Ruth, David. “Dressed to Kill: Consumption, Style, and the Gangster.” Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Ruth describes the changing ideals of a postwar society regarding consumerism and gangster media. He describes how gangster media reflected the growing middle class focus on style, as well as the social context for the change in social beliefs. For example, Ruth writes how “the promoters of style sought to capitalize on the erosion of old values and social arrangements”. I will be able to use this source to explore how American society changed to embrace “style”, or in other words, how mass consumption originated in the US. Additionally Ruth explores how the gangster in films at large represented the public, writing that the gangster “illustrated the possibilities for fulfillment and display offered by the new consumer society”, similarly to “film stars and other celebrities”. This source could be the foundation for the whole essay, possibly serving as a lens text for what exactly consumerism is or as a strong piece of evidence for my argument.
Stearns, Peter N. “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 69, no. 1, 1997, pp. 102–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953434. Accessed 9 Nov. 2023.
- This article goes over the history of consumerism and the key constants in it over time. Stearns explores what it means for a society to be consumerist, writing that it “involves large numbers of people staking a real portion of their personal identities and their quest for meaning-even their emotional satisfaction-on the search for and acquisition of goods.” This can be helpful as a definition for consumerism which can be used in the rest of the paper. The article covers various important periods of consumerism in the United States, so the section over the early twentieth century could be helpful as it overlaps with Ruth’s source, leading to synthesis. In the section about the early twentieth century,