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Transatlantic Consumer Cultures: Italy and the United States in the Twentieth Century

Simone Cinotto

The subjects of consumption, consumer culture and consumer politics loom large on the analytical horizon of this volume – a “long” Atlantic history that acknowledges the permanence of dynamics of interdependence specific to the Atlantic space, beyond the classic chronological boundaries of 1492-1800 and into the “global” 19th, 20th and 21st century.1 This essay, which is the preliminary result of a much broader future study on the Europeanization of 20th-century US consumer culture, is structured in two sections. The first provides a short overview of the historiography on consumption as it relates to the transatlantic arena, as part of the history of consumption and globalization, and focuses on the historical narratives of the relations between Europe and the United States as articulated through the exchange of capital, goods, consumer cultures and consumer ideologies in the 20th century. (Herein, “consumer culture” refers to the array of meanings with which commercially-produced goods and leisure activities are associated). It is argued here that early-modern and modern transatlantic histories of consumption largely grew in mutual isolation. One result of this disconnection is the fact that while the multipolar, multi-actor and circulatory dynamics of early-modern transatlantic consumption were appreciated, 20th-century historical narratives disproportionately focused on the one-way transfer of American consumer patterns and institutions to Europe as a strategic factor in the Americanization of European societies in full display after 1945. As concluded in this first section, the number and relevance of works by US and European historians who have studied the reverse dynamic of European influences on the shaping of the US consumer landscape have been minimal. As suggested in the last part of this section, the case of Italy and US-Italian relations may be a particularly promising one as part of the aforementioned broader project to close the gap of analytical historical acknowledgment of the Europeanization of 20th-century US consumer culture and society.

1. Donna R. Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies, 1, 1 (2004), 1-27.

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The second section of this essay builds on transatlantic historian Mary Nolan’s argu-ment that US hegemony over international modern consumerism and popular culture did not exist prior to World War I. As she argued, the United States was in fact only one among many economic and cultural international powers; Americans were eager consumers of European products and culture; and consumer culture and its institutions developed to a great extent horizontally, in a shared rather than nationally compart-mented transatlantic space.2 US consumerism was a strategic arm of US imperialism in two different ways: in terms of the commercial expansion and global exportation of its manufactured products – the aspect most familiar to historical scholarship; and the much less studied consumption of global products and cultural influences, from French fashion to chinoiserie, which allowed American women and men to participate in a domestic imperialism of consumption, or imperial emporium, despite not having di-rectly participated in travels of conquest and colonization, as best described by historian Kristin Hoganson.3 In this respect, a US imperialism centered on the Caribbean, Latin America and East Asia resembled, shared similar dynamics with and drew inspiration from European imperialisms then at their zenith, including the minor Italian strain cen-tered on the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. As is argued in this section, US and Italian imperialisms were indeed interconnected incubators of transatlantic consumer cultures. (Herein, the notion of “imperialism” is understood as a strategy of imposing one country’s power over other lands and populations, not only through military force and colonialism, but also through a variety of cultural means, including the imperial-minded understanding, racialization and gendering of other people and places encountered in the deployment of imperialism).

In sum, it is argued here that throughout the 20th century Italian consumer culture helped significantly diversify a society typically seen as promoting a global monoculture. As a result, Italian goods, popular culture artifacts and approaches to consumerism encoun-tered other European consumer cultures (France and its products being especially popular discursive counterparts to Italy) that were equally determined to carve out their space in the US consumer market and imagination. Other consumer products, institutions and ideologies generically labeled “European” – from housing to the welfare state – have clearly had a similar impact on US consumer culture. A critical analysis of the Europeanization of the United States via consumerism in the 20th century is a necessary endeavor that has yet to be carried out by scholars. The collapse of conceptual boundaries and chrono-logical ruptures between early-modern and modern historiographies of consumption and globalization appears to be the methodological prerequisite for achieving a balanced revision of the US-European relationship as defined by consumer culture.

2. Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (New York, 2012).3. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007).

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Transatlantic Consumption, the Americanization of Europe and the Place of Italy in the Consumer Atlantic

Until recently, the history of consumption focused primarily on specific “key” spaces and moments in time. Consumer history emerged in the 1980s as a distinct disciplin-ary branch with antecedents in the investigation of the material cultures of the Middle Ages and the early-modern era across the Mediterranean of the French Annales school; the pioneering studies of British subaltern and working class daily life of E.P. Thompson and the History Workshop group; and the analysis of 19th-century European bourgeois culture and sociability on the part of German and French new social historians.4 In the 1980s, an early wave of consumer historians set out to debate when and where to locate the “birth” of a consumer society in which many goods, including unnecessary ones, are available to large portions of the population, and the selection, acquisition and owning of things significantly defines social relations and individual and collective identities. Earlier chronologies had focused on the “Roaring Twenties” in the United States and the 1950s economic boom in European societies as initial examples of such a society.5 Inspired by Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel’s reflections on the symbolic figure of the flâneur or “urban stroller,” later historians identified the origin of specialized places of consump-tion in the late-19th-century emergence in Europe and the United States of department stores – places that fetishized commodities and made shopping and its languages a task to which large sections of the populace dedicated time and energy.6 However, other his-torians of consumption soon placed the birth of modern consumerism as far back as the early 18th century, linking it to the developments of European capitalism and protestant world visions in England and the Netherlands – the countries that first experienced a capitalist-oriented agricultural and industrial revolution in production. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb illustrated the emergence of modern consumer institutions such as advertising, shopping catalogs and store windows enticing consumers through the aestheticization of goods and a new consumerist language in 18th-century England. Simon Schama described the emergence of an acquisitive ethos and discriminating desire

4. Landmark works summarizing the research results of these different material-culture historical schools include Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York, [1967] 1973); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the British Working Class (New York, 1966); Jürgen Kocka and Allen Mitchell, eds., Bourgeois Society in 19th-Century Europe (New York, 1993); Phillippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., History of Private Life, Volume 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).5. For a comprehensive overview, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York, 1993), 19-39.6. Susan Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1987); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1992); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1994); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1994).

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among the 18th-century Dutch mercantile entrepreneurial class that reconciled protestant ideals of thriftiness, deferment of pleasure and self-control with the enjoyment of beauty and distinction through possession and display.7

The fact that some antecedents to 18th-century English and Dutch developments can be found in different parts of Asia and Europe, however, reveals the limits of a research agenda aimed at identifying a single time and place for the birth of consumerism. It is also indicative of a major shortcoming in the early historiography of consumption, namely its focus on place-specific ruptures and turning points, rather than on continuities, diffu-sions and hybridizations. In the 20th-century history of consumption this has translated especially into the dominant notion of Americanization and the “irresistible” soft power exercised by the United States, in particular on Cold War Europe via mass-produced goods, popular culture, marketing and patterns of public relations and advertising. According to this vision, the transatlantic market that allowed postwar western societies to enjoy unprecedented degrees of material prosperity was formed on a distinctive American matrix. While this Americanization-via-consumerism argument was most powerfully summarized by Victoria De Grazia in Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe of 2005, it has also been articulated in several books and essays focusing on different features and areas of Europe.8

More recently, however, historians have begun to dispute such time- and place-specific, unidirectional approaches to the history of consumer culture. In his history of consump-tion in modern Europe, for example, Paolo Capuzzo has programmatically insisted on continuities over time and genealogies of technological innovations, market expansions, state interventions, cultural exchanges, borrowings and appropriations to describe the developments of modern consumer societies. According to Capuzzo, two broader, albeit irregular, long-durée processes reigned over the formation of European consumer societies: the creation and growth of a global economic system that supplied Europe with new products as it integrated the continent into dense networks of relations with the rest of the world; and the ongoing “democratization” of consumption, that is, the loosening and receding of a binding link between styles of consumption and social status, which in Europe had been codified in the sumptuary laws of the Late Middle Ages. Within this

7. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: Commercialization of 18th Century England (Bloomington, IN., 1982); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).8. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago, 2005); David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (New York, 2012).

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framework, under a new continuous light extending from the 16th century to World War I and beyond, Capuzzo revisits changes that the previous literature had attributed to his-torical turning points, twists and watershed developments. His history presents the spread of new products like sugar, coffee, cacao, tea and tobacco in Europe not as a mechanical side effect of Europe’s colonization of the world but rather as the slow incorporation of these commodities into the everyday life of different consumer subjects, and examines the meanings of this process. Capuzzo’s account of the developing relationship between social standing and styles of consumption describes a measured, nonlinear movement of consumerism, from a means to sanction social differences to one that complicates them and even subverts them, as consumers empowered themselves, individually and collec-tively, to use goods in subjective and creative rather than prescriptive ways. Eighteenth-century concerns about the emergence of consumption and the market as vital ways to define social identities were thus reflected in the 19th-century reconstruction of social divides based on taste and distinction. This is best exemplified in the private and public forms of bourgeois consumption, which combined thrift, sobriety and self-discipline with the enjoyment of aesthetic pleasure and material accumulation. The working class also responded to bourgeois claims of hegemony over taste by creating and endorsing a distinctive consumer culture that was in a constant state of tension and negotiation with middle-class consumer values and practices. Finally, Capuzzo looks at emerging modern structures, spaces and institutions of consumption not as neutral occurrences, but as the results of both entrepreneurial efforts and the response of consumers who, again, used consumer spaces not only or not necessarily for their prescribed shopping uses, but also for various other social practices and purposes.9

Recent criticism of time- and place-specific, evenementiel histories of consumption have pointed both to the obscuration of continuities in previous literature and especially to the need to look at developments of consumer culture and consumer societies as global processes. In particular, historian Frank Trentmann has drawn attention to the disjuncture between the emphasis of early-modern historians of consumption on global connections, exchanges and circulations and the insistence of modern historians on Americanization and their selective concentration on specific contexts of emerging consumerism. Furthermore, historians studying early-modern consumerism have predominantly chosen a culturalist perspective, insisting on the cultural production of desire and the entanglements between a new acquisitive ethos and religious dictates. Those working on 20th-century consumerism have instead mostly focused on the social and political dimensions of the fulfillment of needs through increasing levels of consumption among a widening population of con-sumers.10 As Trentmann concludes, their indifference and isolation from each other led

9. Paolo Capuzzo, Culture del Consumo (Bologna, 2006).10. Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 3 (2004), 373-401.

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these two historiographies, along with their respective chronologies and conceptual ap-paratuses, to miss out on “the dynamic interaction between diversity and standardization, gift-exchange and commodity-exchange, public engagement and private materialism across time [and space],” insisting instead on imaginary linear progressions from the former to the latter.11 According to Trentmann, bridging early-modern and 20th-century global histories of consumption with the relatively neglected early-19th and late-20th century would mean illuminating many forms, places and meanings of consumption that have been lost in the self-referentiality of the two most practiced historiographies.

Consumption, with its economic, cultural, social and political implications, has been an indisputably vital factor in the formation of the modern world. In the first place, the Atlantic world in particular was created by Europeans’ ventures across the ocean and South to West and Central Africa in search of goods to trade, particularly East Indian spices destined for the tables of Europe’s wealthiest. The Atlantic slave trade emerged in response to the massive demand of labor for the sugar (and later rice, tobacco, cotton and coffee) plantations established by European conquerors in the Caribbean, the eastern coast of Latin America and what is now the southern United States. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz argued in his classic global history of sugar, the calories provided by American sugar produced as a result of forced African labor and European colonial capitalism, together with “hunger-killing” American plants such as corn and potato, sustained the spectacular growth of the European population in the late 18th and 19th century, inextricably linking consumption with expansive capitalism, industrialization and transatlantic migration.12 At the same time, transatlantic trade revolutionized tastes, ideas of refinement and lifestyles. In other words, consumption defined the terms of European encounters with numerous other populations as well as the development of European transatlantic identities from their beginnings to today. Consumption is therefore significantly associated with the formation and deployment of empires, as demonstrated by a vast amount of historical literature on empires – literature that has convincingly portrayed the connection between the emergence of late-19th and early-20th-century modern consumer culture and the European subjugation, racialization and commodification of colonial people.13

In the “Transatlantic Consumption” entry of the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption edited by Trentmann, historian Michelle Craig McDonald critically

11. Frank Trentmann, “Crossing Divides: Consumption and Globalization in History,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 9, 2 (2009), 187-220.12. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985).13. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Ann Arbor, MI., 2006); David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York, 2006).

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summarizes the vital contribution of 16th-to-18th-century Atlantic history to the revi-sion of the Euro-American-centric “birth of consumer society” paradigm. Firstly, as with other branches of modern history, Atlantic history extends the confines of the research on the history of consumption by transcending and superseding national boundaries in order to set out supranational, continental and global histories. Secondly, in more recent incarnations of Atlantic history, a shift from the history of trade in the Atlantic to the history of what was traded across the Atlantic – often following the travels of specific commodities – has led to the incorporation of many previously neglected, invisible and silent consumer subjects such as African slaves, Native Americans, and women and men as gendered individuals into the Atlantic history of consumption. Finally, while continu-ing to embrace wide-ranging spatial and multicultural contexts, the most recent Atlantic history of consumption has coherently and harmoniously combined the measurement of human migrations, trade patterns and circulations of goods across the Atlantic and in three continents with an attention to the cultural determinants of consumer culture – taste, refinement, distinction, and the appropriation and creolization of goods and cultures.14

Early economic historians of the Atlantic found trade across the oceanic basin to be an even more important factor than national industries in the development of a modern capitalist system. Based on the research he carried out in the 1930s and 1940s on the fur and cod industries in Canada, Harold Innis articulated his core theory, arguing that specialization in the production and trade of a dominant commodity in the framework of a highly interconnected Atlantic economy determined the relatively successful develop-ment of different regions within the Atlantic world.15 In the 1970s, Ralph Davis was the first to convincingly illustrate that “links between Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French commercial and colonial efforts created an Atlantic system that transcended the economies of individual nations or empires.”16 Like Innis, he did so by focusing on single commodities – notably sugar – and observing how places of production, output, capital, labor and consumption markets all fluctuated within an integrated transatlantic system that must be considered in its entirety.17

While skillfully connecting local contexts of production and consumption on different shores with broad scenarios of supply-and-demand analysis, this mostly quantitative line of research largely overlooked the names, faces and motivations of individual consumers in every part of the Atlantic world. Arguably, the most important and critical human factor in the formation of the Atlantic world – slavery – was also one of the most crucial

14. Michelle Craig McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (New York, 2012), 111-126.15. Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (New Haven, CT., 1930); Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven, CT., 1940).16. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 114.17. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973).

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determinants in shifting the focus of research toward the subjective experience of con-sumption within the Atlantic history field. The link between slavery and consumption is an especially sensitive one, not only because it involves fundamental ethical issues – for Europeans at the turn of 19th century, purchasing sugar from West Indian plantations meant expending the blood of slaves – but also because African slaves, in addition to being the most significant suppliers of labor, were “among the most profitable, and con-sistently demanded and consumed, goods of the Atlantic world.”18 Important statistical works, from Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census to David Eltis and David Richardson’s Routes to Slavery, have painstakingly reconstructed the numerical dimensions of the slave trade.19 Increasingly, other works are recognizing the crucial role of slaves as consumers by pointing to the development of industries that supplied slave owners with clothes and other commodities for slaves as well as to the goods that slaves managed to acquire and use within interstices of the wholly oppressive system to which they were subjected, thus expressing their own preferences, needs and tastes. Roderick McDonald explores this dimension by looking at the plantation economies in Jamaica and Louisiana, while Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor focuses on the significant independent economic activity that free and enslaved African American women in South Carolina and Rhode Island were able to carve out for themselves and conduct.20

The incorporation of enslaved people into the history of transatlantic consumption opened the door to considering other groups of consumers as well, namely Native Americans. Stressing the conflicting notions of the land and property of Native Americans and the British people they encountered in North America, James Cronon’s Changes in the Land offered an example of the dialogic construction of consumer subjects across the Atlantic and national/cultural borders.21 More recently, Daniel Richter has insisted that Native Americans were active consumers who interacted and bartered with European newcomers, reinterpreting and using European goods for their own means and in accordance with their own values. Even when they discovered the original purpose of European goods, Native Americans continued to incorporate them in their own symbolic and social systems of meaning, while gift-giving remained a vital means for them to forge alliances, display power and reinforce status, both within Indian societies and in their

18. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 116.19. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI., 1972); David Eltis and David Richardson, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1997).20. Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA., 1993); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Collaborative Consumption and the Politics of Choice in Early American Port Cities,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830, eds. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT., 2006), 125-149.21. James Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983).

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interactions with British, French and Spanish colonizers.22 The history of consumption in the Atlantic world has also recently been consistently gendered. As historian Ann Smart Martin has argued, women in early colonial Virginia saw their agency as consumers (for example, in selecting home furnishings) erased because shopkeepers registered purchases made by women under the names of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. Michael Zakim’s Ready-Made Democracy has described the 19th-century shift in men’s fashion, from homespun garments – symbols of the colonial democratic man’s self-reliance and independence – to ready-made clothing, which represented new ideals of democracy and masculinity embodied in capitalism and middle-class social mobility.23

In general, the significantly greater empowerment of different consumer groups brought about within the history of transatlantic consumption in recent years is part of a trend towards giving greater attention overall to the cultural dimensions of consumption – why people consumed what they did, what values they invested in the goods they consumed and why those goods were desirable to them. A cultural analysis of demand in transat-lantic consumption developed in the mid-1980s with Sidney Mintz’s investigation of the transoceanic sugar routes and the contexts of production and consumption. However, it was more effectively theorized ten years later by Cary Carson in his essay “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?”24 Carson reviewed a vast and multifarious historical production, considering different aspects of the world of con-sumption in the 18th and early 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic – histories of material culture, religious and etiquette-based normative literature, art, architecture and so on. As Carson explained, “Each of these literatures very clearly outlined important changes in transatlantic consumption, [reflecting] both a growing distinction between living standard (literally, how one lived) and lifestyle (a cohesive force uniting like-minded people to reaffirm their similarities), as well as a growing number of people who presented themselves and behaved in ways more class- than culture-bound.”25 This finding is very similar to what Capuzzo identified as an overreaching process happening in Europe. Yet, Carson added two methodological approaches that have become nothing less than pillars of the Atlantic history field: the combination of consumer culture studies with statistical-analysis-based social history and the strong emphasis on “the true internationalist character of consumer changes.”

22. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).23. Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, MD., 2008); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago, 2006).24. Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the 18th Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA., 1994), 483-697.25. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 124.

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As this review suggests, the application of Atlantic history’s varied approaches to and perspectives on the history of consumption after 1800 would help in transcending the na-tional boundaries with which the existing historical scholarship on consumption in the modern and late-modern era still significantly confines itself; delineating the circulatory and systemic nature of the exchange of goods between different geographic and cultural contexts; and illuminating the role and agency of a very diverse array of consumers within it. As Trentmann proposes, fostering the mixing of categories and methodologies previously occupying the separate realms of early- and late-modern historians would better place the study of consumption within a wide-ranging framework of transatlantic relations involving a variety of subjects and agendas operating across state and imperial boundaries. Within the broader goal of utilizing new conceptualizations and periodiza-tions in transatlantic history as the analytical toolbox for reconsidering the transatlantic relationship, notably as related to the history of consumption, the more modest purpose of this essay is in fact to begin rethinking and reframing the historical literature, which assigns a dominant role to the United States as the exporter of consumer goods, images, practices, institutions and ideologies to Europe throughout the 20th century but that largely skips over the reverse process – the material, cultural and intellectual influence of European tastes and models of consumption on the shaping of US consumerism (and its occasional re-exportation to Europe).

The narrative of the Americanization of Europe through consumer culture has been based on four tenets. The first, since early in the 20th century, has been Fordism, un-derstood as not only a comprehensive manufacturing model that “claimed to optimize all factors of production through mechanization, rationalization, standardization, and factory integration,” but also a promise of large-scale production of standardized con-sumer goods at prices so low even working families could enjoy high degrees of private material consumption.26 The second tenet is the notion of a “citizen consumer” living in a “consumers’ republic,” as defined by Lizabeth Cohen in her 2003 book of the same title. This tenet emerged in the 1930s as part of the New Deal, identifying consumption and the acquisition ethos as the ignition for a Keynesian machine running on expanding production, expanding profits for capital, expanding labor wages and the unprecedented presence of the state as a mediator, regulator and sometime-planner of the national economy and industrial relations.27 After World War II, the “citizen consumer” notion developed into “a new postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming.” This was vital to the Cold War imperialism of peace, which represents the third tenet. Proceeding from the US aid programs of the Marshall Plan on, it promoted free market capitalism as the exclusive

26. Nolan, The Transatlantic Century, 86.27. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003).

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pathway to democracy, which was to be exported to Western Europe and smuggled into Eastern Europe.28 According to De Grazia’s narrative, it was at this point that the Irresistible Empire of Hollywood films, self-service supermarkets, psychology-based marketing techniques, corporate advertising and other paraphernalia of modern US consumerism wiped out the old European regime of consumption dominated by “old bourgeois” taste and authority on desire, distinction and lifestyle and clearly bounded by class and nation. Finally, after the fall of the soviet empire and its political alterna-tive to capitalist economy and ideology in 1989, the resulting accelerated globalization of trade and markets – i.e. the fourth tenet – was popularly presented not only as the result of deregulated, flexible US late capitalism, but also as the ultimate expression of US cultural imperialism bent on erasing resilient European cultural differences and values, sometimes epitomized in the arrival of multinational fast-food restaurant chains on the Old Continent.29

In reality, as a growing body of historical literature has begun to acknowledge, the Americanization of Europe via Fordism, the “citizen consumer” concept, and flexible Cold War and free-market corporate consumerisms has been variously resisted, adopted and adapted in specific European contexts, in turn producing original, if hybrid, European consumer cultures, consumer politics and consumer identities. Europeans looked at Fordism with both admiration and awe. As Sheryl Kroen details in her useful review of the most recent historiography on 20th-century politics of consumption, the generally enthusiastic adoption of Fordist rational production methods was paired with the con-cern, from both sides of the political spectrum, that mass consumption would dupe and demoralize European peoples. Perhaps more importantly, the Fordist promise was unable to deliver the high-level goods of private consumption and material comfort to most western Europeans before the 1950s. As Kroen underlines, the “citizen consumer” model found itself in competition with different ideas of democracy, citizenship and the market-place, which in the 20th century translated into the different versions of the European democratic welfare state, socialism and fascism, as well as the specificities of European consumer practices and institutions themselves – from labor and industrial relations to advertising, marketing, commodity cultures, consumer cooperation and activism – all rooted in long, distinctive pasts (and transatlantic and global dialogues). Therefore, Kroen concludes, European societies retained their diversity, selectively incorporating US consumerist ideas and practices into their own consumer cultures, in areas such as housing, food, healthcare, higher education, fashion, popular music, leisure, tourism, and even advertising, marketing and corporate public relations. Even debates about consumerism have been more intense among continental western European observers

28. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 119.29. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2007); Rick Fantasia, “Fast Food in France,” Theory and Society, 24, 2 (1995), 201-243.

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and critics than among the British.30 Heinz Haupt and other historians of consumption in Europe, working principally from a quantitative perspective, have noted how, in the face of strong exposure to US-branded consumerism, Italians and the French continued to buy most of their food at open markets and independent grocery stores rather than supermarkets well into the 1980s. German, British, French, Italian and Dutch tourists consistently showed different consumer preferences, choosing to spend their holidays abroad or in their own country and selecting specific destinations over others according to national-specific patterns. The professional sports most popular in the US – baseball, football and basketball – were only modestly so in Europe, where soccer, cycling, rugby and other spectator sports were overwhelmingly more entertaining and interesting to Europeans. American automobiles made very little inroads in European markets until very recently, while German cars were and still are generally recognized as offering the highest standards of design, durability and performance. Alongside its kitchens, sofas, chairs and desks, Swedish store IKEA – by far the most important furniture company in Europe – also exports very distinct architectural designs and lifestyles globally, including to the United States.31

Indeed, the main assertion of this essay is that the material-cultural transfer between the two shores of the North Atlantic in the 20th century was never a one-way street but rather a continuous bidirectional flow. As an example of the European influences on US consumer culture in the “American Century,” this essay will specifically look into the case of Italy. The Italian case is particularly important because so much of the relationship between the US and Italy has been built upon the transfer of people, goods and ideas about acquisitiveness, taste, distinction and beauty. At the end of the 19th century, Italy was a newcomer imperialist state like the United States, one that based its claims as an upcoming imperial power less on its economic and military muscle than on its historical heritage as successor to the Roman Empire, its civilization and its civilizing prowess. As we will see in the second section of this essay, emerging modern consumer cultures and national projects in both countries were shaped in close connection to the encounter with, conquest of and fantasies about the racial and cultural colonial “Other.” By 1900, however, US and Italian understandings of empire intertwined with the fact that liberal Italy’s major export to the United States was people. Between 1890 and 1924, three million Italians migrated to the United States, representing the largest national group

30. Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” The Historical Journal, 47, 3 (2004), 709-736.31. Heinz Gerhard Haupt, “The History of Consumption in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Some Questions and Perspectives for Comparative Studies,” in The European Way: European Societies in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Hartmut Kaelble (New York, 2004), 161-185; Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York, 1997); Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, MI., 2001); Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (New York, 2001).

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in the massive “new immigration” of the turn of the 20th century. Overwhelmingly comprised of urbanized rural men and women from the southern part of the peninsula – i.e., some of the most economically backward areas in Europe – migration complicated the prevalent US image of Italy as the quintessential home of classical art, architecture, music and various Mediterranean delights. In turn-of-the-20th-century United States, the racist cultural categorization presiding over Euro-American imperialism applied to, and largely equated, southern European immigrants with colonized people in the world’s South and East.32 The first comprehensive US immigration law, the racist 1924 Immigration Act, especially targeted Italians and resulted in the closing of mass im-migration from Italy.33 However, the millions of migrants returning to Italy and the descendants of early-20th-century immigrants to the United States who maintained transnational relations with their diasporic home across the Atlantic would significantly influence commercial and cultural relations between the United States and Italy for the rest of the century, during which time politics of consumption considerably influenced US-Italy relations.34 Most of the Italian cultural influences and goods enjoyed by early-20th-century US imperial consumers were increasingly mediated by the massive presence in the large US cities of rural southern Italian immigrants, who were categorized as racially inferior. I explored this apparent paradox with the edited collection Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities by arguing that, contrary to the predominant historiography’s insistence on the United States as an exporting nation, immigrants played a tremendous role in securing a beachhead for the “Italianization” of US consumer culture, alongside their role as labor force for the expanding US economy.35 The consumer patterns of Italian immigrants centered on the articulation of their identity as Italians in America through the loyal consumption of Italian commodities (both imported from Italy and made in the United States by im-migrant manufacturers possessing the necessary cultural capital) created an impressive transnational ethnic market, which eventually seduced and attracted millions of non-Italian US consumers and transformed the US consumer landscape as a whole. Wine is a case in point. As I have shown elsewhere, between 1900 and 1980 a small number of first- and second-generation Italian immigrant winemakers almost singlehandedly transformed a niche product, mostly consumed in poor immigrant communities and stigmatized as an un-American alcoholic drink, into a lifestyle and a national industry, one that by the end of the century competed on equal footing with the best international

32. Matthew F. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000).33. Matthew F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).34. Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle, 2000).35. Simone Cinotto, ed., Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York, 2014).

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high-quality wine producers in the global market.36 Through their transnational ethnic-inflected consumerism, Italian immigrants developed original, inherently working-class aesthetic styles and lifestyles that were later incorporated in the high-end “Made in Italy” products that grew increasingly popular in late-capitalist, postindustrial United States. For example, designer men’s suits by Armani, Versace, Valentino, Prada, Gucci, Zegna and Dolce & Gabbana, which became a distinctive status symbol for the upwardly-mobile, urban and cosmopolitan American man between 1980 and 2000, paid homage to both the aggressive masculinity and rebellious elegance of the pinstriped suits worn by popular Italian-American singers and actors of the 1930s-1970s and to the skills of Italian immigrant tailors and garment workers, a historically overrepresented por-tion of the labor force in the US clothing industry. Overall, the Italian designer men’s suit and the other commodities that established the “Made in Italy” label – luxury clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances, motor scooters, specialty food and wine, auteur films, etc. – definitively and successfully brought the two divergent Italies together, which had been problematic for early-20th-century US consumers and policy-makers to reconcile: the “white Italy” of ancient Roman and Renaissance art, opera music and stunning urban and pastoral landscapes, and the “black Italy” of immigrant supersti-tion, primitivism and sensual danger.

At any rate, consumer culture patterns and ideas about consumerism circulated between Italy and the United States throughout the 20th century. As detailed by the growing literature on the transatlantic formation of state social policies pioneered by Daniel T. Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, in the 1930s, both the New Deal state and the corporatist fascist state aggressively addressed questions of consumption and citizenship, especially concerning women, sometimes looking to each other for inspiration.37 For a while, the dual fascist emphasis on belligerent mo-dernity in imperial war, architecture and the moving image, on the one hand, and the

36. Simone Cinotto, Soft Soil, Black Grapes: the Birth of Italian Winemaking in California, trans. MichelleTarnopolsky (New York, 2012).37. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2000);Maurizio Vaudagna, Corporativismo e New Deal: Integrazione e conflitto sociale negli S tati Uniti, 1933- 1941 (Turin, 1981); John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View f rom A merica (Princeton, N.J., 1972); Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the Two Wests (Turin, 2009); Lizabeth Cohen, “The N ew D eal S tate a nd t he M aking o f C itizen C onsumers,” i n Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century, eds. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (New York, 1998), 111-126; Meg Jacobs, “’Democracy’s Third Estate: New Deal Politics and the Construction of a ‘Consuming Public’,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 55 (1999), 27-51; Meg Jacobs, “The Politics of Plenty in the 20th-Century United States,” in The Politics of Consumption, eds. Daunton and Hilton, 223-239; Victoria de Grazia, “Nationalizing Women: the Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 337-358; Stephen Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (New York, 2013); Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (New York, 2004).

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promotion of local folklore and idealization of rural and family life, on the other, seemed capable of bringing together and resolving the “white” and “black” Italian identities embodied in Italy’s material and cultural production, which was difficult for US consumers confronting Italian immigrants in their midst to make sense of.38 After World War II, Italy’s strategic position in Cold War Europe, enhanced by its being home to the strongest communist party in the western world, made it one of the principal destinations of US material aid and propagandistic images of America as the land of plenty (reflecting enthusiastic early-20th-century migrant narratives of “la Merica” and reinforced by letter-sending campaigns from Italian Americans to their Italian relatives before the landmark 1948 elections).39 Material assistance and cultural propaganda were the most important components of an all-inclusive diplomatic politics aimed at keeping the country on the democratic, capitalist side of a polarized world.40 Notwithstanding the importance of US intervention in Italy’s postwar recon-struction, US consumerism was received cautiously, if not reluctantly, even by the fervently anti-communist Christian Democratic Party, which ruled the country through-out the Cold War, and the powerful Catholic Church that supported it. Stephen Gundle and other historians of consumer culture in modern Italy have noted how criticism of and alternative philosophical approaches to the postwar US brand of consumer culture abounded in communist, catholic, post-fascist, and even social democratic and free-market entrepreneurial circles. The Christian Democratic-dominated government, for example, imposed very strict limitations on TV commercials for mass-produced brand-name products. Between 1957 and 1977, the only national TV channel, the state-owned RAI (Radio-Televisione Italiana), limited commercials to a popular short program called Carosello (Carousel), broadcasted before the evening news. The program featured short stories sponsored by manufacturing companies, which were allowed to mention the

38. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 2000); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).39. Marina Maccari Clayton, “Communists of the Stomach: Italian Migration and International Relations in the Cold War Era,” Studi Emigrazione, 41, 155 (2004), 327-336; Wendy I. Wall, “America’s ‘Best Propagandists’: Italian Americans and the 1948 ‘Letters to Italy’ Campaign,” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst, Mass., 2000), 89-109.40. James Edward Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940-1950: The Politics of Diplomacy and Stabilization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945-1948 (New York, 1986); Elena Aga Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky, eds., Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 2011); Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War: Waging Political Warfare 1945-1950 (New York, 2014); Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff, eds., Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture, and Society, 1948-1958 (Washington, D.C., 1995); Andrew Buchanan, “’Good Morning, Pupil!’ American Representations of Italianness and the Occupation of Italy, 1943-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 2 (2008), 217-240; Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011).

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name of their product – food, detergents, home appliances and the like – for a few seconds at the end of the story.41 The most original state- and private-capital venture in Cold War Italy – Enrico Mattei’s Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Fuel Trust) – ultimately aimed at providing the country with an independent, cheap and steady supply of energy for its economic development, even though that meant defying the oligopoly of the “Seven Sisters” dominating the mid-20th-century oil industry, negotiating oil concessions in the Middle East with Arab countries at odds with US international politics and signing trade agreements with the Soviet Union.42 The originality of postwar Italian consumer culture and its tendency to explore wide-ranging export markets were reflected in the successful model of the “Third Italy,” represented by small firms and workshops collected in specialized production districts concentrated in the central and northeastern regions of the country. In the 1960s-1970s these businesses started anticipating some features of the Reagan-era, neoliberal consumer culture of the 1980s-1990s with their outsourcing, small-batch production, diversification of product lines, emphasis on design and style, and aestheticization of the brand.43 In the mid-1950s, the cheap source of labor supplied by internal migration – from the countryside to the cities, and from the South to the North – started replacing international migration, and was put to the service of an economy based on dynamic entrepreneurship, refined craftsmanship and a distinctive taste for beauty and style meant to be exported under the “Made in Italy” label, to a significant extent, to the most important global market – the United States.

41. Stephen Gundle, “Visions of Prosperity: Consumerism and Popular Culture in Italy from the 1920s to the 1950s,” in Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918-1945, eds. Carl Levy and Mark Roseman, (New York, 1989), 151-172; Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991 (Durham, N.C., 2000); David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington, IN., 2007); Adam Arvidsson, “From Counterculture to Consumer Culture: Vespa and the Italian Youth Market, 1958-78,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 1, 1 (2001), 47-71; Natalie Fullwood, “Popular Italian Cinema, the Media, and the Economic Miracle: Rethinking Commedia all’Italiana,” Modern Italy, 18, 1 (2013), 19-39; Piero Dorfles, Carosello (Bologna, 2011); Sarah Annunziato and Francesco Fiumara, “Targeting the Parents through the Children in the Golden Age of Italian Television Advertising: The Case of Carosello,” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 3, 1-2 (2015), 11-26.42. Elisabetta Bini, La Potente Benzina Italiana: Guerra Fredda e Consumi di Massa tra Italia, Stati Uniti e Terzo Mondo (1945-1973) (Florence, 2013).43. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1994); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York, 1990); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC., 1991). On Third Italy see Arnaldo Bagnasco and Charles Sabel, eds., Small and Medium-Size Enterprises: Social Change in Western Europe (London, 1995); Arnaldo Bagnasco, Tre Italie: La Problematica Territoriale dello Sviluppo Italiano (Bologna, 1977); Michael H. Best, The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Michael L. Blim, Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences (New York, 1990); Aldo Bonomi, Il Capitalismo Molecolare: La Società al Lavoro nel Nord Italia (Turin, 1997); Anna Bull and Paul Corner, From Peasant to Entrepreneur: The Survival of the Family Economy in Italy (Oxford, 1993); Sylvia Junko Yanaisako, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (Princeton, N.J., 2002).

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United States and Italian Imperialisms as Incubators of Transatlantic Consumer Cultures, 1900-1914

The turn of the 20th century was an era of spectacular economic growth centered on the Euro-American North Atlantic. Technical innovations, progress in transportation, increasing volumes of international trade and investments, and mass labor migrations marked a watershed moment in economic world history and laid the foundations for 20th-century developments. The spread of economic growth and material progress across the Atlantic involved a number of different players. In 1900 there was still no definitive sign of the United States’ forthcoming transformation into the leading global power after World War II. Great Britain was still the leader in international trade, investment and finance, though it had to face more than one competitor. With regards to industrial output capacity, Germany’s expanding industrial might rivaled the similarly impressive advancements of the US. Growth rates attest to the existence of a multipolar international economic system between 1900 and 1913. The United States and Germany experienced the highest average increases in GDP in absolute terms for the period, but with regards to GDP per capita, industrializing Italy and Denmark grew at the same average rate of 2 percent per annum as the United States; more than Germany and Russia (1.6 percent) and Great Britain’s modest 0.7 percent. European (notably German) multinationals and European (notably British) investments held significant shares of the US market. In other words, before World War I, the United States, with its very limited military power, was in every respect “a nation among nations” within a highly integrated international economic system.44

The unprecedented circulation and exchange of capital, goods and labor between Europe and North America, ushered in by the introduction of steamships, railroad building and canal openings, developed largely under the umbrella of the British Empire and its control of the global capitalist order. Indeed, the formal colonization of other parts of the world linked the many European and American imperialisms like never before or after. By 1900, Europe and the United States officially ruled 90 percent of Africa, 57 percent of Asia, and 98 percent of Polynesia.45 Imperialism was a supranational phenomenon, connecting Euro-American empires via similar dynamics of domination, exploitation and cultural formulations about the relations between the metropole and the colonies, the citizens of the empire and the colonized “Other.” Historians have long argued that the links between European and American attitudes towards race were shaped through imperialism, as well as the mutually-influenced production of ideologies, representations

44. Mira Wilkins, “European Multinationals in the United States: 1875-1914,” in Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective, eds. Alice Teichova, Maurice Lévy-Beboyer, and Helga Nussbaum (New York, 1986), 55-64; Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006).45. Nolan, Transatlantic Century, 43.

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and aesthetics of the empire like the picturesque, an aesthetic ideal unifying European and American visions of the imperial landscape.46

At first glance, similarities between US and Italian imperialisms are difficult to find, apart from the fact that both the United States and Italy entered the colonial competition late in the game. In the 1896 battle of Adwa, the Italian army underwent what was at the time the most devastating defeat a European colonial power had ever suffered at the hands of non-Europeans. A tremendous blow to Italian national pride, Adwa marked the conclusion of the first Italo-Ethiopian War, which secured Ethiopian sovereignty and halted for another four decades further Italian attempts to expand beyond their colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland and establish domination over the Horn of Africa.47 Italy would not add more territories or peoples to its colonial possessions until 1911 with the conquest of Libya and the Dodecanese Islands in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, two years after Adwa the United States easily defeated the troops of the modern era’s first European empire in the Spanish-American War, thus driving that empire out of the Western Hemisphere for good. Consequent to the 1898 victory over Spain, by 1914 the United States occupied the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Samoa, Guam and the Panama Canal Zone. It also informally controlled Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti, and, by expanding into the Caribbean and towards Asia, had established itself as both a Pacific and an Atlantic power. Italian imperialism, which mostly operated through military occupation and the repression of native uprisings, was motivated by not only a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis more powerful neighbors like France and Britain as a latecomer nation-state wishing to establish itself on the international scene, but also the embarrassment caused for Italian nationalism by the hundreds of thousands of migrants leaving the country annually at the turn of the century. Colonies were supposed to supply Italy with badly-needed commodities and cultivable land for turning would-be migrants into settlers. However, the plan never succeeded on either count, and for Italy’s rulers the true significance of the empire remained primarily politi-cal and symbolic.48 The principal drive behind early-20th-century US imperialism, on the other hand, was more commercial and economic than geopolitical. The US strain of imperialism was generally wary of assuming direct administration of native people

46. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York, 1989); McClintock, Imperial Leather; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York, 1997); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1993).47. Alessandro Triulzi, “L’Africa come icona: rappresentazioni dell’alterità nell’immaginario coloniale italiano di fine ottocento,” in Adua: Le Ragioni di una Sconfitta, ed. Angelo Del Boca (Bari, 1997), 255-281. 48. Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860-1960 (New York, 1996); Mark I. Choate, “From Territorial to Ethnographic Colonies and Back Again: The Politics of Italian Expansion, 1890-1912,” Modern Italy, 8, 1 (2003), 65-75.

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deemed as racially inferior, let alone incorporating them into the American nation and polity. It prided itself on being the definition of an informal empire, launching a “dollar diplomacy” in the Caribbean and Central America that would represent US hegemony in the area, and even the occasional military intervention, as the deployment of a benign, soft power. The emissaries of US imperialism were bankers, businessmen, sales agents and missionaries, as well as soldiers, diplomats and administrators.49

If we turn our attention to the cultural and domestic realms, and in particular to the consumer cultures emerging in step with, and stemming from, the imperial experience, commonalities between US and Italian imperialisms become more evident. Furthermore, by focusing on domestic consumption, we can appreciate the fascination some images and identities of Italian imperialism held for US consumers and their imitation of Italian models as part of their own identity construction as imperial consumers. By the turn of the 20th century, a broader culture of imperialism linked North Atlantic metropoles with their colonies, and their empires with one another. Colonial images and issues pervaded Italian and US society, fundamentally shaping consumer culture in both countries. The penny press in the United States and Italy avidly followed the adventures of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in Cuba and Italian explorers and soldiers in eastern Africa, respectively, also capturing the attention of each other’s readers. US and Italian women and men widely read colonial travel narratives that mixed adventure, exoticism and eroticism while objectifying native cultures and commodifying colonial goods. National Geographic and other popular magazines provided US readers with images of the many diverse regions of the newly-acquired empire as paradises, markets available for commercial expansion and suppliers of a wealth of natural riches, while indigenous people were represented as either noble savages or wicked heathens.50 The Italian press never tired of providing travel accounts of the Italian adventurers and explorers who began to venture into interior regions of eastern and equatorial Africa in the late 1870s, spurring a craze for all things African among middle-class readers and fueling early imperialist claims for a colonial destiny of the kingdom. At the end of the century, popular papers like Illustrazione Italiana reached out to a broader, working-class readership, prompting the socialist journal Critica Sociale to note disapprovingly that “Africa is second only to macaroni in the list of the most popular things in Italy. […] Italians read very few books and papers, but when it comes to Africa, or the black continent as they call it, everybody

49. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York, 2009).50. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C., 1993); Julie A. Tuason, “The Ideology of Empire in National Geographic Magazine’s Coverage of the Philippines, 1898-1908,” Geographical Review, 89, 1 (January 1999), 34-53; John D. Perivolaris, “’Porto Rico’: The View from National Geographic, 1899-1924,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 84, 2 (2007), 197-212; Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993).

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eagerly pays the penny for the daily, and they want to know all.”51 Exotic novels similarly caught the interest of vast popular audiences. In Italy, the dime novels of Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) achieved immense popularity using the archetypical language of dramatic love, mystery, hate, loss and violence to articulate an orientalist narrative about the – sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes revolting – cultural and racial identity of a variety of “non-white” people all over the world.52 Domestic participants in imperialism contemporarily prepared colonial bodies and objects for consumption at world’s fairs and exhibitions in the US and Italy. Between 1898 and 1915, they hosted more inter-national exhibitions than any other country, visited by millions of people: Turin (1898), Buffalo (1901), Charleston (1901-1902), Turin (1902), St. Louis (1904), Portland (1905), Milan (1906), Jamestown (1907), Seattle (1909), Turin (1911) and San Francisco (1915). On both sides of the Atlantic, colonial exhibitions, world’s fairs and commercial shows celebrating Euro-American progress and the bright future of imperial societies regularly displayed sub-Saharan African dancers, Polynesian villagers and replicas of Arabian souks for the edification, entertainment and racialized voyeurism of white visitors.53

Yet, international expositions were primarily occasions for displaying the many new goods that imperial consumers in both the United States and Italy could, or at least hoped to, enjoy in the early 20th century. The industrialization of food production, processing and marketing ended the preindustrial Malthusian cycle of plenty and famine and the dependence of communities on local foodstuffs, climate and seasons. Mechanized farming, canning, industrial refrigeration and other new technologies shifted food production from the home to the factory and ushered in packaged, stan-dardized, brand-name foods, some of them utterly new, like Coca-Cola, corn flakes, condensed milk, bouillon cubes, margarine and canned soups, meats and vegetables. With the introduction of the sewing machine, homemade clothes gave way to ready-made, ready-to-wear, store-bought apparel. Electric lighting, gas stoves and elevators changed housing and urban life; mechanized public transportation, bicycles and cars revolutionized mobility; and the telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter, high-circulation

51. Francesco Surdich, “L’attenzione della ‘Gazzetta Piemontese’ per le prime iniziative di esplorazione ed espansione coloniale italiana in Africa (1880-1885),” Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico Subalpino, 78 (1980), 525-568; Paola Zagatti, “Colonialismo e razzismo: immagini dell’Africa nella pubblicistica postunitaria,” Italia Contemporanea, 170 (1988), 21-37; Francesco Surdich, “L’impatto dell’esplorazione dell’Africa sull’Italia di fine ottocento,” Materiali di Lavoro, 1, 2-3 (1992), 5-33. 52. Emy Beseghi, ed., La Valle della luna: avventura, esotismo, orientalismo nell’opera di Emilio Salgari (Florence, 1992). 53. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 2013); Robert W. Rydell, “’Darkest Africa’: African Shows at America’s World’s Fairs, 1893-1940,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington, IN., 2000), 135-155; Guido Abbattista, “Torino 1884: Africani in mostra,” Contemporanea, 7, 3 (2004), 369-410; Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in 19th-Century Britain (Chicago, 2011).

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newspapers, nickelodeons and silent films radically changed how people communicated and spent their leisure time. The widely expanding accessibility of tropical goods like tea, cocoa, coffee, sugar, bananas, tobacco, rubber and cotton produced on plantations established and controlled by European and US companies exploiting colonial labor all around the equatorial belt offered consumers on both sides of the Atlantic the practical proof that they were the beneficiaries of a global marketplace. Department stores, a consumer institution pioneered in Paris by Le Bon Marché in 1869, were ubiquitous in the major cities of the United States and Italy by the end of the century. They offered concentrations of commodities from every angle of the world in specialized, sanitized sites of consumption, transforming shopping from a necessity and a chore into leisure, spectacle and an activity that required expertise.54 Finally, yet another new element of consumer culture – modern advertising – established direct links between consumption and empire in both the United States and Italy. Caricatures of black figures consistently appeared in Italian and US advertisements, especially those for colonial products and former luxuries that were now an everyday presence in metro-politan lives like coffee, cocoa and tobacco products, thus reflecting a broad fascination with an exotic “Other,” as well as the political economy of Euro-American colonialism and a widespread sense of racial identity and scientifically-supported racism. In the United States, the presence of black individuals in tobacco ads and the “mammy image” used to advertise pancake flours were obvious legacies of tobacco plantation slavery and African American women’s servile labor in their white masters’ kitchens. These images subtly intertwined with a variety of commodified images of the people of color being encountered and seized upon by representatives of US imperialism abroad, thus articulating a new commercial aesthetic of racial-cultural difference that inextricably linked the rise of modern advertising culture and the subjugation of colonized peoples.55 In Italy, figures of black women, men and children in advertising were, if possible, even more popular than in the United States as visual referents for Italy’s belated (due to its belated national unification) but inborn imperialist vocation; the sensual exoticism of primitive Africans ready to be at once conquered (politically and sexually) and rescued by Italy’s high civilization; racial hierarchies; and advancing commercial modernity. The considerable black presence in early-20th-century Italian advertising was thus si-multaneously a mark of the colonizer’s power, a reflection of consumers’ narcissistic

54. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, U.K., 1999); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (London, 1981); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1992); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, N.J., 2000).55. Jeffrey Auerbach, “Art, Advertising, and the Legacy of Empire,” Journal of Popular Culture, 35, 4 (Spring 2002), 1-23.

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interest in the exotic and a hint of the casual attitude towards racism that was instrumental to Italy’s often brutal rule in East Africa and Libya.56

In other words, before 1914 the shared experience of empire made nationality a relatively minor factor in shaping consumption patterns in metropolitan societies. Class, gender and race were significant determinants and dividers, but early-20th-century consumer cultures in Italy and the United States bore many resemblances. Upper-, middle- and – albeit within the rigid limits imposed by their income – even working-class Italians and Americans alike could see themselves as part of a multinational colonial project and could imagine that as consumers they had access to an amazing variety of exotic cultures. In fact, US and Italian consumers’ shared experience of images, visual tropes and ways of thinking about the world of turn-of-the-20th-century Euro-American imperialism helps explain the dynamics of the consumption of Italian things, identities and cultures in the United States before World War I. US middle-class consumer cosmopolitanism, spurred by the profusion of information about Europe and the non-European world as well as the will to participate in imperialism from the domestic sphere of consumption, avidly looked to and borrowed from European imperial societies on matters of taste – the framework for interpreting the value and meaning of things – that it felt it lacked and needed. This initial phase of US consumerist imperialism was largely imitative. American culture was less historically rooted and homogeneous than European national cultures and therefore more open to foreign influences and imported goods, especially in the realm of high culture where many thought the US tradition was comparatively weakest.57 Among the material and cultural products that Italy had to offer to the global marketplace, US consumers indulged in those they felt represented the Italian vocation to an imperialism ideally based on ancient Roman imperial roots, the cult of beauty and the global civilizing power of the arts. The cultural structure of Italian imperialism, made familiar by the common participation in turn-of-the-20th-century Euro-American consumer imperial-ism, was incorporated into US consumer culture, which in turn modified consumer configurations of taste and visions of the world.

56. Adam Arvidsson, “Between Fascism and the American Dream: Advertising in Interwar Italy,” Social Science History, 25, 2 (2001), 151-186; Gaia Giuliani, “L’Italiano Negro: The Politics of Colour in Early 20th-Century Italy,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16, 4 (2014), 572-587; Karen Pinkus, “Selling the Black Body: Advertising and the African Campaigns,” in Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis, 1995), 22-81; Karen Pinkus, “Shades of Black in Advertising and Popular Culture,” in Bodily Regimes, 134-153; Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Spotless Italy: Hygiene, Domesticity, and the Ubiquity of Whiteness in Fascist and Postwar Consumer Culture,” California Italian Studies, 2, 1 (2011); Loredana Polezzi, “Imperial Reproductions: The Circulation of Colonial Images across Popular Genres and Media in the 1920s and 1930s,” Modern Italy, 8, 1 (2003), 31-47; Lucia Re, “Italians and the Invention of Race: The Politics of Difference in Libya, 1890-1913,” California Italian Studies, 1, 1 (2010); Stephanie Malia Hom, “Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911-1943,” Journal of Tourism History, 4, 3 (2012), 281-300.57. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (New York, 2001), 45.

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United States art collectors, many of them wealthy industrialists and financiers, put an astounding amount of energy and money into the acquisition of Italian art as part of a national project of cultural progress to overcome a perceived cultural gap and partake in the heritage of Western Civilization most powerfully embodied by ancient, Renaissance and modern Italian art. Although Italy had the longest tradition of protec-tion for artworks and monuments in Europe, by the late 19th century regulation of the art market had become a controversial political issue, and it took decades before a comprehensive law – quickly deemed ineffective – was passed by the Italian parliament. As a result, between 1900 and 1914 roughly one-fifth of all paintings imported into the United States came from Italy – a share similar to Britain and Germany, and second only to France.58 Opera was another area in which Italian influence on US culture was important. Although German and Austrian composers, musicians and conductors were generally at the forefront of the US classical music scene, Italian directors, musicians and singers hegemonized opera and the transplantation of this art form – steeped in European aristocratic, and later bourgeois, cultural tradition – into the US cultural environment. The widely-acclaimed operatic tenor Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) best embodied the decisive Italian contribution to this realm of refined entertainment and consumer culture within the popular imagination.59

While musicians represented by far the largest segment of the “skilled and profes-sional” category of Italian immigrants to New York between 1899 and 1910, the areas in which they shaped the US physical and cultural landscape most significantly at the turn of the 20th century, arguably more than any other national group, was construc-tion and architecture.60 Italians left indelible marks on the physical environment and architecture of the US through a continuous interweaving of professional and unskilled migrants in the construction trade – architects, engineers, artists, craftsmen, artisans, masons, plasterers and carvers – many of whom came from the same specialized trade groups based in particular Italian towns or regions and had travelled worldwide in trade migration chains. The importation of Italian architectural models, which beauti-fied and transformed major US cities – notably New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – made an equally import impact. Renaissance models inspired Frederick Thompson, the creator of Luna Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn (1903), who dotted this landmark site of American commercial leisure with views of Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Venetian Grand Canal and Doge’s Palace to delight

58. Flaminia Gennari Sartori, “The Taste of Business: Defining the American Art Collector, 1900-1914,” in Across the Atlantic: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United States, ed. Luisa Passerini (Bern, 2000), 73-92.59. John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT., 1993).60. Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York, 1977), 33.

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working-class visitors and provide beauty for their consumption.61 As noted by late historian Tony Judt, “in early-20th-century America, some [terminal train stations] were carefully modeled on Rome: the dimensions of Penn Station in New York were calibrated to those of the Baths of Caracalla (AD 217), while the barrel vault ceiling in Washington’s Union Station borrowed directly from the transept vaults in the Baths of Diocletian (AD 306).”62

The influence of Italian cultural and consumer imperialism was felt most strongly in the arena of film. Even in this new industry, American productions represented but one player among many between 1900 and 1914. Movies developed independently in Europe and North America, with the first large company (Pathé) originating in France. Hollywood did not ascend to international market domination until the 1920s, when the disruptions of World War I proved fatal to Europe’s former hegemony over the international silent film industry. French, German and Italian films accounted for half the melodrama, romance and adventure movies viewed in prewar United States. At the same time, US movies sold poorly in France and especially Italy, whose cities Turin, Rome and Naples were home to thriving moving picture companies and studios.63 Some of the Italian movies shown in nickelodeons and theaters in the United States were aimed at satiating US imperial viewers’ penchant for entertainment that associated natural landscapes with racial differences and national identities. Most of these movies combined picturesque aesthetics and poetics with an artistic realism meant to disclose the ethnographic reality of the mysterious and intriguing southern Italy in particular. Favorite subjects included devastating earthquakes and spectacular natural disasters, as in L’Eruzione del Vesuvio (The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1906) and L’Eruzione dell’Etna (The Eruption of Mt. Etna, 1909); ethnographic renderings, such as Eating Macaroni in the Streets of Naples (prod. Edison, 1903); and melodramatic fiction films, such as Sperduti nel buio (Lost in Darkness, Nino Martoglio, prod. Morgana Film, 1914) and Assunta Spina (Gustavo Serena, prod. Caesar Film, 1915; also known as Sangue Napolitano [Neapolitan Blood]).64

Newsreels celebrating the progress of contemporary Italian imperialism, such as Italian-Turkish War (prod. Cines, 1911), and documenting Italy’s war efforts in

61. Maddalena Tirabassi, “Making Space for Domesticity: Household Goods in Working-Class Italian American Homes, 1900-1940,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York, 2014), 57-70.62. Tony Judt, “The Glory of the Rails,” New York Times Review of Books, 57, 20 (December 23, 2010), 61, cit. in Tirabassi, “Making Space for Domesticity,” 74.63. Gerben Bakker, “The Decline and Fall of the European Film Industry in the U.S., 1907-1920,” in Across the Atlantic: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United States, ed. Luisa Passerini (Bern, 2000), 213-240.64. Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington, IN., 2010), 7.

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Libya enjoyed far less circulation and were distributed for only the most exclusive Italian-oriented film audiences. The popularity of Italian historical movies is what best accounts for the prominence of images and fantasies of Italian imperialism in early-20th-century US consumer culture. Epic films made in Italy between 1910 and 1914 were breakthroughs in US film culture. Films like L’Inferno (“Dante’s Inferno,” Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, 1911), Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912), Spartaco (“Spartacus,” Giovanni Enrico Vidali, 1913) and Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) were the first movies to convey the power of film to recreate and make a spectacle of the past, and they were vastly popular throughout the United States for their epic form, complicated plots, massive sets and unprecedented length of two to four hours. Grandiose in their production, from the writing and the set and costume design to the acting and filming, Italian historical movies regularly garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity even prior to their release. These ex-tremely successful movies, all of which earned millions of dollars, attracted the interest of US audiences with their all-encompassing depictions of the ancient world that united spectacle, lavish set design, new camera movement techniques and narrative. In fact, they went on to have an enormous influence on later developments in the cinematic arts. The first giant of US cinematography, D. W. Griffith, decided to make his two-reel biblical film, Judith of Bethulia (1914), after seeing Guazzoni’s blockbuster Quo Vadis? in 1913, and he began working on his own national historical film and masterpiece, the controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915), after learning about the grandest of Italian historical films, Pastrone’s Cabiria, still in production at the time. Cabiria, a ten-reel epic set during the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, was also screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson in a widely publicized event that witnessed film’s ascension from its lower-class origins to the status of respectable artistic form of middle-class leisure and edification.65 As film historian Maria Wyke notes, “Putting into the present an exhibitionist spectacle of pomp and magnificence, of grand crowds and monumental architecture, of orgies, seductions, and sadistic martyrdoms, these extraordinarily costly historical reconstructions excited the voyeuristic look of their spectators and provoked the pleasure of gazing on the vividly realized vices and exoti-cisms of Rome’s imperial villains.”66 The acclaim with which US spectators greeted Italian historical films demonstrates not only their acknowledgment of Italian technical and aesthetic superiority in the staging of the most grandiose cinematic spectacles to date, but also a recognition of Italian imperialism as the cultural medium through which their new identities as imperial consumers at the center of a global marketplace were articulated.

65. Mark Whalan, American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh, U.K., 2010), 38-39.66. Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York, 1997), 25-26.

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Conclusion

Historical narratives of the United States and its place in the 20th-century world have insisted on the hegemony of US consumer and popular culture and its centrality in the articulation of a soft power that significantly partnered military, diplomatic and economic means in the US plan for world leadership. In particular, US consumer and popular cul-tures have been repeatedly portrayed as the most effective media of the Americanization of European societies throughout the century, albeit most forcefully from after World War II until 1989. Recent historiographical debates have identified the key to overcoming such unidirectional, hegemonic and evenementiel explanations of changing consumer dynamics and meanings in a yet-to-be-realized positive mixing between the conceptualizations and methodologies of the history of early-modern and modern transatlantic consumerism. This essay has utilized the case of Italy and Italian-US relations within the landscape of consumer culture to argue that the formation of a modern consumer culture was instead a transnational, bidirectional and multidirectional process, best understood as the result of transatlantic and global circulations of capital, goods, ideas, images and imaginations. In the 20th century, US consumer culture was Italianized just as significantly as Italian consumer culture was Americanized.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Italian consumer culture produced by and alongside Italian imperialism and colonialism provided a model and a companion to a US con-sumer culture that was, similarly, the product and the cause of imperial encounters with other cultures. Complicating matters, however, were the millions of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1914 – most of whom were poor, rural migrants from southern Italy who became denizens of the largest US industrial cities – encountered and experienced by imperial US consumers through commodities and commercial images, both abroad and at home. As a result, after World War I, the Italianization of US consumer culture characteristically played out through a dialogical articulation of identities, meanings and geographies based on an imperial, urban and masculine Italy centered in the North, an Italy representing the world’s center for art, culture, craftsmanship and taste for beauty, on the one hand; and a diasporic, rural, feminine Italy centered in the South that conveyed narratives of primitivism, familism, exoticism and sensuality, on the other. As I have recounted elsewhere, in the 1970s, juxta-positions of low- and high-class identities, northern and southern Italian geographies and imaginations, and diasporic and transnational meanings, sensibilities and tastes started developing in the realm of food, thus dramatically influencing the way Americans ate, thought about their diet and saw themselves as global consumers.67 In the world of US

67. Simone Cinotto, “Consuming the European Other: Italian Cookbook Writers, the End of Labor, and the Transnational Formation of Taste in Postindustrial America, 1973-2000,” in Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono (Turin, 2013), 181-203.

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fashion, Italian designers and their tastes exercised considerable creative influence between 1980 and the end of the century.68

The history of the influence of Italian products, ideas and identities on US consumer culture in the 20th century continuously intertwined with the transatlantic trajectories of other national products, ideas and identities, including those that were formulated, described and understood as generally European. Indeed, the ultimate goal of this essay, based on the example of Italy, is to provide the preliminary framework for a larger study of the Europeanization of US consumer culture in the “American Century” that still needs to be written.

68. Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry (New York, 2000); Valerie Steele, Fashion, Italian Style (New Haven, CT., 2003); Courtney Ritter, “The Double Life of the Italian Suit: Italian Americans and the ‘Made in Italy’ Label,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York, 2014), 195-206.