Ewen - Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th Anniversary Edition

Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses.

WALTER BENJAMIN, The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Thirty-seven years ago, when I was a freshman history major at the University of Wisconsin, consumerism, the mass media, and the commercial culture more generally were not yet included within the liberal arts curricula of most colleges and universities. Though these institutions had been leaving tractor marks across the American social landscape for over a century, few historians saw advertising, consumerism, or the apparatus of mass impression as subjects worthy of serious inquiry. Quite the contrary. For many in academia, ignorance about such matters was regarded as a litmus test of intelligence.

This scholastic blind spot posed a problem for me. I was, after all, a child of postWorld War II America, a time and place where economic prosperity and television were turning citizens into consumers, living rooms into salesrooms, and advertising into the prevailing vernacular of public address. As a participant-observer at the postwar barbecue, I was both assailed and seduced by a burgeoning visual culture, intimately aware of the ways that it was reshaping the topography of aesthetics and desire. I had seen it firsthand. I grew up in a middle-class suburban family in a town where competitive consumption was elevated to an art form. Finding a social identity, being popular in a peer group determined in large part by Papagallo shoes and Impala convertibles, was an often anxiety-ridden right of passage. I had, and still have, a love-hate relationship with consumption.

From early on, even before college, I had an interest in learning about the history that stood behind the emergence of this now familiar new world. Writers for decades had criticized and bemoaned the unsettling invasions of commercial culture, but nothing that I learned in school provided me with a tangible interpretation of how twentieth-century consumer culture had come into being.

My historical interest in media, consumer culture, and the shadowy arts of persuasion, then, was not the outcome of formal learning. If anything, it was the result of visceral experience. Thoughlike many of my generationmy social panorama was framed by television, comics, rock and roll, and by the overheated commercialism of the fifties, the sensibilities and aspirations of my parents and grandparents derived from different origins.

Immigrants from Poland and Latvia, my grandparents never fully relinquished their village mentality. They simply relocated it in New York City. Despite their tenacious bonds with an older world, however, the boil of modernity touched their lives. The last time I saw my mothers father, when I was four, he was working as an usher and ticket taker in an old movie theater. Though scarcely a modern man, he drew his last paychecks from a decidedly modern job. My paternal grandmother never discarded her commitment to the old worldI could smell it when I entered her apartmentbut my other grandmother, Anna Scott, was a big movie fan, able to recite the intimate details of Robert Taylors life from movie magazines that she had read. Still, they were, all of them, grounded in the old neighborhood, in a world of familiars.

My parents, the children of these immigrants, worked hard and successfully to escape their working-class roots. Both went to college, and both, throughout my childhood, repeatedly declared their scornful aversion to popular culture. My cultural interests, such as they were, were foreign to them and a disappointment. Given their efforts to assume the attributes of middle-class culture, they couldnt help but be mortified by a son whose cultural tastes seemed to have regressed, who watched television, listened to loud music, and seemed perfectly satisfied paging through magazines looking at comely sirens, two-tone cars, and other commercial attractions. Whatever ambivalence I might have been developing amidst all of this time wasting, wherever I might be going with my fascinations, it appeared to themand to the only grandmother who survived into my teenage yearsthat I was lost, swallowed up by something awful.