Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 25, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(4):788-815; doi:10.1093/es/khn082
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Did the Protestant Ethic Disappear? The Virtue of Thrift on the Cusp of Postwar Affluence
DAVID STEIGERWALD is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He is the author of four books, including Culture's Vanities: The Paradox of Diversity in an Age of Globalism (2005) and numerous essays, articles, and reviews. He is currently finishing a book on affluence and American thought after World War II.
Contact information: E-mail: steigerwald.2{at}osu.edu.
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.
I would like to thank my colleagues, Mansel Blackford and William Childs for their criticisms of an earlier draft of this essay, as well as the sharp-eyed students in Professor Childs's graduate seminar on consumer history at Ohio State University. I am grateful as well to the journal's anonymous readers for their generous criticism.