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SECTION I
CONSUMERISM AND LEISURE
DIFFERENT PATHS TO MASS CONSUMPTION: CONSUMER CREDIT IN THE UNITED STATES AND WEST GERMANY DURING THE 1950s AND '60s
| By Jan Logemann |
Pennsylvania State University |
| A 1971 comparative study surveyed differences and similarities in consumer behavior and aspirations in Europe and the United States. Among the first and most glaring discrepancies the authors found was the use of consumer credit: "About one-half of all Americans both approve of and use installment credit. At the other extreme, only one-fourth of the Germans approve of it, and only one out of ten actually has any installment debt."1 Well before the massive proliferation of credit cards that began in the late 1960s, consumer credit had become an integral part of modern consumer economies, albeit on one side of the Atlantic much more so than on the other. Despite some convergence in recent decades, this contrast largely holds true up to the present day.2 |
1
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Credit financing is a critical aspect of the rise of mass consumption in the twentieth century. Pioneered in many ways by the United States, credit financing defined a particular form of consumer society that dramatically democratized access to innovative consumer goods, challenging an older division between a subsistence consumer society and a bourgeois consumer society that survived longer in Germany and other European countries. Over the past twenty-five years, historians have begun to trace the implications of mass consumption in various countries. While recent scholarship has qualified overly simplistic notions of "Americanization," the outstanding importance of the United States as a social and economic model for modern mass consumption and its complex adaptation in other societies has recently been reemphasized by Victoria de Grazia's study Irresistible Empire.3 Consumption appears—for better or worse—as a globally homogenizing force. Yet, a closer comparative look at mass consumption during the postwar decades in the United States and Western Europe alone reveals that this process was far from even. Especially during the initial postwar decades, patterns of mass consumption retained important differences on both sides of the Atlantic, and consumer credit played a significant role in this process.4 |
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This article aims to show how differences in the way Americans and West Germans financed their consumption during the postwar decades point to significant distinctions in social and cultural meanings of consumption. Consumer debt—from installment purchases to personal loans and mortgage obligations—rose rapidly in postwar America. Many Americans came to regard credit as a means of ensuring democratic access to the American dream and to an expanding middle class. The federal government regarded installment credit as a viable way of expanding mass purchasing power as well as—at times—a regulatory tool in Keynesian efforts of macroeconomic management. Since the late 1930s, public policy underwrote the expansion of consumer credit as a means of creating demand in response to the Depression-era collapse of consumer spending and to reinforce a nascent popular consumer culture built on emulative spending and the rapid diffusion of new goods.5 |
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