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REVIEWS
Sold American
Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945
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By Charles F. McGovern
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(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 536. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $65.00; paperbound, $24.95.)
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| Charles F. McGovern's study of consumerism as public philosophy is the latest addition to the important new literature on the political economy of consumer capitalism. Sold American provides a chronological and conceptual bridge between Kathleen Donohue's Freedom From Want (2003) and Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic (2003) and represents a sturdy contribution to our thinking about what is arguably the most important question in contemporary American history: How was it that consumer capitalism succeeded in sweeping aside all challengers? |
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McGovern's answer is that, in the first half of the twentieth century, Americans embraced "a material nationalism that placed goods and spending at the center of social life," that they "came to understand spending as a form of citizenship" (p. 3). Americans accepted a definition of the "American way of life" built on an image of consumer plenty, McGovern argues, as if the right to use a Gillette razor were part of the daily fiber of national life and its exercise a civic act, if not an obligation. McGovern rightly sees this consumerist nationalism as a decisive ideological creation that eventually defined national identity. As the economic system spilled forth its cornucopia and Americans chased after its goodies, the terrain of meaningful ideological contention shifted from the old socialist-against-capitalist fight to a debate over the nature of consumption. |
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