Luxury

1. Luxury Mass production and marketing were the main foundation for the creation of the abstract of the American dream; the widespread aspiration of Americans to live better than their parents did.

2. Why mass production happened High wages was one factor in this shrinkage of human servitude. More important were machinery and modernization. (Johnson. 594) • Behind this mechanization was the desire - perhaps one should say the compulsion - of the American rich to save labor. (Johnson. 594) • We can trace the gradual reduction of the number of servants by labor-saving devices in the architectural plans of the houses. (Johnson. 593) • In 1880 the percentage of Americans gainfully employed as domestics was 8.4; by 1920 it had shrunk to 4.5 percent. (Johnson. 593)

3. Why the rich embraced luxury The American rich paid no income tax or death duties. Their children did not expect to live in their fathers’ house as the fashions changed so quickly, so each built a country house of his own. They lived like princes of older times because they that it was their duty, as well as their privilege. (Johnson. 592) • Even when American millionaires of the American gilded age were spending their money on conspicuous consumption, they did so from a mixture of motives, combining self-satisfaction, competitive swaggering, public service, and a self-conscious desire to exercise cultural leadership and noblesse oblige, exactly like Italian dukes of the renaissance, French and English noblemen of the 18th century, and, indeed, Washington and Jefferson. (Johnson. 591) • … the answer to Firestone's rhetorical question is that he felt he had to compete with his rival, Frank A. Seiberling, head of the Goodyear Tire Company. Self-made men were told they had to be 'seated.' (Johnson. 592)

4. Why the poor embraced luxury Most importantly, however, was the speed and effectiveness with which more luxuries promoted by the wealthy were turned into necessities for everyone by the process of mass production and mass marketing, two operations in which America set new standards. (Johnson. 594) • This sensational price difference got country people - indeed everyone - wildly excited, when they realized they could afford 'luxuries.' (Johnson. 594) • That caused an uproar, and marked the point at which the separator became standard in the farming dairy. (Johnson. 594)

5. Pros and Cons of Luxury Pros • The United States was the first to introduce voting democracy. Almost equally central to the ethos of the country was market democracy, in which ordinary people voted with their wallets, and, in doing so, insured that they got what they wanted. Salesmanship, market research, advertising, the rapid response of production machinery to perceived customer requirements- all these forms of materialism, which, in their more raucous aspects, are identified as American failings or rather excrescences, are in fact central to its democratic strength. (Johnson. 594) Cons • The function of this political system was not so much to promote this process of market democracy as to enable to take place, and accelerate, by removing obstacles, natural or man-made. (Johnson. 597)

6. American Dream • Food, housing, warmth, refrigeration, light, and power- blessings denied in adequate quantities, or even at all, to most humanity for countless generation of deprivation- were suddenly made available, in less than a lifetime, so that a child born in want lived to enjoy plenty and see its progeny do far better. (Johnson. 597)