In Cheap We Trust
The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue
By: Lauren Weber
Published: September 7, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
ISBN: 9780316030281
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
"Part of the reason I embrace the word cheap is that it embodies some of the contradictions, ambivalence, and confusion we feel about money", writes self professed cheapskate Lauren Weber in her entertaining and thought provoking book about the changing nature of thrift in America In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue. The author takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of American history, exploring how different times had different social attitudes toward thrift, and dispels many of the myths surrounding how Americans thought about saving money. The author points out as well, that thrift is returning to America as a social virtue, and she sees saving becoming a social badge of honor following a period of reckless consumer spending and debt.
Lauren Weber grew up with a father who was very cheap with money for household expenses, but was very generous with charitable donations and with providing good educational opportunities for his children. His dualistic approach to spending forms an archetype of the American historical relationship toward personal spending and saving. The author points out that many people will state emphatically that Americans used to be savers in the good old days, not like the irresponsible spenders of the modern era. Lauren Weber demonstrates that thrift was not always a highly regarded American virtue. She begins her study with a description of Benjamin Franklin, often considered the epitome of thrift. While Franklin may have practiced caution with money some of the time, he was free spending the rest of the time. As America changed from the early agricultural era, where saving everything was a matter of survival, to the industrial world of consumerism, the attitude toward thrift changed many times as well.
Lauren Weber (photo left) describes how thriftiness, as a cultural and racial characteristic, became part of the shameful prejudice against Jews and Chinese immigrants. The alleged cheapness was seen by nativists as feigning poverty or for undercutting already low wage levels. During the latter 19th Century, extravagantly spending Gilded Age millionaires were the idealized role models, while savers were mistrusted as being misers and somehow dangerous. The First World War, however, brought about a fresh wave of saving as a patriotic activity. That sense of frugality, in the form of buying heavily promoted war bonds, was out of fashion once again in the free wheeling Roaring Twenties. The Great Depression, out of necessity, and the Second World War, through war bond drives, ushered in a fresh wave of saving. The post war consumer based world, awash in Keynesian economic theory of demand and spending as a basis of a strong economy, removed the any remaining social support for frugality.
For me, the power of the book is in Lauren Weber's even handed treatment of the past, present, and future of thrift in America. Not being satisfied with the mythology that saving money was always a way of life of all previous generations, the author demonstrates the constant changes in social attitudes toward frugality. On the one hand, Americans are told to save for their retirement and are warned that savings levels are dangerously low for most people. At the same time, the general public is encouraged to spend money on consumer goods to help strengthen the economy. This ambivalent, and often openly contradictory cultural view of money is indicative of American historical attitudes as a whole. For Lauren Weber, the idea that people saved money throughout history, in the good old days, is simply a myth. Her research proves that point conclusively. At the same time, she describes a new culture of frugality that is arising in reaction to the free spending, and debt ridden society of the recent past. Again, the author shows the reader that constant contradictory nature of social mood and ideas about money.
I highly recommend the very readable and highly enlightening book In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue by Lauren Weber, to anyone seeking a well researched and balanced social history of thrift in America. The author presents the changing cultural views of thrift, and how even the supposed virtue of saving money, has often been used as a tool of bigots. Lauren Weber makes clear that at some moments in American history, saving money has been noble and even patriotic, while at other times, thrift has been seen as dangerous and subversive to the good of the country as a whole. The author describes how Americans have never been able to make up their collective minds about the ultimate virtue of thrift.
Read the informative and often quirky history of thrift in America In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue by Lauren Weber, and enjoy the ride through this charming, and insightful history of thrift in America. Discover the joys of saving money, and learn how the concept of frugality was attached to bigoted treatment of minority groups. At the same time, discover how cheapness is once again becoming an admired cultural phenomenon, as the pendulum of history swings back in support of savers. As throughout American history, contradictory attitudes toward spending and saving money are part of the national way of life.
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