William R. Leach is a professor of history at Columbia University. His books include Butterfly People, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, and Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, which was a National Book Award finalist.

PREFACE

Introduction: The Land of Desire and the Culture of Consumer Capitalism

I: Strategies of Enticement

1. The Dawn of a Commercial Empire

“The Master Institutions of Civilized Life” • From Marble Palaces to Masses of Goods and Capital • The Retail Wars of the 1890s • “The Greatest Merchant in America” • The Crisis of Distribution

2. Facades of Color, Glass, and Light

Elbert Hubbard and Eye Appeal • Signs of the Times • The Careers of Robert Ogden and Maxfield Parrish • L. Frank Baum and TheShowWindow • A Maze of Glittering Crystal • Form out of Chaos • Arthur Fraser’s Temple

3. Interiors

Dismantling Doorsteps and the New Intimacy with Goods • “The Stage upon Which the Play Is Enacted” • Seductions for the Masses and the Classes • The “Eliminating” Power of the Central Idea • A New Child World and “Paradise in the Toy Department”

4. Fashion and the Indispensable Thing

The Growth of Fashion and a Gigantic Garment Industry • Women Buyers and the “Queens” of Paris Couture • Rodman Wanamaker and the Queen’s Slippers • Fete de Paris: The Fashion Show • The Garden of Allah

5. Ali Baba’s Lamp: Service for Private and Public Benefit

Service as a “Profitless Ideal” • Holiness or Commercial Hospitality
• “Maximum Max” and Paying the Price in Court •
Customer as Guest in “Self-Sufficient Citadels” • “Distributors
of Happiness” • Gemutlichkeit and the Utopia of Joseph Urban
• A New Commercial Cultural Order

II: Circuits of Power

6. “Business Runs the World”: Institutional Coalitions Behind the New Order

“Searching Out” and Satisfying “Human Wants” • The Great
Museums and the New Curators • City Pageants and Hobnobbing
with Mayors • The Widening Sphere of Public Action •
Better Babies and Better Deliveries • The Paterson Pageant

7. Wanamaker’s Simple Life and the Moral Failure of Established Religion

Wanamaker as Liberal Evangelist and Institution Builder • The
Simple Life and Pastor Wagner • A Day at Bethany • Fairy
Tales or Private Parables • Sin, Consensus, and Institution
Building • Down the Slippery Slope

8. Mind Cure and the Happiness Machine

“The New Healers” • Simon Patten’s Political Economy of
Mind Cure • Pollyanna and the Popular Culture of Mind Cure
• L. Frank Baum and Theosophy • An Affirmative American
Fairy Tale

III: Managing a Dream Culture:1922-1932

9. “An Age of Consolidation”: Goods, Money, and Mergermania

“Consumptionism” • Goods and Money “Flooding the Country”.
Chains Across the Country • Investment Bankers and
Mergermania • “The Power Is All in Business”: Chains of Department
Stores • Paul Mazur and Harvard’s Helping Hand
• The Urban Landscape of Desire

10. “Sell Them Their Dreams”

The Consumer Credit Apparatus • Air-Conditioned Murals and
“One White Fur” • “Brokers in Beauty” • In Style with
Dorothy Shaver • Accessorizing on the Grand Scale • The
Pseudoevents of Edward L. Bernays

11. The Spectacles

The Rainbow House and the Palace of Fashion • The Commercial
Parade • Toys, Spectacles, and the Child Experts •
Ragamuffins and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade • America’s
Mecca of Light and Color • “All the Colours of the Rainbow
Belong to Mr. Bilge”

12. Herbert Hoover’s Emerald City and Managerial Government

Herbert Hoover’s Pursuit of Knowledge • Commerce as Database
and Julius Klein, Master Broker • “Horne, Sweet Home”
• Dissent and the “Torments of Desire”

Conclusion: Legacies