![]() Such an acknowledgment, of course, does not imply that consumer capitalism ever realized its early promise. ![]() In his novel, he emphasizes the transformative and liberating potential of consumption. Baum understood, or at least intuited, that the culture of consumption offered both new opportunities and excited new possibilities for richer and fuller lives. Regarding them as wholly subject to the manipulation of political and economic elites, historians cannot explain the fidelity to consumer capitalism that many ordinary, intelligent, and resourceful Americans displayed at the turn of the twentieth century. Liberal and radical historians have tended to exaggerate the passivity of men and women who sought, and who sometimes found, independence and meaning through consumption. ![]() Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz offers a vibrant, optimistic, and therapeutic tale designed to help Americans embrace the glamorous but unsettling world of delight they had entered. Published in 1900, at this crucial moment of transition, L. Americans found in the diffusion of money and possessions, the real, and enduring, promise of American life. The inflation of desire, the longing for a greater number and variety of commodities in an expanding world of plenty, further diluted older values and customs. There was little about modern America that was fixed and stable. This new culture of abundance and consumption enabled, even encouraged, men and women to alter their identities as often as they pleased, and to do so without anxiety, fear, shame, or remorse. “The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word `new’ in connection with our country,” observed Mark Twain, “that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.” However venerable, the past became a hostage to the present, obliged always to yield to evolving fashions and shifting tastes. Severed from both a religious and political consciousness, the vision of America as a “Land of Opportunity” had given way, in the words of historian William Leach, to a vision of America as a “Land of Desire.”Ībove all, perhaps, America was the “Land of the New.” Prepared by their history to accept the cult of the new, Americans paradoxically embraced change and novelty as the essence of tradition. But America was no longer the land in which men and women from the Old World might find political and spiritual freedom to accompany social and economic opportunity. It still affirmed the idea that American life could be perennially renewed and thereby invigorated. By the late nineteenth century, this myth was changing. Acquisition and consumption thus became the means to achieve happiness, purpose, and even salvation.įor centuries, Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, had looked upon the New World as a garden of plenty, a veritable heaven on earth, where all human needs would be fulfilled and all human desires satisfied. The circulation of money and the exchange of goods were at the foundation of its aesthetic and moral sensibilities. Increasingly disconnected from traditional family and community life, and existing in opposition to old-fashioned religious and social values such as self-restraint and self-denial, hard work and delayed gratification, repression and guilt, this new culture emphasized luxury and indulgence. At its heart was the quest for wealth, security, comfort, and pleasure. ![]() Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new culture emerged in the United States. Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, as the Wizard of Oz himself admitted, every sensible person ought to know is untrue. ![]()
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