The All-Consuming Nation: Chasing the American Dream Since World War II Lytle

The All-Consuming Nation: Chasing the American Dream Since World War II Lytle – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780197568255,0197568254,B09GPQ84LL, 9780197568279, 0197568270

Product details:
• ISBN 10: 0197568270
• ISBN 13: 9780197568279
• Author: Lytle, Mark H.

In his 1958 “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon argued that the freedom to consume defined the American way of life. High wages, full employment, new technologies, and a rapid growth in population known as the “Baby Boom” ushered in a golden age of economic growth. By the end of the twentieth century, consumerism triumphed over communism, socialism, and all other isms seeking to win hearts and minds around the world. Advertising, popular culture, and mass media persuaded Americans that shopping was both spiritually fulfilling and a patriotic virtue.

Mark Lytle argues that Nixon’s view of consumer democracy contained fatal flaws — if unregulated, it would wholly ignore the creativedestruction that, in destroying jobs, erodes the capacity to consume. The All-Consuming Nation also examines how planners failed to take into account the environmental costs, as early warning signs–whether smog over Los Angeles, the overuse of toxic chemicals such as DDT, or the Cuyahoga River in flames–provided evidence that all was not well. Environmentalists from Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich to Ralph Nader and Al Gore cautioned that modern consumerism imposed unsustainable costs on the natural world. Not for lack of warning, climate change became the defining issue of the twenty-first century.

Table contents:

1. Postwar Choices

2. The Birth of a Consumer Democracy

3. The Dark Side of Consumption

4. The Era of Populuxe

5. Segmented America and the New Identity Politics

6. The American Way of Life Polluted

7. The Golden Age of Consumption

8. Consumers Go to War

9. The Consumer Movement

10. Identity Consumerism

11. America Goes Green

12. Blue-Collar Blues

13. Environmental Battlegrounds

14. In Debt We Trust

15. The Battles over Sustainability and Climate Change

16. Hi-Tech Consumers

17. The All-Consuming Nation Imperiled

18. Epilogue: Omens

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