertising innovators like Ernest Calkins used modern psychology, a new scientific discipline, to appeal to the public’s desires and insecurities. Through advertising, producers and industrial designers successfully linked specific products with people’s immaterial longings and desires. The spiraling and self-fulfilling aspects of human insecurities and discontents drove the proliferation of products that could be touted by advertisers as capable of removing such emotional woes.
Greater physical mobility and spatial autonomy proffered by the automobile led to less restrained consumptive activities. The automobile revolutionized leisure and consumption by freeing the pleasure-seeking population from the dictates of streetcar and train timetables and the fixed routes of other forms of land-based transportation. The automobile also offered greater options in retailing, product delivery, and home ownership in areas not serviced by public transit systems. This last point was a crucial factor in the growth in suburban home ownership, particularly spectacular in the post–World War II period.
New communications gadgets, most importantly the radio, were not only another avenue of information dissemination, but also a source of the individualizing trend in consumption. In the privacy of their homes, people could now retrieve and consume information without the encumbrances of engagement with larger communities through which information had been typically spread. Thanks to ever advancing technology, by the 1920s the only skill the radio required of a listener was an ability to turn switches. The automobile, the radio, and, in the postwar period, the television set combined to create more individualistic consumerism in the United States, and the Great Depression and World War II only postponed the inexorable trend. As many luxury items of the 1920s became middle-class necessi ties and respectabilities in the postwar period, more things fell under the purview of private ownership in the first half of the twentieth century. New packing materials such as plastic allowed single packaging of products. The notion of licensing and selling pictorial images such as Mickey Mouse became widely accepted. Walt Disney was the original guru of character licensing directed toward children and families in the 1930s. The licensed visual images were found to be serviceable in advertising as well.
The deferral of wants during the Great Depression and the vastly expanded public sector of the New Deal and World War II years created new energies and venues for private spending in the post-war period. In the so-called GI Bill of Rights, Congress offered veterans returning from World War II low-interest housing loans. This allowed the average working American to achieve home ownership at a relatively young age. Along with the Federal Housing Authority’s long-term mortgages, government-backed loans fueled extraordinary growth in housing construction in suburban America. The advent of suburbs and single-household homes, such as those epitomized by Levittown in Long Island, were harbingers of a breakup of traditional community and kinship networks.
Bereft of such conventional sources of advice and support, many women in suburban homes turned increasingly to purchasable “expert” advice and mass-marketed products with which to rear their children and manage their households. With the increasing use of television, product commercials penetrated private homes and no place remained a sanctuary from advertising. As historian Lizabeth Cohen and others have shown, home itself became a shrine of consumer goods in postwar America. It also became the key site for highly commercialized holiday celebrations and displays of domestic refinement. In the consumption-saturated homes, children became principal arbiters of household spending, accelerating market segmentation.
Various efforts have been made to present a viable alternative to rampant consumerism and the inanities it represents, but most have been confined to endeavors to protect consumer interests rather than to transcend the paradigm underlining mass consumerism itself. Although the consumer movement has contained various strains of ideological and spiritual anticonsumerism, most advocates, to be politically effective, have concentrated on protecting citizens from the abuse and deceit of producers and advertisers. They have also sought to ensure product safety through stricter government regulation, a type of advocacy more easily translatable into specific political resolutions.
In a response to the consumption boom in the postwar decade, Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders (1957) resurrected an idea popularized earlier in the century by critics such as F.J. Schlink and Stuart Chase. It held that big business surreptitiously manipulated consumers into buying goods they did not need and indicted a new trend in advertising based on “motivational research.” This merchandising technique drew on depth psychology to tap into people’s desire for status and differentiation in an outwardly egalitarian society. It also abetted self-indulgence by preying on feelings of personal inadequacy and insecurity in an increasingly appearance-obsessed and secular society.
Befitting the decades of upheaval for which the 1960s and 1970s became known, more Americans began to take issue with the costs of unrestrained consumption as well as environmental degradation caused by such social practices. Many grassroots skeptics coalesced into two organized forces: the consumer rights and environmental movements. In 1965, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed shot the opening salvo of the consumers’ rights movement as an organized political force speaking up against the power of big corporation and omnipresent advertising. The young consumer advocate contended that rising numbers of car injuries were attributable not so much to collisions themselves as to the lack of seat belts and other safety features in cars. He also charged that corporate influence over government regulatory agencies was as nefarious as deceptive merchandising. Nader’s consumer advocacy resonated with various critiques of unrestrained economic growth and its destructive impact on the natural environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring highlighted the indiscriminate use of pesticides including DDT. The environmentalists’ outcry against pollution and waste led to the establishment of a host of new regulatory agencies in the late 1960s and 1970s.
While Nader articulated a vision of consumer rights as an inalienable part of democracy, many Americans saw no farther than the product ratings in consumer reports, and the consumer rights movement was generally reduced to savvy shopping and demands for better and safer products by the end of 1970s. Similarly, the environmental movements were marginalized in American political discourse, as the claims of a new kind of individualistic consumption to status as an aspect of democracy began to gain force. The counter-culture of the 1960s decried the working class’s materialistic aspirations, but in doing so it alienated labor, which expected a right to consume and share in the economic pie as a dividend of equality. Many counterculture radicals themselves could not break out of the middle-class norm and used consumption to establish social practices outside the materialistic sphere. By practicing rebellion through consumption, they added yet another segmented market oriented toward expressive individualism and youthful revolt against “traditional values.”
The political economy of the post-Vietnam inflation also enlarged the juggernaut of material consumption. The use of credit cards became more common among middle-class Americans after the 1960s, and many Americans found the temptation of buying now and paying later with cheaper money all too irresistible. As the nation’s economy stumbled, the association between full employment and consumer spending was formed with active government participation.
After America’s “right” turn in the 1980s, the ideology of the unfettered market came to predominate in American political discourse, in which regulators were often portrayed as tyrants and evil hands of a “big government” and those advocating restraint in consumption as lacking in civic-mindedness. In what social critic Thomas Frank calls the “free-market populism” dominant in contemporary America, the construction of large shopping malls and nationally franchised mega retail outlets such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart received a further boost. The first climate-controlled indoor shopping mall was built near Minneapolis in 1955. In the privately owned “public” space set aside for consumption, however, the political functions that had been traditionally served by town squares and commons, such as free expression and propagation of divergent political views, could now be banned with profound long-term implications for American democracy.
The assertion of minority rights by women, blacks, and other ethnic groups created new, segmented markets catering to their “distinct” tastes and preferences. In the meantime, with more women joining the workforce, some domestic chores began to be performed by paid services, and various time-saving products were invented and sold. The paradigm of fulfilling personalized needs through commodities thus passed unscathed even through the radicalism of gender and minority politics. The New Right assailed consumerist excesses, but seemed to do so only when such consumption was satisfied by an “entitlement” or expressed outside of “traditional” family values. From the 1980s onward, firewalls protecting many remaining sanctuaries from advertising began to break down, as illustrated by a dramatic commercialization of schools. The phenomenon, manifested in the introduction of soft drink vending machines and franchised fast food into school cafeterias, was often justified on budgetary grounds.
The introduction of cable and fiber optics communications in the 1980s accelerated the commercialization of the domestic sanctuary that had been started by the television set. The cable television was a critical device for more customized advertising and programming. The segmented visual and cultural markets created by myriad different channels allows individuals to live in their own worlds and separate themselves from peoples and issues that do not appeal directly to their narrowly constructed personal identities. The availability of personal audiovisual equipment, computer devices, and wireless phones, an outcome of advances in miniaturizing technologies since the 1970s, permits each family member to enjoy his or her self-contained world of entertainment and to turn his or her room into a nest of consumption. The fragmented character of the new consumerism became fully manifest by the end of the 1980s.
These social developments in the United States have presaged many similar phenomena in other industrialized societies, and the global reach of consumer capitalism does not leave developing countries immune from the consumption-oriented systems, even though many in those places are unable to participate. In the age of global financial transactions and industrial standardization, the lives of many people threaten to become an assemblage of single-packaged commodities. The changing nature of childhood worldwide is a good case in point. Children’s life in the contemporary world can be characterized as a composite whole of toys, clothes, food and beverages, and other material objects bearing licensed characters and globally protected brand names. The global media conglomerates will, in all likelihood, continue to propagate images of such a childhood as a model of citizenship in the next stage of modernity.
Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
See also: Advertising; Media.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1964.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Cross, Gary S. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Frank, Thomas. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Glickman, Lawrence B. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Nader, Ralph. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. New York: Grossman, 1965.
Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: D. McKay, 1957.