ABSTRACT
The coalescence of a national market concurrent with the broadening of the inclination to private consumption in the final decades of the nineteenth century advanced with the encouragement of marketing grandees such as Wanamaker, Swift, Candler, Heinz, and Kellogg. Under the leadership of this new breed of industrialist the market not only extended in space, it became “experience near”; it became, truly, a consumer’s market. The combined motor of the Market and
Industrial Revolutions had imposed itself as an impersonal, if overpowering visitation in the early-and mid-nineteenth century, transforming the norms of livelihood and of provisioning. The conscription of all to wage labor coupled with the rise of the mass market implied an irreversible shift from age-old household level processing of subsistence goods to the provisioning of manufactureds almost exclusively via the market. The new commodity mode of exchange and the capitalist system of provisioning that engendered it had swallowed the old order completely, and within a generation or two practically also the memory of it. Born were the generations who live with “the sea surround [ing] us on all sides, commodities determining the very way we try to size things up.”2 From that point on, most of what would exist outside the sphere of the market, however creative and self-determined, was nevertheless obliged to do so self-consciously in reaction to the market.3 Thus is the consumer revolution in America said to have started with a bang, on a scale and to a manner not experienced before, inspiring pundits of the time to testify that the American character itself had somehow been transfigured.4 The commercial ascendancy of the age is what inspired Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to call it the “Gilded Age.” A dominant narrative in the era of all this upheaval was a utopian faith in progress by human ingenuity, countered by an equally ambient portent of gloom. Invoking a literary representation of the two viewpoints in the Gilded Age, Alan Trachtenberg cites two novels published one after the other: Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), which ended as the third best selling book of the nineteenth century (following Ben Hur and Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and its apparent antithesis, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). (Twain simultaneously damned and praised Bellamy’s book when he referred to it as “the latest and best of all our bibles.”) Salient to the optimism of Bellamy’s novel is the identification of happiness “entirely with leisure and consumption.”5 The phenomenal success of Bellamy’s book despite its literary mediocrity-in addition to its sales, hundreds of Bellamy Societies sprang up around the country-stemmed from its upbeat message cast in a familiar idiom of utopian writings. Cecelia Tichi comments in her introduction to a recent edition:
The social and technological innovations of this futuristic novel only updated the scheme of national salvation that had been embedded in American culture since the seventeenth century…. Bellamy restated that myth for the Gilded Age. His lamentation on the misery of nineteenthcentury America, coupled with his assurance of a transcendent, perfect future were certain to strike a familiar chord in readers, because Bellamy drew on their culturally ingrained faith in the forthcoming Christian Millenium.6
