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REVIEWS
| Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media. By Joel Spring (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. ix plus 254 pp.).
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| Over the last two decades historians have paid a great deal of attention to the story of how advertisers transformed Americans from a nation of producers into a nation of consumers.1 However, Joel Spring's new book sharpens the analysis by exploring how the promotion and marketing of the ideology of consumerism led to the creation of our current "consumer state", thanks to the efforts of an unholy alliance (he calls it a "marriage") among schools, the U.S. government, advertising, and the corporate media. |
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Spring's terminology and theoretical framework offer considerable insight into why most Americans have become so enthralled with things like shopping malls, fast food, and designer goods. Defining a "consumer citizen" as a "person who accepts any political situation as long as there is an abundance of consumer goods" (p. 4), one begins to see that the U.S. exists as a "consumer state" peopled by "consumer citizens" rather than by the political or productive citizens that were more common in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. |
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Although the role of advertising and the media in creating consumers has already been well documented, Spring adds to this literature by outlining the role that manufacturers, home economics teachers, and the U.S. government played in promoting consumerism in the first half of the twentieth century, and the role that public schools played in promoting consumerism in the latter part of the twentieth century. His analysis of the writings and campaigns of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the American Legion show how these vehemently pro-business groups were able to prevent educational textbooks from criticizing the ideology of consumerism, and to conflate democracy and free enterprise in the mind of the public (via advertising, media, and text books). Moreover, his exploration of how the American Legion's championing of the consumeristic "American way of life" as an antidote to the "menace" of cold-war communism explains why current slogans such as "shop till you drop" and "America: Open for Business!" seem so natural today. |
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