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"In the decades following the Civil War, American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility. . . ."By World War I, Americans were being enticed into consumer pleasure and indulgence rather than into work as the road to happiness. . . . For generations, America had been portrayed as a place of plenty, a garden in which all paradisiacal longings would be satisfied. . . . By the early 1900s this myth was being transformed, urbanized and commercialized, increasingly severed from its religious aims and focusing ever more on personal satisfaction and even on such new pleasure palaces as department stores, theaters, restaura

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