Educating the Consumer-citizen

A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media

Joel Spring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135632748
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media, Joel Spring charts the rise of consumerism as the dominant American ideology of the 21st century. He documents and analyzes how, from the early 19th century through the present, the combined endeavors of schools, advertising, and media have led to the creation of a consumerist ideology and ensured its central place in American life and global culture.

Spring first defines consumerist ideology and consumer-citizen and explores their 19th-century origins in schools, children's literature, the commercialization of American cities, advertising, newspapers, and the development of department stores. He then traces the rise of consumerist ideology in the 20th century by looking closely at: the impact of the home economics profession on the education of women as consumers and the development of an American cuisine based on packaged and processed foods; the influence of advertising images of sports heroes, cowboys, and the clean-shaven businessman in shaping male identity; the outcomes of the growth of the high school as a mass institution on the development of teenage consumer markets; the consequences of commercial radio and television joining with the schools to educate a consumer-oriented population so that, by the 1950s, consumerist images were tied to the Cold War and presented as the "American way of life" in both media and schools; the effects of the civil rights movement on integrating previously excluded groups into the consumer society; the changes the women's movement demanded in textbooks, school curricula, media, and advertising that led to a new image of women in the consumer market; and the ascent of fast food education. Spring carries the story into the 21st century by examining the evolving marriage of schools, advertising, and media and its ongoing role in educating the consumer-citizen and creating an integrated consumer market.

This book will be of wide interest to scholars, professionals, and students across foundations of education, history and sociology of education, educational policy, mass communications, American history, and cultural studies. It is highly appropriate as a text for courses in these areas.

Chapter 1 Horace Mann Meets the Wizard of Oz

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

“A survey of American school children finds that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus… . The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross,” Eric Schlooser reported in Fast Food Nation. ¹ On arriving in the United States from Bangladesh at the age of 8, Dewan Kazi knew two English words: hello and Coca-Cola.² The Golden Arches, Ronald McDonald, and Coca-Cola symbolize the worldwide spread of the icons of consumerism.

The prelude to a mass consumer society began in the early 19th-century society when schools, newspapers, national postal service, and advertising created a common culture among Americans mainly of European descent. Before discussing these origins of mass consumer society, I would like to explain the basic premises of this book and outline the historical argument that is presented about how the marriage of schools, advertising, and media contributed to the development of a consumer society. I also explain the ideology of consumerism and the meaning of consumer-citizen.

A premise of this book is that consumerism is the dominant ideology of the United States and the driving force of the global economy. Massconsumer culture integrates consumerism into all aspects of life from birth to death, including, but not limited to, education, leisure time activities, the popular arts, the home, travel, and personal imagination. Mass-consumer culture captures the fantasy world of people with brand names and fashions that promise personal transformation, the vicarious thrill of imagining the glamorous lives of media celebrities, the promise of escape from hard work through packaged travel and cruises to an envisioned paradise, and the idea that in America everyone has an equal opportunity to consume. When I ask current American college students how they would introduce an immigrant to American culture, the response without exception is, “I would take them to the mall!”

The most important aspect of mass-consumer culture is the ideology of consumerism. This ideology was articulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the appearance of industrial and agricultural abundance. As articulated by the turn-of-the-century economist Simon Patten, consumerism reconciled the Puritan virtue of hard work with the abundance of consumer goods. From the Puritan standpoint, the danger of abundant goods was more leisure time and possible moral decay. This fear was expressed in the folk saying, “Idle hands … [are the] devil’s tools.”³ In Simon Patten’s 1907 book, The New Basis of Civilization, he argued that the consumption of new products and leisure-time activities would spur people to work harder. In Patten’s words, “The new morality does not consist in saving, but in expanding consumption.”⁴ Patten explained, “In the course of consumption … the new wants become complex … [as a result the] worker steadily and cheerfully chooses the deprivations of this week … they advance onto a period of restraint and morality, Puritan in essence… . Their investment in to-morrow’s goods enables society to increase its output and to broaden its productive areas.”⁵

The professionalization and expansion of advertising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a key contribution of the United States to the creation of a mass-consumer culture. Advertising prompted desires for new products; it convinced consumers that existing products were unfashionable and, therefore, obsolete; it made brand names into playthings in personal fantasies. The advertising profession transformed the capitalist model of buyers making rational choices in a free market into a consumerist model where the buyer was driven by irrational emotions associated with particular brand names and/or products.

In chapter 2, I explore one major theme of this book: While advertising professionalized, home economists were advocating reforms of American diets and families by introducing home economics courses in schools, starting school cafeterias, and linking greater freedom for women from household drudgery through processed and packaged foods. Jell-O epitomized the new American cuisine as it became a staple in school cafeterias, hospital kitchens, and family cooking. I pick up this thread of the story in chapter 7, when I discuss how, by the 1950s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fastfood franchises had joined with prepared and processed food manufacturers to define American cuisine and provide the American family with a quick meal. Today these fast-food franchises have not only entered school cafeterias, but also sponsor their own educational programs. Burger King Academies and Pizza Hut’s BOOKIT! reading program typify what I call fast-food education and the marriage of schools, advertising, and media.

A second major theme is how, in the first half of the 20th century, schools and advertising joined radio and TV in educating workers and consumers. This theme is discussed in chapter 4. Movies were an important form of commodified leisure that captured the fantasy world of workers and helped them escape the drudgery of the office and shop floor. Simon Patten had predicted that people would work harder to consume leisure products. “Their [workers’] zest for amusement,” Simon wrote, “urges them to submit to the discipline of work, and the habits formed for the sake of gratifying their tastes make the regular life necessary in industry easier and more pleasant.”⁶

Educators worried about the potential threat of movies to the school’s effortsto regulate national morality and culture. In the 1920s, a major concern existed about the effect of movies on the morality of youth. The development of radio resulted in a public debate in the 1930s about whether schools or media should control national culture. Commercial media eventually gave advertisers a new means of shaping a consumer society. By the late 1960s, with the development of Sesame Street, media were fully recognized by school people as the third educator. Sesame Street and other children’s TV programs taught children the art of consumption through the marketing of program-related dolls, toys, and games.

A third major theme of this book is the importance of the emergence of a teenage market that served to prepare future consumers. This is addressed in chapter 5, where I show how this teen market was a result of the high school becoming a mass institution in the 1930s and 1940s. The term teenager was coined in the 1940s to identify the high school cohort group as a particular consumer market. The founding of Seventeen magazine in the 1940s played a major role in defining the teenage market for advertisers. By the 21st century, marketers were referring to a global teen market. This market developed in the same period of the 1940s and 1950s when the advertising and public relations industries were creating a popular image of the American way of life symbolized by a suburban family with a stay-at-home housewife who consumed vast amounts of new products. In the 1950s, this consumer model of the American way of life was used as propaganda against the Soviet Union.

A fourth major theme in this book, which I focus on in chapters 2, 3, and 6, is how the marriage of education, advertising, and media was affected by issues of gender identity and racism. In chapter 2, I discuss the interplay between late 19th- and early 20th-century concerns about female identity, home economics, packaged and process foods, schools, and advertising.

The changes in this interplay—particularly among female identity, schools, and advertising—is continued in later chapters. In chapter 3, I discuss the interrelations among male identity, school sports, and advertising. I continue the discussion of these interconnections through later chapters. In chapter 6, I focus on efforts by civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s to provide positive images of all Americans in school textbooks, advertising, and media. These changes transformed earlier textbook and advertising images that are discussed in earlier chapters of the book. In part, I argue, the civil rights movement attempted to achieve equal participation in the consumer market for all Americans.

In the concluding chapter 7, I pull together the various themes to show how the historical evolution of schools, advertising, and media is now manifested in commercial advertising in schools; in the transformation of home economics into Family and Consumer Sciences; in the development of themed environments, such as Disneyland, that function as educators; and in the marriage of schools, advertising, and media in the fast-food industry.

Consumer-Citizen and Ideology

Before examining the early 19th-century roots of a mass-consumer society, it is necessary to provide some brief definitions of what I mean by consumer-citizen and consumer ideology. These brief definitions take on more meaning in the context of the total book. By consumer-citizen, I mean a person who accepts any political situation as long as there is an abundance of consumer goods. I refer to this as “Sonya’s choice.” As I discuss in chapter 2, Sonya Vrunsky, a character in Anzia Yezierska’s 1923 novel, Salome of the Tenements, exclaims, “Talk about democracy… . All I want is to be able to wear silk stockings and Paris hats the same as Mrs. Astorbilt, and then it wouldn’t bother me if we have Bolshevism or Capitalism, or if the democrats or the republicans win.”⁷ In the 1950s, a consumer-citizen is a person who supports the American way of life against Soviet communism and is a responsible consumer. In this context, responsible consumers buy what they can afford within their limits of credit card debt. In contrast to the 19th-century Protestant ethic, with its emphasis on saving, avoiding debt, and simple living, the consumer-citizen’s goal is spending, maximizing their use of credit, and consuming as much as possible. Shopping becomes a patriotic act that demonstrates the superiority of the American way of life over other political and economic systems. The anthem of the consumer-citizen is “Shop ’til you drop.” Seemingly apolitical, the consumer-citizen is wedded to the ideology of consumerism.

Sonya’s choice does embrace consumerist ideology. Understanding of an ideology requires a knowledge of how its various individual ideas were assembled. No ideology appears fully formed on the world’s stage. Consumerist ideology emerges in the 20th century as a mixture of earlier ideas about the value of work, the accumulation of wealth, and equality as equality of opportunity. In addition, there is an acceptance of progress as economic growth, the development of new products, and consumer spending.

Consumerism is strikingly different from other ideologies that place an emphasis on either social harmony or an abandonment of worldly concerns. Many religions value the denial of materialistic desires. Different branches of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity reject the way of life represented by the consumer seeking personal transformation through the buying of goods. Confucianism emphasizes the importance of social harmony over individual pursuit of wealth. Today fundamentalist Islamic governments, such as in Iran and Afghanistan, are attempting to protect their populations from what they consider to be degenerate Western consumerism.⁸

The following is a list of the basic ideas that form the ideology of consumerism. When I use the term consumerism throughout this book, I refer to this ideology. This book explains how these ideas become mutually supporting and influence human actions. For example, three essential ideas of consumerism—work ethic, equality of opportunity, and savings—are present in the early 19th century. In the 20th century, these three ideas take on new meaning within the context of consumerism. The utilization of the work ethic provides the means to purchase goods that promise personal transformation. Equality of opportunity takes on a slightly added meaning to that of just having an equal chance to get ahead in society. It comes to mean an equality of opportunity to consume. The 19th-century emphasis on the virtue of saving is in the 20th century used to justify consumer credit plans as forced savings. As a form of forced savings, people have immediate access to new products while still being required to pay their credit bills.

Consumer purchases and credit motivate and discipline the workforce. Consider the interrelationship among the work ethic, equality of opportunity, and consumer credit. Equality of opportunity gives everyone an equal chance to work hard to purchase goods. Consumer credit allows immediate use of goods by providing a forced savings plan to cover the cost of the goods. Purchasers must then work hard to pay off the debt accrued through consumer credit. Both the desire to purchase goods and the necessity of paying off consumer debt causes the purchaser to work harder.

Basic Ideas of Consumerist Ideology

1. Work is a virtue and it keeps people from an indolent life that could result in vice and crime.
2. Equality means equality of opportunity to pursue wealth and consume.
3. Accumulation of material goods is evidence of personal merit.
4. The rich are rich because of good character and the poor are poor because they lack virtue.
5. The major financial goal of society should be economic growth and the continual production of new goods.
6. Consumers and producers should be united in efforts to maximize the production and consumption of goods.
7. People will want to work hard so they can consume an endless stream of new products and new forms of commodified leisure.
8. Differences in ability to consume (or income) is a social virtue because it motivates people to work harder.
9. Advertising is good because it motivates people to work harder to consume products.
10. The consumer is irrational and can be manipulated in his or her purchases.
11. The consumption of products will transform one’s life.
12. Consumer credit is forced savings allowing for the immediate consumption of products.

Early American Puritanism provides many of the consumerist ideas that turned the United States into a nation driven by work and consumption. However, it is not within the scope of this book to detail the history of Puritan thought. It should be noted, however, that scholars such as Jackson Lears link the history of advertising with early Puritan fear that in the Americas the abundance of goods and opportunities for pleasure would destroy the work ethic. In reference to the effect of Puritan thought on recent industrial development, Lears wrote, “The process of accumulation [of property] had to be kept moving forward, energized by the restless desire for purchase rather than the pleasures of possession. In the modern culture of abundance … desire … is curiously dematerialized.”⁹

I think that Lears and other scholars are correct in emphasizing the Puritan quality of American thought. Later in this chapter, I discuss how Puritanism was contained in 19th-century textbooks and Sunday School literature. Puritanism is a continuing influence on U.S. culture. Throughout this book, I refer to its impact on the development of schools, advertising, and media. Having introduced the book’s basic structure and providing a brief definition of consumerism and consumer-citizen, I expand on the meaning of mass consumer society by examining its early roots in the 19th century.

PART TWO: PRELUDE TO A CONSUMER SOCIETY

There were certain developments in post-Revolutionary society that set the stage for the mass-consumer society that developed in the 20th century. First, the interaction with Native Americans made White Americans conscious of the differences between societies based on manufacturing and consumption and those based on minimal wants and needs. Second, the origins of a mass society can be found in the shared experience of advertising, newspapers, telegraph, postal service, and schools. These provided a shared body of experience, knowledge, and icons that created common bonds among people, mostly those of European descent, across the nation. Third, early 20th-century leaders of school reform, home economics, advertising, and advocates of censorship of the early movie industry were mainly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were exposed to the same or similar texts in public schools and in Sunday schools creating a certain unity of values.

The early interactions between the U.S. government and Native Americans exemplified the use of consumer desires as a prod to hard work and reactions against consumerism. The example was important because anticonsumerism groups in the 20th and 21st centurie...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• SOCIOCULTURAL, POLITICAL, AND HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 HORACE MANN MEETS THE WIZARD OF OZ
• CHAPTER 2 LIBERATION WITH JELL-O AND WONDER BREAD: EDUCATING THE NEW WOMAN
• CHAPTER 3 COWBOYS AND JOCKS: VISIONS OF MANLINESS
• CHAPTER 4 COMMODIFICATION OF LEISURE AND CULTURAL CONTROL: SCHOOLS, MOVIES, AND RADIO
• CHAPTER 5 THE AMERICAN WAY AND THE MANUFACTURING OF CONSENT
• CHAPTER 6 PARTICIPATING IN THE AMERICAN DREAM
• CHAPTER 7 SONYA’S CHOICE: FAST-FOOD EDUCATION
• NOTES