But as a self-declared ideology we should treat ‘productivism’ and the associated fable of American abundance with the caution it deserves. The celebration of American productive power was exaggerated. It tempts historians to project the dominant position that American mass-manufacturing had established by the 1940s anachronistically into an earlier era. As an ideology it obscures the interests that it served and, with its emphasis on tangible, material goods it deflects attention from the true locus of American power, which in 1918 was founded above all on money not on things.
