Chapter 4: American Capitalism: Mass Production, Mass Consumption, and Inequality

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America Through Foreign Eyes

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Rice University

America Through Foreign Eyes

100 оценки

The United States has always been a source of fascination — both attraction and repulsion — for the people of France, Mexico, China, and African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan. "America Through Foreign Eyes" is a rich, interdisciplinary, international course that features Rice University faculty from a variety of disciplines and area studies. Focused on perceptions of America abroad, the course is a cross between World Cultures and American Studies. The course features four modules, each covering the perceptions and interactions of particular regions with America, Americans and Americanization.

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America Through French Eyes

The United States has always been a source of fascination for the people of France. French observers and travelers are rarely indifferent to American culture and people. This module, “America Through French Eyes,” examines historical and contemporary perceptions of America, Americans, and Americanization through the lens of French writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals, and public opinion. Taught by Dr. Julie Fette, a professor of French Studies, this module will cover the four themes of the course: Democracy and Modernity; Globalization and Capitalism; Racism and Immigration; and Intellectual and Cultural Life.

Chapter 1: France and America: Friend and Foe6:04

Chapter 2: America: Land of Democracy12:19

Chapter 3: America = Modernity10:47

Chapter 4: American Capitalism: Mass Production, Mass Consumption, and Inequality11:29

Chapter 5: Globalization and the Cultural Exception9:43

Chapter 6: Racism and Xenophobia in the United States and France13:02

Chapter 7: Religion and Secularism10:09

Chapter 8: Franco-American Cultural Exchange: Art, Artists, and Art Patrons11:48

Chapter 9: Intellectual Life: The American University9:20

Chapter 9: Simone de Beauvoir at Rice, by Melissa Kean7:24

Chapter 10: America as Hyperreality8:05

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Dr. Anne S. Chao
Lecturer
Rice University
Dr. Julie Fette
Associate Professor
Rice University
Dr. Jeffrey Fleisher
Associate Professor
Rice University
Dr. Moramay López-Alonso
Associate Professor
Rice University

The continent is immense and opulent.

Everything is there is measureless quantity, gold, silver, iron, oil,

petroleum, wood, meat and plants, in infinite variety.

The Americans have everything.

They grasp and they plunder.

This quote comes to us from Georges Duhamel, a French doctor, war veteran and

author, who encountered America in the midst of its interwar, industrial period.

One of Duhamel's most vivid accounts of America

focused on the Chicago slaughterhouse that he visited.

Duhamel claims, The Chicago abattoirs are a city within a city,

a world in the bosom of the world, the sanctuary of carnivorous humanity,

the realm of scientific death.

Animals have always been killed for human consumption, of course, but as a result of

urbanization, industrialization and higher standards of hygiene, the slaughterhouse

turned the killing into a rationalized, industrial production site.

In the United States, Chicago emerged in the second half of the 19th century

as the capital of meat packing, with the union stockyards

having introduced the conveyor belt that regulated the speed of the packing work.

In contrast, French abattoirs were essentially artisanal

until after World War I, with a small team of skilled butchers performing

all aspects of the labor by hand.

Only in the interwar years, and after much political wrangling,

did French slaughterhouses begin a mechanization process,

to the chagrin of people like Duhamel.

The Chicago slaughterhouse is also depicted in another French

language book from Duhamel's time, but of a very different genre.

The comic strip, Tintin in America, satirized the mass production and

corruption of a meat factory.

The author, Herge, was actually Belgian, but his Tintin series of comics

probably reached more French speakers than any other text we study in this module.

What's interesting is that among our authors, Herge is the only one

to write about America without ever having set foot in the United States.

So his portrayal is farcical, one whose humor is purposefully exaggerated.

But let's go too far in contrasting French and

American opinion about these vastly different methods of meat making.

Criticism of both methods abounded from within.

Some French were appalled at the primitive and

unhygienic conditions of the butchery outside Paris at La Villette.

Whereas American writer,

Upton Sinclair, exposed the unsanitary conditions, exploitation, and

corruption in a Chicago slaughterhouse in the book, The Jungle, in 1906.

What is important to note is that Georges Duhamel toured the U.S.

in 1930, and he left us with an essay that captures the essence

of a certain French attitude toward the United States in the wake of World War I.

He was particularly struck by America's technical rationalization, that is, its

emphasis on highly efficient workflow and the replacement of man power by machines.

In his book, titled in English, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life

of the Future, Duhamel expresses his shock over the scale of

American mass production and consumption, industrialization, and urbanization.

Duhamel was not alone in this view.

He was a type of French intellectual in the interwar years, such as Andre Gide and

Henri Bergson, who revolted against aspects of modernity.

The message of America the Menace

had great impact on French public opinion about the United States.

Duhamel had won the highest French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt,

in 1918.

This meant that Duhamel's treatise on America was widely read.

And a few years later, in 1935, he was elected to the prestigious

intellectual body, The Academie francaise.

Besides the slaughterhouse, two key resources of power, oil and

the automobile, were key industrial products that French observers

commonly associated with American industrialization.

Indeed, Henry Ford applied the assembly line processes he observed in

the slaughterhouse to automobile production.

In a well known but controversial French novel that I recommend,

Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine,

the French protagonist works a shift in a Ford plant in Detroit after World War I.

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir noted during her travels from California to Texas,

quote, After the vegetative fertility of the cotton fields,

we find the mineral wealth of the oil wells.

You can smell them from a distance.

Infants in their cradles are already breathing it

In those prefabricated houses lined up in rows...

The rich city of Houston has its roots deep in these oil wells.

In America the Menace, Duhamel critiques not only American mass production, but

also its Mass Consumption.

He fears the mechanization and

loss of individuality that assembly line production fosters in its workers,

as well as the conformism and decadence of a population trained to worship

at the altar of new religions, such as sport and cinema.

Dehumanization and uniformization were the specters of modernity,

and Duhamel advocated that Europe not take the path chosen by the United States.

Tocqueville was also an early observer of the connection between

American democracy, mass production, and mass consumption in the 1830s.

Large-scale production focused on quantity

rather than quality of goods because of social mobility in America,

Tocqueville argued, both upward and downward social mobility.

The wealthy can fall into hard times, and

the poor are constantly striving to better their situation.

In both cases, Americans are focused on obtaining possessions.

As Tocqueville wrote, quote, What we call love of gain,

Americans see as praiseworthy industriousness, and

they see a certain faintness of heart in what we regard as moderation of desire.

One hundred years later, Duhamel described Americans this way.

They yearn desperately for phonographs, radios, illustrated magazines,

'movies,' elevators, electric refrigerators and

automobiles, automobiles, and, once again, automobiles.

They want to own, at the earliest possible moment all the articles mentioned,

which are so wonderfully convenient and of which,

by an odd reversal of things, they immediately become the anxious slaves.

We can't talk about French opinions of American capitalism

without discussing Inequality.

French observers have long focused on socioeconomic disparity

as a significant side effect of American capitalism.

“In brilliant New York, I have seen as many beggars as I saw in Moscow.”,

proclaimed Duhamel in 1930.

Nearly a century later, French economist, Thomas Piketty,

recently published the blockbuster, widely translated tome called,

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, denouncing wealth and

income inequalities in both the United States and Europe.

Piketty argues that economic disparity is a direct consequence of

unchecked capitalism, and that government intervention through taxation

is needed to prevent such inequality from undoing democracy, itself.

It is unusual for any economic treatise to become an international best seller, but

Piketty's analysis touched a nerve around the globe after the 2008

financial crisis in the U.S., the Occupy Wall Street movement, and

the rise of the so-called one percenters, that is, the realization that an increased

concentration of wealth is held by only the top 1% of American income earners.

European historian,

Tony Judt, recently published an essay called, Ill Fairs the Land.

In a long quote, he wrote this.

From the late 19th Century until the 1970s,

the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal.

Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor,

the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune,

modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty..

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

To be sure, "we" varies with country.

The greatest extremes of private privilege and

public indifference have resurfaced in the US and the UK, says Tony Judt,

epicenters of enthusiasm for deregulated market capitalism...

He goes on to say, There is a reason why infant mortality, life expectancy,

criminality, the prison population, mental illness, unemployment, obesity,

malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, economic insecurity,

personal indebtedness and anxiety are so much more marked in the US...

than they are in continental Europe.

To conclude, mass production, mass consumption and

inequality are three features of American capitalism

that caused several French observers to fear for this version of modernity.

By the late 20th century, the French economy,

itself, had become largely modernized.

The so called “Trentes Glorieuses”, or 30 glorious years following World War II,

were marked in France by explosive economic growth,

with significantly increased rates of productivity and consumption.

The increased French standard of living by the mid 1970s,

thanks to industrialization, gave a large swath of the French lower and

middle classes greater purchasing power.

Had Duhamel lived to this time, he would likely have been discouraged to see

the same mechanization and uniformization in French socioeconomic

life that appalled him in the United States four decades earlier.

Nevertheless, the French have maintained a distinct approach to managing their

capitalism, an approach that strives to respect social norms such as Sunday rest,

an approach that tries to protect French cultural production from the bulldozer of

the free market, and an approach, as we will see in the next chapter,

that seeks to manage globalization on its own terms.

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