losses." Mechanization would enable workers to "find relief from otherwise intolerable conditions in higher wages, more leisure, better recreation." Only a "nostalgic" attachment to the work ethic and other obsolete ideals obscured the "prospect of final release from labor." With Patten, Tugwell believed that the coming age of abundance demanded a "new morality"—in Patten's more colorful formulation, one that challenged the cultural prestige of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, the "philosophy of development through pain," and the moral "art of wretchedness."

The second phase of the New Deal brought the political philosophy of consumerism to its fullest public acceptance. The early New Deal, with its "planned scarcity in agriculture" and its "collusive controls in industry," gave "priority to production over consumption," as Horace Kallen, Tugwell, and other consumerists pointed out. After 1935, however, the Roosevelt administration listened more attentively to Keynes and the Keynesians, made serious efforts to improve mass purchasing power, and even took a few halting steps toward the full-blown consumerist community contemplated by enthusiasts like Kallen. All of capitalism's ills, Kallen thought—the whole problem of social justice—could be reduced to the failure to see the worker as a consumer. The glorification of the producer—economic man—had thwarted the eighteenth-century promise of capitalism. The Declaration of Independence had recognized the primacy of consumption when it upheld the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So had Adam Smith, who rightly took the position that "consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," in Kallen's words. But these eighteenth-century insights had been forgotten, Kallen argued. "The farther [economists] are from Adam Smith, the more dominantly is their theme the producer.... Marx, the revolutionist, is even more deeply absorbed in him than John [Stuart] Mill, the traditionalist." Under the influence of Marx, Ruskin, and other false prophets, the labor movement adopted as its favorite slogans the "dignity of labor" and the "right to work." "Labor was lifted up from a menial necessity into a free man's dignity" and its "inherent indignities" and "servility" mistakenly attributed to the exploitation of one class by another.

Only when men and women came to see work in its true light, Kallen thought—as a necessarily disagreeable means to the "good life"—would they organize it in such a way as to minimize its importance, to relegate it to the periphery of social life, and to install consumption in its place as

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