April 2007 Newsletter

"The Other Side of Consumer Politics"

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

Lawrence Glickman, University of South Carolina

It is an honor to participate in a roundtable discussion of Victoria de Grazia’s stunningly erudite Irresistible Empire, which is one of the best books ever published in the burgeoning field of consumer history and certainly the most important work to examine the interactions among mass consumption, domestic life, and foreign relations.  This is the kind of book that scholars of consumer society should be writing:  bold, explicitly comparative, empirically rich, and analytically rigorous.  Too often terms like “Americanization,” “consumer culture,” and “mass consumption society” obscure more than they reveal.  By defining her analytical framework so clearly and grounding her book in detailed case studies, de Grazia makes her arguments both bold and firmly rooted.  At the same time, because her choices of topics are often surprising (as in the brilliant opening chapter on Rotary Clubs in the United States and Europe) or else re-visit from fresh perspectives topics that we thought we knew (such as advertising or the Marshall Plan), Irresistible Empire is wonderfully imaginative. It is also beautifully written, with finely wrought sentences making de Grazia’s powers of observation seem all the richer. 

Consisting of interwoven case studies that proceed chronologically, Irresistible Empire offers a series of extraordinary windows into the society, economics, and politics of both the expanding American imperium and the European host regions. Without ever underestimating American commercial might, de Grazia confirms that “Americanization” has been a complex process with many unintended consequences and shows that while many aspects of American consumer culture were impossible to resist, as the title suggests, they were also desirable goals for ordinary Europeans.  De Grazia rejects overly simplistic narratives of American hegemony, along with claims that Europeans were able to Americanize on their own terms, picking and choosing the characteristics they admired while rejecting the rest.  For example, her examination of the Rotary Club phenomenon in America and Europe, highlighted by an instructive comparison of the Duluth and Dresden branches, demonstrates that while Europeans adapted these clubs for their own purposes, they also created new–and distinctly American–styles of rituals and social capital.

 One of the many wonders of the book is that de Grazia is attentive to nuance and complication in each of her disparate case studies, yet she weaves them together into a coherent argument or, more precisely, set of arguments.  Each of the cases demonstrates what she labels the five characteristics of the American “Market Empire” (6-9): (1) the determination that other nations had “limited sovereignty over their public space”; (2) the inexorable exportation of America’s civil society alongside its goods; (3) a parallel exportation of “norms-making,” which made the “American Standard” seem both universal and compulsory; (4) a certain kind of democratic ethos that valued middle-American sociability over traditional modes of solidarity; and (5) an “apparent peaceableness” that masked the hegemonic intentions of what de Grazia calls an “imperium disguised as an emporium.”
           
As these themes suggest, de Grazia zeroes in on the politics embedded in the nature of the American commercial relationship with Europe, a relationship that generally did not express itself in an explicitly political argot.  She does this in a number of ways:  by noting that American diplomacy was often geared toward commercial ends; by demonstrating the ways in which the American nation-state played a role in facilitating “Americanization,” often serving as the handmaiden of business enterprises; and, most important, by arguing that the economic change engendered by America’s commercial empire necessarily catalyzed changes in the social, legal, and cultural structure of European societies, changes that can only be categorized as political.   
       
De Grazia’s book is tough-minded but for the most part scrupulously fair, based as it is on the judicious reading of many sources in many languages. The one area where I felt this scrupulousness broke down was in her often one-sided depiction of American consumer democracy, in which the emphasis was on the former rather than the latter. (She also appears to deny that it is possible for the two to work in tandem, for consumer politics to act in the service of democratic politics, but I will discuss that later.) In the introduction, which begins with an analysis of a speech that Woodrow Wilson gave to the “World’s Salesmanship Congress” in 1916, de Grazia notes that Wilson “infused contemporary statecraft with a strikingly modern consumer sensibility.” (2)  Wilson’s complex foreign policy is here reduced to one component of his vision; too much weight is accorded to one speech given at a sales convention. In this section and elsewhere de Grazia conflates Wilson and Ford.  To be sure, Wilson saw commerce as the key to democratic development, but Ford envisioned Europe as an unbounded region, whereas Wilson famously proposed self-determination for the peoples of Europe and elsewhere as a way to prevent future wars.
           
It may seem unfair to offer critiques of a book that does so many things so superbly.  Yet for the purposes of furthering our understanding of the history of “America’s Advance” through Europe, I offer the following additional critiques.  Most of these suggestions have to do with topics omitted from the book—topics that would, I believe, provide a fuller context for an understanding of the politics of the interactions among United States, Europe and consumer society.
           
One issue is chronological. De Grazia focuses on the period roughly from the Great War to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.  This is certainly a legitimate choice, because it allows her to explore the interaction between the incipiently Fordist (and eventually post-Fordist) American economy and what she felicitously calls Europe’s “old regime” of “bourgeois consumption,” which eventually became a Europe that was “as much a consumer society as the United States.” (463)  It would have been useful, however, to reflect on the pre-history of this relationship. The nineteenth century witnessed a vibrant trans-Atlantic traffic in commercial goods, performers, reformers (among them abolitionists, temperance advocates, and suffrage proponents), and organizations.  We can quibble about whether the United States was a fully formed “consumer society” in this period, but there is no doubt that commercial and organizational exports shaped European culture well before Henry Ford exported his famed assembly line. One of the more intriguing of these exports, the National Consumers League, founded in the United States in 1899, inspired sister groups in almost every European country well before the Rotary Club went abroad. La Ligue sociale d’acheteurs, for example, was founded in France in 1902 and was quickly followed by consumer leagues in Switzerland (1906), Germany (1907), Spain and Italy (between 1906 and 1908), and Belgium (1911).  Many consumer activists of the Progressive Era—Maud Nathan, Florence Kelley, Jane Addams—went to Europe frequently and considered themselves part of an international reform community.1
               
And this leads to what is to my mind the most significant shortcoming of Irresistible Empire. Although de Grazia demonstrates the multifaceted nature of the politics of consumption, she unnecessarily limits her conception of what counts as consumer politics. This is because her focus is so heavily on the producers, as it were, of politics:  governments, industry, business organizations, advertisers.  She does not pay enough attention to those who shaped consumer politics from the other end. When de Grazia refers to the “consumer-citizen” (as Chapter Seven is entitled), she ignores the many significations of this phrase—significations that Lizabeth Cohen elaborates upon in A Consumers’ Republic:  The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). As de Grazia uses it, the phrase “consumer-citizen” suggests that the latter is inevitably subsumed by the former.  In other words, consumers and citizens sit on opposite poles of the polity, the former acting in private, self-interested ways and the latter behaving in a solidaristic, public-spirited manner.  Most telling in this regard is the short shrift that de Grazia gives to consumer activism—efforts to exercise citizenship through consumption that go some way toward breaking down the private/public divide between the two.  Other than the epilogue on the “slow food” movement, there is little discussion of either consumer activism (a term mentioned only late in the book in regard to the American Esther Peterson [450]) or the consumer movement (mentioned briefly on pp. 374-75), two American models of consumer politics and ultimately two influential European exports that were very different from the dominant model of commercial hegemony.  De Grazia mentions boycotts, another nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic development, relatively infrequently (I noted mention of them on pp. 137, 180, 222, 300, 209, 401, although the term does not appear in the index) and does not describe them in depth.  It is hard to know whether boycotts were simply less common in Europe or whether they escape her gaze because they represent another side of consumer politics, the consumer embracing a political role. (Of course, we must keep in mind that the politics of boycotters, in the United States and in Europe, were not always commendable; the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycott was perhaps the most popular boycott campaign in the period that de Grazia covers.)  Consumer activists worked the middle ground between what de Grazia calls “the European vision of the social citizen and the American notion of the sovereign consumer” (342), and more attention to this group might have led to a more multifaceted understanding of citizen consumers.  These groups were particularly attentive to the problem that Georg Simmel set out:  “a growing distance in genuine inner relationships and a declining distance in more external ones” (quoted by de Grazia on p. 27). Although de Grazia touches on green anti-consumerist thought and practice in her excellent account of slow food, there is little discussion here of environmental politics as a trans-Atlantic phenomenon.  Nor is there discussion of the politics of consumer protection and representation.2   These aspects of consumer politics were transnational too; indeed, in 1960, the transnational relationship was formalized with the establishment of the International Organisation of Consumers Unions (IOCU), known today as Consumers International (CI).
           
This is not to suggest that it was a level playing field, or that the actions of consumer activists nullified the powerful forces of commerce that de Grazia treats. It is understandable that a scholar centrally concerned with questions of power would make the determination that consumer movements had little impact in slowing or shaping the commercialization of twentieth-century Europe. Although at the end of the book de Grazia briefly discusses “critical consumption” as a phenomenon of the 1990s (466), to my mind she is insufficiently attentive to consumer activism, considering that it was another of the forces set in motion by the processes of commercialization that she analyzes so powerfully.