The store is a personification of ideals.
—Wanamaker Store Guide
A light snow fell in the early morning of December 14, 1922, on the gathering crowd waiting outside Bethany Presbyterian Church. They waited for the casket of John Wanamaker to make its way from his mansion on Walnut Street to the church he had founded.1 Wanamaker had died at home two days earlier at the age of eighty-four. Never retiring from his business or church, he had been at work just days before he took to his bed with a bad cough, as he did nearly every December, but this time he did not recover. The Philadelphia Inquirer announced his death the next day on the front page, declaring, “World’s Greatest Merchant and Philadelphia’s Leader in Business, Philanthropy, Religion and Civic Effort Ends Brave Fight for Life.”2 Wanamaker had outlived all but one of his siblings, his wife, and three of his children, including his oldest son, Thomas, as well as a daughter-in-law. Of his children, his son Rodman and two daughters, Minnie and Lillie, remained.3
At 9:20 a.m. the doors of Bethany opened, and an estimated twenty thousand people solemnly processed past Wanamaker lying in state. The church overflowed with people and the heavy scent of more than two hundred floral arrangements. At 2:00 p.m. the funeral began, and many Philadelphians paused in their work or closed the doors of their businesses to remember the great merchant for a five-minute silence. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange stopped trading at the time of the funeral.
The Wanamaker’s stores had shuttered their doors and draped the windows in bolts of black fabric, casting the business in mourning. Retailers in Philadelphia and New York took out large advertisements in local newspapers to honor Wanamaker and his contributions to retail. Countless city and service organizations passed resolutions recognizing his philanthropy. Telegrams and letters of condolence poured in from across the globe; those sending messages of sympathy included mere acquaintances, people who had shopped at his department stores, and powerful intimates such as Commander Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army and President Warren G. Harding.
Wanamaker’s final resting place was not Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, where many of the city’s elite went for their eternal slumber. He was not buried in one of the historic Presbyterian cemeteries either. Instead, Wanamaker’s casket was interred in a place that echoed the Christmas cathedral he had constructed in his store; he was buried in a large English Gothic-revival bell tower mausoleum in the quiet churchyard cemetery of the English Gothic-styled St. James the Less, an Episcopal church.
The outpouring of grief at Wanamaker’s funeral demonstrates that he was more than a successful businessman and the founder of a large Sunday school and church. People lamented his passing because he had changed the emotional and material landscapes of their lives. Wanamaker led and supported dozens of civic programs aimed at improving the urban world and its inhabitants. Through his church and stores, he opened up new and beautiful spaces in the middle of the city that focused on service and moral reform.
Wanamaker had changed the way people shopped, dined, and spent their free time. He had entered people’s homes through the goods he sold—the fashions they wore, the furniture they selected, the art they hung on their walls—and the newspaper editorial advertisements he wrote six days a week. He had made fashion, music, art, history, and refinement accessible. He crafted public celebrations that were Christian and patriotic. He tried to make his store a “temple of culture.” He provided educational opportunities and a path to bodily improvement that offered upward mobility for some of the thousands of young men and women who worked for him, while at the same time reinforcing racial and gender hierarchies that stymied the potential of African Americans, women, and immigrants. Wanamaker had consciously and unconsciously defined what it meant to be a valued American citizen—Protestant, white, and (at least in dress, consumption, and behavior) part of the developing middling classes—against the new demographics introduced by immigration and migration. He offered a vision of what people should be or, at the very least, what they could aspire to be. By doing so, he had become a tastemaker—a responsibility he felt was charged with religious and moral obligation that he took on with evangelistic zeal. It was an endeavor that also made him lots of money, which he understood as God’s blessing. In many ways, he had achieved what he had set out to do—to morally uplift the city and commerce or, more specifically, at least some of its inhabitants.
When Wanamaker opened his first store, Oak Hall, in 1861, department stores had not yet emerged on the urban landscape. As we have seen, many Protestants saw business as antithetical to religion, despite a long habit of blending religion and business. While Dwight L. Moody, the famous revivalist, had used business methods to enhance his revival tours, he, like many Protestants, adhered to a double standard. Moody and other Protestant religious leaders relied on business for financial underwriting for their projects and programs. Yet in the eyes of Protestant leaders, business—especially retail—remained problematic primarily due to its reputation of slack ethics. When Moody’s friend Wanamaker turned away from full-time ministry to open a large store, he judged the decision with disdain. After Wanamaker’s dynamic success with the opening of the Grand Depot annex to the Centennial Exhibition, Moody had urged him to leave his business behind to join Moody’s ministry team. He feared that Wanamaker’s triumphs in business would destroy his fiercely held religious commitments. At the same time, Moody feared losing the merchant’s friendship. Wanamaker met many of Moody’s pleas with silence, leading the revivalist to write several contrite letters asking for financial assistance for his struggling seminary in Northfield, Massachusetts.4
Wanamaker had accepted another point of view on business and religion, one whose development was fostered by the YMCA and other moral reform movements. For sixty-one years, Wanamaker mixed his business and religious commitments in the public space of his stores and brought his business acumen to his religious work in an effort to reform the urban world. He extended his reform work through his department stores. Wanamaker’s efforts serve as a rich case study for understanding the development of relationships between religion, business, aesthetics, and commerce in the United States. Far from an anomaly, his innovative efforts are a part of a long line of Protestant efforts to blend religion and business, efforts that expanded in the twentieth century and continue today. Wanamaker exemplified a Protestant synthesis—making the old-time religion into something new.
Wanamaker saw business and religion as mutually supportive and beneficial. He took the money he earned from the YMCA to start his successful dry goods store. To make sense of his increasing wealth in light of his religious values, Wanamaker had also embraced and then promulgated what he called “practical religion,” a version of Conwell’s prosperity gospel. He came to understand his success as a sign of God’s approval and his hard work. He took the money he made from his retail store to finance a myriad of religious organizations and endeavors.
Wanamaker and a generation of business leaders intentionally set out to resolve the tensions between business and religion and the troublesome ethics of retail. Through what he called a “businessman’s gospel,” they tried to remake business into a Christian endeavor—one that followed the “Golden Rule” of the New Testament.5 Wanamaker did so through the way he conducted business, advertised, trained his employees, and disseminated his business methods in an effort to evangelize others. Certainly, there were business leaders who used religion as a way to stave off criticism, as a method to induce employee loyalty, and a cheap ploy to make more money. Some business leaders gave money and support to religious concerns while pursuing a business agenda that appeared at odds with their religious values. But some sincerely attempted to bring together their religious and business lives for mutual benefit and support. Far from a declension narrative, a story that demonstrates the decline of American Protestantism and traces its diminishment to capitalism’s co-opting of religion, this is a story of adaptation and expansion. As Robert S. Ogden described Wanamaker’s approach, “Business is . . . not an end in itself, therein it is a means toward an end: a means for building up all virtues . . . making the life of the city a unity—stronger, more patriotic, nobler.”6 Wanamaker told friends, “my stores will be a pulpit for me.”7
Protestants exercised extraordinary creativity in the nineteenth century in response to rapid changes in population, industry, and society in the United States and to a loss of cultural authority. They formulated a clever mix of strategies to address their concerns by crossing denominational and theological lines to work together, cobbling together a variety of methods, symbols, institutions, and organizations. These organizations joined Protestants from across the United States and Europe in a mutual collaboration of resources, time, and money. Leaders shared ideas through conferences, visits, and letter exchanges. The multiple reform movements cross-fertilized one another, informing the churches, civic institutions, and business. Through trial and error, they forged new institutions and movements like the YMCA, the Sunday school mission movement, the Salvation Army, settlement houses, and the women’s Christian temperance movement, among dozens of others.
As we have seen, tapping into larger cultural forces that solidified in the nineteenth century, many moral reformers tied aesthetics to moral uplift and the cultivation of Protestant values. Spaces, places, artwork, music, and clothing had the power to shape people into moral citizens and to Christianize society as a type of aesthetic evangelism. The development of good taste and moral values needed beautiful and refined environments.8 Cities needed beautiful buildings, gardens, and parks to usher in the desired changes to society. One’s home and body needed to be dressed with tasteful and elegant goods, and Wanamaker and other Protestants like him were happy to provide the visual and material goods to build those environments.
Wanamaker exercised aesthetic evangelism in multiple ways. He used his building’s architecture and design and his many programs to morally uplift the city and its inhabitants. Hiring Daniel Burnham, the visionary architect of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition White City, was a concerted effort to affect Philadelphia through his building’s design. He used his department store as an extension of his religious work at Bethany and especially the YMCA. Wanamaker’s store and his art collection show how many Protestants navigated the changing urban world by imbuing the material world with spiritual and moralizing power. Wanamaker had a dual interest in promoting moral uplift through material aesthetics: these efforts both helped to align the city with Protestant values and increased profits. Wanamaker’s Philadelphia building modeled this approach in its refined and luxurious appointments and the model homes and rooms it displayed. The shop windows gave glimpses to those standing on the street into a world, a life, a setting that was for purchase. For those for whom purchase was not possible, the store windows reached those looking in, bringing the carefully designed vision of the domestic world onto the city streets. Wanamaker drew the strands of moral uplift, good taste, and capitalism together.
Good taste was also equated with deportment; beautiful and well-kept spaces contributed to proper behavior. Behavior and dress became a shorthand way to distinguish visually an individual’s location in society. Dress and manners enabled strangers in the city to identify those who shared a similar background, income, and home situation. The emerging middle-class aesthetics supported a new developing hierarchy.9 Wanamaker’s education and physical fitness courses offered his working-class employees a chance to move up in the ranks of society. Yet, as Bushman has pointedly noted, “Refinement created a standard for exclusion as well as a mode of association.”10 Wanamaker, other departments stores, and shoppers defined the boundaries.
As has become clear, the promises of Protestant refinement did not extend to everyone. African Americans were not afforded the same recognition for their acquisition of refined furnishings and manners. Black advancement was met by white people with open mockery through racist and demeaning caricatures in cartoons, minstrel entertainment shows, and advertisements marking African American efforts as foolhardy, among other indignities.11 At the same time, the adoption of practices of refinement established class hierarchies within the African American community as well.
Ultimately, aesthetics and beautification centered on the socialization of the working class and the formation of a set of expectations for Protestants that mirrored the values of discipline, order, cleanliness, and purity. By exhibiting practices of good taste and refinement in his store’s design and displays and through the bodies of his employees, Wanamaker lifted up consumerism and gave shopping a moral dimension. He was a part of a larger transformation in American material and visual culture. The aesthetics he promoted were developed and reinforced through print media, especially through the emergence of women’s and shelter magazines; fashion and lifestyle magazines mutually reinforced an aesthetic ideal. Many Americans now had the opportunity to consume art and architecture on trips to Europe. And the aesthetics were further fueled by cultural critics and the great exhibitions, especially Chicago’s White City. Wanamaker forwarded this idea through a domestic consumer aesthetic and through art displays that were both aesthetically beautiful and morally didactic. Middling class taste had a distinctively Protestant texture.
Protestants had readily adopted material practices for moral uplift. Good taste aligned with morality with a greater intensity. The sources for American taste and refinement were—unexpectedly—European aristocracy, Catholic art, and ecclesial architecture. Wanamaker’s love of France was not happenstance. He followed the trend of other American elites, finding a model of living from Europe’s elite by drawing on their architecture, clothing, and art scene for inspiration. Religion, on the other hand, turned to the Middle Ages with its knights and lords and ladies—an era depicted as a romantic, hegemonic Christian culture.
In one of the surprising reversals of the nineteenth century, Catholic art and medieval ecclesial architecture, once viewed with suspicion, were now appropriated by Protestants. What had been historically Catholic was now infused with Protestant meaning. Protestants and others organized and flocked to public religious festivals held in city centers and commercial buildings, piecing together new expressions of Christianity for the public square that were dramatic enough to compete with the emerging commercial cityscape. Artwork, especially Catholic paintings of biblical stories, was repurposed to play a didactic function. Catholic art and architecture became Protestant.
During this period, Protestants buttressed their churches with experiments in liturgy, architecture, and religious education, borrowing from Catholicism for many of these projects. They took to the streets, opening outreach centers for working-class immigrants and newly arrived men and women from rural America. Wanamaker took up the cause with his art galleries, history displays, and musical programs in the Grand Court, and his holiday decorations. His store functioned as an aesthetic showcase. Art galleries and displays in his lavishly decorated building had cultural power.
Wanamaker’s was more than a place of employment and material consumption. It was an active site of evangelism. Generations of employees passed through the store’s education programs, which were meant to cultivate a Protestant religious sensibility. Wanamaker cultivated morality through material practices that led to “formation” and moral uplift of his employees, such as summer camp, education programs in the store, and vocational training for black workers. In this process, he provided educational opportunities to all, including black workers and the women and girls who worked in his stores, but on an unequal level, thus replicating the expectations for behavior and participation for black workers and for white women workers. Here again, Wanamaker drew on existing trends, like muscular Christianity and Christian militarism, and then deployed them in new ways aimed at the moral formation of his employees. Wanamaker synthesized popular reform movements with employee programs to round out the edges in behavior, manners, and physical presentation. His goal was to develop in his shoppers and staff alike a moral character that was decidedly patriotic and Christian and, by those definitions, middle-class. These bold moves were done in service to an ideal rooted in an idea of moral superiority—a chance to remake the urban world into a Protestant one.
In the world of department stores, Wanamaker’s was not entirely unique, though he liked to position his store that way. Wanamaker’s store shared many of the same characteristics of European and American department stores. Holiday decorations and celebrations, for instance, abounded in the stores up and down Market Street in Philadelphia and in other American cities. However, Wanamaker also offered new ways of being religious in addition to going to church and in some cases, instead of attending. The content of Wanamaker’s holiday displays had a civilizing purpose about which he and his staff informed customers at every turn. Inside his stores, he had crafted a multisensory world that was climate-controlled while visually and aurally astounding. During the holiday season and in particular parts of the store, Wanamaker’s team created utopian spaces much like the exhibition halls of the world’s fairs.
Bridging the divide between home and commercial Christianity was architecture’s Gothic Revival movement. By bringing the Gothic Revival inside the store, Wanamaker borrowed an architectural design that had a pan-Protestant cultural power. Even when the Grand Court was not dressed as a cathedral, the decorations were rich in intricate symbolism still recalling the cathedral form’s stained-glass windows, stone, and wood carvings. Bringing together symbols that operated on religious and patriotic levels, Wanamaker crafted a new patriotic, commercial Christianity using the Great Organ, the eagle statue, hymns, and flags. He connected the dream world of the great exhibitions to his store by naming his atrium the Grand Court of Honor. By designing a space that echoed both Gothic cathedrals and the world’s fairs, Wanamaker experimented with crafting a civil religion, tying together both patriotic and religious themes for the purpose of cultivating a particular and public Protestant middle-class ethos.
Wanamaker deployed a symbolic lexicon in his holiday displays that was recognizable to the people visiting his store. Weaving a variety of symbols together, Wanamaker’s presented a nostalgic version of Christianity that linked a romantic “ancient” Christianity with patriotism and consumption. Wanamaker dressed his store during the holidays in an emerging pan-Christian imagery. Stained-glass windows, paintings of the Nativity complete with a beam of light focused on the manger, and angels watching graced the Grand Court’s massive space. At holiday time, Wanamaker’s sought to truly offer one-stop shopping—the ability to purchase gifts and train one’s religious sensibilities. He was teaching his customers new ways of being religious.
At other times of the year, Wanamaker’s presented musical concerts and educational lectures in a polite, refined, and beautiful space, helping to develop and curate the American canon of music. Attractive clothes, housewares, musical instruments, toys, and anything a person imagined was offered for sale at Wanamaker’s. Wanamaker offered lessons in lifestyle—an upwardly mobile middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyle imbued with the values of Protestant Christianity. Wanamaker’s was a place to learn how to live.
The popularity of his Christmas cathedrals and Easter arrangements during his lifetime, and the Munkácsy paintings during Lent in the Grand Court after his death, points to the power of the store displays to meet the needs of shoppers. Christmas and Easter obscured the boundaries of shop and religious space. Tour guides invited prayer, and letters from shoppers attest to religious experiences they had at the store. Wanamaker understood his blending of religion and commerce as creating symbiosis rather than conflict. He approached the rapidly changing urban milieu with a set of strategies intended to promote Christian morality and taste.12 His business was as important as the church he founded and the YMCA in his moral reform work. He used his store in multiple ways to improve the moral and aesthetic ambiance of the city.
Wanamaker ushered in a new way to relate to Christianity in the public sphere; Christian practice was no longer sequestered to church and home. The YMCA, Salvation Army, and women’s temperance movement had brought religion out into the streets into the center of the city. Wanamaker and his store’s holiday celebrations and art galleries invited the public to experience Christianity in the commercial and urban world. Wanamaker, his son, and his employees designed an electrifying spectacle of religion in public space, and people responded. He invited public expression of private religious beliefs. Wanamaker acted as a mediator of history, art, religion, and taste.
Wanamaker was not so much an innovator as an early and eager adopter of a variety of methods, approaches, and trends. His innovation came through his stitching together of multiple approaches and his deployment of them. Middling class aesthetics centered primarily on socialization. Through his education programs, summer camp, and employee training, Wanamaker attempted to mold his employees—their bodies, minds, and dress—into models of his Protestant Christian aesthetic vision. That vision reflected assumptions about race, class, gender, and ethnicity that were rooted in a muscular Christianity and white middle-class identity. Wanamaker tied aesthetics to moral uplift and the cultivation of Protestant values and character.
Though never said explicitly, many of these projects by Protestant Christians were about defining whiteness in a time when it felt threatened. While many white Protestants supported African American education and religious organizations, racial hierarchies and racism remained. Minstrel shows thrived as a popular form of entertainment and served as a way for white workers to associate themselves with other more economically secure and upwardly mobile whites. African Americans were actively kept out of jobs, and black workers were permitted to advance only in supporting roles to the wider culture, or for their “entertainment value.”
Neither the division between commercial and religious nor a separation between “profane” and “sacred” existed for Wanamaker. The Grand Court served as both his stage and his pulpit, while other spaces in the store served didactic purposes. For Wanamaker, his store was a way to provide the benefits of the YMCA and church to a wider audience. Wanamaker was part of a generation of business leaders who actively set out to resolve the tensions between business and religion. Business procedures, architecture, educational programs, art, and aesthetics were more than just practices—they worked together to create a new kind of space, brick by brick, stone by stone. His store was not in competition with the church, and the church was not a project to assuage guilt. Wanamaker’s store, through its business practices and then its architecture, served as an extension of his moral reform efforts. The building offered an all-encompassing opportunity: here shoppers could spend the entire day in a morally upright and wholesome space. He offered material expression to matters of the spirit. Shopping, whether it was for everyday necessities or celebration of a religious holiday, became a moral endeavor.
***
In 1953 a group of business, civic, media, and education leaders honored John Wanamaker’s contributions to American retail at a summer black-tie dinner party on the rooftop of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, an immense Art Deco building on the north bank of the Chicago River. Joseph Kennedy, a successful businessman, former ambassador to Great Britain, and owner of the Mart, threw the party to draw attention to his hopes for American commerce, and to attract tenants to the Mart by honoring inspirational merchants of the past with the dedication of the Merchants of America Hall of Fame.13 Earlier that year, Kennedy’s staff had solicited leading retailers for names of deceased merchants who deserved the honor of being inducted into the hall of fame. Forty-one names were submitted, and his staff whittled the list down to a slate of ten merchants. The ballot was sent to leading newspaper editors of business and finance, writers, university marketing professors, and other leaders for a vote.14 Four inductees were announced at the dinner: George Huntington Hartford, the founder of the A&P grocery store chain; Frank Winfield Woolworth, the creator of the dime store chain Woolworth’s; and the department store moguls Marshall Field and John Wanamaker. To commemorate the inductees, Kennedy had commissioned a bronze sculpture of each merchant’s head, four times life-size, by leading artists. He envisioned the hall of fame as an enduring yearly event to both celebrate and encourage American retail and merchandising.15
In the following year, Kennedy unveiled the sculptures of the first four hall of fame members at a ceremony where two more merchants were inducted into the hall of fame: Edward Albert Filene, the founder of Filene’s department store, and Julius Rosenwald, of Sears, Roebuck and Company. The hall of fame lost some of its national focus in 1955 with the final two inductees, General Robert E. Wood, also from Sears and still living at the time of the ceremony, and—a late addition in 1972—Aaron Montgomery Ward, the founder of the dry goods mail-order business and chain of stores. Kennedy placed the hall of fame bronzes in a prominent public spot, along the bank of the Chicago River. The eight bronze heads were placed on slim stone plinths facing the south entrance of the Mart.
Five years later, in 1958, the great-grandson and namesake of John Wanamaker carried the optimism demonstrated five years before at the Merchants Hall of Fame in an article he wrote describing the Christmas traditions of the Wanamaker department store for the Christian Monitor.16 He called his family’s store one of the “historic shrines” of Philadelphia, in the same league as the Liberty Bell. He posed the question, “Why do visitors want to include Wanamaker’s on their tour?” Because it was “a beautiful store,” he argued, “one of the largest in the world” and “one that houses great and famous works of art” and offers “an artistic architectural beauty.” He boasted that “the Grand Court is a sight not quickly forgotten.” It was no less than “the crossroads of the city itself,” with the Wanamaker eagle serving as a “landmark,” “a meeting place of thousands,” and, he proudly noted, “a part of the parlance of the city.” The physical dominance of the Wanamaker department store continued.
Turning to the Christmas rituals of the store, Wanamaker described the great “Wanamaker Cathedral” that stood every year at one end of the Grand Court. As it had been in his great-grandfather’s day, it remained a “masterpiece of workmanship” depicting the great cathedrals of Europe. On the other side of the court, “gargantuan figures magnificently robed” told “the story of Christ Jesus,” while perched on the surrounding ledges were “other romantic displays of the Christmas customs in many lands.” Seemingly little had changed inside the store in the thirty-six years since John Wanamaker’s death. His namesake store, under the guiding hand of his great-grandson, appeared to thrive as it carried on the traditions of its now long dead founder. But outside Wanamaker’s, the decline of the great American department store had already begun. Retail was changing.
At the time of Wanamaker’s induction to what is now called the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame, American retailers and merchandisers harbored hope for ongoing expansion and prosperity of production and merchandising businesses in the postwar economy. However, changes that had started in the late 1920s gained momentum in the 1950s, altering the landscape of American retail. Today, only one of the stores honored in the hall of fame still exists.
Much of the magic of America’s great urban department stores began to fade with increased competition and the move of urban populations to the suburbs. A proliferation of stores and brands lessened the dominance of the older stores locally and nationwide. City center department stores lost their prominence as people moved further from downtown shopping districts. Although department stores followed their shoppers by anchoring new suburban malls sprouting up across the country, the tremendous cultural power of the centrally located department store was diluted across dozens and hundreds of branches, making it impossible to hold grand events on the scale of the big urban flagship stores. Suburban stores were also much smaller than the large multifloor downtown buildings, with fewer departments, leaving little room for “wasted” floor space for an art gallery, a fancy tea room, or an educational display.
Department stores had once been the leading tastemakers of their day and fostered the growth of magazines and newspaper advertisements that extended their reach into people’s homes. The large department stores with only one or two locations exercised a strong curatorial power over what goods they brought into their stores and the cities they served. Over time, print culture and stores both democratized access to fashion and material goods and deepened the furrows between classes and taste. From small towns to metropolises, department stores’ fashion shows, sales, and advertisements guided American taste in home, clothing, and music and shaped American behavior—how they used rooms in the home, how they entertained, and what they wore for work in the home and at the office. They defined a sense of Americanness. As they expanded into the suburbs, taste became localized, with more store buyers making the purchasing decisions for store stock that better fit the needs of the store’s location. Taste lost some, although not all, of its association with morality. The interpretation of what constitutes proper and improper dress broadened.
Yet the lifespan of the suburban mall proved shorter than the city center department store with the advent of Internet shopping. The retail market moved from city to suburbs to online. In a sense, Internet retailers are the department stores of today, with their myriad goods all found in one place. The dominance and authority of department stores as the tastemakers have been replaced by a crowded field of retailers and social media influencers that the shopper self-curates by deciding who to follow and that is also customized to the viewer through Internet history tracking.
The role of religion in department stores changed with the passing of time and the founders. Santa Claus and gingerbread men, Easter bunnies and eggs came to define the Christmas and Easter holidays instead of the baby Jesus and the cross. Other stores, recognizing religious worlds outside Christianity, brought new holidays into the pantheon of celebrations, but often in haphazard ways that attempted to correlate other religions’ holy days as merely different versions of Christian ones. An exception was Wanamaker’s. The flagship store kept the explicitly Christian displays into the 1960s while at the same time encorporating nonreligious symbols. Despite these changes, a fusion of Christianity and consumerism was complete.
The tensions between religion and commerce changed and moved from the store into the churches, with new church architecture sometimes holding more in common with an outlet of a mall than the church edifices of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Church shopping” became common language for people looking for a religious home, and many megachurches resemble malls with their open spaces, coffee shops, restaurants, and food courts. Some churches have started businesses to underwrite their religious institutions. A variety of church services cater to the different tastes of churchgoers—from Sunday night jazz, to praise rock band Sunday mornings, and dozens of small groups bringing together people with shared interests or concerns. Religion and commerce remain intertwined.
Wanamaker’s department store began with the Moody revival, was informed by it, and in a sense, tried to ensure that the revival never ended. Or as Ruskin put it in his essay “Traffic,” “Good taste is morality” and “taste is not only a part and an index of morality; it is the ONLY morality.”17
Most of the great names in American department stores have disappeared, their enormous buildings divided into offices or destroyed by the wrecking ball to make way for new development. Those that remain, with a few exceptions, no longer carry the names of their founders. But memories of the magical worlds they built abide.