Reviewed in Journal of American History

By David Blanke
Texas A&M University
Corpus Christi, Texas
September 2005

Sarah Elvins argues that local identity was much stronger and more persistent in the minds of many retailers and consumers than is commonly assumed during an era that saw the rise of national brand advertising, the spread of national chain stores, and the pervasive reach of modern consumer culture. Focusing on the cities of Buffalo and Rochester, Elvins shows how western New Yorkers used their regional institutions to “put a local spin on national trends and innovations” (p. xv). Retailers such as the Sibley, Lindsay, and Curr department store assumed the role of municipal boosters, conserving a sense of local pride while reeducating patrons on the values of modern materialism. For their part, consumers engaged in an active dialogue with these retailers, typically through their purchases but also by more explicit means, that sustained this sense of home rule. While the island communities of the late Gilded Age were seemingly colonized by a national marketplace, Elvins concludes that the “emphasis on local identities and local roots cultivated by retailers endured through the 1920s and well into the Depression and beyond” (p. 140).

While convincing throughout, Elvins is most persuasive in Chapteres 5 and 6, in which she analyzes the effects of the Great Depression on the region. Here, consumption provided a potential corrective to the debilitating psychological effects of such impersonal economic forces. Local retailers took the lead in organizing festivities such as Buffalo Days or the Monroe County Pledge for Prosperity that defended traditional notions of self-reliance, sustained the local economy, and improved their bottom line. While ultimately unsuccessful, their actions support Elvins’s view that regional citizens saw consumption as “the most effective means by which every individual could make a difference” (p. 138). In earlier sections, Elvins mines trade journals and other prescriptive literature to show that these trends, so evident during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s, were emblematic of the relationship between local sales and celebrations. The near comical tempest unleashed by retailers’ failed attempt to rename Buffalo’s Main Street—they had sought to distance the central business district from negative associations generated by Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel—was fed by a local inferiority complex typical of many cities in the modern era. Buffeted by the impersonal qualities of modernity, retailers and consumers consistently found ways to refashion a sense of local community.

The book’s greatest strength is in connecting these forms of psychic tension with the burgeoning consumer marketplace of western New York. Historians have long noted these anxieties, from the decline of a producer ideology to the hedonistic thrills of materialism. Elvins embraces this historiographical imperative and is diligent in separating out—when sources allow—the various contradictions that sustained these public psychoses. While Elvins’s gaze upon Rochester and Buffalo is steady and critical, however, the same cannot be said of their rural hinterlands. The reader is left to separate out what is regional and what is urban. Still, this minor criticism should not significantly detract from an imaginative, well-written, and convincingly argued text.

Journal of American History
September 2005