Land of Desire

In the accompanying cultural transformation money gained importance as the good life came to be defined no longer by control over production but by the power to consume (pp. 3–8).

By the 1920s, financiers (Goldman, Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Paul Mazur) turned the large stores into even larger chains and corporations though mergers and acquisitions.

The book devotes considerable attention to Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, a display window designer and nationally known expert on decoration.

It discusses other window designers including Elbert Hubbard, Arthur Fraser, and Walter F. Allert, commercial artists such as Maxfield Parrish, Louis Tiffany, Joseph Urban, Boardman Robinson, and promoters of advertising such as Robert Ogden (pp.

Decorators developed seasonally changing central themes based on holidays, mythology, orientalism, and other domains engaging the public imagination (pp.

Edward Bernays pioneered the public relations technique of generating news calculated to influence people's attitudes toward a show, product, or company (pp. 319–322).

These include the sponsorship of educational programs to produce advertising and decoration specialists (New York School of Fine and Applied Art) and retail specialists (New York University School of Retailing), as well as academic research institutes devoted to studying problems interesting to business (Harvard Bureau of Business Research, led by Edwin Francis Gay and Arch Wilkinson Shaw) (pp. 153–163).

Leach discusses the "mind cure" philosophy (including New Thought, Unity Church, Christian Science, and theosophy) as an auxiliary to consumerism.

He cites a performance associated with the 1913 Paterson silk strike, organized by John Reed and Robert Edmond Jones as a paradoxical example of labor radicalism coopted by the emerging aesthetic of spectacle (pp. 185–190).

Richard Bushman wrote that Leach's "gloomy picture could have been made darker still if the nineteenth-century origins of consumer culture figured more in the book", describing how consumption of goods such as furniture was motivated by the desire to project gentility and emulate higher classes.

Bushman suggests also that Leach may have overemphasized the statements of advertisers and department store owners, without scrutinizing how completely the ambition to manage desire had been realized among the masses.

Gorn found the book's tone overly critical, "ponderous" and "heavy-handed" at times "because the author is at such pains to debunk the culture of consumption".

"[6] Alan Trachtenberg also praised the book for its details, writing "Leach has gathered material and biographical evidence from virtually every realm of public life in these years (roughly 1890 to 1930) to document a cultural shift of monumental proportions.