Consumerism was about practices and expectations. On the one hand, it praised industrial and commercial trends that evolved in America by World War I and would characterize the country afterward. In this sense, to endorse consumerism meant to validate a world of science, technology, and marketing, which sparked extraordinary productivity, and which offered great opportunities to hard-driving entrepreneurs and far-flung corporations. In everyday terms, to subscribe to consumerism was to believe in capitalism, or free enterprise, or private property as a positive force in American life.

On the other hand, once the right economic practices flourished, Americans expected them to generate substantial material rewards. Thus there emerged a notion that work is not so much a means by which people create and maintain political freedom but more an activity by which they earn enough to buy the endless supply of commodities that capitalism can produce. In other words, within the context of consumerism, labor is regarded less as an activity that enables people to be effective citizens and more as the effort that enables them to prosper as consumers. From which it follows that America's greatest achievement may be not the republicanism which Lincoln struggled to preserve but the health and comfort which America's free economy can provide for more hard-working people than ever in human history.