Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 3, 142–5. 2. Ibid., 131. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Indeed, all of the books mentioned below look to the market as a site of messy cultural transformations and contestations. 5. Fox, ‘Epitaph for Middletown,’ 104. 6. Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self Realization,’ 3–38; Lears, No Place of Grace; Susman, ‘“Personality” and the Making of Twentieth‐Century Culture,’ 271–85; Leach, Land of Desire; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Ohmann, Selling Culture, 255–66. 7. McGovern, in Sold American, examines the ways in which advertisers and other professionals expressed this, while Glickman, in Buying Power, shows the actions of consumer activists to exercise their personal market power as political. 8. Glickman, Buying Power, 36. 9. Ibid., 23–4. 10. McGovern, Sold American, 4, 18–19; Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 35, describes McGovern’s arguments. 11. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 8. 12. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 108, 9. 13. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 13. 14. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 132; McGovern, Sold American, 37. 15. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 15, 8. 16. For more on the background represented here, see my Buyways, Part I: Producing a Landscape of Signs (especially the sections ‘A Nation on Wheels’ and ‘The Culture of Mobility’), 37–100. 17. Gudis, Buyways, 47. 18. ‘It was not unusual,’ Robert and Helen Lynd wrote, ‘to see a family drive up to a relief commissary in 1935 to stand in line for its four‐or five‐dollar weekly food dole.’ Quoted in Flink, Car Culture, 154; Rhoades, ‘One of the Groups Middletown Left Out,’ 76; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 147–9. 19. Gudis, Buyways, 44–7. 20. Wall, Inventing the American Way, 6, 9. Wall describes the capitalist crisis of the 1930s leading New Dealers, especially those on the left, to call for ‘an extension of majoritarian democracy from the political into the economic realm’ (6). I understand Wall’s use of ‘majoritarian demoracy’ here to refer to how Roosevelt, industrial unionists, and others in the New Deal coalition associated democracy with mutual or collective interests rather than the individual rights and libertarian interests that industrialists and their allies associated with democracy. On the American Way publicity campaign, see Gudis, Buyways, 207, and Ewen, PR!, 311–20. At the top of these advertising images is the tagline ‘There’s No Way Like the American Way.’ One features a family cheerily driving through the rural countryside; in another they have stopped the car for a picnic in a picturesque spot; in a third Dad triumphantly returns home from work. 21. Updegraff captured the sentiments of the day in ‘The New American Tempo,’ 1–15. 22. Schorman, ‘“This Astounding Car for $1,500,”’ 468–523; Gudis, Buyways, 156. 23. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 9–13, 194ff. 24. Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self‐Realization,’ 21–2. 25. Gudis, Buyways, 54. 26. Tourism, in other words, served as an antidote to the anxieties and feelings of ‘weightlessness’ that Lears describes in No Place of Grace, 98–139. Also see Urry, The Tourist Gaze and Shaffer, See America First, 242–3, 248. 27. Gudis, Buyways, 54–5. 28. Many have addressed the idea of vision as appropriative, ‘imperialistic,’ or ‘magisterial,’ especially in terms of art and photography. For instance, Boime, Magisterial Gaze; Miller, The Empire of the Eye; Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 29. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 9. 30. Ibid., 5, 9, 14. 31. ‘Distributing Traffic and Trade: Decentralization and the Birth of the Strip,’ Part 2 of Gudis, Buyways, 101–62, develops these issues further. 32. Gudis, Buyways, 124–5. 33. Today, these modes of surveillance are continued by numerous other means, including photographic and radar policing of drivers, ‘cookies’ attached to Internet browsers, personal data stored on social networking sites, and ‘discount’ cards scanned at grocery and other check‐out stands. 34. See Smythe, ‘Communications,’ 4; Murdock, ‘Blindspots about Western Marxism,’ 109–19; Jhally, Codes of Advertising, 67–73; Mattelart, Advertising International, 203–4. 35. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 107. 36. Moton, What the Negro Thinks, 42; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 249, 251. 37. Admittedly, I am offering this personal litany in response to Seiler’s concluding sentences, in which he says that a republic of drivers simply cannot sustain ‘a historically nourished sense of community, a more‐than‐superficial awareness of the conditions of others, and the imaginative faculties to put oneself in their shoes’ (Republic of Drivers, 151). 38. Banham, Los Angeles, chap. 11, ‘Ecology IV: Autopia,’ 213–22 39. Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular,”’ 453.