Irresistible Empire

Victoria De Grazia

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780674260122
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today.De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it—first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

CHAPTER 1

The Service Ethic

How Bourgeois Men Made Peace with Babbittry

Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy.

GEORGE F. BABBITT,

fictional American businessman, 1922

The Babbitt idealism of the American method terrifies us by its monotony . . . Europe without her individuality would be only one continent among many; she would cease to be the yeast which leavens the rest of the world.

ANDRÉ SIEGFRIED,

European intellectual, 1935

IF THE WESTERN world at the outset of the twentieth century had been mapped to show how men of wealth and power viewed their everyday surroundings, High Street, Germany, would have marked one anti-pode, and Main Street, U.S.A., a far-distant other. To visualize the distance between them, we might pinpoint centuries-old Dresden in Saxony as the easternmost limit and locate upstart Duluth, the half-century-old Minnesota town overlooking Lake Superior, as the westernmost extreme. High Street in central Dresden was the refined Prager Strasse. Moving from Vienna Square by the grand railway terminal down to the Johannes Ring, with the bulging domes, spires, and steeples of the Old City’s baroque palaces and churches soaring into view at its end, Prager Strasse coursed through unbroken blocks of ornately façaded, harmoniously proportioned buildings, with stylish cafés, hotel atria, art galleries, banks, and busy shops crowding the street level. In Duluth, Main Street was the ten-block stretch downtown where West and East Superior met just behind the expanse of train tracks and docks lining the lake shore. Overshadowed by the steel and cement office towers of the Folz Building, Superior Street’s implacably straight course gave order to a hodgepodge of self-important civic and commercial buildings. Each was unto itself an imaginatively overwrought architectural style, set amidst nondescript clapboard rooming houses, frame storefronts, and cement garages.

Downtown Dresden circa 1930 showed the accumulated largesse of six centuries of princely patronage. Prospering at the juncture where the Elbe River traffic intersected with the Silver Road eastward, the Electors of Saxony had turned their munificent power, accrued from lording over the trade in saltpeter and arms and consolidated by warmaking, to endowing palaces, churches, theaters, and museums. As much as Weimar, the birthplace of Goethe and Schiller, the Dresden shaped by the Wettin dynasty came to embody the German ideal of Kultur, a refinement of taste and spirit so lofty and untainted by market forces that only an elite with Bildung, meaning a firm sense of personal vocation and rigorous cultural formation, could aspire to attain it. “Florence on the Elbe,” the Romantic poet Herder had dubbed it. In the late nineteenth century, as the city industrialized together with the rest of the Saxon region to become Germany’s most urbanized area as well as having its densest concentration of machine-tool and craft manufacture, its leading families cultivated both material prosperity and cultural propriety, which is to say both Besitz and Bildung. Weimar, the saying went, was where Germany’s cultural heroes had been born, but Dresden where they found nurturing patrons. Pride in this legacy grew in proportion to the nation’s disarray after Germany’s calamitous defeat in World War I. Given its proximity to the hodgepodge of new states formed out of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian realms, Germans could dream of Dresden as the spiritual capital of a rebuilt Reich, whose boundaries would stretch from the North Sea to the Adriatic and from Flanders all the way east to Russia’s Pripet Marshes and southward to the Black Sea.¹

By contrast, downtown Duluth showed the material wealth of a mere six decades of growth. From 1855, when the canal at Sault Ste. Marie opened up the Great Lakes to the Atlantic shipping lanes, and speculators bet that the scrubby hillock verging on Lake Superior would become the area’s major railroad terminus, the frontier settlement named after the intrepid fur trapper Daniel Greysolon Sieur Du Lhut quickly sloughed off its uncouth origins as a French and Indian trading post turned gambling center and barge pier. Incorporated in 1876, the year that Dresden celebrated its 660th anniversary, the jerry-built village rapidly turned into a robust manufacturing center and port. By the 1920s Duluth was a bustling entrepôt; its warehouses brimmed with grain, its wharves were piled with iron ore from the Mesabi, lumber, foodstuffs, and equipment ready to load. From their moorings at the narrow docks, the freighters steamed out across Lake Superior to pass through the elaborate system of canal locks whence they moved southward to the eastern seaboard or across the North Atlantic to unload their cargos at Southampton, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremen, or one or another of the lesser European ports.

For the city fathers, Duluth was “the Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas.” Boundlessly ambitious as they were for their hometown, their pride was only slightly tempered as the town’s growth was outpaced by that of Detroit, Minneapolis, and, of course, Chicago. Even when they had to settle for more modest sobriquets like “the Pittsburgh of the West” or “the Chicago of the Northern Great Lakes,” they still regarded their Duluth as embodying in clapboard and concrete the industriousness, optimism, and patriotic spirit that in their eyes made the United States the greatest nation on earth. With equal gusto they boosted the vim and vigor of Rotary luncheon speeches, the fanciful architecture of Superior Street, the eclectic repertoire of the Opera, Orpheum, and Strand Theaters, and the efficiency of the city jail. One and all were worthy enterprises, conceived to satisfy universal human wants for comfort, decencies, diversion, and order.²

Manners too could not have seemed further distant between the two cities. At noontime on Prager Strasse, the formalities of a bourgeois culture graced with aristocratic gestures were still palpable. The prewar hierarchies were fading, if one was to judge from the swagger of boyish young women, the war-decorated mutilees crouched begging on city streets, and the insolent posture of youthful men in uniform clustered at the main crossings. Yet form was still a point of honor, visible in the drape of suit, the doff of hat, the click of heels and sharp bow over the lady’s hand, the courteous deference of shopkeepers, and the fixity of leisure habits. After dining, the Kaiser Café or the Hülfert under the hotel Europa-Hof at the corner of Waisenhausstrasse was the place to be seen. Teatime was at Brülsche Terrace, where one could chat until dusk, the river traffic maneuvering in the distance, undistracted except by the fast-moving cloud-light glinting off the Catholic High Church’s spire and the murmur of groups of tourists agape at such magnificence. From this perspective, it was hard to imagine Dresden as a city also inhabited by hard-scrabble working poor, crowded into the dreary brick slums abutting the machine industries that drove the local economy. It was equally incongruous to imagine the calm, cobbled avenues swept by street battles—in 1919, when cavalry troops from the Police Presidium faced down rioting veterans with the rat-tat-tat of machine guns, and again in 1920, when the right-wing Kapp Putsch was crushed and the city wracked by civil war. In its sublime beauty, cosseted by its ring of gray-ocher walls, the Old Town seemed unshakable.

By contrast, Duluth was all a-flurry. Around noon, East Superior Street saw crowds of Fords and Phaetons disgorge gray- and brown-suited men at the Kitchi Gammi Club, the Masonic Lodge, or, if it was Thursday, at the Rotary luncheon in the nearby Hotel Spalding while smartly coiffed women maneuvered family cars into parking spaces before hopping out to do their shopping. The workers crowding out of Fitger’s Brewery sat side by side at the diner counters with salesgirls from Wirth’s Drug Store and sales managers from the Folz Building, and secretaries in bright printed dresses rushed over to the five-and-dime to pick up odds and ends. Everybody was talking, with hellos to one and all, hearty handshakes, and big pats on the back; everybody looked so perky, well-dressed, and well-nourished that their class provenance was hard to discern. Calm descended only at evening when the center emptied out, the middle classes heading home to gardened suburbs, the workers to the grimy frame houses of West Duluth. This calm had been broken only once in recent times by an event whose memory was quickly suppressed. That was on June 15, 1920, when several thousand of the town’s residents, many out-of-work and panicky from the postwar recession, had rushed the city jail, overpowered the police, and yanked from the cells three black youths, workers from a traveling circus being held on trumped-up rape charges. They were lynched from the lightpost just off East Superior, the one by the crosswalk between First Street and Second Avenue East.³

One might be tempted to say that Dresden with all its magnificent culture was inimitable, whereas Duluth was just another average American town. Dresden had aura. It was authentic. Duluth, by contrast, spunky, optimistic, philistine, was practically indistinguishable from scores of similar middle-American places. Even so, Duluth was as central to defining American civilization as the unique beauty of world-weary Dresden was to defining European culture. Under the guise of Zenith, Duluth had become world-famous through the novels of Sinclair Lewis. It was in Zenith-Duluth, the closest big town to his birthplace, tiny Sauk Centre, that Lewis sited his tragic-pathetic story of George Babbitt, the real estate agent who was the hero of his eponymous 1922 novel. It was in this place, a fictional composite of a score of similar towns, that Lewis situated the capital of middle-class mores and consumption habits. It was here that he exposed the new business rackets in real estate and car insurance, the nuclear family’s bickering over bathroom time, the pious displays of churchgoing, the demagogic politics, and the clubby conventions of fraternizing made to order for the inveterate joiner—the Babbitt—whose anxious status fears, indulgent materialism, and complaisance made him the nemesis of the well-marked individuality, inner spirit, and skepticism of the true bourgeois man of culture.⁴

When the Nobel Foundation awarded Sinclair Lewis the prize for literature in 1930, the citation underscored that he was the first American ever to win the prize. The intention of the award was to recognize the capacity of a new literary realism to vivify the average man’s way of life. It was also to acknowledge a style that Europeans regarded as typically American, one that Lewis exemplified: the use of deft humor to put critical distance on the dejecting human condition epitomized by the everyday existence of the middle classes. Wanting to choose an American, they preferred the “cheerfulness and alacrity” that gave “a festive air to his crusading social criticism” to the “weightily serious” realism of their other favorite, Theodore Dreiser, who like Emile Zola was too Old World in his emphasis on exposing a “consistently dark view of life.”⁵ The award to Sinclair Lewis thus showed the Old World self-consciously bowing to America’s still uncertain cultural prestige. It also acknowledged that in Lewis’s work, world literature had given life to a new human type, one in which at present a whole nation with “greater or lesser pleasure recognized itself.” This was the get-up-and-go businessman, whose tragi-pathetic existence was chronicled in the figure of George F. Babbitt.

With this questionable choice, the Swedish Academy placed Lewis in the company of the greatest and most controversial of all contemporary novelists. This was Thomas Mann, whom they had finally honored only twelve months earlier after years of misgivings. The Mann they celebrated was first and foremost the author of Buddenbrooks, his prewar epic narrative of the inexorable decline of a merchant dynasty. In the accolades and ceremonies accompanying the prize, Mann’s most challenging (and recent) work, The Magic Mountain, was mentioned only en passant, as if his reflections on the sickly denizens of the Alpine sanitarium at Davos were a too-depressing commentary on the moral decline of Homo europeensis. For the Academy, Mann’s contribution to world literature stood in his capacity to trace the degeneration of bourgeois figures from “self-contained, powerful, and unselfconscious characters to reflective types of a refined and weak sensibility.”⁶ Accepting the prize as a token of sympathy for his “much injured and misunderstood” nation, Mann spoke of German culture’s uniquely “productive and problematic genius.” Like a Mannerist Saint Sebastian, painted bound to the stake, his alabaster-white body pierced from all sides, his agonized face illuminated with a smile, German culture was uniquely able to turn “anguish into pleasure.” Through its terrible travails, the German nation safeguarded, indeed reinforced, “the Western and European principle of the dignity of form in the face of an almost Eastern and Russian chaos of passions” at the same time as “combining the essence of sensual intellectual adventure, of the cold passion of art of the South, and the heart, the bourgeois home, the deeply rooted emotion, and innate humanity of the North.”⁷

When his turn came to address the Academy, Sinclair Lewis could not but allude to the traditions embodied in his intimidatingly erudite predecessor, in whose Magic Mountain he saw “the whole of intellectual Europe.” Europe had the critical spirit and cultivated manners lacking in those small-town American elites that elsewhere he chided as “a sterile oligarchy,” “men of the cash-register.” Far be it from them to conceive of the “community ideal” in “the grand manner.” Their self-esteem swelled not from contemplating their heritage of art or music, but from surveying the number of cheap appliances in the kitchen and calculating the upward spiral of land values.⁸ On the European side of the Atlantic, drawing-room conversation touched on love, courage, and politics, whereas on the American, homey evening chats on front porches turned to the workmanship of safety razors, the artfulness of colored ads for Crisco and Maxwell House coffee, and the joys of cruising around in flivvers.⁹ Making this contrast, Lewis wanted to show neither servility nor snobbery so much as his own paladinship of a new synthesis. This was a straightforward, superbly crafted middle-brow culture, one that despaired at the frivolity, escapism, and hypocrisy of the new material civilization yet was deeply indulgent about rendering its human comforts, democratic mores, and sociable ways. Many Americans of average culture shared his views.

As each man was decorated at the Nobel ceremony, first Mann, then Lewis, each was indirectly the interlocutor of the other; not that they had ever met each other, nor would they for another half-dozen years. However, both framed their thoughts for the occasion in terms of the conflict of cultures that was coming more and more sharply into view between the New and the Old Worlds, especially as this had been framed by the vexed opposition between Kultur and Civilization.¹⁰ However, until the war, Germany had been the embodiment of Kultur, whereas Germany’s rivals, England and France, were the standardbearers of Civilization. When European culture had been split and Germany crushed by World War I, the torch of civilization had been passed to the United States. For many Europeans, this outcome posed the risk that Western civilization would be thoroughly tainted by the materialism peculiar to American society. But few Americans saw it that way, including prominent intellectuals. True, the everyday culture they saw around them was not high culture, certainly not in the sense that Germans intended when they used the word Kultur. But it was culture nonetheless, at least in the sense anthropologists use the term, to speak of commonly held ways of living and patterns of belief that impart a sense of unity to a people and give significance to their daily lives. American culture rested on shared assumptions, civilizing manners, and mutual recognition, and most Americans didn’t worry that there was nothing transcendent about this sense of belonging. In that respect, their culture was akin to what French anthropologists at the time called a “habitus,” and it wouldn’t have particularly bothered them to know that the French term had first been conceived to characterize the fetishes, rituals, and superstitions of primitive peoples.

How much distance, then, ran between Mann, who during the war spilled out his torment in countless pages to defend the value of German Kultur against the Western powers, and Lewis, the articulate American spokesman for improving the cultural quality of civilization.¹¹ Mann, the novelist-philosopher, had as his frame of reference the pessimism of Schopenhauer, Goethe’s idealism, and Nietzsche’s mordant critique of civilization. Lewis, the novelis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Fast Way to Peace
• 1. The Service Ethic
• 2. A Decent Standard of Living
• 3. The Chain Store
• 4. Big-Brand Goods
• 5. Corporate Advertising
• 6. The Star System
• 7. The Consumer-Citizen
• 8. Supermarketing
• 9. A Model Mrs. Consumer
• Conclusion: How the Slow Movement Put Perspective on the Fast Life
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Acknowledgments
• Index