Consumer Culture in the United States, 1935-1965
Daniel Horowitz
If the United States began the middle third of the twentieth century mired in a deep and prolonged depression, it ended that period in the midst of a sustained period of affluence in which consumer culture thrived. In the mid-1930s, writers wondered whether affluence would ever return; while by the mid-1960s some authors decried excessive consumption and others launched protests against what they saw as the costs that affluence inflicted on the poor, women, African Americans, Latinos and the environment.[1]