Description
In the years following the First World War, the United States experienced a resurgence of conservatism and intolerance.Yet the 1920s was also the decade when mass production, the installment plan, and the rise of advertising and the movies combined to forge a new culture of consumption that promoted self-gratification over self-denial, spending over saving. In this seminar, the sixth of the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890–1945, Professor Casey Nelson Blake describes the consumer culture of the 1920s and Middle America's ambivalent embrace of it, particularly as portrayed in Robert and Helen Lynd's sociological study Middletown. He also examines critiques of this new American ethos by such intellectuals as H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Mead, and Malcolm Cowley, and concludes by examining the fate of the Harlem Renaissance in the hands of mainstream consumerist culture. The Rise of Consumer Culture is presented through text and streaming video of Professor Blake's lecture and includes illustrations, readings, and biographies.