In Engineered to Sell Jan L. Logemann extends a critique of the “Americanization” of consumer capitalism thesis that he first ventured in Trams or Tailfins? (Jan L. Logemann, Trams or Tailfins?, 2012, p. 2). In that book Logemann argued that the West German “economic miracle” of the late 1950s resulted in a uniquely German approach toward the built environment (p. 8). Far from submitting to “Coca-colonization,” West Germans created housing and municipal transportation systems according to their own vision of the public good. In his new book, Logemann goes much further. Following the transatlantic careers of dozens of mid-twentieth-century European-born social scientists and commercial designers, Logemann contends that the intellectual infrastructure of the consumers' republic was not American, even if was largely U.S. made. Rather, his émigrés took emerging European research methods or modernist aesthetics with them when they relocated to the United States and insinuated those tools into...

"The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest. By Walter A. McDougall. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 408. $30.00.)." The Historian, 80(2), pp. 406–408

One Foot Out of the Plastic Cage:The Un-Americanization of West German Consumer Society David Steigerwald (bio) Jan L. Logemann. Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. vii + 300 pp. Figures, tables, abbreviations, notes, and index. $45.00. For about a week in Summer 2011, my favorite restaurant became the Lidenbrau at Potsdamer Platz. Partly, this was because I did not know Berlin well, and the prominent location is easy to find. Though I had never been there, the place looked familiar. Helmut Jahn’s SONY building famously lords over the site, Mt. Fuji–like; but given contemporary architects’ apparent conviction that no amount of glass is too much, one could be forgiven for thinking of Jahn’s buildings in Philadelphia or Chicago. The clearest proof that we weren’t in Kansas City was the waiter’s response when my companion asked for tap water: He shook his head in stern disapproval and delivered an emphatic “NO!” Today’s Potsdamer Platz is an international architectural showcase. After the Wall came down, the junction became the world’s largest single construction site and gave work to an array of world-renowned architects, including Jahn, Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, and Richard Rogers. They brought with them the latest in building fashion, if not a rich knowledge of, or respect for, the city’s past. For many Berliners, the plaza’s pell-mell reconstruction symbolized not so much German redemption as the post–Cold War triumph of global capitalism at virtually the precise geographical flash point of three-quarters of a century of profound human conflict. Destroyed in the war, left desolate in No Man’s Land after 1961, Potsdamer Platz was mostly a weed-strewn wasteland in the early 1990s. Then the city invited multinationals like SONY to scoop up huge tracts of prime real estate for their vanity buildings, and the architects imposed their visions without much reference to Berlin’s notable architectural past. City officials and locals alike bemoaned the “Manhattanization” of a space that has played a key role in their city since Frederick the Great turned it into the main point of royal entry into the capital from Sanssouci. Surely this was a better resolution than bombs and guard posts, but it was bound to leave anyone who cared about the German-ness of the city ambivalent at best. [End Page 132] It is tricky business negotiating between the homogenizing pressures of global capital and particular social and cultural forms, and the most important contribution that Jan L. Logemann makes in Trams or Tailfins? is his largely convincing explanation for how a distinct value system can shape and control consumer capitalism in ways that honor, rather than obliterate, that distinctiveness. In arguing that West Germany was not “Americanized” after the war, Logemann joins a long debate about American consumer capitalism’s power, sweep, and depth of influence in the developed world through the second half of the twentieth century. In pointed contrast to Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-colonization and the Cold War (1994) and Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (2005), Logemann argues that, for all the noisy commentary, pro and con, about postwar Americanization, West Germans shaped their version of the affluent society according to deeply held and distinctly un-American values. Rather than a sweeping homogenization of the developed world, postwar affluence ran along “different paths to consumer modernity” (p. 2). Logemann’s book is a closely reasoned “structural comparison” (p. 2) of the competing manners by which the United States and West Germany moved through the postwar Age of Affluence. He argues that, during the postwar “miracle years,” West Germans molded a regime of consumption based on the ideal of “social citizenship” and insisted on a privileged place for public goods over merely private ones. Instead of the “consumer-as-citizen” (whom Lizabeth Cohen, in The Consumer’s Republic [2003], defined as the main social type in postwar America), West Germans promoted the social consumer who practiced “public consumption,” which Logemann defines as “the provision of publicly funded alternatives to private consumer goods and services in areas ranging from housing...

James Livingston is at his best when he is provocative. Judging from Against Thrift, a two-part exercise in the political economy of pleasure, I fear he is losing his provocateur's edge. It is easy to agree with his claim in part 1: that America's obscene wealth gap undermines economic growth by eroding the public's ability to engage in the consumption that makes the economy grow. The second part, in which Livingston provides philosophical clarity to his long-developing belief that consumer capitalism has been the principal force behind contemporary psychic and cultural liberation, feels tired and worn. Distilled, Livingston's argument goes like this: In the days of industrial capitalism, economic growth depended on adding labor to production, which invited consistent capital investment. Then, roughly in the 1920s, Taylorism and labor-saving machinery reduced the need for additional labor inputs and made investment in production redundant and unprofitable. Thereafter, surplus capital, having no productive outlets, has flowed into destructive bubbles. By contrast, the United States enjoyed economic growth when surplus capital was redistributed through social-welfare programs, unionization, and progressive taxation that together widened consumption.

Historians have slighted the importance of automation both as a cause of organized labor's decline in America and as a lively issue among labor leaders in the early post-WWII period. In part, this disregard stems from labor's own ambivalence about technological change. This essay considers that ambivalence by looking at Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers. Reuther and his colleagues shared widespread hopes that the new production processes would relieve the burdens of assembly-line work and increase the working class's access to cultivated leisure. At the same time, however, they recognized that unchecked technological change would generate a wave of structural unemployment by displacing experienced workers while denying new, unskilled workers necessary jobs. Reuther and his colleagues feared that automation in this form would destroy the consumer capacity that the working class had so recently acquired, and in so doing would undermine the health of the entire economy. Reuther's strategy, therefore, was not to resist automation but to manage its implementation through both collective bargaining and progressive political victories.

Journal Article Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. By Kristin L. Hoganson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 402 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3089-5. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5793-9.) Get access David Steigerwald David Steigerwald Ohio State UniversityMarion, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 94, Issue 4, March 2008, Pages 1268–1269, https://doi.org/10.2307/25095380 Published: 01 March 2008

After World War II, the United States moved into what historians are now recognizing as a full-blown consumer society. Consumer society carried with it vast cultural changes, including shifts in fundamental values. Not least important were shifts in the practices of thrift, as seen in how Americans regarded personal savings and debt. Traditionally seen as opposites, those two economic behaviors became intertwined in the 1950s, as Americans continued to save, not to accumulate wealth but to spend and often even as they took on consumer debt. Thus, the 1950s were a tipping point between industrial capitalism and consumer capitalism.

Journal Article All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought Get access David Steigerwald David Steigerwald associate professor of history at Ohio State University's Marion campus Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 385–403, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486235 Published: 01 September 2006