In his 2013 Enterprise and Society presidential address, Kenneth Lipartito examined trends in business and cultural history and concluded that neither the focus on profit-seeking self-interest and organizational structure nor language, mentality, and symbolic structure alone were sufficient to explain the economic past. Instead, he made a case for the importance of practice theory in reintegrating “mentality and materiality in the study of history,” calling for a broader interpretive model through which cultural and business history can be viewed as inclusive. “What we can bring to this discussion,” he invited, “is the insight that what we call business or profit-making activity can be found on both sides of what others assume to be a clear divide between commerce and culture.” Furthermore, he argued that “cultural forms and practices have often been enacted through businesses.” ^{Footnote 1} In discussing the use of practice theory in history, Lipartito was careful to note that it is the historian’s job to “disentangle” certain elements that “come together historically” and “coalesce into a practice.” ^{Footnote 2} Only through analyzing power, language, symbols, and categorizations can we understand business as a “field of practice” and how businesses accrue not only economic capital, but also symbolic capital. One must investigate how business interacts with other fields—education, art, religion, politics—to “give greater weight to what seem superfluous or secondary matters,” including “why firms acquire symbolic objects such as art collections, or how they express themselves in architecture or civic works.” ^{Footnote 3}

Lipartito contended that this conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital needs to be examined, implying that agents within the field of business trade in all forms, or, as Pierre Bourdieu describes the inversion, “only those [cultural producers] who can come to terms with the ‘economic’ constraints inscribed in this bad-faith economy can reap the full ‘economic’ profits of their symbolic capital.” ^{Footnote 4} Lipartito connected economic and symbolic capital to better understand the field of business, referring to and expanding on Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of cultural production as it relates to an economy of symbolic goods, especially in the field of restricted production, which is most associated with highbrow art and its disavowal of economic capital. For Bourdieu, whose primary focus is the restricted production of highbrow art, or art and literature produced with little regard to acquiring economic capital, the field of cultural production “attracts agents who differ greatly in their properties and dispositions” but nonetheless have a common aversion to vocations in other fields, such as education or the bureaucracy. ^{Footnote 5} On the other hand, agents in the field of large-scale production are most commonly producers of bourgeois or middlebrow art, culture for the “average” public. ^{Footnote 6} In this field, cultural producers are less concerned with the trade in symbolic capital than in economic capital, and in many ways are subordinate to economics as controlled by business and the market. ^{Footnote 7} The field of large-scale, or heteronomous, production is what most interests my evaluation of the circulation of economic and symbolic capital as it informs culture and what I call the twentieth-century sensuous consumer—a consumer of both culture and goods, economic or symbolic.

Similarly, Lipartito maintained that historians must “consider both the functional and the aesthetic when looking at technology or physical embodiments of capital.” He analyzed Tamara Plakins Thornton’s study of England’s West India Docks in the nineteenth century, remarking on consumers’ changed perceptions of this new symbol of business. The “appearances and smells” of the spices and teas and silks were no longer solely associated with “real goods” but also with a “sensual disorder that the machinery of the docks tamed and regulated.” ^{Footnote 8} Lipartito noted that William Cronon reimagined economic capital when describing the wheat market in late nineteenth-century Chicago as a “golden stream” due to the interdependence between the hinterland and the city, allowing these “material and aesthetic effects” to transform the market into a “great river of goods.” ^{Footnote 9} In his analysis of Thomas Andrew’s study of the coal workers’ strike in Ludlow in 1914, he wrote of “people and things” as well as “markets and technology” having agency, claiming that “the history of the economy is the history of how the economy is constructed.” ^{Footnote 10} By historicizing the field of business in ascribing agency, describing the circulation of economic and symbolic goods and power, and evaluating the dispositions of habituated consumers, Lipartito argued that business historians should use practice theory to better explain the past.

Using Bourdieu’s explanation of the field of cultural production and Lipartito’s interpretation of practice theory as it relates to culture and business, then, the field of cultural production and the field of business overlap, as do the economies of real and symbolic goods. The historians tasked with explaining the economic, social, and cultural changes wrought by modernity at the turn of the twentieth century have examined cultural production and the economy and concluded that emerging technologies facilitated new mass culture media, a primary aim of which was to educate the audience about the modern world. Influenced by the advancements in technology during the Second Industrial Revolution, these cultural producers—whom Bourdieu would call artists and writers and actors and filmmakers, a group I would expand to include businesspeople and advertisers and salespeople—helped to usher in a new culture and a new capitalism in which they placated the fears and played on the senses of consumers to provide and sell new experiences and products. ^{Footnote 11} In short, consumerism became more integrated into Americans’ daily lives in the twentieth century, and capitalism became more ingrained in culture. I contend that consumers are as important agents as producers in the ongoing transformation and redefinition of capitalism. ^{Footnote 12} As such, I explore the twentieth-century sensuous consumer by reviewing four texts that study industries within the field of cultural production, with a focus on the large-scale production of middlebrow art, popular entertainment, and emergent mass media, as well as what Lipartito describes as the field of business, to better appreciate the interrelationships among art, commerce, capitalism, democracy, and modernism, broadly defined. Each work details the importance of consumer senses in the making of modernity, and, taken together, they incorporate the rise of motion pictures, amusement parks, and radio into new fields that affect our bodies and encourage us to consume.

The consumer often experiences many senses at once, not just through seeing and feeling and smelling simultaneously, but also through the conversion and inversion of sensorial perceptions. Joshua Yumibe discusses the importance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of synaesthesia, or the transposition of sense perceptions, in his examination of early color cinema, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. “Color is in so many ways uncontainable,” Yumibe notes, “It transgresses formal boundaries—spilling outside the lines in art—and it inundates the senses” (p. 9). Indeed, “color cinema has its synaesthetic appeals: it can invoke not just vision, but also sound, smell, taste, and especially touch” (p. 9). By framing his study within color’s aesthetic history and theories of perception, Yumibe explains the importance of color to nineteenth-century life and its impact on the new film industry. For some, color was to be feared—it was dangerous and must be controlled or manipulated; for others, it was to be consumed as an exulting experience, a sensuous acceptance that “color affects us by way of our bodies” (p. 19).

In his inquiry, the author focuses narrowly on the techniques used in the process of applied coloring and the resulting abstract aesthetics as they appear on film in the medium’s nascent years, well before the Technicolor revolution. He foregoes investigating the aesthetic realism that results from natural coloring, including Kinemacolor, admitting that there are extensive studies on these processes, but less academic interest has been lent to hand coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning. Yumibe uses the aesthetic history of color in the early cinema of attractions, and later in narrative films, to explain why cultural producers spent so much time and money to color film and how the product was marketed, projected on screen, and consumed. His goal is to bring “aspects of [cinema’s] aesthetic sensuousness back into being” and thus “recover something of ourselves” (p. 16). He recognizes that the new technological processes and the resulting aesthetics must be analyzed within the larger categories of mass culture and modernism, and, in doing so, he argues that the “roots of mass production and consumption and of color cinema interweave with color theory like the tendrils of an arabesque” (p. 25).

Yumibe observes that technological innovation in the nineteenth-century dye and pigment industries in Europe, as well as color theory, had a profound impact on modernity and turn-of-the-century culture. The large-scale production of colored goods, including street advertisements, textiles, art, and foodstuffs, influenced the emerging mass culture at the turn of the century, especially as to how people perceived and consumed these products. To appreciate color cinema, it is essential to “understand that these different spheres of modernity—from physiological studies of color to the emerging mass culture to modernist art—were reciprocally related” (p. 18). He describes cinema as a “modern medium” that should be included within the areas of production for both the mass cultural media and modernist artwork, the latter often identified with restricted production. ^{Footnote 13} Yumibe maintains that beginning as early as the 1890s films that did not adhere to “strict modernist tradition” nonetheless used color to express abstract ideas (pp. 137–138). However, in these examples, producers used color abstraction to educate popular audiences on modernist principles and the potential of film aesthetics, and a goal of experimentation with “technologies of color” in early cinema was to “educate mass audiences at the level of the senses” (p. 36). Similarly, Bourdieu acknowledges that the opposing views of the middlebrow and the avant-garde, for example, are not exclusively binary, but instead that “the two fields of production, opposed as they are, coexist” and the “opposition between the two modes of production is to be observed, separated as much by the nature of the works produced and the political ideologies or aesthetic theories of those who disseminate them as by the social composition of the publics to which they are offered.” ^{Footnote 14} Yumibe recognizes the importance of acquiring symbolic capital in the early film industry, and he claims that color was often used for artistic purposes and to appease spectators’ senses in both abstract cinema and, later, mass-produced narrative films. While filmmakers were experimenting with color and creating new aesthetics, they were using modern technologies and techniques to sell their products to a modern, mass audience.

Yumibe’s explanation and analysis of these new techniques as used in applied coloring is noteworthy. Hand coloring, the most popular form of applied coloring in the 1890s, was labor intensive. Each frame of each print was painstakingly colored by hand, increasingly by women, just as hand coloring itself became increasingly associated with the rise of films of the dancing, eroticized female body and the perception of color as feminine. In his discussion of realism versus abstraction regarding the use of color in these pictures, he concedes that the two styles are not necessarily opposites but instead are part of the cinema of attractions, whether verisimilar or abstract. Producers tended to market their movies as naturalistic to highlight their realistic qualities, even when the film was neither naturally colored nor realistic. As evident in advertisements, color was often used to entice viewers on the level of the senses, and “from a marketing standpoint could be used to excite and move a paying audience with everything from exotic lions to erupting volcanoes” (p. 67).

Although Yumibe is most concerned with color aesthetics, the business of film as it relates to coloring processes cannot be discounted, as a primary aim of colorizing film, of course, was to make money. As motion pictures became longer, hand coloring was replaced with stenciling, tinting, and toning processes driven by technological advancements that could more easily produce color films on a large scale. For example, in the early 1900s the French film production company Pathé transitioned to stenciling, a less precise though much more efficient means of coloring prints via precut stencils through which dye could be applied onto the film. With the increase in production and further mechanization of the stenciling process, Pathé reduced costs, increased profits, and expanded. The company came to dominate first the French and then the global market, and those who continued to rely on hand coloring, like George Méliès, were unable to compete and maintain market share. Similarly, tinting and toning were introduced as early as the 1890s as cheaper alternatives to both hand coloring and stenciling, and these methods became more widely used in the early 1900s. The importance of converting symbols to economic capital manifested in Pathé’s marketing, as the company continued to advertise its early stenciled films as hand colored to “convey a sense of handcrafted aura … through a disavowal of their mechanical origin” (p. 82). Regardless of the industrial methods used in creating a motion picture, films were marketed in a way that would maximize the accrual of both forms of capital through placating the newly popular Arts and Crafts movement and emphasizing naturalism, even as the products were mass produced in form and abstract in content.

As an aesthetic history, Moving Color does a fine job of educating readers about applied coloring techniques but fails to provide a comprehensive narrative of color in early film. Nonetheless, applied coloring is most applicable in understanding how color is used in motion pictures today, as color is easily altered in both the production and post-production stages of moviemaking through digital manipulation, to make no mention of the remarkable consistency of color during projection, something new in film exhibition. As a history of the field of film production, Yumibe focuses on the culture more than the business, but nonetheless provides sufficient reason in “holding popular media and fine art simultaneously in focus” to analyze the “reciprocal interplay between highbrow and lowbrow aesthetic productions” (p. 18). In the context of nineteenth-century color and its influence on early cinema, he cites the influence of color theorists and critics of aesthetics, including Guillaume Apollinaire, who failed to separate the heteronomous forms of cultural production from high art in describing color in mass culture. Apollinaire noted that color theory “draws its origins from fireworks, fountains, electric signs, and those fairy-tale palaces which at every amusement park accustom the eyes to enjoy kaleidoscopic changes in hue” (p. 18).

In her study of amusement parks and movies in early twentieth-century America, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, Lauren Rabinovitz agrees that turn-of-the-century entertainment stimulated and educated the public about modernity and industrialization. With the bombardment of the senses—what Walter Benjamin called the “shocks of modernity” when describing modern cities—the public was often overstimulated, although Rabinovitz argues that this “uneasiness required new assurances, and movies and amusement parks served their audiences by adjusting them to new features of city life, its modernization, consumerism, and alienation” (p. 13). The result was the acclimation of the American people to the permanency of electrification through their own consumption of mass-culture entertainment. Movies and amusement parks were “steeped in this sensorial reorientation” in which consumers, urbanites or ruralites, learned to live in and love modernity (p. 11). In contrast to Yumibe’s aesthetic history of early cinema, Rabinovitz contends that movies and amusement parks are best understood together. She focuses on large-scale cultural consumption as it relates to the rise of modernity, the sensuous spectator, and a new national American culture.

Foremost, amusement parks provided “sensory overstimulation” and new experiences (p. 26). Americans could witness sexualized female bodies on the stage or on rides. The audience was thrilled with danger, whether it was the perceived danger of undermining female morality or the simulated danger of riding fast-moving machines in which patrons were excited by the kinesthetic jolts but were assured safety through rhythm and routine: “[T]hey consisted of waiting, boarding, riding, and disembarking organized around the purchase, anticipation, experience, and relief of risk, danger, and pleasure” (p. 34). The event of going to an amusement park was based on newness and excitement. The making of urban modernism was also facilitated by the bringing together of the city and the country into places of national consumption; often, this connection was made by railway companies looking to increase ticket sales by terminating their lines at amusement parks. These economic motivations not only encouraged the transportation of American business across what Rabinovitz believes to be an arbitrary division between rural and urban, but it also spurred the expansion of large-scale cultural production industries. “Amusement parks accustomed Americans,” regardless of race or social division, “to urban shocks while defining and making pleasurable modern sexuality in relation to public space, the act of looking, and consumerism” (p. 64). Consequently, the transformation of “entertainment as well as market economics” remade the American people as consumers (p. 10).

Attendees purchased souvenirs, especially postcards, which “commodified the parks and made them transportable” (p. 97). Rabinovitz theorizes that postcards and movies, having emerged at the same time, served similar roles in their simultaneous miniaturization and enlargement of the world. However, whereas movies were social and fleeting, postcards were more permanent and more personal. More than anything, postcards, especially in their representation of amusement parks, helped to assuage the purchaser’s fears of modernity and remind him or her that the United States was still primarily an agrarian country. Change often begets nostalgia, and postcards incorporated the revered past and the feared future into a present that “blurred the boundaries and distinctions between” the preindustrial and the industrial, just as amusement parks erased the division between the rural and urban (p. 113). Postcards “promised an antidote to the chaos, sensory overstimulation” and promoted “oases of space and time for exoticizing all that was considered modern” (p. 107). They were mass-produced and sold, and choice was limited to a handful of options. Postcards were advertisements, and they showed only the best that the parks had to offer, but they could also be personalized with a note and mailed to friends or family. As consumer goods, they were often the only official way to get a photograph of the park, and as souvenirs, Americans, and especially women, began to picture themselves as tourists, “a new type of consumer consuming both amusements and physical spaces in the world at large” (p. 106).

Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, a combination ride and movie, served a similar purpose, including educating consumers about tourism and “provid[ing] sensory verification of the turmoil increasingly associated with modernity, the new century, and urban life” (p. 94). In fact, Rabinovitz says, it introduced many riders to motion pictures. These rides were “immersive” in that they “were about a physiological and psychological experience associated with travel” (p. 85). Advertisers focused on the motion over the movies, promoting kinesthetic sensations and sound effects as instrumental to transport the riders around the world. In her analysis of the films, Rabinovitz notes that point of view and narrative were essential in creating a unique experience for the rider, sometimes forgoing realism and incorporating the trick-film and abstract influences of George Méliès to create “fantasies … made out of the materials of mass media” (p. 91). Again, she concludes that Hale’s Tours was an “antidote” for modernity.

Rabinovitz speculates that one reason the ride’s popularity endured in Great Britain was because its images of dependent areas of the world served a more specific nationalist purpose for the larger British Empire than for Americans who had yet to reconcile their country’s increased global influence. At the same time, however, she discusses the rise of an American nationalist identity as manifested in films, postcards, the railroads, and amusement park spectacles. Whereas Hale’s Tours democratized tourism as it became more affordable and available to the middle class, the ride was a descendant of the phantom train ride films and panoramas of the late nineteenth century, which often focused on Civil War battles in promoting American nationalism. Additionally, film and postcards provided “new lessons on tourism and nation-building” (p. 98). Although amusement parks, she concludes, were not bastions of democracy, as once thought—they were often segregated—they nonetheless served everyone in the United States, black and white, men and women, and taught Americans the importance of forming a cultural unity across geographical and racial divisions. As consumers, Americans were having the same experiences, purchasing the same products. They watched reenactments from the Spanish-American War, emphasizing military glory and perhaps encouraging American imperialism. It was an Americanizing experience, and amusement parks, as a particularly American form of mass culture, were exported to Europe along with “an American nationalist modern identity” (p. 62).

Joshua Yumibe also lends insight into the importance of nationalism in the film industry. By 1907, American producers made a push to retake the U.S. market from Pathé, often criticizing the French company’s films as encouraging immorality and sensationalism in their use of color. Pathé adapted to the market, distributing its films in the United States under a different name, and the company began to distance itself from its sometimes maligned use of tinting and toning as being overly sensational by the “newly nationalized U.S. film market” (p. 114). The emphasis on black-and-white films in the United States was not wholly adopted, and although Yumibe admits that it is difficult to conclude how widespread the turn from color was based on surviving prints, it is clear that American filmmakers were attempting to reclaim the market by way of condemning the French. Subsequently, the strategy led to the use of more subdued colors not only in the shift from the cinema of attractions to the subtleties of narrative film, but also as “a refinement of the sensual-emotional address of film form within the nationalist dynamics of the U.S. market” in challenging Pathé (p. 117). Similar to the situation with amusement parks and panoramas and Hale’s Tours, Yumibe argues that travel films educated viewers about the world while at the same time promoting American nationalism and commerce via tourism. Within the field of cultural production and product exports, Americans were forming their own nationalist identities.

Both Yumibe and Rabinovitz effectively connect the dots between nationalism and popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. As a study of leisure and mass culture, Electric Dreamland succeeds in its analysis of the simultaneous rise of amusement parks and movies, even if better statistics are needed on those who visited the parks—socioeconomic levels, rural versus urban populations, and men, women, and children. Rabinovitz rightly concludes with a discussion of Disneyland, especially in its fusion of the film and amusement industries in using the power of nostalgia to recapture childhood and a “mythical American homogenous past” (p. 168). Things had changed by 1955, and although Rabinovitz mostly skips over the decades between the early twentieth century and the opening of Disneyland, she notes that the suburbanization of the country did little to save the old amusement parks from falling into disrepute and disrepair. As a park, she says, Disneyland looked back to and tried to recapture a perhaps bygone, though mostly imaginary, era of American history.

Like the amusement park and film industries in the early twentieth century, many historians also view radio as a nationalizing force in the United States by creating national listening communities across regional lines and thus homogenizing the country. According to Neil Verma, author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, dramas encouraged national unity through mass culture as well as individuality in building a unique experience in the imagination. However, Verma admits that although homogenization and national unity are often discussed in the context of radio helping to construct an American identity, this process was less about democratization and more about consolidating the radio industry into networks with flagship stations concentrated in Hollywood and New York.

For Verma, the sensuous consumer was defined not by sight or kinesthesia, but by sound and imagination. Influenced by a cadre of culturalists, notably Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams, as well as film historians Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen, Verma’s aesthetic and cultural history of radio drama from 1937 through 1955 deftly focuses on producers who built not just a theater of the mind, but a theater in, about, and for the mind. In short, he argues that the theater of the mind was built at the intersection of networks, broadcasters, and “a particular set of political, technical, and cultural developments” (p. 3). By examining technological innovations that enabled the emergence of new techniques to stage radio plays and through studying a sample of six thousand dramas that span the Depression, World War II, and the early years of the Cold War, Verma makes a case for the way radio drama represented the changing dynamics of American culture. The recordings “index a variety of aspects of social life,” he says, as most dramas promoted a “plurality of messages.” Even though that might not reveal Verma as critical of what Adorno called the “culture industry,” he nevertheless agrees that Americans listened “in a state of incredulous credulity toward the inducements before them” that generated “agnosticism about the ‘ultimate’ social meaning of the form itself” (p. 11).

Driven by sponsorship in the 1920s, a new “stopwatch aesthetic” normalized lengths of shows and seasons and routinized the radio as part of daily American life. At the same time, broadcasters looked to populate their audiences’ minds with motion pictures of the imagination, and Verma’s analysis of these aesthetics is notable. In producing these “dramas of space and time” he observes an increased emphasis on perspective and audioposition. To orient listeners, radio producers adhered to mainstream theater conventions to construct an audio setting that conjured images of the stage. ^{Footnote 15} Verma uses the term “audioposition” to denote the position of both the listener and characters as marked by sound effects, dialogue, and composition. New microphones that produced manipulated or directional sounds and innovative physical layouts of the studio helped to both cement and transcend time and space. Broadcasters experimented with new styles, and listeners became adept at recognizing standard sounds across broadcasts. By 1937, audioposition had become so ingrained in the radio industry for both producers and listeners that “meaningful audioposition affected all levels of production” and “whole aesthetic projects hinged on the result, sometimes with political effects, since audioposition suggests alignment” (p. 47). Verma observes this alignment in two audioposition styles that arose during the Depression—the “intimate” and the “kaleidosonic.” In the intimate style, listeners are positioned near isolated characters to sympathize with their alienation or as protagonists in the midst of adventure. In the kaleidosonic, most famously represented in the first half of Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds,” point of view is more objective, and the narrative moves from scene to scene without a guide to show the listener the way. The intimate works best for dramas about places and “make[s] us certain that we know people,” and the kaleidosonic was primarily used in plays about events and “make[s] us certain that we know ‘the people’” (p. 68). Both were necessary to represent New Deal fears and policies, Verma argues, with the latter style serving “to pluralize narrative perspectives in a socially inclusive manner” (p. 69). When Pearl Harbor was bombed, these styles collapsed on one another, and the radio industry, like the rest of America, retuned itself for warfare.

The Depression-era dramas of space and time were replaced with news, propaganda, and, most importantly to Verma, new psychological dramas. Interested in “interiority,” many of these plays substituted the intimate and kaleidosonic audiopositions with “signals” that represent setting but also “reveal inner truths and hidden facts” (p. 106). Radio producers had begun “to both question and reformulate how mass media organized signification in the world of the imagination” as they adapted dramas to the changed national landscape. In his analysis of plays based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as “The Hitch-Hiker,” signals were used to trigger the psyche of both listeners and characters. Verma explores the binary of passive receiver and active transmitter, commenting on contemporary studies that concluded that much of this communication was to persuade listeners to vote or to buy. In these conclusions, the listener has little agency, as propaganda and commercialization transform them into purchasers. Furthermore, “transmission tales” were used to placate listeners and convince them otherwise, ushering in a “false consciousness” in which they believed they were in control (p. 132). However, Verma contends that this view ignores the complexity of the supposed duality in 1940s radio drama, which is often upset by active listeners and passive transmitters, most especially the eavesdropper and the ventriloquist. Wartime radio may have had a nationalizing, propagandizing purpose, but in its portrayal of communication as an avenue to interiority it undermined that purpose at the same time and revealed that the “link between mass media and consciousness” is not easily answered (p. 158).

In the postwar period, too, there are few answers to how producers reconciled their attempt to understand the mind. Verma insists the radio industry did not succumb to the power of television just yet and instead continued to reflect the changing psyche of the nation, particularly Cold War anxieties and paranoia. Technology was increasingly important to the medium, including the introduction of audiotape as well as radio plays’ “obsess[ion] with technology” and fatalism in the new atomic age (p. 172). Police programs and the noir style encouraged subordination of authority and promoted a fear of communism and big government, a rebuttal of New Deal reforms, and the reclassification of national unity and community as collectivism and conformity. Culturally, then, consumers were not part of a unified community but instead, with the second Red Scare and the introduction of more local programming amid FCC recommendations, fragmented into what Lizabeth Cohen refers to as smaller “consumer subcategories” (p. 167). The large-scale production of radio dramas succeeded in developing consumers’ listening habits and educating the audience about the importance of sound in narrative and imagination. Much like Yumibe’s use of nineteenth-century color theory in analyzing the synaesthetic properties of color cinema, Verma suggests that Depression-era radio drama’s “culture was synaesthetic in quality, a theater of the mind in which sound was right, or dreamed itself to be” (p. 222). By the 1950s, however, radio had changed. The experimentation with audioposition was over and the road to interiority closed. In this way, it is a study of a bygone era as much as Rabinovitz’s study of turn-of-the-century amusement parks is.

Verma, like most radio lovers, refers to this time as the “golden age” of radio, and, almost by necessity, the study is sometimes mired by nostalgia. Even as the author admits it is impossible to listen now as people did then, millions all at once at a particular time, he suggests that the “reciprocity” between the producers and consumers of sound “is not at the forefront of our repertoire of listening habits now,” an assertion that is both vague and unsupported (p. 226). Moreover, although it is first and foremost a history of the aesthetics and cultural interpretations present in sound production, and a fine one at that, Theater of the Mind is hesitant to discuss the promotion of capitalism present in dramas or inherent in advertisements. Even within the throngs of anticommunism, even with increased FCC regulations aimed at stations that relied too much on sponsor revenue, of which a primary goal was to crack down on the radio industry oligopoly, Verma sees little connection between money and aesthetics.

Timothy Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, does not dismiss economics in the same way. His study on the music industry’s relationship with advertising covers nearly a century, from the radio boom in the 1920s until now. Like Verma, Taylor is influenced by past writings on culture, fusing the perspectives of Marx and Max Weber, along with Theodor Adorno and Raymond Williams, in attempting to comprehend the relationship between the field of cultural production, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, and capitalism. He argues that consumption has fostered capitalism for more than a hundred years and that advertising music has played a unique role in the making of the current consumer economy. He forgoes emphasizing “consumption as a social practice” for attempting to understand how this relationship between consumption and capitalism defines “how individual subjects have slowly … become increasingly, and primarily, defined as consumers” (p. 3). In his analysis, he observes three periods of consumption—from the radio age during the 1920s and the Great Depression to the rise of television in the postwar world to the “promotion of consumption as a public good” under Reagan (p. 8). Most appropriately, Taylor analyzes the new petite bourgeoisie’s role in promoting a rebranding of Thomas Frank’s “conquest of cool” into a “conquest of culture” through the trade in symbolic capital—the “hip and the cool”—and its promotion of a “new capitalism that is more culturalized than earlier ones” (p. 9). As a result, the music industry is distinctive within the field of large-scale cultural production, as its role in mass production, mass communication, and mass consumption created a new market structure that relies on the accrual of symbolic capital to survive within the field of business.

Mass-produced radios themselves were products of technological progress during the latter years of the Second Industrial Revolution. In the 1920s the consumer radio was coupled with the sponsorship model, a marriage of advertising and broadcasting that relied on a goodwill strategy to persuade listeners to become purchasers. By appealing to a broad audience, sponsors looked to create a brand halo effect. Music was key, and “programs educated listeners about their roles as consumers in an era widely viewed as a kind of technological modernity, encouraging people to fashion selves through … mass-marketed goods made real and vivid—and desirable—on the radio” (p. 41). The debate between classical music, preferred by advertising agencies, and popular music, namely jazz, preferred by sponsors, was replaced with the jingle during the Depression as the goodwill strategy was replaced by the hard sell. Because the Depression undermined the stability of the capitalist system, companies began to appeal directly to consumers. They began to use upbeat jingles that both sold the brand and acted as an avenue of musical expression in which a “hard-sell message could be sugarcoated with a catchy tune” (p. 73). Taylor’s analysis of the rise and fall of the jingle from Depression-era radio to its use in television ads from the 1950s until the 1980s reveals that advertisers used music in both effecting and adapting to the changing cultural landscape. Like Neil Verma, Taylor concludes that postwar radio emphasized psychology. Instead of exploring Cold War anxieties and interiority, however, Taylor examines the use of emotional selling to bypass consumer rationality and appeal to their desires and fears via radio waves and television signals.

Here, too, Taylor references the seminal work of Lizabeth Cohen on postwar consumer culture. As consumption increased and Americans’ identities as citizens conflated with their identities as consumers, music was more commonly used in advertising for its emotionality. Although using music for its affective potential was only slowly introduced in advertising, “since the late 1970s,” Taylor claims, “the ideology of affect has become so deeply ingrained in the culture of production of advertising music that composers routinely refer to music’s almost magical powers to influence consumers” (p. 124). Even with the reliance on jingles in both radio and television in the 1950s, the hard sell of the postwar era focused on combining commerce with civic duty. This practice was slowly phased out over the next two decades, replaced by an emphasis on emotion and mood, as well as a search for authenticity in advertising, especially as consumers were becoming immune to hard-sell tactics. At the same time, advertisers discovered that investing in the youth market in the 1960s would yield increases in their stock of both symbolic and economic capital. Advertising could be used to appease countercultural trends, appealing to a generation through introducing rock music to encourage consumerism, just as many members of the movement came to view materialism as anathema. Ultimately, a “new capitalism” arose in the decades following World War II in which a trade in symbolic capital, or the “artistic” critique of “capitalism’s inauthenticity,” became as important to the survival of a business as did a strict trade in economic capital. One must not view advertising and culture separately, Taylor reasons, as the “advertising industry co-opted youth and the counterculture as much as it was shaped by them” (p. 176). Even so, advertising in this way worked, and it continued to work, when twenty years later companies used music to allow the now middle-aged baby boomers to recapture their youth and open up their significantly deeper pocketbooks.

In the 1980s, consumption was tantamount to being American. The Reagan administration encouraged both consumers and businesses to engage in free-market capitalism. In this environment, market segmentation increased (supported by catalysts like MTV), Americans increasingly identified as consumers, and the advertising and music industries corporatized and moved closer together. The use of popular music in advertising continued to grow, and companies attempted to reap the benefits from the good faith fostered by artists, sometimes to adverse effects, as when many perceived the use of The Beatles’ “Revolution” in a Nike commercial as sacrilege. Nonetheless, in the 1990s and 2000s artists looked to use their music in advertisements more than ever. With the steady decrease in compact disc sales, the decline of MTV’s cultural cachet, and an emergent youth less concerned with the perceived drop in symbolic capital caused by “selling out,” the advertising and music industries adjusted their relationship with artists. As Taylor explains, “The erosion of meaningful distinctions between the advertising and music industries has resulted in a convergence not only of content and commerce but also of the marketing of popular musicians” (p. 224). “Musicians are thus branding themselves as any other commodity,” agents willing to conquer culture through the trade in symbolic capital that manifests in the hip and the cool (p. 229). There is no such thing as advertising music; there is just music.

The result of this process was the creation of a “new capitalism” fueled by the large-scale production of advertising music and populated by the symbolic transactions of what Taylor, borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, calls the new petite bourgeoisie. Advertisers and musicians, varying in their educational and cultural capital, belong to the new petite bourgeoisie in that they are producers within the advertising industry as a field of cultural production. As intermediaries between lowbrow and highbrow culture, the petite bourgeoisie was at once an important stopgap to the haute bourgeoisie’s production and consumption of “legitimate culture,” otherwise known as high art. The author contends, however, that the new petite bourgeoisie is less interested in social and cultural mobility and more concerned with retaining “large amounts of knowledge of the hip and the cool—their form of capital—that can be employed in their field of cultural production” (p. 235). Legitimate culture is of little concern to the new generation of producers whose focus is on honing their own creativity within a field that will make them money. Commerce and commodification is commonplace in new capitalism, and the acceptance of its ubiquity has allowed the “new petite bourgeoisie’s quest for legitimacy” to “erode the value of high culture and its credibility as mediators” (p. 239). In this way, producers have been successful in their conquest of culture, or at the least, in their recognition that commercial culture is so dominant that their appreciation of the hip and the cool serves to convert their symbolic capital into money, to make the new petite bourgeoisie essential to capitalism’s survival, for better or worse.

The sensuous consumer was integral in this process and remains at the forefront of new capitalism. “Music in advertising has helped make us into the consumers we are,” Taylor confirms, “for music’s relationship to the body and its ability to address listeners emotionally have made it a powerful tool for advertisers at least since the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s” (p. 2). The Sounds of Capitalism is an excellent dissection of music’s influence on consumer culture as used in advertising, and its thesis on the transformation of capitalism reflects generational changes within culture that necessarily proposes the potential for future deviation. Although less concerned with consumer habitus in favor of the production of consumption as detailed in the field of advertising music, echoes of the “sounds of capitalism” can be heard throughout media, across the century. In Moving Color, Joshua Yumibe recognizes that experiments in chromolithography and color music were not entirely accepted as legitimate forms of culture, yet the film industry nevertheless “extolled cinema as a new democratic art that can uplift working-class and immigrant spectators through the inculcation of an American middlebrow sensibility” (p. 119). The democratization of culture, or blurring the distinctions between the highbrow and lowbrow, is an important part of all of the studies outlined here. These are the stories of the making of popular culture in the twentieth century, primarily defined by businesses built around new forms of “art” or “entertainment” within fields of cultural production that market their products or experiences to consumers at the level of their senses, a form of cultural capital all its own, as well as influence taste and convert symbolic capital to economic capital and vice versa. ^{Footnote 16}

Kenneth Lipartito asserts that to study business as a field of practice, it is essential to study culture in the same way. To understand the market broadly and capitalism specifically, one must understand how the former is made and how the latter is transformed through the influence of practice on the symbolic market, not in one fell swoop but over time. To do this, historians must study economics from a “cultural perspective” and pay “much greater attention to symbols, discourses and meanings.” ^{Footnote 17} In the books I have reviewed in this article, the field of business would necessarily have to be studied more directly. To best understand the past, it is vital to examine producers as they relate to the businesses involved in the field of cultural production. How does Pathé’s motivation and strategy in cornering the market on color film in the 1900s effect the trade in symbolic capital, or the conversion of symbols to money, within the field of film production? In what ways did the proprietors of amusement parks believe money could be made off the middle class, and were the rail companies satisfied with the coupling of line and park? How did radio and television executives seek to use their own broadcasts or relationships with cultural producers, whether actors or musicians, to sell products and protect their bottom lines? In all cases, the authors could focus as much on the purchaser as the producer, as much on the consumer as what is being consumed. They address some of these questions implicitly, if not explicitly, and in each case practice theory best explains the intersection of the fields of business and cultural production and how this relationship reflects the agency of producers, the market, and the consumer.

In his closing remarks, Lipartito defines “the history of business” as “a narrative of how we remake ourselves, and the consequence of doing so,” recognizing the importance of individual and collective identity in the discursive processes in which we define ourselves as agents working within and effecting larger social or economic structures. ^{Footnote 18} Pierre Bourdieu says that the “struggle itself creates the history of the field.” ^{Footnote 19} Time and again, newcomers displace the existing model within the field of cultural production, and they habituate consumers to new forms of practice. History is continually made and remade, and like the producers themselves, sensuous consumers are neither ambivalent nor complacent about their roles within these processes, especially in their consumption of both symbolic and real goods.