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The All-Consuming Nation
The All-Consuming
Nation
Chasing the American Dream
Since World War II
M A R K H . LY T L E
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lytle, Mark H., author.
Title: The all-consuming nation : chasing the American dream since World War II / Mark H. Lytle.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021027465 (print) | LCCN 2021027466 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197568255 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197568279 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197568286 (oso) | ISBN 9780197568262 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)—United States—History. |
Consumers—United States—History. | Sustainable development—United
States—History. | United States—Economic conditions—1945–
Classification: LCC HC 110. C6 L98 2021 (print) | LCC HC 110. C6 (ebook) |
DDC 339.4/70973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027465
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027466
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568255.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my grandchildren,
Rowen, Shea, and Quinn Blood,
Mary Jane and Xander Lytle,
and my great-niece and great-nephew,
Tessa and Ethan Husted,
future stewards of the planet
The love of well-being is there displayed as a tenacious, exclusive, uni-
versal passion; . . . but to add a few roods of land to your field, to plant
an orchard, to enlarge a dwelling, to be always making life more com-
fortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest
wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects,
but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day,
till they at last shut out the rest of the world, and sometimes intervene
between itself and heaven.
—Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, Book II, Chapter XI
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
I . T H E C R E AT IO N O F A C O N SUM E R D E M O C R AC Y
Introduction: Cold War, Warm Kitchen,
and the Trump Dilemma 3
1. Postwar Choices 17
2. The Birth of a Consumer Democracy 37
3. The Dark Side of Consumption 66
4. The Era of Populuxe 93
I I . T H E E R A O F I D E N T I T Y C O N SUM E R I SM
5. Segmented America and the New Identity Politics 117
6. The American Way of Life Polluted 147
7. The Golden Age of Consumption 174
8. Consumers Go to War 198
9. The Consumer Movement 216
10. Identity Consumerism 237
I I I . T H E AG E O F L I M I T S
11. America Goes Green 261
12. Blue-Collar Blues 287
13. Environmental Battlegrounds 306
14. In Debt We Trust 330
15. The Battles over Sustainability and Climate Change 361
viii Contents
I V. E - C OM M E R C E I N T H E AG E
O F G L O BA L WA R M I N G
16. Hi-Tech Consumers 391
17. The All-Consuming Nation Imperiled 420
18. Epilogue: Omens 443
Notes 459
Selected Bibliography 489
Index 499
Acknowledgments
This book originated during a conversation I had with Chris Rogers and
Peter Coveney, both editors at Oxford at the time. Chris had been godfather
to several other projects, including the revitalization of After the Fact: The
Art of Historical Detection. Oxford was moving in new directions, and Chris
thought a book with elements of social, cultural, and environmental history
would be timely. After Peter and Chris left Oxford, my enthusiasm for a the-
matic textbook dwindled. It was then that Jim Davidson, my frequent coau-
thor and godfather to my children, helped me find a path for All-Consuming
Nation. In one conversation, I complained that I wanted to foreground the
environmental consequences of mass consumerism and to integrate bio-
graphical sketches into the narrative. Jim pointed out that I’d reached a point
at which I could and should write the book I wanted, and so I did. When
I completed the manuscript, Susan Ferber steered me to Charles Cavaliere.
Charles recognized that I had not done the book as originally conceived
and persuaded Oxford to assign it to a new editor. For his support I am most
grateful. I was fortunate to have Nancy Toff take on the project for its final
leg. She is a savvy editor who helped me bring the manuscript to its final
form. Her assistant, Zara Cannon-Mohammed, provided much needed and
warmly offered guidance on the finishing steps.
Writing history is generally an individual endeavor, but the collective
fruits of those labors shape the way others reconstruct the past. In my case,
historians of both consumerism and the environment illuminated many of
the paths I chose to follow. On the consumer side, Gary Cross proposed the
idea that consumerism was the triumphant ideology of the twentieth century.
Frank Trentmann, Thomas Frank, Lizabeth Cohen, and Victoria Da Grazia
all contributed important perspectives. An anti-consumer tradition has also
been important in shaping our understanding of the role consumerism plays
in both the economic and cultural realms. Daniel Horowitz and Timothy Wu
have been among the most trenchant in this area, which has roots deep in
our Puritan past. John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas H. Naylor, Annie
Leonard, Juliet Schor, Susan Strasser, Jackson Lears, and Richard Fox were
other enlightening sources. Meredith Lair deserves a special comment for
x Acknowledgments
her imaginative conception of the role consumerism played in fighting the

Vietnam War. Similarly, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner revealed the
tawdry history of industrial pollution and the attendant cover-ups as the
dark side of our consumer economy.
My shift from diplomatic to environmental history, while far from com-
plete, began after I entered graduate school at Yale. During a C. Vann
Woodward seminar, I asked a fellow student about his dissertation. He
explained he was working on nineteenth-century American environmental
thought. The idea seemed so anomalous at the time that it made a deep im-
pression. That student was Donald Worster. Along with Bill Cronon, Richard
White, Bill McKibben, John McNeill, Roderick Nash, and others, Don helped
define environmental history as a vital field. I was lucky also to meet Jake
Hamblin and Kurk Dorsey at the point when we all pushed an environmental
perspective into the field of diplomatic history. My many colleagues with
whom I worked to build an Environmental and Urban Studies Program at
Bard College have been a constant source of inspiration and enlightenment.
Among them, I’d like to acknowledge William Maple, Kris Feder, Michele
Dominy, Susan Rogers, Noah Chasin, Gidon Eshel, Jennifer Phillips, Peter
Klein, Bruce Robertson, Eban Goodstein, and Myra Armstead. I’m equally
indebted to my history colleagues, who encouraged me to offer a variety of
courses that contributed to the writing of this book.
Numerous people have read the manuscript or made contributions, some-
times unwittingly, that helped me frame the project and clarify its arguments.
Mike Stoff, a stylistic perfectionist, has edited several of my projects and
made them better. Richard Aldous and I have taught together since we first
met at University College Dublin in 2000. Lucky for me, Richard became my
colleague at Bard, so I could avail myself of his editorial acumen. Matthew
Mutter was another particularly insightful reader. My brother, James (Torch)
Lytle was willing to take on the manuscript despite his confessed preference
for fiction. I also had the benefit of conversations with the members of my
book club and especially Vin Teahan, who was both encouraging and alert
to points that needed correcting. George Constable, a part of my summer
circle of friends for over fifty years, is one of the most voracious readers
I know and an astute editor. My son Jesse and friend Tom Stoenner also
volunteered to bring their judgment to bear. Jesse, along with my daughter,
Kate Blood, taught me that life could be better not by accumulating more, but
by having less.
Acknowledgments xi
The freedom to follow one’s own agenda is one of the joys of teaching at
a liberal arts college. In that regard I am indebted to generations of Bard
College students who have challenged, expanded, enriched, enjoyed, crit-
icized, and inspired the material that became this book. My sister-in-law
Anne Brueckner, in recognition of my enthusiasm for acquiring cutting-edge
consumer products, deserves credit for dubbing me “Appliance Rex.” Anne
brought me into the Lifetime Learning Institute at Bard, whose members
have joined in discussing many of the topics the book explores. Finally, and
far from last, my wife Gretchen has been infinitely patient and appropriately
skeptical about some of my broader generalizations. Her work in crafts and
keen eye have made me more sensitive to the aesthetics of consumption,
while her love for Nantucket has made ocean ecology a central part of our
life together.
PART I
THE CR E AT ION OF A C ONSUM E R
DE MO C R ACY
Introduction
Cold War, Warm Kitchen, and the Trump Dilemma
Sokol ‘Niki Park, a tree-lined Moscow neighborhood, was an unlikely venue

for a Cold War showdown. But there in July 1959 Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev and US vice president Richard Nixon squared off to debate the
superiority of their respective political systems. Fortunately for the fate of
humankind, they fought with words and ideas, rather than nuclear weapons.
Even though the lanky Nixon at 5'11" towered over the 5'3" Soviet leader,
the two were well matched. Khrushchev was a bulldog of a man with an
earthy peasant humor. In his youth he worked as a laborer and became an
active trade unionist before joining the Bolsheviks. Since he only learned
to read in his late twenties, his success was all the more surprising. Those
who dismissed him as a crude peasant or even a buffoon misjudged the man.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Khrushchev outmaneuvered his fellow
conspirators to establish himself as first party secretary and premier.
No one had been a more outspoken critic of that regime than Vice
President Richard Nixon. Like Khrushchev he grew up poor, in his case
in rural Whittier, California, far from the corridors of power. As an ambi-
tious and sometimes cunning young politician, Nixon exploited the post–
World War II Red Scare to build his political career. He once smeared his
Democratic senatorial opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas with the charge
that she was “pink right down to her underwear.” Nixon loyally served
Dwight Eisenhower, though Ike did not particularly care for his vice presi-
dent. By 1958 Nixon had his eyes firmly fixed on the White House. A show-
down with the Soviet premier on Russian soil promised to light Nixon’s path
to victory in the 1960 presidential election.
The trip to Moscow became possible after the two sides agreed in 1958 to
exchange demonstrations of “science, technology, and culture,” in order to
promote “peaceful coexistence,” a live and let live way to reduce Cold War
tensions. In June 1958, the Soviets made the first move when Khrushchev’s
The All-Consuming Nation. Mark H. Lytle, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568255.003.0001
4 The Creation of a Consumer Democracy
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (second from left) and Vice President
Richard Nixon visit the model kitchen displayed at the American National
Exhibition in Moscow in 1958. While Khrushchev boasted of the superiority
of the Soviet system, Nixon cited this high-tech kitchen as the essence of the
American way of life that gave consumers the freedom to choose.
Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. S.O.S. is a registered trademark
of The Clorox Company and is used with permission. ©2021 The Clorox Company. Reprinted with
permission
good-natured deputy, Frol Kozlov, opened a Russian exposition in New York.

American visitors saw social realist art, heavy industrial equipment, space
capsules, and a model of a nuclear-powered ice-breaking ship. “That’s what
we use atomic power for,” the Soviets bragged. Sputniks on display reminded
Americans of their failure to launch their own satellites into space. Nor did
the exhibit lack for the stuff of Soviet domestic life: fashions, furs, kitchen-
ware, TVs, chrome-laden cars, a model Moscow apartment, and long rows
of washing machines and refrigerators that few Russians could find in stores,
much less afford. Khrushchev knew that in the world of consumer goods the
Soviets lagged far behind their American rivals. He remained optimistic, at
least publicly, that having “launched a rocket into space,” Soviet ingenuity
would soon increase the supply of home appliances. In that way Khrushchev
recognized the growing importance of consumer goods as a measure of a
successful government.
Introduction 5
Most Americans who toured the exhibition suspected that it reflected

Soviet dreams rather than Russian realities. A writer in the New York Times
suggested that it strove “for an image of abundance with an apartment few
Russians enjoy, with clothes and furs that are rarely seen.” Time magazine tol-
erated the show because once the Americans set up their display in Moscow,
they would “make the Russians more restlessly aware of the gulf between
U.S. and Soviet standards of living.” As if to vindicate Time’s sour assessment,
few Americans took the opportunity to buy the Soviet goods offered for sale
when the exhibition closed.1
At the heart of the exhibit Americans selected to display in Moscow
was a mock-up of a six-room, suburban ranch house, furnished by Macy’s
Department Store with the latest in appliances. Complementing the typ-
ical suburban kitchen was a second, futuristic Whirlpool “miracle” kitchen
run by a computer. With the push of a button a dishwasher came to the table
to collect dirty dishes. Then, a robot swirled around to clean and polish the
floors, while mannequins arranged as a happy family watched their remote-
controlled color television. For the Americans who planned the exhibit, these
kitchen appliances, present and future, more than any ideology represented
the true essence of American life.
By the time Nixon reached Moscow to open the exhibit, Khrushchev
was spoiling for a fight. Republicans in Congress, as they had done for six
straight years, passed a “Captive Nations Resolution” that directed President
Eisenhower to designate a week in which Americans prayed for the freedom
of those held under the tyranny of communist rule. The feisty Khrushchev
saw the resolution as political grandstanding meant to insult the Soviet
Union. On first meeting Nixon in the Kremlin, he treated his American guest
to an array of barnyard epithets that made even his translator blush. Given
that harsh greeting, Nixon recognized that his trip involved more than an op-
portunity to show off the latest in American consumer goods. At stake were
the bragging rights between the world’s two great powers. Each leader hoped
to show that his way of life was superior in every way, including the consumer
goods that would likely appeal to those people around the world taking sides
in the Cold War struggle.
As he welcomed Khrushchev to the exhibit, Nixon deftly steered his host
toward the model suburban house. On the way, the Soviet premier could not
resist chiding Nixon for the insulting Captive Nations Resolution: “If you
would not take such a decision which has not been thought out thoroughly,
as was approved by Congress, your trip would be excellent. But you have
churned the water yourselves—why this was necessary God only knows.”
Khrushchev then wrapped his arms around a nearby Soviet worker attending
the opening and said, “Does this man look like a slave laborer? [Waving at
others] With men with such spirit how can we lose?” Nixon dodged the ques-
tion and Khrushchev’s claim that “in another seven years we will be on the
same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will
wave to you.” He turned instead to the exhibit and said, “I will not comment
on the various points that you raised, except to say this—this color television
is one of the most advanced developments in communication that we have.”
Where Khrushchev saw conflicting political economies separating the
two sides, Nixon shrewdly framed Soviet-American differences in terms of
consumer technologies, in this case color televisions that could entertain
millions and open the world to images that transcended national bound-
aries: “There are some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example
in the development of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer
space; there may be some instances in which we are ahead of you—in color
television, for instance.” The Soviet premier refused to concede even that
point. “No, we are up with you on this, too. We have bested you in one tech-
nique and also in the other,” he assured his adversary.
By then they had arrived at the model American house, just where Nixon
wanted them to go. This one, he explained, “is like those of our houses in
California.” “We have such things,” Khrushchev replied, but Nixon pressed
his advantage. Americans built such kitchens by the thousands to make life
easier for their women. The premier replied that his country rejected “the
capitalist attitude toward women.” Nixon, however, had a larger point to
make. The consumer cornucopia on display before them was affordable for
most American veterans and workers. “Our steelworkers, as you know, are
on strike,” he admitted. “But any steelworker could buy this house. They
earn $3 an hour. This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a con-
tract running 25 to 30 years.” Better yet, “American houses were built to last
only 20 years, so builders could sell new houses at the end of that period.”
“We have steel workers and we have peasants who also can afford to spend
$14,000 for a house,” a defensive Khrushchev replied. As for Nixon’s boast
about planned obsolescence, Khrushchev was having none of it. The Soviets
build for permanence, he insisted, “We build firmly. We build for our chil-
dren and grandchildren.”
When Nixon pointed proudly at a television monitor that showed “what
is happening in other parts of the home,” Khrushchev went on the offensive.
Introduction 7
“This is probably always out of order,” he said. “Don’t you have a machine that
puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown
us are interesting, but they are not needed in life. They have no useful pur-
pose. They are merely gadgets.” Merely gadgets? For most Americans, the
appliances Khrushchev so blithely dismissed were the center of their way of
life. Convenience, ease of use, and efficiency made them indispensable in a
modern society.
On the all-important question of who had a right to proper housing, the
Soviet leader found an opening of his own. “All you have to do to get a house
is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing,” Khrushchev
crowed. There was no better example than the man standing before Nixon.
“I was born in the Soviet Union,” he explained, “So I have a right to a house.”
The contrast was as clear to him as it was dramatic. “In America, if you don’t
have a dollar—you have the right to choose between sleeping in a house or on
the pavement. Yet you say that we are slaves of communism.”
That wasn’t quite the case, but the point was well made, and Nixon changed
the subject, returning the debate to the issue of freedom, by which he meant
the freedom of choice in the marketplace. He described the kitchen as an-
other example of the superiority of American values: “We do not claim to
astonish the Russian people. We hope to show our diversity and our right
to choose. We do not wish to have decisions made at the top by government
officials who say that all homes should be built in the same way.” In none too
subtle terms, he was suggesting that Americans were free not because they
elected their leaders, but because they had the right to choose how or where
they wanted to live and, by implication, whether to buy a Whirlpool, GE, or
Frigidaire refrigerator or a Chevy, Ford, or Dodge. Wouldn’t it be better to
have just one type of refrigerator, Khrushchev wondered aloud, so long as it
worked?
Nixon could not easily forget that this argument about consumerism was
set against the backdrop of a nuclear arms race. “Would it not be better to
compete on the relative merits of washing machines than on the strength
of rockets,” he asked his host. “Is this the kind of competition you want?”
To which he might have added, a competition the Americans were sure
to win. Khrushchev agreed, “Yes that’s the kind of competition we want.
But your generals say: ‘Let’s compete in rockets. We are strong and we can
beat you.’ But in this respect we can also show you something.” A sober
Nixon added that neither side should “put the other in a position where he
in effect has an ultimatum. In this day and age that misses the point. With
modern weapons it does not make any difference if war comes. We both
have had it.”2
Jump ahead now forty-two years as George W. Bush addressed a nation
shocked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In choosing the World
Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, as targets,
the Islamic jihadists had struck a painful blow at the symbols of American
financial and military power. On September 20, before a joint session of
Congress, the president condemned the attackers as evildoers and warned
of a long struggle ahead. He also recognized that the attacks coincided with
a weakening economy, a faltering stock market, and a decline in consumer
spending. As one way to demonstrate the nation’s resolve in the war against
terrorism, he asked the American people for their “continued participation
and confidence in the American economy.” While the “terrorists attacked a
symbol of American prosperity,” he assured Congress, “they did not touch its
source. America is successful because of the hard work, and creativity, and
enterprise of our people.”
A week later, Bush spoke to representatives of an industry the
September11 attacks had particularly devastated—the nation’s airlines.
“When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear,” the presi-
dent told his audience of airline pilots, flight crews, and officials at Chicago’s
O’Hare airport, “And one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore
public confidence in the airline industry.” How would he achieve this worthy
objective? By urging the American people to live as they had always lived,
by working hard and buying large. “Get on board,” he urged the traveling
public. “Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great
destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families
and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” By that he meant feeling
free to move around the country without fear and to spend freely while
doing so. To be fair, Bush did not mean to trivialize the sacrifices he called
on the American people to make. Rather, he acknowledged that leisure and
consumption were vital elements of the American way of life that promoted
a sense of well-being in unbroken rituals of spending to acquire both mate-
rial things and experiences.
Bush sharpened his point in a radio address just a week later. To give the
economy the boost it needed to overcome the impact of September 11, the
president wanted to apply recent tax cuts now. The current crisis provided
an opportunity to do so. “In other words, instead of waiting for next year’s
tax relief to happen,” he said, “let’s put it into this year, to bolster consumer
Introduction 9
spending.” His message to the American people invoked the holiday most
devoted to consumerism—Christmas: “We want you to have more money to
spend, particularly as we head into the Christmas season. We want our con-
sumers feeling confident.” For Bush, one way to put the country back on track
after the recent tragic events was to put the consumers back in the stores.3
Bush’s response to September 11, much like the “Kitchen Debate” between
Khrushchev and Nixon, brought together two central strands of life in post–
World War II America—mass consumerism and the defense of the American
way of life. What Richard Nixon made clear in Moscow and George W. Bush
reiterated in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, is that the United
States has spent the past seven decades or more trying to persuade people
around the globe that its “way of life,” based on ever expanding access to con-
sumer goods, is superior to socialism, fascism, Marxism, Islamic-terrorism/
fascism, or any other “ism” that challenges the capacity of consumer capi-
talism to provide citizens a high quality of life.
A number of historians have linked the spread of American values abroad
to the celebration of consumerism at home. Several themes emerge from
their analysis. For one, well before World War II many American business
leaders, such as department store magnate Edward Filene and automaker
Henry Ford, worked to “Americanize” Europe. New or expanded markets
were but one advantage they sought. In addition, they believed that selling
America’s goods would convert other people to an American way of life.
One historian traced what she saw as the inexorable triumph of “the Market
Empire,” “a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium.” Another
went so far as to identify the American idea of a consumer-based society as
an ideology that triumphed in the twentieth century over such competing
ideologies as socialism and Marxism. In an era of declining citizen participa-
tion in politics and public life, one could argue that consumerism, not liberal
democracy, won the Cold War. Or, as historian Gary Cross put the point,
“consumer culture is democracy’s highest achievement, giving meaning and
dignity to people when workplace participation, ethnic solidarity, and even
representative democracy have failed.” Beyond that, he argued persuasively,
“The American Way of Life in the twentieth century, based on popular access
to consumer goods, has replaced the older American Dream of property or
independence.” Americans who once struggled for equal rights have largely
settled for equality in the marketplace. Indeed, marketplace equality has de-
fined the consumer democracy the United States established after World War
II, though its roots reach deep in the nation’s history.4
Large numbers of Americans seem to believe that possessing mate-

rial goods brings them a sense of well-being. The desire to acquire those
things and the sense of success, security, and finally happiness that goes
with possessing them drive consumers to work hard at jobs that otherwise
offer little satisfaction. Certainly, we know that Americans work more hours
than do the citizens of other industrial countries. Further, the marketplace
has been more democratic and egalitarian than other arenas of American
life. Goods once available only to the rich, such as international travel, pri-
vately owned homes, personal transportation, restaurant meals, higher ed-
ucation, and global communications, are accessible to the broad mass of the
American population. Even those denied access to good housing or schools
because of their race, ethnicity, or gender identity have found more accept-
ance in stores, where one person’s credit card is as good as another’s.
While economic inequality has remained a fact of life into the twenty-
first century, Americans generally believed until recently that their material
circumstances would be better than those of their parents, and their children’s
even better than theirs. That faith has tempered tensions bred by differences
of class, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and, to a lesser extent, race that
could have made the nation’s politics more divisive and violent. How else can
we explain why among the advanced industrial nations, the United States
has never had a significant class-based labor party? Nor has the country ex-
perienced long periods of labor strife for over three-quarters of a century,
much of it a time of peace and prosperity with a cornucopia of widely avail-
able consumer goods and services. Where lack of access to the marketplace
has existed, social protest erupted. Early leaders of the civil rights movement
discovered that segregationists who resisted their pleas for equal treatment
on the basis of constitutionally guaranteed rights proved far more sensitive
when demonstrators boycotted local stores or sat in at lunch counters. What
protestors could not achieve as aggrieved, even militant, citizens, they could
often accomplish as boycotting consumers. Those who occupied segregated
lunch counters almost literally defined a key aspect of their right to equal cit-
izenship as their right to consume.
For the three decades after World War II, Americans turned their material
dreams of a post-Depression American way of life into reality. Wages rose
steadily and, except for an occasional hiccup during brief recessions, un-
employment and inflation remained low. New suburbs sprawled across the
landscape, making homeownership practical not only for the middle class,
Introduction 11
but also for blue-collar workers. One-car families became two-and even
three-car families, often buying a new model every two or three years.
To accommodate all those cars, the federal government committed itself
to an interstate highway system that made it possible to crisscross the na-
tion without entering a major city. American industry poured out a vast array
of consumer goods for home, work, leisure, and personal pleasure. New
materials made many of these goods cheaper, lighter, portable, and dispos-
able. Armed with new machines as well as synthetic fertilizers, pesticides,
and hybrid seeds, the nation’s farms produced abundant foods at affordable
prices. As fewer dollars went for food (from about one-third before World
War II to less than one-sixth by 2015), more were available for non-essential
purchases. The consumer sector came to account for some 70 percent of the
economy.
Dark clouds occasionally crossed these generally sunny skies. In the early
years of the Cold War, the Democrats, with Harry Truman in the White
House, chose a defensive style of containment to counter a perceived Soviet
communist threat, while the Republicans under Dwight Eisenhower adopted
a more belligerent rhetoric with such phrases as “brinksmanship,” “more
bang for the buck,” and “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD. Since con-
sumerism played a key role for both, the differences between the two presi-
dents and their parties were more cosmetic than real. Most leaders believed
that American prosperity made possible huge military buildups, while still
maintaining an abundance of consumer goods. Americans were willing to
rebuild the war-torn economies in Europe and Asia because they saw mate-
rial prosperity as a bulwark again communism.5
By the late 1940s, a few farsighted critics began to identify the damaging
effects that mass consumption imposed on the natural world. High levels of
consumption, neo-Malthusians William Vogt and Fairfield Osborne warned,
could simply not be sustained if humans wanted to survive on the earth.
Beginning in the late 1960s and increasingly in the 1970s, ecologically in-
clined environmentalists such as naturalist Rachel Carson, biologists Barry
Commoner and Paul Ehrlich, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader extended
their critique. Too many people consuming too many goods, they argued,
threaten the natural systems on which life depended. As if to vindicate the
critics, the postwar consumer order by the 1970s began to fail. At that time
scientists began to notice disturbing trends in global temperatures, increases
in polluted air and water, and rapid growing species extinctions.
The political and cultural battles that erupted in the 1960s, environ-
mentalism prominent among them, would dominate the American public
agenda into the twenty-first century. Other issues, such as civil rights, class
inequality, and the war in Vietnam, expanded into battles over gender and
sexuality, ethnic and racial identity, affirmative action, the imperial presi-
dency, nuclear arms and the Cold War, and the destruction of the environ-
ment. The United States entered an age of limits in which what had been
going up since World War II—wages, employment, industrial productivity,
and America’s dominance as a hegemonic power—went down, and what
was supposed to go down—inflation, political divisiveness, and American
fear of foreign competition—went up. Political and economic conservatives
challenged the Keynesian assumptions of the postwar order and especially
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. No longer would they accept maximum
employment and regulation as the basis for activist government economic
policies. For them the control of inflation and wealth creation, promoted by
lower taxes and deregulation, should have top priority. Evangelical Christians
re-entered the political fray from which they had been absent since the 1925
Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. They warned of a profound moral decay
inspired by a liberal media and a permissive culture. Historian Philip Jenkins
aptly described the period from 1975 to 1985 as “the Decade of Nightmares.”6
Perhaps, we should be amazed that the American consumer democ-
racy flourished as long as it did. The United States did become, as wartime
planners urged, a high-wage, high-consumption society striving toward
“maximum employment.” That abetted the growth of an affluent middle class
which, in turn, bred political stability and a broad consensus that Americans
enjoyed the world’s highest standard of living. All the same, every system, no
matter how robust, has a finite life expectancy, and America’s postwar con-
sumer democracy was no exception. It staggered through a series of busts
and booms in the 1970s into the early twenty-first century before encoun-
tering several severe economic crises. Those crises, beginning with the col-
lapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000, the housing and credit bubble of 2008,
and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, suggested that the United States’ ability
to sustain the model of economic growth and maximum employment it had
pursued since World War II was declining.
Social scientists identified a disorder of another kind, which they dubbed
“Affluenza.” By that they meant, “a painful contagious, socially transmitted
condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged
pursuit of more.” It resulted in nonexistent savings, maxed-out credit cards,
Introduction 13
burdensome mortgages, and under-funded retirement plans. The authors

of Affluenza suggested, “the commercialization of cradle to grave life in
America is making us all poorer in spirit, in security, in sense of belonging,
and in a wholesome environment.” As one popular adage asserted, “When in
doubt, shop.” Or consider that “he who dies with the most thing wins.” Come
weekends, Americans are more likely to find spiritual comfort at the mall
rather than the church, synagogue, or mosque of their choice.7
Affluenza has not been limited to consumers. By 2007 tax cuts, seemingly
endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unchecked spending at almost all
levels of government created a mountain of public debt. Shrewd operators
of hedge funds and other financial institutions developed ways to turn debt
into money (and thereby even more debt). Longer-term trends accounted
for much of this indebtedness. Between 1980 and 2008 consumer debt rose
from $355 million to $2.6 trillion—at a rate faster than the economy grew.
Government debt grew with it. To fund that debt the United States borrowed
heavily from the rest of the world. The Chinese alone held massive reserves
in United States Treasury securities. And as US debt soared, the dollar
steadily lost value against other currencies such as the Euro and Japanese
yen. Those Americans who traveled abroad discovered how much less their
dollars could buy. Finally, in 2007 the nation’s financial system crashed as the
housing market collapsed and undermined the value of mortgage-backed
securities based on rising real estate prices. Americans faced an economic
crisis that threatened to restore levels of unemployment and poverty not seen
since the Great Depression. Massive consumer and government debt raised
doubts that the “all-consuming nation” could be restored to health.8
More ominously, as financial markets collapsed, the reality of global cli-
mate change could no longer be ignored as polar ice caps melted, sea levels
rose, coastal regions faced widespread flooding, and many species verged
on extinction. Al Gore, George Bush’s political rival from the 2000 election,
won an Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and a Nobel Peace
Prize for his tireless efforts to warn the United States and the world that the
time to address the threat of climate change was shrinking. That did not stop
Bush from putting the economy ahead of the environment. As one of his
first efforts to distance the United States from the environmental agenda and
notions of international governance, he repudiated the American commit-
ment to the 1997 Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gas emissions.
By 2009, newly elected president Barack Obama faced the ultimate di-
lemma for a nation of shoppers: How to revive a consumer economy without
compounding the problem of global warming? Obama addressed that issue

head-on in 2014 when he pledged the United States to join 144 nations to
meet the goals reached in the Paris Agreement on Climate. In addition,
he issued new regulations to extend gas mileage for autos, limit air pollu-
tion, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Donald Trump won the hearts,
minds, and votes of many conservatives who rejected Obama’s efforts to re-
duce the nation’s carbon footprint. They denied climate change and resented
government regulations designed to meet commitments to goals set in
Paris. Ultimately, in 2017, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris
Agreement, much to the dismay of political leaders around the globe. Shortly
after, hurricanes Harvey and Irma, two of the most powerful storms ever re-
corded, devastated parts of Texas and Florida.
Climate change was only the most severe manifestation of looming eco-
logical disaster. Mountains of trash piled up in landfills no longer adequate
to handle all that consumers threw away. Much of that trash contained toxic
materials that leached into nearby ground water. Across the United States,
chemical discharges, acid rain, toxic metals, and other byproducts of the
mass consumer society tainted virtually all sources of fresh water. Mercury,
lead, and chemical discharges fouled the air. Soil erosion and suburban
sprawl combined to reduce the nation’s once seemingly unlimited agricul-
tural lands. Overfishing wiped out the stocks of most major food species. Out
in the Pacific Ocean, a mass of floating plastic garbage created a dead zone
twice the size of the state of Texas. These were the physical manifestations
of consumer excess on a massive scale, as standards of living rose around
the world.
What has gone wrong? How has the promise of the postwar era produced
these increasingly dystopian conditions? For one, postwar planners, business
and political leaders, and the average American failed to recognize certain
flaws in their promotion of an ever-rising standard of living. In the stampede
to promote consumption, they might have wondered, when was enough,
enough? Creating wealth may have seemed like a social good, but to what
ends would Americans put that wealth? Was it enough to build bigger and
more gas-guzzling cars and energy-intensive houses? Might Americans not
imagine a society based more on non-material measures of the good life?
Might they not have adopted a lifestyle that allowed them to tread more
lightly on the earth?
In reality, a minority of Americans, generally unheeded, raised just those
questions. Since the Puritan era, Jeremiahs as prophets of disaster have long
Introduction 15
warned against the perils of worshiping Mammon. For them, the focus on
things of this world distracts from the worship of God. In the postwar era,
intellectuals developed a secular variation on this theme. They railed against
the corrupting influences of consumer capitalism, mass media, and adver-
tising. “Opposed to excessive commercialism and the consequences of chan-
ging patterns of comfort and luxury,” writes historian Daniel Horowitz, “they
proposed varying combinations of genuine work, self-control, democracy,
public welfare, high culture, meaningful recreation, and authentic self-
hood.” Some social critics and environmentalists such as Lewis Mumford
and Ralph Nader seemed intent on promoting a new secular Puritanism op-
posed to mass consumption. Others condemned capitalism for its manipu-
lation of consumer appetites to promote a wealth-generating economy with
little regard for economic inequality or environmental destruction.9
Critics of postwar consumer democracy were generally muted in the 1940s
and 1950s, when McCarthyism made dissent both dangerous and unpop-
ular. The leveling effects of postwar prosperity subdued class-based analysis,
as did an American cultural ideal of rugged individualism. In the 1960s and
1970s, dissenters translated those warnings into a body of ideas that have in-
formed public discourse over the last four decades. Their reservations about
our consumer democracy have fallen into three major categories: the failure
to eliminate or substantially mitigate persistent and often severe inequality;
the spiritual inadequacies of a materialistic society; and, most critically, the
environmental destructiveness of an energy-intensive, mass-consumption
economy that strives to “improve on nature.”
The All-Consuming Nation follows those themes from the prosperous
postwar decades to the current era, when powerful evidence suggests that
our consumer democracy faces the consequences of its excesses in the dete-
riorating global environment. It identifies those points in the history of the
postwar era when other choices beckoned and when Americans could have
chosen to go down other roads. The triumph of consumer capitalism in the
postwar era accounts for both the prosperity that once brought political and
social stability and today’s economic inequality that has created growing
civic discord and political gridlock.
Creative destruction has been the defining characteristic of that consumer
capitalism. In the wake of the Great Depression, Harvard economist Joseph
Schumpeter noted that “the perennial gale of creative destruction” would
shape the evolution of advanced economic systems. Indeed, Schumpeter
believed it was “the essential fact about capitalism.” He wrote, “The same
process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that in-

cessantly revolutionizes the economic system from within, incessantly de-
stroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one,” thrives on the belief
that new technologies generally improve on earlier ones and thereby gen-
erate more wealth and personal satisfaction. Think how much more flexible
and convenient cell phones are than the landlines they are replacing. Yet, it
once took vast numbers of operators and linemen to keep those landlines
working. What became of those workers when technology eliminated their
jobs? Apple, despite having a far higher market value than AT&T, employs
fewer people.
Schumpeter anticipated that some form of social democracy would con-
tain the excesses of capitalism’s destructive forces. The New Deal and Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society did adopt a host of measures—unemployment in-
surance, social security, unionization, Medicare and Medicaid—to protect
workers when circumstances beyond their control took their livelihoods
away and their ability to consume. In the recent past we have seen many of
those protections eroded, and the inclination to extend them or provide new
ones, such as Obamacare, come under intense assault. So, too, have efforts
to protect the world from the destructive force of global warming. The All-
Consuming Nation may have triumphed in the post–World War II era, but by
examining past trends, we can better understand why the global community
needs another model to survive in the twenty-first century.10
1
Postwar Choices
Months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World
War II, troop ships from Europe and Asia swarmed into American harbors.
The soldiers on board, many of whom had been away for four years, were
eager to be home. For all their euphoria, they could not help but wonder what
they were coming home to. Would their wives and families welcome them
back? Where would they live? How would they live? What would they do
with their lives?
Wartime planners had those questions very much in mind when they
thought about the future. They remembered the aftermath of World War I,
when the government had no plan to convert the economy to peacetime pro-
duction. The military services discharged millions with little thought of how
they would readjust to civilian life. War industries shut down, in the process
leaving millions of workers unemployed. While it lasted only a few years, the
economic dislocation that followed had been troubling. Labor unrest and vi-
olence became widespread, until Warren Harding’s call for a return to “nor-
malcy” signaled a new era of political stability and economic prosperity. Ten
years later, when the economy collapsed, the nation faced the longest crisis
in its history. Despite the New Deal’s energetic tinkering with economic
planning, regulation, and social programs, only the onset of World War II
brought a sustained recovery.
Would the end of the government’s wartime spending bring back the
conditions of the 1930s? Would businesses restore the flow of consumer
goods Americans had missed once the United States entered World War II?
No one knew for sure, since business leaders, politicians, and economists
could never agree on what caused the Great Depression. All the same,
many Americans spent the war years thinking, not only about the cur-
rent conflagration, but also about what kind of society would emerge from
the war.
The All-Consuming Nation. Mark H. Lytle, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568255.003.0002
From War to Peace
Franklin Roosevelt had addressed that concern in broad strokes. In January

1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, he announced the “four free-
doms”—of speech and of worship and from fear and from want—as prin-
ciples for which Americans stood. The following August, Roosevelt and
British prime minister Winston Churchill met secretly off the coast of
Newfoundland. There they agreed to what became known as the Atlantic
Charter—a set of ideals that would serve as war aims. Neither nation would
seek territorial gains, and both recognized the right of all people to govern
themselves. To ward off the economic nationalism that aggravated depres-
sion conditions, they would lower trade barriers and improve global eco-
nomic cooperation in order to improve the welfare of all people. Since those
principles threatened the foundation of the British Empire, it is no surprise
that Churchill’s agreement was less than enthusiastic. Soviet premier Joseph
Stalin never even gave them lip service.
Obviously, Roosevelt planned for peace with his mind partially fixed on
what he learned from World War I and the recent depression disaster. As
he remarked to a radio audience in a Fireside Chat, the United States would
not triumph over fascism and militarism only to see its victorious soldiers
“demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place
on the bread line or on a corner selling apples.” Liberal disciples of the British
economist John Maynard Keynes thought the war had taught useful lessons
about the role of government in creating postwar prosperity. Having mobi-
lized the nation and its resources, as economist Robert Nathan commented,
“can we not mobilize our resources for peacetime consumption? If we can
build vast quantities of battleships, airplanes, guns, ammunition, tanks, and
other weapons to kill our enemies, can we not devote the same resources
after the war to building houses, automobiles, electrical devices, schools,
hospitals, and other goods so much needed to raise the standard of living
of all our people?” In essence, the key to a prosperous future was economic
growth, sustained by full employment, high wages, and mass consumption.
The United States would become a consumer democracy in which opportu-
nities for its citizens in the marketplace would have the same priority as tra-
ditional civil rights and liberties.1
Americans planned that consumer democracy around some widely
shared assumptions, though they often disagreed, sometimes bitterly, over
how to put their ideas into practice. Keynes framed an idea that became a
Postwar Choices 19
Outside Detroit, Ford Motors operated the giant Willow Run bomber plant.
Wartime necessity drew many women into the industrial work force, and at
Willow Run they operated such machines as this Rockwell hardness tester
(left). The wages they earned supplemented family incomes and provided many
women with economic independence.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8e11147
gospel for many postwar economists. “Consumption,” he asserted in his

General Theory, “is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” In
accepting that premise, planners determined that economic growth was
critical to the American way of life, a concept that included notions of per-
sonal liberty, democratic politics, and free enterprise capitalism. Rather than
improve living standards by dividing a limited economic pie, as socialists
were inclined to do, the United States would grow the pie. In that way, even
if inequalities persisted, the broad majority could look forward to a rising
levels of consumption. Liberals, heavily influenced by Keynes, saw mass con-
sumption, not mass production, as the driver of sustained economic growth.
Steady employment at high wages would give people the power to consume.
Many business leaders agreed, but unlike the Keynesians they saw the private
sector, not the government, as the key to mass consumption and economic
growth.2
Planners also assumed that widespread homeownership would be cen-

tral to the new consumer society. As early as the 1920s, Herbert Hoover
had argued that a home of one’s own would be “the foundation of a sound
economy and social system.” Numerous New Deal programs sought to re-
alize that ideal, and at the end of World War II, Office of Price Administration
(OPA) director Chester Bowles made that case. Linking mass consumption
to economic growth, Bowles wrote, “In the construction industry lies per-
haps our greatest single opportunity, not only to correct our shocking lack
of decent homes, but to increase the purchasing power of our people.” New
homes, of course, meant increased demand for new appliances, furniture,
and household goods.3
World War II also restored American faith in the productivity of American
industry, as well as the inventive genius of the nation’s scientists and engin-
eers. Who could have imagined during the depression years that factories
in the United States would turn out materials to supply two major and sev-
eral secondary war theaters simultaneously, and still provide sufficient goods
to improve the standard of living at home? All the same, production never
kept up with domestic demand fueled by full employment and high wartime
wages. Workers poured much of their unspent earnings into war bonds and
other savings that would be available when industry resumed its domestic
production.
Much that Americans sought to consume would be new and improved
as the war accelerated technological development. The successful creation
of the atomic bomb confirmed American faith in the human capacity to
turn natural forces to human purposes. In the postwar era, nuclear energy
promised to became a source of cheap and clean energy. Other technolo-
gies clearly anticipated new consumer goods. Radar and sonar, for ex-
ample, could be applied to television, an evolving medium that promised
to transform broadcasting and popular culture. New designs for airplanes
made possible expanded commercial aviation, bringing transcontinental
and overseas travel within the reach of far more people. Plastics and other
synthetic materials could make clothing, building, and consumer goods
cheaper and more available. Hybrid seeds might lower costs and improve
production on the nation’s farms. And if insects threatened those crops, hy-
drocarbon pesticides such as DDT offered a solution superior to the chem-
icals it replaced. The first widespread use of penicillin gave doctors a major
weapon for fighting infectious diseases.
Postwar Choices 21
No industry did more to demonstrate the superiority of American mass

production technologies than the automobile industry. During the war,
car production ceased, but the auto industry manufactured 20 percent of
all war goods, including millions of trucks and light vehicles such as the
Jeep that introduced Americans to off-road recreational driving. As peace
approached, Americans yearned to revive their love affair with their cars.
Mass auto-mobility freed car owners from dependence on public transporta-
tion. Such flexibility would allow real estate developers to build houses where
land was cheap, outside cities. In that way the dream of mass homeownership
and mass consumption were linked. Because the auto industry employed ei-
ther directly or indirectly about one out of every six workers and paid high
wages, it offered a model of how a full-employment, mass-consumption
economy could work.4
That economy would most certainly be dependent on cheap and plentiful
oil. During World War II, Petroleum Administrator for War Harold Ickes
pointed out that “about 60 percent, or nearly two out of every three tons,
of supplies sent to our expeditionary forces are oil.” The amount of oil the
military consumed defied simple description. A single armored battalion
burned 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel to move 100 miles. The US Fifth Fleet
consumed oil at the rate of 3.8 billion gallons per year. Such extravagant
consumption took a toll on American oil reserves as Americans supplied
some 80 percent of the Allies’ oil. Ickes wondered publicly if the United
States could “fuel another war?”5
That fear of looming oil shortages marked a sharp departure from the
1930s, when low prices and huge surpluses bedeviled the industry. It did not,
however, weaken the nations’ commitment to a hydrocarbon-based energy
economy. Postwar planners never seriously discussed the possibility of de-
veloping alternative energy. Instead, they wondered where they would find
new sources of oil. All eyes pointed toward the Middle East, where petro-
leum geologists discovered vast untapped reserves. Questions then arose
over just who would develop those reserves—the British or the Americans?
Would it be private oil companies or the US government? How would the
United States assure access to sufficient reserves to meet the nation’s future
needs? Ickes, for one, thought the government should buy an oil company
with Middle Eastern concessions, and go into the oil business. Private oilmen
and political conservatives viewed this idea as yet another dangerous step
toward socialism. Yet, both sides agreed with State Department economic
adviser Herbert Feis, who stated, “Oil, enough oil within our certain grasp,
seemed ardently necessary for greatness and independence in the twentieth
century.” That need for foreign oil to power postwar consumerism as well as
to secure the national defense guaranteed that the United States would as-
sume a leading role in world affairs once the war ended.6
What kind of world that would be provoked considerable debate. The
United States had not gone to war against Italian Fascists, Nazis, and Japanese
militarists only to see other anti-democratic or totalitarian states dominate
the international system. Roosevelt spelled out that determination in the
“Four Freedoms” and the Atlantic Charter. As the war progressed, it became
ever clearer that the United States could not promote democracy and free
enterprise if it retreated into its isolationist pre-war stance. One diplomat
pointed out that the United States could not “be indifferent to the welfare
of any part of the world, no matter how remote, because sooner or later it
will affect our peace.” After all, before the war, few Americans worried about
events in Ethiopia, Indo-China, or even Poland, yet aggression in those re-
mote places paved the American road to war.7
Conservatives of varying stripes gravitated between suspicion and out-
rage as they watched the president spin out his plans for the postwar world.
Former isolationists saw the United Nations as a Rooseveltian scheme
to create a world government that undermined American sovereignty.
Conservative anti-communists believed that Stalin had a plan for world
domination. Roosevelt, surrounded by his leftist advisors, they feared, was
either too soft to deal forcefully with the Soviet dictator, or worse yet, was
plotting to sell out the United States and its freedoms. Some, such as the bel-
licose General George Patton, even urged a preemptive war to prevent the
Soviets from gaining a major foothold in Europe.
Out of those fears of the threat of Soviet ambitions, the Cold War came
to preoccupy policymakers in Washington every bit as much as the fear of
a postwar depression. Truman’s forceful response—the Truman Doctrine,
the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and more generally “containment”—
confronted conservatives with a dilemma. Most profoundly despised the
idea of the “state” that they associated with tyranny, restrictions on individual
freedoms, censorship—even mind-control, and intrusive police agencies. As
anti-statists, they railed against big government, high taxes, and economic
regulation they associated with the New Deal. Republicans sought to pro-
mote those ideas in order to recapture the White House, which Roosevelt
had denied them for four terms. Yet, they also wanted the government to root
Postwar Choices 23
out subversion at home and create a military-industrial complex sufficiently

powerful to wage Cold War abroad. To them, Stalin’s totalitarian commu-
nism was worse even than the evils of Hitler’s national socialism. As histo-
rian John Lukacs argued, these conservatives opposed socialism, but they
embraced nationalism that, like the Hitlerian kind, celebrated the “people” in
a tribal or clannish way.8
Harry Truman appreciated the contradiction between nationalism and
opposition to the state. “Our international policies and our domestic policies
are inseparable,” he observed. “Our foreign relations inevitably affect employ-
ment in the United States. Prosperity and depression in the United States just
as inevitably affect our relations with other nations of the world.” Truman’s
more conservative secretary of state, James Byrnes of South Carolina, struck
a pose somewhere between Truman and his conservative adversaries. “To
the extent that we are able to manage our domestic affairs successfully,” he
noted, “we shall win converts to our creed in every land.” As a result, Truman
preempted the conservative initiative to use Cold War politics as a path to the
White House. The United States under his watch would foster prosperity at
home, while it promoted democratic freedoms abroad.9
Full Employment
As peace approached, New Dealers worried less about the spread of com-
munism and more about promoting a full employment economy. In essence,
where conservatives rallied around nationalism, liberals promoted con-
sumer democracy. John Maynard Keynes gave them the tools they needed.
Before his path-breaking work in the 1930s few economists understood the
workings of capitalism. None had an adequate explanation for the boom-
and-bust cycles that wreaked havoc on both business and labor. Traditional
economists saw investment and production as the key to a healthy economy.
If the government wanted to encourage prosperity, they recommended it
take steps that promoted investment in the private sector and adopt policies
that removed inefficiencies and bottlenecks from the economy. The liberal
Keynesians turned this model upside down. They believed that “full em-
ployment” provided the path to a new age of abundance. The government
should focus its attention on creating demand by assuring “continuous full
employment” at high wages. Once possessed of purchasing power, American
workers would stimulate production through increased demand. Or, as one
planner put it, “the job of the future will be to build up mass consumption
great enough to use this mass production.”10
Among the more aggressive liberal Keynesians, Alvin Hansen offered
a set of prescriptions to achieve a “high-consumption” economy in which
consumers, rather than producers, would be key to economic growth. For
Hansen, the government had a vital, though limited role to play to “ensure
and underwrite an adequate volume of purchasing power and effective de-
mand,” essential for “the growth and expansion of private enterprise.” Social
welfare programs, public works, public housing, as well as loans to foreign
governments and to private businesses, would all help to sustain a healthy
economy. More important, and with an obvious nod to Keynes, Hansen
believed that whenever the private economy faltered, the government
should step in with deficit spending to stimulate demand. “We cannot in this
country change the propensity to consume rapidly enough to achieve full
employment without a considerable volume of loan expenditure by the gov-
ernment,” Hansen argued.11
A mixture of “faith and fear” underlay Hansen’s case for full employment.
Hansen was confident the government could adjust taxing and spending to
keep the economy growing. He feared that if the government failed to use
those powers, the soup kitchens and armies of the unemployed would return.
Overall, however, he was confident that wartime prosperity could continue
in the future without restrictions on free enterprise and “within the frame-
work of a free market.”
The National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) similarly advocated for
government action to make sure that jobs existed “for all who are willing and
able to work.” Before conservatives killed the Board in 1943, it issued a report
that called for a vast increase in programs that aimed to protect those suf-
fering through no fault of their own: the unemployed, disabled, and elderly.
Support for education and public health would be vital as well. Like Hansen,
the NRPB believed that these government programs were the best means to
guarantee a full-employment economy, because “the unemployment com-
pensation systems, suitably amended, offer a speedy and almost automati-
cally operating mechanism for distributing funds for those who will spend
them.” The NRPB thereby linked two elements of its postwar planning—
generous welfare state benefits and a full-employment economy.12
These ideas received a warm reception in the White House. In his 1944 State
of the Union message, Franklin Roosevelt called for a second Bill of Rights
“under which a new basis for security and prosperity can be established for
Postwar Choices 25
all.” Roosevelt’s vision expanded his Four Freedoms. It included “useful and
remunerative employment,” sufficient earnings for adequate food, clothing,
and leisure; a business world free from the suffocating hand of monopolies;
decent housing for every family; security in the face of old age, sickness, un-
employment, or debilitating injury; and a good education. “All of these rights
spell security,” Roosevelt told Congress, “And after this war is won we must
be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to the
new goals of happiness and well-being.” No one more forcefully made the
connection of consumerism to full employment and the rights of citizens to
economic security and personal well-being.
Most conservatives supported the idea of consumer-driven prosperity, but
they shuddered at the specter of an expanded role for government to achieve
it. Despite their defense of personal and economic freedoms, many did sup-
port one of the most expansive and generous programs for extending gov-
ernment benefits: the GI Bill of Rights. In October 1943, President Roosevelt
sent Congress a message recommending a broad array of benefits for vet-
erans, though no specific legislation. Planning of the particulars took place
in the War Department, the NRPB, and, especially, the American Legion, a
conservative veterans’ lobbying organization. All seemed to agree on a broad
program covering jobs, healthcare, finances, and education.
In early 1944 the American Legion offered a blueprint for what Congress
called the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or what the Legion referred to
as the GI Bill of Rights. The provisions reflected many of the welfare and
employment goals the NRPB recommended and Roosevelt endorsed.
Conservatives supported the bill because it was limited to veterans and,
hence, not a blueprint for an expanded welfare state. More important, it was
extremely popular with the public who would be voting in the 1944 national
election. About the only objection in Congress came from Representative
John Rankin, a diehard segregationist, who worried that 50,000 Mississippi
Negroes would use their benefits “to remain unemployed for at least a year.”
The act that Congress passed offered veterans both protection from po-
tential economic uncertainty after the war and a path into good jobs and
the middle class. It did not promise jobs, but gave veterans preference in
gaining work, plus occupational guidance and unemployment benefits while
they looked. A new government agency, the Veterans Administration (VA),
would have authority to guarantee loans that allowed veterans to start small
businesses, buy a farm, or purchase a home of their own. Homeownership
ranked among the highest aspirations Americans had expressed during the
war. Finally, the bill recognized that education and job training were crit-
ical to fruitful employment. So Congress provided tuition payments and
living allowances so that former GIs could learn a trade, finish high school,
or pursue higher education. Later amendments added healthcare to the
bill’s provisions. These were benefits that liberals would have given to all
Americans; conservatives would tolerate such largesse only for those who
had served their nation. Segregationists sympathetic to John Rankin tried
but failed to make skin color an additional criterion.13
Since the GI Bill limited its benefits solely to veterans, the liberal Keynesians
saw a “full employment” bill as an additional way to secure the purchasing
power essential to a postwar consumer democracy. Conservatives wel-
comed that consumer democracy only so long as the private sector had a free
hand to determine production, employment, and wages. To them, welfare
benefits and high wages raised the specter of inflation, so they preferred tax
cuts and deregulation as safer means to promote consumption. The standoff
between liberal New Dealers, who by now were almost all Keynesians, and
conservatives, who clung to the idea of unfettered free markets, triggered
a battle that limited, but did not eliminate, the role that government would
play in the postwar growth of the consumer economy.14
Staunchest support for a “full employment” bill came from lib-
eral Democrats, union leaders, especially the Congress of Industrial
Organization’s (CIO) Political Action Committee, and progressive elements
in agriculture such as the National Farmers Union (NFU). Those liberals
were almost all Democrats. Many other Democrats, the majority from the
South, seldom supported New Deal–style reforms like the full employ-
ment bill. They formed an informal coalition with anti-statist conservatives
in the Republican Party that became the majority in Congress for much of
the postwar era. That union made the ideological differences within the two
parties deeper than the differences between them. Legislation succeeded less
often along party lines than by building bipartisan majorities.
In January 1945 the Senate began to consider an employment bill bowing
to conservatives by endorsing “free competitive enterprise,” but declaring
that “all Americans able to work and seeking work have a right to a useful
and remunerative jobs,” and then adding, “it is essential that continuing
full employment be maintained in the United States.” Under the terms of
the bill, each year the president would provide an estimate of the number
of jobs necessary to sustain full employment. Whenever it appeared that
the private sector failed to generate sufficient jobs, the government would
Postwar Choices 27
engage in Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policies of loans, spending, and

public works to create the desired employment levels. With a carrot, liberal
supporters promised that this proposal offered “a firm assurance that unem-
ployment will never again be permitted to become a national problem”; and
with a stick, warned that it was “probably our only alternative to an otherwise
irresistible drift toward real socialism.”15
Conservatives were unimpressed with either the carrot or the stick. They
agreed unemployment was an issue, but not one they believed the govern-
ment should have power to address. Some warned darkly of the huge bu-
reaucracy that would produce jobs, determine who would get them, and
force people to take work they did not want. Supporters of the bill under-
stood that full employment was an ideal to which they aspired, not a practical
reality. They substituted the phrase “maximum employment” to soften the
opposition. That did not address the concern of conservatives who feared the
expense and inflationary potential of high wages. Some employers worried
that high wages would prevent them from hiring workers for non-skilled
jobs. Finally, numerous conservatives did not buy into the new Keynesian
paradigm of government deficits. To them, deficit spending was another ruse
to grow the government and especially the power of the executive branch.
Conservatives ultimately succeeded in killing the Full Employment Act
of 1945. One year later a much weaker bill, now retitled the Employment
Act of 1946, emerged from Congress. The provisions of the bill were so ge-
neral as to be virtually meaningless. They required nothing concrete from
the federal government other than a commitment in principle to promote
conditions “under which there will be afforded useful employment for those
able, willing, and seeking to work, and to promote maximum employment,
production, and purchasing power.” The only tangible provision of the bill
established the Council of Economic Advisors to provide the president with
policy recommendations to promote “employment, production, and pur-
chasing power,” though the president had no obligation to adopt the council’s
recommendations. Some disappointed liberals saw the bill as a symbol of
growing impotence in the face of the powerful congressional coalition of
conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. Others believed the
bill had established a vital Keynesian principle—a government with definite
responsibilities to promote full employment and consumption.16
Union workers stood to be beneficiaries of the full-employment concept
and had thus been in the vanguard of the postwar project for a consumer
democracy. With few exceptions, their leaders rejected socialism and were
generally anti-communist. The war had been good for their cause. Under the
guiding hand of the War Labor Board, unions won new powers over labor
contracts. Membership grew by over 40 percent during the war years, so that
in 1945 almost 15 million workers held union cards. As peace approached,
unions sought to consolidate their gains and make further advances in wages
and working conditions. In 1944, thousands of grassroots strikes interrupted
war production. This activism produced some gains, but it also hardened the
determination of conservatives to curtail the power of labor.
The gauntlet was thrown once the war came to an end. Peacetime meant
layoffs, shorter hours, and an end to much overtime pay. Rather than rising,
wages fell by about 30 percent, while postwar inflation pushed consumer
prices upward. Workers, angered by their loss of purchasing power, walked
off the job from coast to coast. Such unrest proved a political headache for
Harry Truman. Labor unrest, he complained, “hampered the return to
peacetime production.” The problem became even more severe in 1946. Over
the course of the year, the worst in the history of labor-management conflict,
almost 5,000 walkouts idled some 4.6 million workers.
A strike by railroad workers posed a particular threat to postwar reconver-
sion. In May 1946, A. F. Whitney and Alvanley Johnson visited Harry Truman
at the White House. These two, old drinking buddies of the president, led
the most powerful railroad labor unions. Truman thought they were on the
verge of an agreement to avoid a crippling national railway strike. When
Whitney and Johnson told him the agreement was dead, Truman shouted,
“If you think I’m going to sit here and let you tie up this whole country, you’re
crazy as hell.” “We’ve got to go through with this,” Whitney replied. “Our men
are demanding it.” Truman warned that if they failed to reach an agreement
within forty-eight hours, the government would take over the railroads.
Battle on!
Despite Truman’s threat, the railway workers struck. Seldom in the nation’s
history had a president been so outraged. Truman wrote a speech asking for
legislation authorizing him to draft striking workers into the military, if a
walkout created a national emergency. He planned a radio address in which
he intended to lambaste “effete union leaders” who he suggested had ties to
communism. And in what must rank as one of the most hyperbolic bits of
presidential rhetoric, Truman planned to close by saying, “Let’s put trans-
portation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, and make our
country safe for democracy.” With such a friend in the White House, labor
need not look far for enemies. More temperate aides persuaded Truman to
Postwar Choices 29
revise the speech, but he still insisted on congressional action to authorize

him to draft strikers. Even as he was addressing Congress, union leaders
agreed to end the strike on terms he had proposed, and Truman dropped his
request for legislation. The White House called it a major victory. Liberals
and labor leaders disagreed. The New Republic called Truman’s request to
Congress the “most vicious piece of anti-union legislation ever introduced by
an American president.”17
A deep fissure had opened in the liberal–New Deal coalition. Labor’s
postwar truculence achieved little beyond increased enmity on Capitol Hill.
There, a coalition of business-oriented Republicans and anti-union Southern
Democrats were determined to strike a blow against what they called “Big
Labor.” They combined in 1947 to produce the Taft-Hartley bill. For Senator
Robert Taft, son of former president William Howard Taft, the battle against
“Big Labor” was a crucial step toward what he hoped would be his nomina-
tion as the GOP’s candidate for the White House. Popularly known as “Mr.
Conservative,” Taft had been a staunch foe of the New Deal and creeping
socialism, and, as a non-interventionist, an outspoken foe of American in-
volvement in World War II.
Popular and congressional opinion favored Taft in his battle against
unions. Striking at the heart of their power, his bill banned “closed shops”
in which new workers were required to belong to a union as a condition
of employment. Another section allowed states to outlaw “union shops”
in which workers were required to join unions soon after they were hired.
More troubling to labor, the bill empowered the president to acquire a court
order mandating an eighty-day “cooling off ” period, if a judge determined a
strike threatened the national interest. And in the spirit of the growing red
scare, the bill required all union leaders to sign an affidavit swearing they
were not communists. Management faced no similar requirement. Those
unions in which leaders refused to sign lost access to the NLRB, whose past
interventions had protected union organizing from a wide array of hostile
management tactics. Union leaders damned Taft-Hartley as a “slave labor”
act, and Truman, eager to mend fences, vetoed it. Both the House and the
Senate then overrode his veto by comfortable margins.18
Successful passage of Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of a long, slow
decline for union organizing. A number of factors influenced that decline.
For one, New Deal liberalism and the push for a more energetic state inter-
vention in the economy declined as prosperity returned. For another, pro-
gressive management more readily accepted a partnership with labor and
thereby undercut the case for union militancy. Auto manufacturers, for ex-
ample, increasingly saw well-paid workers as among their most loyal con-
sumers. Further, with demand for cars strong, the industry could ill afford
protracted labor disputes. A number of key industries such as steel and
mining, with especially strong unions, faced falling employment, in some
cases because of new technologies and in others because of shifts in demand.
In transportation, electric power, and home heating, for example, oil and
natural gas increasingly became the fossil fuel of choice. Production and re-
fining of petroleum were far less labor intensive than coal mining. Finally,
white-collar workers who were less likely to be unionized dominated the
major growth areas in the postwar economy: education, healthcare, and
government.
Consumer Consciousness
The person most central to the transition from wartime to civilian pro-
duction was OPA director Chester Bowles. It is hard to imagine a person
better equipped to understand the dynamics of a consumer democracy
than Bowles. After graduating from Yale in 1924, Bowles joined with class-
mate William Benton to create the advertising firm Benton and Bowles. The
middle of the Great Depression seemed an unlikely moment to launch a new
agency, but their timing could not have been better. Battered consumer-
goods companies often changed ad agencies as a way to buoy plummeting
sales. Benton and Bowles in response created a number of radio-based soap
operas and comic strip “situation copy.” The firm also pioneered techniques
in “product research and consumer studies,” or what is now thought of as
market research. Surveys of consumer preferences allowed Benton and
Bowles to design ads targeted at wants and needs that the consumers them-
selves had identified.19
Bowles never felt at home in what critics often dismissed as the “ad
game.” He left Benton and Bowles in 1941 for a long career in public service.
In 1943 Roosevelt appointed him to head the OPA, established to control
wartime inflation through its power to set limits on both prices and wages.
Bowles brought a pro-consumer bias to the agency. He created a Consumer
Advisory Committee, staffed with consumer advocates, and appointed a
woman to head the Office of Consumer Relations Advisor. With a limited
staff and a huge directive to manage the consumer economy, Bowles turned
Postwar Choices 31
to volunteers. Close to 200,000 people across the country served on local

boards, and some 3 million people stepped in to help when OPA distributed
rationing books.20
Active participation in the war effort nurtured, as Bowles understood it
would, a growing consumer consciousness as ordinary citizens combined to
promote the war effort by fighting waste and inflation. Responsible consump-
tion became patriotic behavior. Americans took “The Consumer’s Pledge for
Total Defense” and the “Ten Commandments for Consumers.” They vowed
to obey OPA restrictions on rents, prices, and rationing. And when they
saw cheating, they reported it to the authorities. In addition, they planted
“Victory Gardens,” canned homegrown fruits and vegetables, became “Uncle
Sam’s Scrappers” and “Tin Can Colonels,” and donated raincoats and hot
water bottles to scrap rubber drives. The chorus to the Consumer’s Pledge
Song (sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) promised,
I will be a wise consumer,

Gladly do so with good humor,
That’s the way to win the sooner
To Peace and Victory!
Bowles recognized that to succeed the OPA had to nurture a common sense
of sacrifice. Rather than keep up with the Joneses, patriotic consumers would
keep down with the Joneses. The system of rationing would also have to be
fair. Cheating, black marketeering, and unequal access to coveted goods
would destroy the sense of shared sacrifice. Roosevelt himself justified the
OPA’s rationing program “so that scarce goods, may be distributed fairly
among consumers and not merely in accordance with financial ability to pay
high prices for them.” Opinion polls showed that Bowles had hit the right
note. Consumers understood the need for rationing and valued the sense of
participation in the war effort.21
As the agency asserted its authority, it became a lightning rod for attacks
on big government. Business leaders and conservatives, seeing OPA as so-
cialism run amok, lay in wait to dismantle it at the first opportunity. Business
owners charged that OPA bureaucrats set prices too low and wages too high
and thereby deprived them of their rightful profits. Their fears of OPA as a
growing bureaucratic monster were heightened when consumer advocates
in the agency, with Bowles’s support, tried to impose quality standards as well
as rationing. These advocates proposed labels that graded canned goods so
Movie and theater star Judy Canova, like many celebrities, supported the war
effort through drives to collect vital materials such as steel and rubber. Canova
donated her slingshot to the drive. Such gestures were often more symbolic
than essential, since synthetic rubber soon replaced the natural rubber in short
supply.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USE6-D-006089
that consumers could comparison-shop and know the condition of the goods
they pulled off the shelves. The National Canners Association denounced the
proposal as a “war” in which “our system of private enterprise is at stake.”
Consumers complained about shortages of restricted goods ranging from
meat to shoes to rayon stockings and gasoline. Congress agreed and passed
legislation prohibiting the OPA from imposing the labeling requirement.22
Bowles turned some of his attention to the factor he saw at the very heart
of the postwar consumer democracy: housing. The shortage of adequate
homes at affordable prices, he believed, posed the single major obstacle to
successful reconversion. “Today nearly 50 percent of all our homes are in
need of replacement or major repairs,” he observed. “Yet at the close of 1945,
there were 1.25 million families doubled up with relatives or friends—that
means at least 2.5 million families living in cramped quarters.” Bowles saw
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striking personality and individuality that shut her up within herself as
within a husk, and kept her from mingling with others. This absence of all
capability of thought or feeling, this perfect blank and stupefaction of
intellect and heart, took away from her all that lively sense of novelty, all
that interest in the unknown which is so strong and so beneficent in youth.
She did not ask to understand either the things or persons round her. She
accepted them dully, as she would have accepted any other order of things;
they did not affect her at all; they moved her neither to love nor to hatred,
scarcely even to wonder; through them all she pursued her own dull way,
crossed by these other threads of existence perforce, but never entangling
with them, or allowing herself to be woven into the common web. Their
outcries and laughter, their manifestations of feeling, their fondness for each
other, the perpetual movement of life among them, affected her only with a
vague surprise too faint for that lively title, and a still more languid
contempt. She had nothing in common with them; they were, it seemed to
her, restless, afflicted with a fever of activity, bound by some treadmill
necessity to talk, and walk, and move about, and be always doing, of which
her frame and mind were totally unconscious. A vague resentment against
them—the girl scarcely knew why—for disturbing her with their
companionship, and subjecting her to such strange demands for a sympathy
which she had not to give, and an affection for which she felt no need, gave
a certain reality to the mistiness of her sensations. But that was all; she
came among them like a thing dropped out of another sphere, having no
business, no pleasure, nothing whatever to do or to learn upon this alien
earth.
But there was an exception to this rule. Innocent clung to Frederick as a
savage might cling to the one white man who had brought her out of her
woods and from among her people into the strange and beautiful world of
civilized life. She knew him, though she knew no one else. Frederick was
her revelation, her one discovery out of the darkness which surrounded
every other nature. She formed no very close or distinct estimate of him, but
at least she was conscious of another existence which affected her own, and
upon which she was to some degree dependent. When Mrs. Eastwood found
her lurking in the hall in the cold and darkness, waiting for Frederick, an
immediate and full-grown love tale glimmered before the unfortunate
mother’s eyes, filling her with dismay. But Innocent’s thoughts had taken
no such form. She was as unconscious of love as of any other passion, and
had as little idea of anything to follow as a baby. It was, however, her only
point of human interest, the sole thing which drew her out of herself. When
Frederick was present she had eyes only for him; when he spoke she
listened, not much understanding what he said, but vaguely stimulated by
the very sound of his voice. When he told her to do anything she made an
effort to bring her mind to bear upon it, and somehow took in what he said.
The moment when he came home was the moment to which she looked
forward the whole day through. A vague sense that he understood her, that
he did not ask too much from her like the others, made no bewildering
demand on her comprehension, but accepted what she gave with a matter-
of-fact simplicity equal to her own, gave her confidence in him. Could she
have been with Frederick alone she would have been happy; or would he
even have permitted her to sit close to him, or hold his hand, while the
bewildering conversation of the others—conversation which they expected
her to join in and understand—was going on around, Innocent would have
been more able to bear it. This, however, he had privately explained to her
could not be.
“When we are alone I do not mind,” he said, with a condescension which
suited his natural temper, “but when we are with the others it makes you
ridiculous, Innocent; and what is more, it makes me ridiculous. They laugh
at both you and me.”
“Why should they laugh?” asked the girl.
“Because it is absurd,” he said, frowning. “I cannot allow you to make
me a laughing-stock. Of course, as I tell you, I don’t mind so much when
we are alone.”
And he stroked her hair with a caressing kindness which was at that time
about the best sentiment in the young man’s mind. He was often
embarrassed by her, and sometimes had asked himself the question, What
on earth was it to come to? for he too, like his mother, believed that
Innocent was in love with him; and the love of such a girl, so manifested,
was more absurd than gratifying. But yet he was always kind to her. Evil
impulses enough of one kind and another were in his mind, and he could
have made of this girl anything he pleased, his slave, the servant of his will
in any way. But he never treated her otherwise than as his little sister, and
was kind, and put up with her demonstrative affection, and did his best to
advise her “for her good.”
“You must not shrink so from my mother and Nelly,” he said. “They
want to be kind to you. If you could only take to them, it would be much
better for you than taking to a fellow like me——”
“I don’t like women,” said Innocent. “My father always said so. I cannot
help being one myself, but I hate them. And nobody is like you.”
“That is very pleasant for me,” said Frederick, “but you must not keep
up that notion about women. Your father was a capital judge, I have no
doubt, but he might have taught you something more useful. Depend upon
it, you will never be happy till you make friends with your own sex. They
may be dangerous to men, though men are not generally of your opinion,”
continued the moralist, “but for you, Innocent, mark my words, it is far your
best policy to make the women your friends.”
“What is policy?” she asked, stealing her hand into his, much as a dog
puts his nose into his master’s hand.
“Pshaw!” said Frederick. His mother had come into the room and had
seen this pantomime. “You ought to be put to school and learn English,” he
added, somewhat roughly. “I don’t believe she understands half of what we
say.”
“Indeed, I should not be sorry to think so,” said Mrs. Eastwood, not
without severity in her tone. But the severity was lost upon Innocent. She
understood, as she did always by some strange magic understand Frederick,
that she was now to withdraw from him and do her best to appear
indifferent. It was a Sunday afternoon, rainy and miserable—and a rainy
Sunday afternoon, when English domestic virtue shuts up all its ordinary
occupations, is, it must be allowed, a dreary moment. I do not at all agree in
the ordinary conventional notion of the dreariness of English Sundays
generally, but I allow that a Sunday afternoon, when all the good people are
at home, when the children are forbidden to play, and the women’s work is
carefully put away, as if innocent embroidery were sin, and the men do not
know what to do with themselves, is trying. If you are musical to the extent
of Handel you may be happy, but the only thing to be done otherwise in a
good orthodox respectable family, bound by all the excellent English
traditions, is to pick a quarrel with some one. About five o’clock or so, with
the rain pouring steadily down into the garden, the flower-beds becoming
puddles before your eyes, the trees looking in upon you like pitiful ghosts—
if you have not dared the elements and gone to afternoon church, you must
quarrel or you must die.
Mrs. Eastwood felt the necessity. She called Frederick close to her, and
she addressed him in an undertone. Innocent had gone away, and placed
herself in a chair close by the window. She had not even “taken a book”—
the impossibility of making her ever “take a book” was one of the miseries
of the house. She was gazing blankly out upon the rain, upon the trees that
shivered and seemed to ask for shelter, and the beds, where a draggled line
of closed-up crocuses were leaning their bosoms upon the mud. Her
beautiful profile was outlined distinctly against the pale gray dreary light. It
was a beautiful profile always, more beautiful than the full face, which
wanted life. Blank as the day itself was her countenance, with that
motiveless gaze which was, indeed, almost mystic in its absolute want of
animation. Her hands were crossed upon her lap, her whole limp girlish
figure seemed to sympathize with the dreariness outside. Mrs. Eastwood
looked with a mixture of pity, sympathy, and disapproval at this apathetic,
immovable being, so self-absorbed, and yet so childish and pitiful in her
self-absorption. She drew Frederick to her and laid her hand upon his arm.
“Frederick, look there,” she said in a low tone, “if you were not in the
room Innocent would rush off up-stairs. She stays only for you. I saw you
just now with her as I came in. For God’s sake, take care what you are
about. You are turning that child’s head.”
“Bah! nonsense,” said Frederick, freeing himself with a complacent
smile.
“It is not nonsense. I have watched her since ever she came. She has
neither eyes nor ears but for you.”
“Is that my fault?” said Frederick, making a motion as if to break away.
“I do not say it is your fault. Stop and hear what I have to say. It was
very good of you, no doubt, to be so kind to her on the journey, to gain her
confidence——”
“Your words are very nice, mother,” said Frederick, “but your tone
implies that it was anything but good of me, as if I had gained her
confidence with an evil intention——”
“Frederick! how dare you put such a suggestion into my lips? If I were
to answer you as you deserve, I should say that only a guilty mind could
have thought of such a thing, or thought that I could think of it,” cried Mrs.
Eastwood, becoming involved in expression as she lost her temper. This
heat on both sides was entirely to be attributed to the Sunday afternoon. On
arriving so near the brink of the quarrel as this, Mrs. Eastwood paused.
“Sunday is not a day for quarrelling,” she said, “and heaven knows I
have no wish to quarrel with any one, much less my own boy; but
Frederick, dear, you must let me warn you. You do not know the world as I
do (heaven help the innocent soul!) nor how people are led on further than
they have any intention; nor how the simplest kindness on your part may
affect the imagination of a girl. She is not much more than a child——”
“She is an utter child—and a fool besides,” said Frederick, throwing the
female creature about whom he was being lectured overboard at once, as a
sacrifice to the waves, according to the wont of man.
“I would not say that,” said Mrs. Eastwood doubtfully. “She is a very
strange girl, but I do not like to think she is a fool; and as for being a child
—a child of sixteen is very near a woman—and, my dear, without meaning
it, without thinking of it, you might do a great deal of harm. With a
brooding sort of girl like this, you can never tell what may be going on. If
she was one to speak out and say what she is thinking, like my Nelly——”
“Nelly! Well, to do her justice, she is very different from Nelly,” said
Frederick, with that natural depreciation of his sister which is also usual
enough, and which was largely increased by Sunday-afternoonishness.
“No, indeed, she is not like Nelly, more’s the pity,” said Mrs. Eastwood,
fortunately not detecting the injurious tone. “She is so shut up in herself that
you can never tell what may be going on within her. I am sure you don’t
mean it, Frederick, but sometimes I think, for Innocent’s own sake, it would
be better if you were not quite so kind. I don’t like her waiting for you in
the hall, and that sort of thing. There is no harm in it, I know—but I don’t
like it. It is always an unpleasant thing to have ideas—which she would be
better without—put into a girl’s head.”
“You are too mysterious for me to follow,” said Frederick. “What ideas?
If you will be a little more plain in your definition——”
She was his mother, and thought she knew a great deal more than he did
about life; but she blushed as red as a girl at this half-contemptuous
question.
“Frederick, you know very well what I mean,” she said quickly, “and I
hope you will not try to make me sorry that I have appealed to you at all.
You may make Innocent more fond of you than will be good for her, poor
child, and that can produce nothing but unhappiness. I am not finding fault,
I am only warning you. Her I cannot warn, because she so shuts herself up.
She is a mystery,” said poor Mrs. Eastwood, shaking her head.
“Whip her,” said Frederick, with a little scornful laugh; and he walked
off to the library, where Dick was pretending to read, and really teaching
Winks, who had been having a mauvais quart d’heure, and whose patience
was so utterly exhausted that nothing but his regard for the family could
have kept him from snapping. Winks made his escape when the door was
opened, and rushed to the drawing-room, where nobody was allowed to
insult his intellect by tricks. He came and sat up before his mistress on his
hind legs, waving his feathery forepaws in expostulation. She understood
him, which is consolatory alike to dogs and men. The tears had come into
her eyes at the unkind scorn of Frederick’s tone, but this other complaint
brought a little laughter and carried off the sharpness. “Yes, Winks, they are
wicked boys,” she said, half laughing, half crying. Dick declared after that
Winks had been “sneaking,” and I think the dog himself was a little
ashamed of having told; but it did the mother good, and set her thinking of
her Dick, who was not too bright, nor yet very industrious, but the honestest
fellow!—and that thought made her laugh, and healed the little prick in her
heart.
CHAPTER XVI.
INNOCENT’S FIRST ADVENTURE.

Innocent had remained quite unconscious that she was the subject of this
conversation. She was still a little in doubt even of the words of a dialogue
carried on by others. The quickness of utterance which strikes every one
when hearing an unaccustomed language, the half completed phrases, the
words half said, confused her mind, which was not equal to such a strain,
and her want of interest in the matter limited her comprehension tenfold
more. She sat with her profile marked out against the light, the line of the
curtains falling just beyond her, the garden furnishing a vague background,
until some time after Frederick had left the room. She had scarcely moved
while she sat there; there was nothing to look at, nothing to occupy her, but
that did not matter to Innocent. When Frederick was gone she, too, moved a
little, and after a few minutes stole out and up-stairs like a ghost. She went
to her room, stealing through Nelly’s, where her cousin was occupied about
some of the little legitimate Sunday employments which a good English girl
may permit herself on a rainy Sunday. Nelly made some little friendly
observation, but Innocent glided past and closed the door upon her.
Innocent, however, had nothing to do; she sat down by the fireplace, where,
Mrs. Eastwood being extravagant in this particular, there burned a cheery
little fire. But the fire was no comfort to her. So far as she had any feeling at
all, she disliked the warm little room, with all its cushions and curtains, and
its position so close to her cousin’s. Now and then she thought of the cold
and bare rooms at the Palazzo Scaramucci, so large and empty, and lonely,
with something like a sigh. Her life there, which was so void of any interest,
so blank and companionless, came back upon her as if it had been
something better, more natural than this. There no one bade her talk, bade
her do anything; no one cared what she was about. She might stand for
hours at the window, looking out, and no one would chide her or ask why
she did so. Books and music, and such perplexing additions to life, had no
existence there: and in Pisa there was room enough to move about, and air
enough to breathe. With the help of a scaldino, and the old velvet cloak,
which she kept in her box now, she had been able to keep the cold at bay;
but here she grew drowsy over the fire, and had no need for her cloak.
There too she might do what she pleased, and no one ever said Why?—no
one except Niccolo, who did not matter. Whereas now she could not go in
or out of her room without being observed, without having somebody to
peep at her and to say, “Ah, it is you.” What did it matter who it was? If
people would but let her alone! I do not know how long she had been alone,
shut up in the little room, when Nelly knocked at the door. During the short
time since Innocent’s arrival Nelly had gone through a great many different
states of mind respecting her. She had been eager, she had been
sympathetic, she had been sorry, she had been angry, and then she had
recommenced and been sympathetic, sorry, and indignant again. The only
thing Nelly could not do, though she advised her mother with great fervour
to do it, was to let the stranger alone.
“Leave her to herself, mamma,” Nelly said with precocious wisdom, “let
us have patience, and by and by she will see that we mean her nothing but
good, and she will come to herself.”
This was admirable advice if Nelly herself could only have taken it. But
she could not; a dangerous softness would come over her at the very height
of her resolution. She would say to herself, “Poor Innocent, how lonely she
must be!” and would go again and commit herself, and endeavour in
another and yet another way to melt the unmeltable. On this Sunday she had
begun the day very strongly in the mind that it was best to leave Innocent
alone; but the sight of the pale girl gliding past, escaping to her solitude,
shutting herself up alone, was too much for Nelly. The soft-hearted creature
resisted her impulse as long as possible, and then she gave in. Surely this
time there must be an opening somehow to the shut-up heart. She knocked
softly at the closed door, which, indeed, Innocent had almost closed upon
her. “May I come in?” she said softly. It was not easy to make out the
answer which came reluctantly from within; but Nelly interpreted it to mean
consent. She went in and sat down by the fire, and began to talk. It was
before her engagement, and she had not that one unfailing subject to excite
Innocent’s interest upon, if that were possible; but she chattered as only a
well-conditioned good-hearted girl can do, trying to draw the other from her
own thoughts. Then she proposed suddenly an examination of the house.
“You have never been over the house, Innocent; come, there is no harm in
doing that on Sunday. There is a whole floor of attics over this, and the
funniest hiding-holes; and there are some curiosities which, if we only
could find room for them, are well worth seeing. Are you fond of china, or
pictures? Tell me what you like most.”
“No,” said Innocent, “nothing.”
“Oh, that is just because you don’t know. China is my delight. If I had
my way I would cram the drawing-room; but mamma is no true
connoisseur; she likes only what is pretty. Come along and I will show you
the house.”
Innocent rose, more to avoid controversy than from any interest in the
house. Nelly showed her a great many interesting things in the attics; an old
screen, which you or I, dear reader, would have given our ears for; a whole
set of old oak furniture, which had once been in the library; old prints,
turned with their faces to the wall; and one or two family portraits. The girl
moved quite unaffected through all these delights. She neither knew their
value nor saw their beauty. She answered Nelly’s questions with yes or no,
and vaguely longed to get away again. To do what?—nothing. Once, and
only once, she was moved a little. It was when Nelly introduced her into the
old schoolroom, a bare room, with a sloping roof and two windows, looking
away over the elms to the suburban road some distance off, which led into
London, and showed moving specks of figures, carriages, and people,
diminished by the distance, over the bare tops of the trees. There were
neither curtains nor carpets in this bare place. It was cold and deserted,
apart from the other rooms, up a little staircase by itself. Innocent gave a
cry of something like pleasure when she went in. “I like this room,” she
said, and it was about the first unsuggested observation she had made since
her arrival. “May I come and live here?”
“Here! far away from us all?” cried Nelly, “with no furniture, no
pictures, nothing to make you cheerful! It would seem like banishment to
put you here. You do not mean to say you like this bare little place?”
“Yes,” said the girl, “I can breathe here. I can see out of the windows;
and I should not trouble anybody. I like this best.”
“Innocent, you must not talk of troubling anybody. All that troubles us is
when we think you are not happy.”
“I should be happy here,” she said wistfully, sitting down on the ledge of
the window, which was low, and turning her gaze to the distant road.
“Oh, Innocent!” said Nelly, half inclined to cry in her disappointment;
“if you knew how much I wished to make your room pretty, how I worked
at it, and how anxious mamma and I were to make it look like home to you!
We thought you would feel less lonely if you were close to us, and felt that
we were within call night and day. We hoped you would grow fond of us,
Innocent! You don’t really mean that you would like to get away from
mamma and me?”
To this appeal Innocent made no immediate answer. She looked far away
over the tree tops, and watched the omnibuses, crawling like flies along the
road. It was not a beautiful or exciting sight, but it soothed her somehow,
like “the woven paces and the waving hands” of Merlin’s spell—the subtle
influence of motion apart from herself, which acted upon her like a cadence
and rhythm. Then she said slowly, as if to herself, “I like this best.”
“Oh, you cold-hearted, unkind thing!” cried impetuous Nelly, growing
red and angry. “After all we have done and tried to do to make you
comfortable! Don’t you care for anything or any one? Good heavens! how
can any girl be so indifferent! You deserve to have nobody care for you;
you deserve to be kept by yourself, to be allowed to do whatever you
please, never to be minded or thought of. You deserve—to be shaken!” said
Nelly, with all the heat of sudden passion.
Innocent turned round and looked at her, vaguely wondering; though she
did not comprehend the gentler emotions, she knew what it was to be
scolded. It was an experience she had gone through before. Her father and
Niccolo had both scolded her, and the sound was familiar. Perhaps it might
even have penetrated her apathy, and roused some sort of life in her, had not
poor Nelly been smitten by instant compunction, and gone down
metaphorically on her knees to expiate her fault.
“Oh, what a wretch I am,” cried Nelly, “to lose patience with you like
this, you poor, dear, little lonely child. I dare say you will care for us in
time. I did not mean to be disagreeable, Innocent. It was only
disappointment and vexation, and my horrid temper. Forgive me, won’t
you?” she said, taking the girl’s hand. Innocent let it drop as soon as she
could extricate her fingers. She was moved only to wonder, and a feeling
scarcely lively enough to be called impatience—weariness of this perpetual
emotion. Nelly seemed to her to be always laughing or crying, always
demanding sympathy, requiring to be responded to, asking answers which
by no strain of her nature could Innocent give.
“Oh, don’t!” she said, as her cousin put her arms round her and pleaded
for pardon. Poor Nelly, transported with anger and repulsed kindness, had
nearly blazed up again, but fortunately restrained herself, looking with a
kind of dismay at the other’s composure, which, indeed, was a little
disturbed by confused amazement, but nothing more.
“You are a very strange girl,” she said, drawing away with a feeling of
offence which had never before surmounted her friendliness and pity; “but
if you will keep us all at arm’s length, I suppose you must be allowed to do
it. If you wish for it very much mamma, I am sure, will let you have this
room.”
“I could sleep there,” said Innocent, pointing to a hard little settee, which
Nelly knew was far from luxurious.
“Oh, you need not be afraid. I shall take care that you are comfortable,”
said indignant Nelly, and she went away down-stairs with dignity to lay the
case before her mother. “You know the way back to your own room?” she
said, pausing at the door. “As it is Sunday we cannot make the change to-
day.” Innocent heard, and gazed at her, but made no answer. She did not
know how she had offended her cousin; neither, it is true, did she care; but
yet a certain surprise awoke in her mind. Why was Nelly angry? What was
there to make any one angry? Innocent did not connect the “scolding”
which she was aware of with anything that might have called it forth.
Scolding was in her experience a phenomenon by itself, not attached by
way of cause and effect to any other phenomena. Many times in her life she
had been scolded; but very seldom could she have told why. In this present
case the cause was one entirely beyond her moral grasp. If she had broken a
china tea cup or torn a dress, these would have been tangible causes of
displeasure, which her mind could have taken in; but this was altogether
mysterious. Perhaps it was partially owing to the strange way in which she
had been brought up, and the absence of natural love in her early life, that
Innocent’s entire mental constitution was of so peculiar a kind. She had no
consciousness of the home affections, no need of them, no perception of
their sweetness. Whether there might not be in her the capacity for a great
love was yet unproved; but she had no affections. Such a condition of
nature is not so rare perhaps as we think. There are both men and women
who can love with passion the lover or the mistress, the husband or the
wife, but who remain through all the warmth of that one possibility cold as
death to all other affections. The decorous guise of ordinary life prevents
such natures from making themselves fully visible in many cases. But
Innocent was like a savage; she was unaware of the necessity of those
gentle pretences and veils of apparent feeling which hold civilized life
together. Therefore she sinned openly, and, so to speak, innocently, against
the softer natural sentiments which are general to humanity, yet did not
exist in her own bosom. She knew nothing about them, and she had never
been taught to feign a virtue which she did not possess.
She sat in her newly-found refuge till she was thoroughly chilled with
cold, and gazing from the window she found out an object which exercised
some influence upon her afterwards, and got her into some immediate
trouble. This was a little chapel in the distant road, which some freak of her
imagination connected with that little church of the Spina which she had
been in the habit of frequenting in Pisa in so strange and passive a way. I
need not tell the gentle reader that the Methodist chapel in the Brighton-
road was profoundly unlike any chapel ever dedicated to Our Lady. This
particular Little Bethel, however, was ornamented in front with some stucco
pinnacles and tabernacle work, which caught at a stray corner of Innocent’s
memory. She had been taken to church that very morning, to a church
utterly unlike Santa Maria della Spina—a huge place, with pews and
galleries full of people, where she had looked on at a service of which she
had very little knowledge, and listened to a sermon which she never
attempted to understand. A longing for her old haunt came upon her as she
saw the place which seemed to recall it to her mind. If she could but get
there it seemed to her that part of her old life—with which she had never
been dissatisfied—would come back.
Innocent had so far felt the thrill of awakening novelty and change as to
know that her present life was not satisfactory, though rather in the
instinctive way of sensation than by any conscious thought. The little
chapel possessed her not with any idea of improvement or knowledge to be
gained, but only as a possible means of drawing back to her a scrap of the
past. Innocent had a consciousness that were she to rush out immediately to
find this place she would be stopped and “scolded,” or perhaps locked in,
and prevented for ever from gratifying her wish, so she resisted her impulse
to go at once. The dreary afternoon by this time was over, and the dressing-
bell sounded its welcome summons through the house. Frederick was
dining out, so that there was nothing to detain her in the drawing-room
during the evening. She stole up to her room as soon as dinner was over,
and, taking her old velvet cloak from her trunk, and the old black hat which
she had worn in Pisa, stole very carefully down-stairs, and out into the
darkness. Nobody saw her making her stealthy exit, and it was with a
strange sense of bewildered freedom mixed with fear that she found herself
out of doors alone, in the drizzling rain and darkness. She had no
superstitious terrors, however, of any kind, her imagination being too little
active to make them possible, and she had run down the long dark stairs of
the Palazzo Scaramucci too often to be afraid merely of the dark. It was the
novelty, the uncertainty as to how to turn and where to go that moved her.
However, Innocent had the good fortune which so often attends the
beginning of a foolish enterprise. By a maze of muddy turnings, which she
took aright by mere luck, and without making any note of them for
guidance on her return, she managed to make her way to the chapel. It was
resounding with the clangour of a hymn, chanted at the top of their voices
by the young men and young women who form in all places and in all
churches the majority of the evening worshippers. The noise startled this
poor little pilgrim; but she stole in notwithstanding, to the mean little
building full of pews and glaring gas-lights, which was like and yet unlike
Mr. Browning’s wonderful description. The sight of the place inside startled
Innocent still more. The quaint darkness of her little Italian church, the
silent people kneeling and sitting here and there, the priest proceeding with
his uncomprehended mystery at the altar, the glimmer of the tapers, the
odour of the incense, were strangely replaced by the glare of light, the
clangour of the hymn, the people packed close in their pews, who stared at
the lonely girl as she entered. The chapel was very full; but Innocent, whose
instinct led her to the dark corners, found a refuge in a dim pew close to the
door, underneath the little gallery, where, after a while, a grim old pew-
opener with a black bonnet came and sat beside her. Innocent went through
her own little simple formula; she kneeled down and said the Lord’s Prayer;
and then she seated herself and gazed towards the pulpit, which stood in
place of the altar. I do not know whether the sermon that followed would of
itself have attracted her attention any more than the more regular and
decorous one which she had heard in the morning. But while poor Innocent
sat looking rather than listening, and began to think of repeating her prayer
and going away again, the old woman at her side uttered a groan which
chilled the very blood in her veins. The girl shrank away from her into the
corner of the pew as far as she could go, and turned her eyes from the pulpit
to her terrible neighbour. But no sooner had she recoiled thus than a man in
front of her uttered another exclamation. The preacher was one famous in
the Wesleyan connexion, whose appearance prepared his audience for
excitement, and as he went on the exclamations grew louder and louder.
Innocent, who had no understanding of this proceeding at all, who could not
make out even the words of those cries which rose around her, was first
startled into fright, and then frozen into physical terror. I don’t know what
dreadful vision of savages and cannibals and human sacrifices came into
her bewildered mind; a mixture of fairy tales and those horrors of ghosts
and vampires which still linger about Italy, and which she had heard,
though at an ordinary moment her memory would not have retained them.
The old woman by her side was pale and haggard, with long teeth and large
jaws. She groaned at regular intervals, so regular that Innocent got to be
prepared for them, though they made her jump each time they sounded on
her ear. When her endurance was almost at an end, and she had become sick
with very fear, there came a lull in the proceedings; a hymn was sung, and
part of the congregation went out. Innocent made an anxious effort to go
too, but the old woman stood immovable between her and the door, and the
girl watched with agony the last figures retiring, and an evident movement
to begin again taking place. “Let me go! Let me go!” she cried in her terror.
The old woman clutched her shoulder with long, lean fingers, which looked
like claws to the girl’s excited fancy. She approached her face to Innocent’s
ear, and hoarsely whispered something which she did not understand.
Innocent was half frantic with fear. She did not know what might be the
next step. It seemed to her that other people were approaching her, and that
she saw the gleam of knives, an idea which was natural enough to her
Italian breeding. She uttered one loud shriek, and springing over into the
pew in front rushed out of the chapel, pushing down someone in her
passage. It seemed to her that she heard steps pursuing as she flew madly
along the dimly-lighted road. She had taken the turn towards London in her
bewilderment, and by the time she lost breath and was obliged to stop, had
come to the verge of a greater thoroughfare, crowded and noisy. No one had
come after her, though she had thought she heard steps resounding close
behind. She stopped short, panting for breath; and, leaning against a wall,
looked round her in dismay up at the dark sky, and down at the muddy road,
and along the long line of dim lamps and passing figures, all strange, and
without help for her. When the full sense of her helplessness, her loneliness,
her desolation, burst upon her, she crouched down upon the pavement close
to the wall, and burst into tears. “Niccolo! Niccolo!” she cried, with a wail
of childish despair. Another girl in such circumstances would have called
upon God or her mother; but Innocent knew nothing of her mother, and
very little of God. The only being who had always been helpful to her was
Niccolo. She called upon him with a bitter cry of helplessness. Niccolo in
Pisa—how could he come to her? What could he do for her? But other help
—less tender, less sure than Niccolo’s—was approaching slowly to her
along the crowded way.
CHAPTER XVII.
FREDERICK TO THE RESCUE.

“What is wrong?” said one of two young men who were coming along the
road.
“Bah! what does it matter to us?” said his companion.
This companion was Frederick Eastwood. He had dined out, and he had
looked in for half an hour at his club, and he was now walking leisurely
home with a friend who was going the same way. Why should two
gentlemen thus making their way homewards on a Sunday evening pay any
attention to a group of people gathered on the muddy pavement? But the
curiosity of his companion was stronger than Frederick’s indifference.
There were a dozen or so of people standing round some one who was
crouching down against the wall, and there was a policeman in the middle.
“Ask her her name; even if she’s furrin’ she’ll give some sort of an
answer to that,” suggested one of the bystanders.
“It is some tipsy woman,” said Frederick; but the next moment he
changed colour, and stepped into the midst of the crowd.
“Call me a cab,” he said to his amazed friend, and put out his hand to
grasp, not very gently, at the old cloak which he recognized. “Heaven and
earth! what has brought you here?” he said, in a tone of passion. The
crouching figure uttered a cry, and, springing up at once, rushed upon him
and clung to his arm.
“She’s found her young man at last,” said some one in the crowd; and
the very policeman grinned as he cast the light of his lantern upon poor
Innocent, who, pale and scared, and dazzled by the light, clung closer and
closer to her cousin.
“Oh, Frederick, I lost my way. Take me home! take me home!” she cried
piteously.
“Why did you ever leave home, you little fool?” he asked, and thrust her
savagely into the cab which drove up. He threw a coin to the policeman,
and waved a good-night to his companion. He did not give any explanation.
It was better, he thought, to leave his friend to suppose that this was some
adventure—some disreputable acquaintance whom he took the trouble to
help, than to let him know who it really was whom he had found in such a
position. But he was savage when he got into the cab, and thrust away the
girl, who put out her trembling hands to cling to him once more.
“How can you be such an idiot?” he said. “Where next must I pick you
out of? Do you know you are behaving like a shameless creature, and
doubly like a fool? Did you come out after me? or why are you here, and
where were you going? By heaven, it is enough to drive a man mad to see a
girl making an idiot of herself like this!”
Poor Innocent could not stand against this torrent of reproof. She shrank
back into a corner, and cried and sobbed. It seemed to her that heaven and
earth had risen up against her, now that Frederick “scolded” her too. She
had done no harm. But what an evening, what a round of miserable
adventures she had gone through! Her limbs were aching with fatigue, and
her mind with fright and terror. He had seemed to her the very messenger of
heaven for her deliverance. Her cry when she saw him was one of those
outcries of pure joy which sound keen and sharp as if a pang were in them.
Out of the darkness, the forlornness, the utter misery, he appeared to her
like an angel. But when the angel began to scold her, poor Innocent, muddy
and wretched, shrank up into her corner. For the first time a consciousness
of her own foolishness came across her mind. How could he, so spotless
and smooth as he was, touch or look at her, with mud on her dress, with her
old cloak wet with the rain, and her hair hanging limp and damp upon her
shoulders? Yes, she deserved to be scolded: she perceived this for perhaps
the first time in her life.
“When you have done crying,” said Frederick, still savage, “perhaps you
will explain to me what ridiculous cause brought you to this plight. Have
you run away entirely? Where were you going? What do you want! You
little fool! They are far kinder to you at home than any one would be
anywhere else. You would gain very little, I can tell you, by running away.”
“I did not mean to run away,” said Innocent, crying softly as it were,
under her breath.
“You will find no other people so foolish,” said Frederick savagely.
“What did you want? what were you thinking of? Good heavens! you are a
girl, are you, and not a spirit of mischief? Fancy my dismay when I saw you
—you, who ought to have been safe and sound at home, questioned by a
policeman in the midst of a London crowd! Try and imagine how
disgraceful such a thing is to yourself—how exasperating to me.”
“Oh, Frederick!” cried the girl, overwhelmed by his reproaches, and
roused into understanding by the sharpness of the pain to which she was
subjected, “I did not mean it. Do not be angry: it was not my fault——”
“Not your fault!” he cried in his rage. “Good heavens! if it had not been
that I was afraid you might get into some still more disgraceful scrape, I
should have left you to your fate. The thought did go through my mind. If
this were known, nobody would ever speak to you again; nobody would
believe your excuses. Not your fault! What made you come out at all, away
from home?”
“Oh, don’t be angry,” she cried piteously, and put out her trembling hand
to touch his coat, to propitiate and pacify him with abject self-humiliation.
By this time his passion had begun to wear itself out, but he would not give
her any sign of forgiveness. When the cab reached the gate of the Elms, it
was thrown open to them by all the servants in a body, who were searching
about among the shrubbery with lights.
“Oh, here she is, with Mr. Frederick. I know’d she’d be found with Mr.
Frederick,” said one of the maids, whom Frederick overheard.
Mrs. Eastwood met them at the door, looking pale and frightened. “Oh,
thank God, here she is at last!” she cried to Nelly, who was behind.
Innocent clutched tightly at Frederick’s arm as she stepped down,
bewildered and dazzled by the lights that flashed everywhere around her.
He had scolded her cruelly, but yet she clung to him in preference to the
women who had been so kind to her. He felt the implied compliment, even
in the midst of his wrath.
“Yes, I have brought the little fool home,” he cried loudly, that all might
hear him. “Where do you think I found her? In the middle of the Brompton
Road, with a crowd round, crying, and unable to tell where she came from.
What were you thinking of, mother, to let such a child go out alone?”
“I! let her go out alone!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, astonished at the
undeserved blame. “Are you mad, Frederick? I have been more unhappy
about her than I can say. The gardener has gone out to look everywhere, and
we have been all over the grounds with lanterns. But bring her in—bring
her in. Thank God we have her safe at last!”
With the lights apparently flashing all round her, dazzling her eyes,
Innocent went in, half dragged by Frederick, to whom she kept clinging. He
pushed her roughly into a chair, pulling away his arm. “There! let us see if
you can give any account of your escapade,” he said harshly.
The tones of his voice, his harsh words, sunk into poor Innocent’s heart
like stones sinking into water. She remembered nothing else afterwards, and
the pain seemed something more than she could bear. She sat and gazed at
them all, holding her old faded cloak round her closely, and showing the
stains of mud on it and upon her black frock. Her hair fell limp to her neck:
her poor little hat was pushed back from her head. The excitement and
distress threw out, as nothing before had done, the peculiar beauty of her
face, but a more forlorn figure could not have been seen. Mrs. Eastwood
was more anxious and more compassionate than her son.
“How was it, Innocent?” she asked: “I am sure you could not mean any
harm. Tell me where were you going? where had you been?”
The girl sat silent, like one under a spell, eager yet dumb, on the point of
utterance. She seemed to struggle with some force which prevented her
from speaking. She turned her eyes from one to another, eager, miserable—
trying, it seemed, to tell her story—incapable of beginning. At last she
surmounted the spell, and burst suddenly into wild tears.
“I did not mean it. I saw the church from the window—I thought it was
like the Spina. Oh—h! it was not a church at all: it was some dreadful place.
They tried to kill me, and then I fled—fled! and I did not know the way
——”
“What is the Spina?” said Mrs. Eastwood, wondering. “You frighten her,
Frederick, making those grimaces. Innocent, no one will be hard upon you.
Tell me plainly; what sort of a dreadful place was it? Why did you go?”
The girl looked round her at them all, one after another. Why did she go?
She did not really understand the question, but it seemed to drive her to that
necessity for an answer which sometimes brings the truth from our lips, and
sometimes calls up an involuntary fiction which appears like truth to other
minds, and sometimes to that of the speaker. “I was—lonely,” she said, after
a long pause.
Mrs. Eastwood gave a cry of pain. She turned her back upon them all,
and walked up and down the room two or three times with an agitation that
no one understood. Then she came and stood by Innocent, and put one arm
round her. “Oh, Nelly,” she cried, “Nelly, this is our fault!”
It would be wrong to say that Nelly was less tender-hearted than her
mother, except in so far as youth is always less considerate, less tolerant
than experience; but on this occasion she stood unmoved, feeling more
indignant than sorry. She, too, had made her essay at sympathy, and she had
not got the better of its rejection. She stood by without any particular
demonstration, while by degrees some sort of account of the evening was
got from her cousin. Innocent told them in broken words all that had
happened to her. She shuddered as she described the groans. She was sure
she had seen the gleam of the knives, and heard the steps approaching of the
men who were going to kill her. This curious Italian version of a very
commonplace incident puzzled the family greatly, to whose imaginations
knives were quite strange and impossible things. When she had told her tale
somehow, she sat, looking at them all, one after the other, with strained
eyes, not knowing what they might do to her for the crime she seemed to
have committed, without knowing it to be a crime. She did not catch the
sense of what they said to each other, though her eyes followed every word,
trying to divine it on the lips of the speaker.
“I was lonely,” she repeated, with a curious mixture of wistful misery,
and the childish cunning of the perception that she had made a successful
stroke with these words before.
The result, so far as Innocent was concerned, was that she was taken
tenderly up-stairs, and committed to the care of Alice, who put her to bed,
and questioned her over again, making her own reflections on the
adventure. Innocent cried herself to sleep, sobbing while drowsiness crept
over her, and waking up to sob again. The groans of the old woman in the
chapel possessed her brain, and the strange black desolation of the streets,
which every time she dropped asleep seemed to enfold her again,
frightening her back out of the world of dreams to feel for the first time the
soothing of the firelight, and the kindly warmth and comfort of her little
room. These, however, were but superficial tortures. The one which gave
them their hold upon her, and which had indeed produced a sort of half
awakening of her spiritual nature, was the terrible disappointment of being
“scolded” by Frederick. She knew no more tragical word to use, even in her
own mind. He had forsaken her. She dwelt upon the fact with an acute pang,
almost like the birth-pang of the soul which had not yet come to life within

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American Dream Since World War II

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her imaginative conception of the role consumerism played in fighting the

Sokol ‘Niki Park, a tree-​lined Moscow neighborhood, was an unlikely venue

good-​natured deputy, Frol Kozlov, opened a Russian exposition in New York.

Most Americans who toured the exhibition suspected that it reflected

Large numbers of Americans seem to believe that possessing mate-

burdensome mortgages, and under-​funded retirement plans. The authors

compounding the problem of global warming? Obama addressed that issue

process of industrial mutation—​if I may use that biological term—​that in-

From War to Peace

Franklin Roosevelt had addressed that concern in broad strokes. In January

gospel for many postwar economists. “Consumption,” he asserted in his

Planners also assumed that widespread homeownership would be cen-

No industry did more to demonstrate the superiority of American mass

out subversion at home and create a military-​industrial complex sufficiently

engage in Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policies of loans, spending, and

revise the speech, but he still insisted on congressional action to authorize

to volunteers. Close to 200,000 people across the country served on local

I will be a wise consumer,

INNOCENT’S FIRST ADVENTURE.

FREDERICK TO THE RESCUE.

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Sokol ‘Niki Park, a tree-lined Moscow neighborhood, was an unlikely venue

good-natured deputy, Frol Kozlov, opened a Russian exposition in New York.

burdensome mortgages, and under-funded retirement plans. The authors

process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that in-

out subversion at home and create a military-industrial complex sufficiently