Charge It! - Review - book reviews

Reason, Nov, 1999 by James B. Twitchell

Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit, by Lendol Calder, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 374 pages, $29.95

Nothing so warms the heart of a contrarian as the self-evident falsity of a time-tested bromide. Take, for instance, "You can't judge a book by its cover." The book in hand is Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit, by Lendol Calder, and, although it is a revision of a doctoral dissertation, it reads like a work of seasoned scholarship. In fact, the dissertationness is a help, since it leads the common reader carefully through the modern history of consumer debt, showing how the concept of borrowing figures not just in economic theory but in popular culture.

The cover really does tell us what Financing the American Dream is about: the intimate and often distressing relationship between debt and dreaming, between anxiety and desire. Contrary to those who piously and ahistorically rail against consumer debt as a modern fall from grace, Calder takes a much more nuanced and interesting view, one informed by the tension between Puritan restraint on the one hand and capitalist enthusiasm on the other. Most refreshingly, Calder is able to bracket moral judgment, thereby letting his story of American dreaming unfold.

As he says early on, "In the beginning of my research, I...subscribed to the two key notions that make up the myth [of lost economic virtue]: first, that before consumer credit people rarely went into debt and always lived within their means; and second, that consumer credit destabilized traditional moral values by making it easier for people to live lives devoted to instant gratification and consumer hedonism. But the more I learned about the history of consumer credit and its effects on personal money management, the harder it became to accept the myth's central presumptions."

Here's what his book's cover - a painting that originally appeared as the August 15, 1959, cover of The Saturday Evening Post - looks like: In the foreground of an evening scene by a lake are two young lovers. A brilliant full moon casts an eerie shade of blue light. The youngsters are recumbent in the crook of a magical tree that has a vine of starry moss creeping up into the heavens. The lovers are looking up into those heavens.

Let's call them Missy and Buck or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve. Beside Missy on the ground are her white gloves and, interestingly, her purse. She looks rather like Debbie Reynolds of the Tammy movies, and her eyes are now dreamily shut in reverie. Presumably she's already seen what is between her and the moon. Next to her sits her beau, himself looking a bit like Tab Hunter. Earnest, crew-cut, paying attention, he is still focused on what is in the sky.

And well he should be. For in the night sky, drawn as if they were the outlines of constellations, are objects that we still easily recognize. In pagan times the sky might have been filled with the :imaginary connect-the-star images of Leo the Lion or the Big Dipper, and in the Renaissance these heavens might have been peopled with Christian saints and divinities. But in the modern world, the heavens are composed mostly of machine-made stuff.

Let me itemize these heavenly objects, because they are still at the center of American dream life. Right under the moon is a split-level house with a two-car garage. Off to the right are two cars - one looks like a Jaguar coupe, and the other is a wood-paneled station wagon. To the left of the house is the swimming pool, complete with deck chairs, diving board, and floating toys. Moving counterclockwise are Buck's future do-it-yourself tools: a drill press and a power drill. Then Missy's stuff: a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, a washer-dryer combo, electric stove, Toastmaster toaster, Hoover portable vacuum, electric rotisserie, portable iron, electric percolator, electric frying pan, portable mixer.

And then some family stuff: window air conditioner, portable radio, television with rabbit ears, and a stereo record player in a console. In the upper right quadrant are the kids, Bucky and Missy junior, respectively doing their things. He's catching a baseball. She's playing the piano. Next to them are the two family dogs sniffing each other. Finally, there's the family maid, wearing an apron and little hat, pushing a third child in a perambulator.

Heaven on earth? Or materialistic blasphemy?

Readers of The Saturday Evening Post 40 years ago must have been a little concerned by this Edenic image. For at one level this is a sacrilegious vision. An unnamed editor even took time to note that this aerial view, painted by Constantin Alajalov, an emigre from Russia, had originally been planned to depict "castles in air." But the painter changed his mind, the editor explains, not out of "cynicism" but because it "takes as much magic to create a two-car domicile as it does to whip up an air castle."

All it takes to make this scene contemporary is to freshen the inventory. In the update, the split-level is now in a gated community, the cars are an SUV and a Beemer, the pool is covered and heated, the fridge a Sub Zero, the stove a Vulcan, the rotisserie a stainless-steel Weber. There's a big-screen TV and well - let's face it, you know the rest. If you don't, just realize that The Saturday Evening Post, that vade mecum of middle-class dreaming, has been replaced by House & Garden, Architectural Digest, and, heaven forbid, the Robb Report.