| dc.description.abstract | If consumption was to become a hallmark of American society, this research investigates how a nation struggled to come to terms with modernity. With the advent of mass communication systems, rapid transportation across the continent, the influx of thousands of immigrants to the port cities and the mainland, and the changing social position of women in society among many social, economic and political developments, American conservatives raised their voice to examine the changing world around them. And as consumption touched upon the lives of almost all Americans, whether in a deserted prairie town through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, or in San Francisco’s dazzling downtown shopping district, the conservative moralists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century worried about the influence of a consumer economy on the nation’s moral character.
Starting with the budget study investigation of working-class expenditures, carried out by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in 1875, to the vehement public discussion in the 1920s about automobiles and moving pictures as beacons of modernity, over decades American moralists – writers, civic groups, household budget experts, scholars, religious spokespersons, medical experts and intellectuals – have issued their concerns about the impact of the nation’s consumer society on its inhabitants. By contemplating over the loss of old times and the uncertainty of the future, their writings indicated that times were in fact changing at the turn of the century. This research focuses on the critical opinions about the corrosive influence of a new culture of consumption, issued during an important era of nation building. | |
