Financing the American Dream

Presenting a social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America, this book focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established.

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Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt. The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end - undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this book, Lendol Calder argues that this conception of the past is in fact a myth. Calder presents a social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present of 1999.