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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Baker, Laura. "Capitalism Beautiful and Consumer Democracy: Civic Ideals, Mass Culture, and the Public in Chicago, 1900-1925," University of Iowa, December 2001.
At the turn of the last century, a modern consumer society based on the mass marketing of goods and services took shape in America’s cities, profoundly affecting the contexts of public life and the discourses that shaped it. Focusing on Chicago, this study explores commercial and civic constructions of the public during this period and their complex relationship. It traces as well the shifting locus of these constructions from architectural to mass media forms. The study begins with the development in the late 1890s of broad, organized efforts by the urban middle-class to regulate free-market culture. Individual chapters concentrate on three sites of debate over the nature and meaning of the public: outdoor advertising, the 1909 Plan of Chicago, and movie exhibition. The study concludes by examining the community constituted by one of the city’s new commercial districts, Uptown Chicago. During this period both civic and business leaders reconfigured commercial mass culture as an important foundation of “American” culture and as a key component of mass democratic society. It took multiple generations for mass culture to compare favorably with nineteenth-century genteel forms. Indeed, in the late 1920s when this study ends, social and cultural leaders were as likely to see mass culture as the downfall of American society as they were to see it as the key to its success. Yet, in retrospect, an overarching change is evident toward an idea of consumer democracy, a public ostensibly integrated and empowered through mass consumption. Identifying this reconceptualization of mass culture as a precipitate of both civic and business ideology is one of this study’s most significant implications. While important differences distinguished civic and business conceptions of the public, their mutual promotion of the integrative powers of mass communication and consumption cultivated a common ground where consumerism flourished.
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