Consuming Visions Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880 1920 EDITED BY Simon J. Bronner PUBLISHED FOR The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum WINTERTHUR, DELAWARE W W Norton & Company NEW YORK LONDON Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Simon J. Bronner Coordinator, American Studies Program Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg Reading Consumer Culture Simon J. Bronner The Victorian Jeremiad: Critics of Accumulation and Display Michael Barton Associate Professor, American Studies Program Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America Jackson Lears Professor, Department of History Rutgers University Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire William Leach Fellow, New York Institute for the Humanities A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic Jean-Christophe Agnew Director of Graduate Studies, American Studies Program Yale University From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality Karen Halttunen Associate Professor, Department of History Northwestern University 73 Beyond Veblen Rethinking Consumer Culture in America Jackson Lears A portrait of Thorstein Veblen in the faculty lounge at Yale University shows him leaning back in his chair, one leg tossed easily over the other, smoking a cigarette. He is surveying the passing scene of academic pomp with just the hint of a twinkle in his eye. Despite his mythic marginality, Veblen looks more bemused than embittered. And were he alive today, Veblen might be pardoned some bemusement. The ideas of the celebrated iconoclast have become part of the conventional wisdom about American society and conspicuous consumption. Many serious analysts of American culture have clasped Veblen to their bosoms, and more than a few would agree with Max Lerner's assertion that Veblen possessed "the most creative mind American social thought has produced "' In many ways the reputation is deserved. Veblen broke new ground, much of which is still neglected. He was one of the first theorists to move away from the producer orientation of nineteenth-century economics and focus on consumption as an important category of social and economic behavior. He rejected the utilitarian psychology of orthodox economic thought, demolished through caricature the "Economic Man," and effectively focused on the irrationality and absurdity inherent in many acts of consumption. Having immersed himself in anthropological literature, Veblen could add a cultural dimension to Karl Marx's famous distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Much of 1 Max Lerner, ed., The Portable Veblen (New York: Viking Press. 1948), back cover. 74 what passed for exchange-value, he noted, was also a form of symbolic value. The orgies of display at Newport and the parading of ornamental wives on Fifth Avenue corresponded to similar ceremonies among "primitive" tribes: the captain of industry, like the Kwakiutl chieftain, was eager to demonstrate his prowess by showing off his trophies. But unlike many anthropologists of his own time or ours, Veblen preserved a keen sense of hierarchical social structure and of how that structure was reinforced by patterns of consumption. By remaining sensitive to the interaction between culture and power relations, Veblen plunged forward where orthodox Marxism pulled up short. He was able to see how subordinate groups could develop allegiances to a dominant culture that may not have reflected their own best interests. He anticipated some of Antonio Gramsci's insights into the ways dominant groups exercise cultural hegemony under organized capitalism 2 Despite Veblen's achievements, his persistent influence has been a mixed blessing. His republican moral commitments prevented him from realizing the near universality of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous display. He himself habitually resorted to conspicuous display in the guise of antidisplay. Veblen's unkempt appearance and bizarre attire, his thick woolen stockings supported by pins clipped to his trouser legs, were aspects of costume that contributed crucially to his legendary status as a bohemian intellectual. Despite his anthropological perspective, he could not see accumulation and display as patterns interwoven by different social groups throughout the whole fabric of a culture. He insisted on attributing the dominant patterns of consumption to the pernicious influence of a parasitic "leisure class." His assumption that cultural influences flow only from the top downward is not borne out by the historical record. Lois Banner's recent and comprehensive study of American fashion, for example, demonstrates that the pacesetters in the beauty sweepstakes were courtesans and chorus girls who were often aped by their social betters. 3 2 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan Co, 1899); John Patrick Diggins, The Bard of Savagery (New York: Seabury Press, 1978); T J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567-93. 3 Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983). For an influential discussion of consumption as a way that various groups throughout a society can create cultural meaning, see Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: 75 Veblens's top-down model of cultural domination melded with his desire to stress the irrationality of consumption. As a result, his psychology remained narrow. His thinking was, to be sure, a step beyond the simple-minded utilitarianism of orthodox economics, but he still reduced complex social rituals to one-dimensional examples of "pecuniary emulation." Nothing from a funeral to a wedding to any form of "devout observance" was allowed its true, multivalent significance. Veblen realized that all consumption enacted cultural meaning, but he was willing to assign it only one meaning: status-striving. Moreover, since nearly all cultural artifacts and practices contain elements of display, Veblen's furious assault on display amounted to an "attack on culture" itself, as Theodor Adorno recognized more than forty years ago.4 Veblen's polemical intent led him to a sweeping dismissal of art religion, and nearly all sensuous or material cultural forms in the name of a utopian alternative: a rational state where sturdy producer-citizens would be ruled by the discipline of the machine rather than the irrationalities of consumption. What is amazing is how often this bleak vision has continued to inspire critics of consumer culture, particularly on the Left, and how often they have perpetrated Veblen's misconceptions. 5 Why has Veblen's influence been so durable? In part, I would suggest, because his critique resonates with a long tradition in Anglo-American Protestant culture: the Puritan's plain-speak assault on theatrical artifice and effete display. I The ensuing essay furthers this argument by situating Veblen historically by tracing the tensions between authenticity and artifice in nineteenth-century American market culture and by suggesting how those tensions were reorchestrated during the period from 1880 to 1920, the period when Veblen consolidated his data base. Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: W W. Norton, 1979). For a somewhat more sophisticated version of this argument, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton The Meaning ot Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 4 Theodor Adorno, "Veblen's Attack on Culture" (1941), reprinted in Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 73-94. 5 See, for example, Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan, 1 9Z 1925); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library 1958); and John Kenneth Galbraith, The New industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967). 76 The origins of the plain-speech tradition lay in a fundamental project of the Protestant Reformation: the effort to create an alternative to the method of constructing meaning through the assemblage and display of objects, the method that anthropologists claim is virtually universal and timeless. The pietist tradition in Protestantism insisted that salvation lay in faith rather than works, in inner being rather than outward form. They believed that the objective surface of things concealed rather than revealed meaning. Appearances, for the early Protestant, were always deceptive.¢ The problem of appearances was exacerbated by the emergence of a modern, placeless market, as Jean-Christophe Agnew has persuasively argued. Theatrical modes of artifice were detached from their customary ritual moorings; they became modes of self-aggrandizement in the fluid, boundless world of market relations.7 Puritan and later evangelical Protestants aimed to create a new and tighter set of boundaries around the simple, striving self and to control the flood of meanings unleashed in market society by insisting on unadorned communication in language as well as material goods. Plain speech complemented plain living: both served the vision of social transparency; that is, a society where people said what they meant and meant what they said. That vision, of course, remained provokingly just out of reach, as market society multiplied goods and the meanings attached to them. The tension between authenticity and artifice transferred slowly to American shores. American public culture was born in opposition to European-style luxury and display, nurtured in dreams of Spartan simplicity. But by the early and mid nineteenth century, representatives of the national and international market began to fan out from the cities into a countryside that was still dominated in many areas by household production. We are just beginning to glimpse the ways that this expanding world of goods was represented in popular culture, but preliminary evidence suggests that it may be a mistake to argue a shift from the 6 This issue is discussed in Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), and the issue is deftly brought into the nineteenth century in Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Sudy of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1982), esp. p.45 7 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmericun Thought, 1 550-1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 77 plodding nineteenth century to the carnivalesque twentieth: the carnival may have been in town all the time.8 Certainly the nineteenth-century market signified entertainment and exoticism, offering new sensations as well as new goods. Exotica were the stock-in-trade of museum promoters from P. T. Barnum to his backwoods emulators; Barnum's first and most famous estate itself a gigantic advertisement for his work was Iranistan, a fabulous oriental villa built in 1846. From the 18305 on, many consumer goods (such as clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, patent medicines) were surrounded by an aura of sensuous mystery, even magical self-transformation. The mysterious East had long been associated with marketable goods, and mid Victorian writers kept that link before the reading public. "India is the Ophir of commerce," a Godey's Lady's Book contributor announced in 1853. Fashion magazines printed engravings of bare-breasted brown ladies, such as "The Circassian Beauty" in Peterson's for 1851, providing a kind of sanctioned Victorian pornography. By the 18505, fashionable clothes were often surrounded with exotic attributes: the Turkish shawl, the Castilian cloak, the Echarpe Orientale. New York department store magnate A. '1'. Stewart chose oriental motifs for the interior of the store he built at Broadway and I Tenth Street in 1863, complete with "luxurious llassocks ... soft Persian mats . . . [and] fairylike frostings of lace draperies." The tie between the market and exotic oriental goods was firmly implanted in the bourgeois imagination. 9 8 Here I do not mean to abandon my own and other historians' stress on the late nineteenth century as a period of crucial transformation. But I now believe that an understanding of that transformation requires a subtler conceptual framework than simply the notion) of a shift from a Protestant "producer culture" to a secular "consumer culture " For statements of that earlier view, see T. J Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. 1. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) pp. 3-38; and Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books 1984), esp. Introduction. 9 P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years' Recollections of P.T. Barnum (Buffalo: Warren, Johnson, 1872), p. 263; Henry P. Haynes, "The East," Godey's Lady's Book 47 (July 1853): 33; engraving, "The Circassian Beauty," in Peterson's 29, no. 3 (September 1851), frontispiece; "Work Department: The Ottoman," Godey's Lady's Book 56 (June 1858): 555; advertisement for "The Castiglione" in Godey's Lady's Book 58 (January 1858): 9; Emily May, "The Echarpe Orientale," Peterson's 27, no. 1 (January 1855): 89-90; "Chitchat upon Prevailing Fashions," Godey's Lady's Book 48 (May 1854): 479-80; Alice B. Haven, "A Morning at Stewart's," Godey's Lady's Book 66 (May 1863): 429-33. 78 Representatives of the market reinforced those connections. Many, to be sure, were complaisant shopkeepers; but many others were more aggressive and intrusive peddlers whose wares were sometimes just as enticing as those found in the fashionable shops. For many Americans, particularly those outside the urban upper classes, the market was personified in the itinerant peddler. The primal scene of the emerging market culture in the mid nineteenth century was the peddler entering the isolated village or rural community, laden with glittering goods that were ornamental as well as useful: scissors, knives, tools, tinware, clocks, patent medicines, jewelry, perfumes, and fabrics. The peddler embodied a multitude of cultural associations. Certainly he was a trickster figure, a confidence man who achieved his goal through guile rather than strength, particularly through a skillful thearicality. What was perhaps most striking about the peddler was his liminality. He was constantly on the move, scurrying along the fringes of established society. He occupied the threshold not only between the village and the cosmopolitan world beyond but also between the natural and the supernatural He was an emissary of the marvelous, promising his audience magical transformations not through religious conversion, but through the purchase of a bit of silk, a pair of earrings, or a mysterious elixir. Like the traditional conjurer multiplying rabbits, doves, or scarves, the peddler opened his pack and presented a startling vision of abundance. (In Clement Moore's famous poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" [1822], Santa Claus himself "looked like a peddler opening his pack.") Despite his secular concerns, the peddler, particularly if he was the impresario of a patent medicine show, had much in common with the evangelical ministry: itinerancy, a special appeal to women, and a rhetorical style that combined exhortation with the invocation of testimonials from the saved. From Johnson Jones I looper's Simon Suggs to Mark Twain's Beriah Sellers, humorists presented the confidence man as preacher, and vice versa. 10 10 The standard works on peddlers are Richardson Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others, from the Beginning to the Civil War (Philadelphia: l. B. Lippincott Co., 19Z7)