Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

Elizabeth Hoyt noted that most of the hostilities toward the various ethnic communities could be clearly connected to these people’s violation of the norms of consumption. “I’d like them better if they didn’t wear such queer clothes,” Hoyt reported, quoting an alleged American housewife “of her foreign neighbors.” Elsewhere, she observed, there were a variety of racial/ethnic epithets—“Frog-eating Frenchmen” and “Mackerel Snappers”—that spoke to the primacy of proper consumption habits among Americans. Accepting such a definition of Americans as those who comment on their foreign neighbors, Hoyt noted that there was but a hair’s breadth of difference between the problem of “questionable consumption” and that of “questionable consumers.”101