Americans don’t know if they love or hate commerce, which is almost like saying they don’t know if they love or hate their own lives. So much of life in the United States consists of the work commerce provides, the objects industry manufactures and sells, and the structures built by commercial enterprises. For most immigrants, the American dream means a good job, in an economy whose life-blood is trade. The United States would not have been a place of hope and fulfillment for so many without the work commerce creates. Peddlers’ carts, sewing machines, small restaurants, laundries, truck farms, grocery stores are icons in the classic tales of hard-earned success and Americanization.
On the other hand, commerce is always corroding our highest ideals and tarnishing our best selves. Although Plymouth Plantation would not have survived the desperate early decades without the cattle market in Boston, William Bradford complained that the passion to raise and sell animals destroyed the community at Plymouth as people scattered to get more pasture. Jeffersonian republicans thought a farmer had to have a market to keep his hand to the plow while fearing that commerce would bring with it luxury, weakened character, and corruption. In current academic accounts of the early Republic, the expansion of the market after the Revolution infected the nation with an ethic of self-interested profit seeking that destroyed an older devotion to community and the public good.
In our national myths, commerce is greed and selfishness, as well as opportunity and prosperity. Through all of American history, the huckster is a despised figure, whether in the form of the Yankee peddler, the high-pressure salesman, or the modern ad man, a person given to deceit, false promises, and the evocation of unwanted desires. He lures us away from the wholesome, simple life we know is best, toward luxury, self-indulgence, and extravagance, the life we know will ruin us.
Religion, like all idealisms, has long been at odds with commerce. Vanity Fair is an established distraction on the road to heaven, and everyone knows that the consumer economy manufactures golden calves. Obviously the affections must be weaned from material wealth before we can love the true God with a pure heart. Ironically, ever since the moneychangers in the temple, the opposition of religion and commerce has not prevented the two from mixing.
In America, religion itself early became a kind of sell. The most successful evangelists have often been great marketers, developing techniques that taught business a lesson or two. But the mixture of religion and commerce forms an explosive amalgam. The revulsion against the televangelists when the scandals broke came partly from the widespread suspicion that they were only in it for the money.
For most people, the issue of religion versus commerce comes up yearly with the return of the holiday season. Does the annual campaign to buy and sell gifts, driven by the engines of capitalism and promoted by a barrage of advertising amidst the fantasies of department-store display, comport with the story of Jesus’ birth in a stable? Nearly everyone wonders from time to time who and what is being worshiped at Christmas.
Leigh Eric Schmidt dives into this turbulence at the center of the American psyche in his study of American holidays, primarily Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. In individual chapters, he tells the story of each holiday’s origins, its commercial elaboration and exploitation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then ends with the history of holiday criticism. Almost as soon as the celebrations came under the sway of commerce, Schmidt tells us, critics arose to denounce their ill effects: people forgetting the true meaning of the event, the poor being paid a pittance to produce pleasures for the rich, and consumption holding out extravagant promises for personal fulfillment that are never realized. Commerce turned significant celebration into an empty, excessive, and deceptive show, so it was said. Schmidt makes the generation of these criticisms as much a part of the holiday story as John Wanamaker’s Christmas displays in the Grand Court of his department store.
In borrowing from the churches, the master of commerce purposely or inadvertently consecrated their enterprise.
The book is written in full consciousness of the objections to commercialized holidays, including the current academic social criticism growing out of the Frankfurt School. Were he to follow the usual line of attack, Schmidt would unmask the holiday folderol to reveal how consumerism hides the commodification of people and conceals the exploitative social relations underlying the production of Christmas. That would make for an interesting if predictable study, but Schmidt takes another tack. Contrary to materialist views of culture, he finds that the interplay of religion and commerce in holiday celebrations is not wholly dominated by merchants mulcting the public, while poor religion takes a beating. While frequently in tension, religion and commerce also engage in negotiations where religion makes a few gains of its own, or the two join forces for the benefit of both and the production of new cultural formations.
The commercialization of Easter, to take an example, began in the churches in the 1860s with a growing attention to decoration for the commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection. Garlands, wreaths, floral crosses, trellises, and flowers—hundreds of flowers, in mounds, banks, pyramids—became the vogue, all to commemorate the climactic event in the Christian calendar.
In the 1870s, as merchants began to recognize the commercial potential in Easter, they borrowed the churches’ decorative motifs for their stores. Lilies migrated from altars to show widows—along with seasonal folk symbols such as rabbits, chicks, and eggs, to be sure—but also with crosses. Millinery and jewelry were displayed hanging on the cross in department-store windows. In Wanamaker’s Grand Court, statues of angels, thousands of lilies and ferns, ecclesiastical vestments, religious banners, and tapestries adorned the hall along with mottoes proclaiming “He Is Risen,” while shopping for Easter went on in nearby aisles.
Schmidt recognizes the depreciation of religious values in this blatant deployment of holy icons for commercial ends. The combination of crosses and jewelry is both funny and sad. But the use of Christian symbols in the market, he also insists, acknowledged the deep hold of Christianity on the culture, and led to something more.
“In appropriating Christian symbols, merchants were at one level achieving exactly what liberal Protestant pundits had been calling for: namely, the wholesale consecration of the marketplace.” The displays were “a modern Protestant staging of the ‘festive marketplace’ of the early modern world in which the church’s time converged with the ‘brimming-over abundance’ of the fair.”
Merchants could not appropriate the icons of Christmas or Easter without importing part of the religious meaning with which those potent symbols are invested. In borrowing from the churches, the masters of commerce purposely or inadvertently consecrated their enterprise. This interpretation explains why, in our increasingly secular and pluralistic culture, crosses and mangers are more and more omitted from store windows. There is too much Christian doctrine bundled into the images, even when surrounded by jewels and hats.
Schmidt sees plenty of tension between religion and commerce in the history of the holidays, but he also finds instances of a happy blend, where people glided from gifts and Christmas trees and feasts to meditations on the miracle of the Incarnation. If the cost and effort of mounting a properly consumerist celebration deadened some, it enlivened others.
He is unwilling to admit that the two old foes were always at war. In a revealing postscript in the acknowledgments, he admits “that the bourgeois holidays that I have described are my holidays,” the ones he grew up with. His appreciation for “the wonders of the holiday gifts and the marvels of the marketplace” takes rise from the “little ‘miracles’ or ‘graces’ ” in his own experience. He is unwilling to yield his own happy times to the demeaning critiques of Veblen or Adorno.
Although Schmidt seeks for a balanced analysis, one that allows full voice to the critics as well as to the promoters and enjoyers of holidays, in the beginning and end he puts himself in opposition to the critics. He does not write against social gospelers who denounced the hypocrisy of Christmas or any of the other voices out of the past. He is most irritated by academic critics who dump on Christmas kitsch or can only see in holiday celebrations the machinations of capitalist culture. He detects in some of the critics the echo of a Puritan or republican objection to festival itself.
Elsewhere he sees “another highbrow indictment of popular culture and its feast days. The academic critics display an enlightened disdain for the supposed gullibility of people as they marvel at Christmas windows or buy yet another bouquet for Mom.” Still other critics join a long tradition of deprecating those public occasions that were under the control of women. “Historians have often slighted what Lousia May Alcott fondly called ‘home-festivals,’ those rituals centered on domestic gift giving and orchestrated almost exclusively by women.”
Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays
By Leigh Eric Schmidt
Princeton University Press
363 pp.; $24.95, hardcover,
$16.95, paper
Consumer Rites can be read as a conservative book. Schmidt does not identify some portentous flaw at the center of holiday celebrations, a fundamental evil that must be altered for religion and human life to flourish. The moral of his story is that religion and commerce have constantly contested the meaning of the holidays, with mixed results for both. Neither has defeated the other, and sometimes they join forces to form new practices and meanings as, for example, when the Babe of Bethlehem is made to bless the promise of American abundance in the Christmas ads. It has always been so, and will always be. No reform, no reorientation is called for.
If Schmidt is no Amos or Jeremiah, he is a populist and a democrat. He believes in popular choice over against elitist critiques from the academy. Intellectuals are too disdainful of the people’s imagined plight: “if only they could see through the manipulation—the logic seems to go—they would be freer, better human beings, socially and religiously more aware.”
Schmidt dislikes that logic. Although acknowledging the pressure of entrepreneurial manipulation, he insists that consumers themselves helped create the market versions of the holidays, “imbuing these rites with their own hopes and desires.” Ordinary people are active agents in Schmidt’s history, not the puppets of the merchants and their minions. Intellectuals who fail to give the people credit are the ones who come in for a scolding.
Consumer Rites does not resolve the tension between religion and commerce, but it does reconcile readers to the inevitable intervention of commerce in religious life. While the products of the mercantile mind may be frenzied, trivial, and false, they are also often festive, hopeful, and kindly. If commercial energies sometimes interfere with holiday worship, they may also aid and abet the pursuit of divine goodness on celebratory occasions. Schmidt assures us that we may safely buy into the merchants’ Christmas without fear of selling our souls.
Richard Lyman Bushman is professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, including most recently The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Knopf).
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.
Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 30
