Customer Reviews

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

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This is a very clever book. The author pinned her explanation of American influence in Europe on canny business practices. The service ethic. Big-branding. Supermarkets. These are some of the themes that are worked over to make the case. The book is delighfully stuffed with anecdotes, vignettes and odd facts and statistics to lend it the feel of visiting a large emporium of ideas. Personally, I liked this 'shelf browsing' feel to the chapters.

The book has a few serious downsides which marr its central argument. First and foremost, the author takes little cognisance of the influence of WWII on shaping European attitudes towards American culture. Secondly, in the two generations after WWII more Europeans (percentage) speak English in order to accommodate their ambitions. The author attributes the creeping growth of English pre-WWII to business needs (strange to me that she singles out the Rotarians as particularly influential). However, that does not explain its widesprgead endorsement by the general citizenry after WWII. This brings me the third issue, the lack of attention paid to the rise of youth culture - largely driven by perceptions of American youth in the fifties. Music, rock'n'roll and the drug culture were directed to a large extent by American tastes. Consumerism is too broad a concept to explain the uptake of American habits.

Despite these lacunae, the book is a a thought-provoking exercise and though the prose is bit attenuated at times, it is overall readable and stimualting.

This is a deeply insightful work on how America "conquered" Western Europe with one of the most devastating and total weapons in its arsenal during the twentieth century: economics. De Grazia isolates the nine characteristics of American consumer culture (the service ethic, branding, corporate advertising, etc.) and how each of these overcame intense cultural opposition in Europe and eventually made the West a true "consumers paradise." Here analysis is very keen on both how America's consumer-culture changed the European world in the interwar period (c. 1919-1939) and how those gains were solidified following World War II's end. However, there is one thing about this work that makes it seem distant both to me and to any possible general readers: de Grazia's prose is too cerebral. This is typified with her overuse of the words "bourgeois" and "bourgeoisie," which I was able to understand having had those words drilled into my head in my high school European history class, but I doubt that the average history reader would get it. In fact, her prose is so erudite that, at times, it hides the main argument in each chapter. While America's cultural dominance of twentieth century Europe should be studied, I would recommend this book only to a true history buff with a high SAT verbal score.

The central theme of Irresistible Empire was that `America's hegemony was built on European territory' and through the Marshall Plan, the Market Empire tried `to bind western Europe to its own concept of consumer democracy.' The body of the composition examined the features of this Market Empire: `other nations as having limited sovereignty over their public space'; `exportation of its civil society meaning its voluntary associations, social scientific knowledge and civic spirit - in tandem with, if not ahead of, the country's economic exports'; `the power of norms-making' governed by `the rules of `best practice' as spelled out by enterprising businessmen, civic leaders, and conscientious bureaucrats.'; `vaunted democratic ethos, democracy in the realm of consumption coming down to espousing equality in the face of commonly known as standards'; and `apparent peaceableness - obscuring the fact that the Market Empire advanced rapidly in times of war and that its many military victories - and occasional defeats - were always accompanied by significant breakthroughs to the benefit of its consumer industries and values.' De Grazia delineated the power and expansion of the Market Empire by three focuses: `forces pushing out from the United States, which caused the consumer revolution in the first place and propelled its institutions and practices into Europe'; `brings into focus Europe to reconstruct the commercial civilization that confronted American consumer culture with a rival vision of market institutions and values' and `the new transatlantic dialectic fostered by America's consumer revolution. More than a pace-setter or the first to get there, American consumer culture catalyzed discontents, produced ruptures, and pushed aside obstacles.

The Service Ethics

De Grazia used `the spread of Rotary clubs to show how European elites began to accommodate to a new life that emphasized the material commonality of daily needs.' The club's promotion of `a new spirit of service capitalism' epitomized `how Bourgeois Men Made Peace with Babbittry' and de Grazia humorously stressed the use of `babbitt and Babbittry not as pejoratives but as terms invented by a fast-changing social lexicon to characterize new ideal types of middle-class identity and social behavior.' Even though it appears to be egalitarian and transparent, `the real power of decisionmaking rested with the imperturbable `Men of Chicago.' Looking at Dresden, the club's `service ideal was hard to imagine, much less to implement, in communities wracked by partisan, religious, and regional splits' yet, `belonging to Rotary also promised to reestablish the business trust to support Germany's export economy' during the interwar years. In an example of pushing aside obstacles, `Rotary was urging European Catholics too to believe that religion worked not by means of doctrinal persuasion, but by individually interpreting scripture as a guide to social conduct.. At Rotary's urging, Catholics were to become not less religious, but differently religious.'

A Decent Standard of Living

The American standard was marked by an American consumer culture that asserted `the good life consists of a decent income for lots of people spent individually by purchasing goods that they believe enable them to live comfortably,' which could be defined by scientifically measuring `the amount of wages, the expansion of purchasing power, the bountiful output of mass production, and the range of individual choices provided by private enterprise.' The standard conferred `consumer sovereignty' - `the power granted to consumers to exercise freedom of demand, champion the power citizens might exercise by means of their choices as consumers.' `There were classes of goods, but no longer classes of people.' The breakthrough came in the US when Franklin Roosevelt's domestic and economic policies recognized Keynes' theories on demands and the relationship with the overall level of consumer expenditures. Roosevelt's `government regarded the consumer not as a political force, but as an aggregate in economic growth' when it recognized `collective rights to bargaining at the same time as setting up social security.' The European `government responses to the Great Depression spelled the death knell of the political economy underpinnings of the old regime of consumption' and `one remarkable outcome was that pumping up purchasing power began to be viewed as indispensable to the recovery of capitalism.' French sociologist Halbwachs found that `new needs could cause people to jettison fixed hierarchies of wants' when hitherto, `social classes lived in ways utterly segregated from each other even if they had similar incomes.'

The Chain Store

`Fordism had made way for Fileneism,' named after Edward Albert Filene who coined the adage, "True mass production is not production of masses of goods but production for masses of people." `By concentrating managerial expertise, capital, and decisionmaking capacities in one headquarters, the chain store performed as a `machine for selling.' The chain store concept developed in fertile American terrain because `the small shop would never be sanctified as it was in contemporary Europe as a social institution valuable in itself. The net effect was to accustom business, state policy, and the public to never0ending, head-spinning newness in the retail trades.' The growing `middleness was also a distinctive a feature of American consumer culture' - `middle as in the `middle millions' was also the social self-definition of the growing number of people occupied as employees, managers, and experts in all sorts of merchandising-related services.' In Europe, `class behaviors, which weighed so heavily on consumers' standards of living, similarly shaped where and how consumers shopped. The plethora of people involved in small commerce regarded themselves not merely as economic units, but as the very pillars of a social order doomed to death if they failed to survive.' Again, the consequences of the Depression wrecked the old models. `The European department stores operated in a far less mobile market than their U.S. counterparts, reducing their customer base and weakening their capacity to source goods' and during the `interwar years, department store began to wobble as the standard-bearer of bourgeois consumption and, on the other, small commerce flagged in its claim to represent the sound alternative universe of the middle classes.' The twin developments paved way for the challenge of the Five-and-Dime, which showed that `mass retailing could make as heady as profit as manufacturing.' The giant chain `spelled a social revolution by attracting a socially mixed clientele. Thereby they lessened the gap in purchasing habits between the bourgeoisie and the middle classes broadly intended, and in some places between the lower-middle and working classes.' Furthermore, `trust in the pricing system came from factors that were extrinsic to the item,' inculcating `the feeling that customers were al being treated equally.' The outcome was that `mass retailing was now available to the masses as it pressed into residential neighborhoods amid small shops that had not hitherto had to contend with major competition.'

Big-Brand Goods

Even though European products dominated the Great Leipzig Fair, production strategy marked key trans-Atlantic divergences. `As a result of diversification, German firms could not invest as much in research, design and marketing as the American firms did, and their line of models was more limited.' Furthermore, `generally, many of the new U.S. inventions were labor-saving, whereas in Europe, they were resource-saving; the former were applied to household, the latter to manufacture.' `U.S. manufacturing was becoming fabled for namely high-profile branded products. These were the consumer durables, the convenience items, the comfort goods.' `Old World merchandising emphasized the character of the product, highlighting qualities that could be said to be intrinsic to it and closely related to the environment in which it was produced. The New World's marketing emphasized the product's personality, highlighting outward charms that compensated the consumer for not knowing its place of origin or its intrinsic qualities.' `Marketing the brand thus became a way to neutralize the Europeans' monopolies over circuits of local knowledge.' `The modern marketer's duty was to get bourgeois consumers to relinquish their paralyzing nostalgia for so-called authentic goods by creating brands that were useful, tasteful, and sensitive to preserving social hierarchy.'

Corporate Advertising

`American advertisers posed their goal as promoting a science in the name of corporate profits; on the other hand, `Europeans often claimed to be defending an art in the name of a community of feeling about the familiar brands, pastimes, and places of local material life.' As the `prototype of the full-service agency, grouping under one roof all the personnel and equipment needed to carry out advertising on a scientific basis,' J Walter Thompson was even the `leading consultant of Europe's makeover under the Marshall Plan.' `Like European distribution generally, advertising pivoted around the major capitals of consumption and their mainly bourgeois clientele. Trendsetters could thus rely on what Edward Bernays called the `innate social-fashion-taste planning' of European elites.' The American challenge pitted `American mass-circulation press' against `the design aesthetic associated with European postermaking traditions.' The American success created `the most significant pressure to shift to American-style text advertising was also the most complicated, namely to enable the advertiser to communicate with his public': `The pressure to incorporate, even sometimes to plagiarize, American text styles came from leading enterprises and showed up particularly vividly in the ever-more massive advertising for food, drink, and toiletries.' Ironically, `Nazi Germany offered the most propitious environment for American-style advertising in all Europe.'

The Star System

In de Grazia's words, `How `Hollywood' by which we mean the mass-produced, classically narrated feature film mainly fashioned in the giant studio systems of southern California - challenged European commercial civilization is the subject of this chapter.' The Great War broke the back of European dominance: `the moment must have been mid-1916. For it was then that U.S. motion picture exports to Europe leaped, taking advantage of the slowing of local production.' `By August 1918, when the Armistice ended the fighting, American releases could be found practically everywhere there was a moviehouse, the big exception being Germany.' The American `Motion Picture Patents Company: shaped the future organization of the whole industry' and `had barred foreign firms from its licensing cartels.' To oust the remaining French influences in domestic cinema, MPPC successfully pursued and applied `the cultural defense' by engendering `debate over style and content of movies' and formalizing `new aesthetic categories' in order to `distinguish healthy films from insalubrious ones.' `With the US market thus permanently captured for national producers by a system of protectionism exercising power over both distribution and taste,' the exportation efforts muscled its way in Europe. The Herriot decree on film quota was overturned by the threat of American boycott and the unemployment of French film workers. The dominance was checked temporarily by the Nazis: `German industrialists had long encouraged their potential partners, first and foremost in France, to establish a vertically organized lobby like their own SPIO in order to end their internal squabbles and exercise effective political power.' By the war's end, `Hollywood made it clear that according to its agenda the `war had been waged to win back the European film market.'

The Consumer-Citizen

`The market could not be trusted to be egalitarian and that government had to intervene to equalize their citizens' purchasing power. Thereby European societies had come around to embracing the right to `social citizenship'.' Nevertheless, `starting in the 50s was the conflict between the European vision of the social citizen and the American notion of the sovereign consumer.' De Grazia identified the Marshall Plan's `ultimate intention to promote a cross-Atlantic, western European wide alliance to grow consumption.' Therefore, `as a condition for obtaining aid, American officials not only pressed for more or less legal ouster of the left from government coalitions... it sought to repress labor radicalism by splitting the trade union movements.' `Because of its `inability to resist militarily,' western Europe `has to compensate economically.' `To do this, the region had to keep pace with Soviet rates of growth. Thereby it could weaken if not destroy the appeal of communism to its workers and intellectuals.' In turn, `its rising standard of living would give the lie to communist propaganda about the decadence of the West' and have `a magnetic effect on the satellite peoples.' `Sharply rising demand had the effect of reorienting the distribution system to the `one class market' that had enabled American manufacturers to commit to mass production systems in the early 20th century.' `By so doing, it broke the monopoly of manufacturers who in their domestic sales were too exclusively concerned with service to a limited, almost custom-tailored high quality market.' `The figure of the consumer-citizen took a further step away from the past with the establishment of the Common Market in 1957.'

Supermarketing

`The key to success was to make a speedy entry and offer stunningly effective services. The stores would open for business as quickly and perform so efficiently that public officials, starting with the mayor, would grant them the license to operate.' `Supermarket Italiani showed European capitalists that investments in food retailing could harvest excellent profits. Second, it set a clear standard for procedure and equipment. And, third, it lent support to a new alliance, forged among big capital, new local entrepreneurship, government and consumers. This alliance was indispensable to revising laws and changing customs so as to establish the supermarket as the main reference point for making calculations about provisioning.'

A Model Mrs. Consumer

The last chapter detailed the culmination of the Market Empire in Europe and the new lifestyle it fashioned. `The kitchen's manager was the modern homemaker, a Mrs. Consumer who worked solo or with her electric servants.' `Her most important task was to balance the competing needs weighing on the family budget.' `As women and men joined themselves in marriage to secure their future, they negotiated each other's functions with contractlike precision.' `Good management of the family held out the promise that the American Standard of Living would continue to improve and American women were becoming more and more adept at converting wages into goods and services.' `Economic women, in the figure of Mrs. Consumer, personified what economists came to call the `family utility function': in making choices she behaved as if she knew the wants of her husband and children as well as she knew her own.' Overcoming inveterate feelings of disgrace and social faux pas attached to credit, the community of belief by the turn of the 1970s embraced `the new standard of living that was based on the full stock of household equipment included not only all classes, but also regions formerly excluded from any national notion of norms of comfort.'

Conclusion

`As mass consumer models became universalized, the grounds for American hegemony became less evident.' `By the 1980s, the average western European enjoyed a higher standard of living than the average American.' De Grazia noted that curiously, `the US no longer exercises a sufficient technological edge to monopolize innovations in either production or consumption' and `the Market Empire has lost its impetus to other regions.' In the area of supermarket for example, the French-owned Carrefour out compete Walmart in China and `has been the main innovator in Latin America.' Essentially, `nothing now prevents the pioneers of multinationalism from themselves falling prey to global predators. In 1987, J. Walter Thompson was taken over in a hostile bid by the British based firm Wire & Plastic Products.' `In the end, mass consumer culture is such an ephemeral form of material life that the great ruptures that formed it are easily lost to sight.' De Grazia's study revealed the pivotal role American social inventions played in Europe's regeneration and the broader global development today.

De Grazia shows that the triumph of American-style consumption in Europe -- from supermarkets to Hollywood movies -- wasn't automatic; there were alternatives, there was resistance, there was a history. The book is full of fascinating surprises: Woodrow Wilson's speech to the first World's Salesmanship Congress in 1916; the Duluth-Dresden connection; Hitler promising to protect Europe from American economic domination. This may be the best book we have on the history of consumption in the 20th century.

What the other reviews fail to convey about this wonderful book is that the writing is exquisite. Each chapter uses real-life examples, ironies and juxtapositions to vividly evoke contrasts between America and Europe and demonstrate the course of change. When the chapters arc to their conclusion, you feel a real emotional and intellectual punch. History writing just doesn't get any better than this.

As someone who reads for a living, let me commend the work of Professor Victoria de Grazia: Irresistible Empire. You see, to write a review, one must not only READ the book, but UNDERSTAND what's read! Professor de Grazia makes reading her book an educational,enlightening pleasure.I read Irresistable Empire prior to interviewing Prof.de Grazia on my radio show. My producer Bun-E and I select books/interviews that will enlighten and entertain our diverse audience. The book MUST be 'readable', for which Irresistable Empire receives an A+AND relevant, another A+!!We've been told by listeners that this book's a great choice for Christmas lists! The entertaining style that Victoria de Grazia writes enhances the reader's ability to understand the "Americanization of Europe" - as much has been written about the subject but little has been understood prior to this book. A book that educates in a very entertaining style?-that's Irresistable Empire!!!

This book is flat out too long. The author's argument is simple. So simple, in fact, that this would have made an excellent journal article. Instead, the author drags it out, and drags, and drags, and drags and...

you get the idea. Read the book reviews instead. You'll save yourself a few hours.

Triumph of the American consumers over Europe? Never in a million years! What we need is a little of the European culture to rub off on us crude Americans, especially those with all the money who flaunt their wealth and power. It is only temporary. Any disaster could wipe them out and they'd be as poor as some of us and have no power of persuasion to the king pins. Today, in America, money is all that matters. If you have none, then you are a nobody.

I know you can't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes an unusual cover can grab a reader's attention when another more drab would not. The girl on the airplane engine dressed in a '60s outfit complete with flowered cowgirl hat looks like a young Jackie Kennedy, the closest thing we ever had to royalty in America. She was the style maven back then (with her Marilyn Monroe voice), but she was always a lady and, like Diana, loved the colorful hats. They could make or break the outfit!

This was more like a romp through Europe than an "advance." After all, we're not talking war here. How about the movies? The 'Brave New World of Manhattan" of the Twenties was the model for the super-modernistic film, METROPOLIS, which was filmed in Berlin in 1926. See THE ISLAND for a post-modernistic plan for life in America. 'Metropolis' was a "technical marvel with feet of clay" -- three years in the making saw the end of illusions; no interface between European and American filmmaking.

From the Dresden file: "Nobody was made to go it alone.
Either they marry or a club they join...
Club life is as old as mankind itself
Club life, the dance around the golden calf.

The times have not changed. People have. They still kneel down to the golden calf, and wish they had all the money in the world. But they would not be any happier. They might get a 'high' spending all of that ill-begotten cash, but then when it is gone, they are back to the old 'do-nothing' attitude. Attitudes need to change. Church can help if you will keep your independent spirit and not be led around by the nose.

Chain stores have demolished the art of buying and supplied us and the world with cheap goods, there is no fun in shopping anymore. Where is the glamour of all the beauty in merchandising and the desire to look beautiful. To be beautiful in today's world, besides using lots and lots of makeup (men and women) and dressing in expensive, tasteful clothes, you must have the money for reconstructive surgery to always appear "young." The real young women wear nightware out in public, and have no desire to look glorious and glamorous. They just want to attract the opposite sex. Waiting for the bus at the Mall, I observed some of the young males preening before the half-dressed girls: there was a tatoo man (too many on his arms and legs to count), an ape man (all bent over with a drooling gaping mouth) and a Tarzan (with the long flowing hair in the style of the Tarzan movies.) It was quite a show.

Now sex is a big deal in today's society. You don't have to fall in love and get married to be 'active' and have a family. It is not looked down on in today's society (except for church, perhaps) for this type of bad behavior to constantly be flaunted in today's world. It is the world of America. To be respected for a well-brought-up family is passe. Today, anything goes.

Victoria is a professor of history at Columbia University in New York. She has the European mind set about how things should be and might have been. America will always be different from Europe as we have no royalty here, no special personage to admire and try to emulate. The Pope in in the Vatican. The Queen is in England. Jesus is at the right hand of God. What on earth can we aspire to in a country so full of sin and greed -- not much for the average folks. The rich enjoy their big houses and cars (and vans), vacations, cruises, trips overseas; while the rest of us are struggling just to get through one day at a time. The vastness of different lifestyles here will be our undoing. Europe has the edge there. Everyone knows his or her place in the society in which they live.