April 2007 Newsletter

"Simply Irresistible"

A Review of Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe

Brian Etheridge, John D. Winters Endowed Professor, La. Tech University

In the interest of full disclosure, I have an admission to make.  I am a sucker for “lumpers,” those historians who, in the formulation of John Gaddis, seek to “deliver themselves of sweeping generalizations that attempt to make sense out of whole epochs . . . [and] reduce the sheer untidiness of history to neat patterns that fit precisely within the symmetrical confines of chapters of books.”1  I like books that think big, and I am willing to overlook the ways in which they have to flatten history, compress events, and emphasize long-term themes to do so.  Aware of the subject matter from reading several laudatory reviews, I was therefore favorably inclined toward Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire before even cracking its spine.  Now, after finishing the book, I am convinced that it is a brilliant work that delivers in the way that the best “lumpers” do:  it tackles a large subject and in so doing invites discussion on a range of topics, from the conceptualization of the subject to the methods it uses to achieve its objectives.

De Grazia’s subject is one of the biggest and most controversial of current times:  the Americanization of Europe.  Her focus is on the growth of the American consumer society, which she refers to as “the rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium.”  To make sense of this phenomenon, she develops the concept of Market Empire, which she calls “an empire without frontiers” and others have described as an “empire by invitation” and the “empire of fun.”  The most salient features of this empire are the interlocking and mutually supportive social institutions and cultural values that were exported along with its goods—namely, a civil society, American business norms, visions of democratic practice, and the firm belief that the spread of the empire contributes to international peace.

 De Grazia traces the advance of the Market Empire by outlining a “transatlantic clash of civilizations” in which the American apostles of the consumer revolution are juxtaposed with the European defenders of bourgeois commercial practices.  By the end of the century, she concludes, a “new transatlantic dialectic fostered by America’s consumer revolution” had come into being.  She shows the large forces at work within this dialectic by relating the history of the spread of Rotary International, efforts to impose an American standard of living on Europe, the rise of American chain stores, the growth of American marketing and advertising, and the conquest of European cinema by Hollywood.

It is obvious that de Grazia is a gifted historian in her prime.  Her breadth of knowledge is staggering.  In researching this impressive work she visited archives in the United States, Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland, and she appears comfortable in all of these national contexts.  What is more, she has mastered a number of subjects related to her overall research agenda.  She appears equally at home talking about chain stores and Hollywood, as sure of herself discussing Frank Woolworth as Erich Pommer.  Moreover, her grasp of the written word is dazzling.  Only a true wordsmith could intermingle slangy words like “cockamamie,” “control-freak,” and “oddball” with GRE-prep words like “dudgeon” and “divagations” without sounding hackneyed and/or contrived.  (I am not embarrassed to say that I had to break out the dictionary on more than one occasion.)  If I have one reservation about assigning this book to graduate students, it is that her style could complicate my teaching of basic historical writing.  De Grazia writes with such authority and felicity that I am afraid some students will try to mimic her, most likely with disastrous results.  If I assign the book, I must be prepared to repeat to my beguiled students, “Yes, but you’re no Victoria de Grazia.”                 

My fears about students’ misguided and clumsy attempts to copy her style are more than counterbalanced by her exemplary craftsmanship, however.  At many points throughout the book I was reminded of A Midwife’s Tale, in which Laurel Thatcher Ulrich masterfully contextualizes thin documents to tell a rich and significant story.  I thought that this enviable ability was most evident in the first chapter on Rotary International.  This chapter is written so gracefully, especially at the beginning, that it would be easy to miss how much work went into it.  With vivid descriptions and absorbing insights, it contrasts Duluth and Dresden, Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann, Babbit and Buddenbrooks to set up the differences between America and Europe.  The rest of the chapter explores the fascinating expansion of Rotary across the Atlantic.  A thorough look at the sources from which this mini-masterpiece is fashioned highlights how much imagination and creativity went into its creation.  Just seeing how it was put together was worth the price of admission.

In fact, her writing is so mesmerizing and she is such a good storyteller that one can find oneself following along without being fully aware of what she is doing or how she is doing it ( I am reminded, strangely enough, of George Kennan, who had a different but also very persuasive style).  Since she is a “lumper” and covers such a large span of time with her book, failing to wake up and critically engage her work would translate into a failure to take advantage of one of the greatest contributions that lumpers have to offer—namely, that they provide an admirable departure point for discussing how and where current and future scholarship can build on, challenge, and otherwise revise the ways in which the subject has been synthesized.

In that spirit, I would like to raise a few issues that future scholars may choose to address.  In the introduction, de Grazia lays out the big picture and familiarizes her readers with her integrative idea of Market Empire.  After setting the macro-level stage, she then moves on to several case studies to flesh out how this Market Empire works.  It is an interesting and almost necessary move, since tackling the entire phenomenon would be too much for one book or one lifetime.  Yet I wish that she had returned more explicitly to the concept of Market Empire throughout the body of her book.

Her strategy of moving immediately from the macro level to case studies also deflects attention away from other significant developments.  The effects of World War I and World War II are mentioned and are always, it seems, looming in the background.  But the introduction and the narrative paint an almost fatalistic picture of the Market Empire’s inexorable movement through Europe, which raises a question that, while impossible to answer, is worthy of consideration:  would Americanization have proceeded without these cataclysmic events in European history?  How central were the two world wars to America’s eventual domination of Europe?

On a related matter, while I applaud her focus on non-state actors, which certainly has not been the norm in foreign relations history, I wonder if policymakers are perhaps too absent in this narrative.  She begins with an anecdote about Woodrow Wilson, but then she largely ignores American policymakers and American foreign policy, despite the amount of research that has been done on the relationship between private and public interests (such as the whole notion of corporatism).  American policymakers make brief appearances in her discussion of the post–WW II world, but it is worth noting that the Republicans of the 1920s were also aggressive in encouraging business interests abroad.

Other questions regarding periodization and content come to mind.  Why does she concentrate so heavily on the interwar years?  Again, by her own admission, Americanization reaches its zenith after World War II.  Why spend so much time on the years before it?  And why ignore the sixties and the seventies almost entirely?  Her choice of case studies also raises questions.  Why these particular “social inventions”?  Why not a chapter on American clothing or American music?  Why not a whole chapter on fast food?

Other reviewers have noted that the first six chapters follow a fairly standard pattern.  A particular “social invention” is introduced, its American supporters are outlined, its European detractors are described, and finally Nazi Germany is presented as the only credible form of resistance to its spread.  Are the differences between the American innovators and the European resisters as stark as de Grazia suggests?  In many of these industries there was a greater degree of cross-fertilization than she lets on.  Take Hollywood, for example.  De Grazia admits that Hollywood was populated by Europeans such as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Fred Zinnemann.  Yes, they were Americanized to a degree, but their Europeanness also influenced their films.      
De Grazia’s overall narrative structure and argument also raise questions about resistance.  That the Nazi regime emerges as the most effective form of resistance is both ironic and troubling.  As Max Friedman points out in another review, positioning Nazi Germany as primarily anti-American ignores the true nature of the murderous regime.2  But there has always been true resistance to mass society, and that resistance has manifested itself at all levels and in all regions.  What de Grazia attacks with the pen has been and continues to be assaulted with the sword, whether it be in Middle America, Middle Europe, or the Middle East.  How else does one understand the Days of Rage, the Red Army Faction or 9/11?  It is in relation to this notion of domestic resistance that I think an extended discussion of the sixties would have been a most welcome addition to the book.   I also think it is very important to emphasize here that diverse groups in the United States have criticized large-scale capitalism and mass consumerism since their inception, which points up a real irony:  much of what Europeans have regarded as quintessentially “American” has been viewed as perniciously “anti-American” by America’s rural population.  Put simply, there is evidence that the process De Grazia describes is a far more complex phenomenon than her trans-Atlantic clash of civilizations allows. 
               
Finally, I think this question is worth asking:  when compared to its eighteenth and nineteenth century ancestors and its twentieth-century rivals, is the modern consumer society that bad?  Because consumerism’s deficiencies are so obvious, I think we have a tendency to romanticize the past.  Consumerism offers a numbing standardization of goods and services often targeted at the most vulgar level, but it also provides a great deal to the masses that was unavailable before.  Consumer society simply would not work if consumers did not buy cheap goods from Woolworth’s or Kmart. And while cheap, standardized goods and services may not necessarily represent the good life (especially for elites), they often have represented a better life for people who did not have access to these kinds of goods before.  To paraphrase a now-famous political question:  are we better off now than we were one hundred years ago?  Surely it depends on how the “we” is defined, but many alive today would probably answer “yes” (which in itself might mean that American standards of the good life have triumphed).
               
In sum, de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire is an indispensable work for those who would seek to wrestle with the modern, globalizing world.  It is an amazing piece of historical scholarship, immensely valuable on many different levels, and it establishes an agenda for future works on the complicated relationship between the United States and Europe.  It is, like the empire it describes, simply irresistible.