ABSTRACT
Throughout American history a pattern of escalating consumer demand has served as a basis for social control. A consumption culture, predicated upon the belief in ever-rising living standards, efficiency in production, and the intrinsic value of a commodity-oriented lifestyle has undermined personal autonomy. The relationship between consumption and centralized control in our nation's past demonstrates that a design of behavioral regulation was behind the destruction of Native American autonomy in the Colonial period. Contact between Europeans and Native-Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries initiated a consumer demand for European goods. The emergence of a democratic-consumer state in America in the first half of the nineteenth century echoes the struggle to modify the behavior of Native Americans. The desire to globalize middle-class state culture was realized in the twentieth century. While historians have emphasized the moral qualities which informed Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, it would be equally profitable to study the role consumerism played in shaping Wilson's thinking.
