John F. Schumaker's article "Dead Zone

In John F. Schumaker's article "Dead Zone: The Monster of American Consumer Culture", he writes, "While most societies throughout history have organized themselves in order to curb natural greed, America’s devoted consumers are encouraged to respect, nurture and act on the subtlest stirrings of their avarice. As a result materialism has reached fever pitch and continues to rise sharply." While Schumaker does make a valid point about the rise of materialism in mainstream America today, he fails to look at the historical causes and events that have shaped America into the capitalistic society we now live in. His statement also suggests that he sees America as only a single society and does not differentiate between the drives and goals of individual Americans.
In order to understand why America is in the state that it is today, we must first look back at the time before America was seen as greedy. Throughout the middle to late 1800s and into the early 1900s America was seen as the...