Theft at the Public Till
cultural milieu. The result was that implicit understandings were common to the entire group doing the governing. Their initial domain was small. The New England town meeting perhaps best epitomizes the close working knowledge the governing had of the governed. Change as the fabric of an American life was well off into a distant future. The institutions that the Founders gave us were if anything biased against change. It was made far more easy to kill a proposal than to pass it. Each level of change if more all encompassing in scope had its own set of barriers. Our institutions thus had a conservative nature that was only upset in times of war or distinct national emergency. Abraham Lincoln made the first set of sweeping changes to this institutional bias, but his changes did not survive reconstruction. It took the Depression to allow a mandate for change to be implemented. Government since then has been more active, but active in a pattern established at this time of structural change. Daniel Boorstin suggests that "consumption communities" developed in the late nineteenth century as a creation of advertising. They consisted of people with a feeling of shared well-being, shared risks, common interests, and common concerns, which came from consuming the same kinds of goods. National advertising of name brands promised the consumer a com- munity seal of approval, the security of buying or doing what other respect- able people across the country were doing. Advertisements promised that in the judgment of experts the product was the best to be had and invited the consumer to join others in enjoying the benefits. According to Boorstin, "The peculiar importance of American consumption communities made it easier to assimilate, to 'Americanize,' the many millions who arrived here in the century after the Civil War. Joining consumption communities became a characteristic American mode of acculturation." Just as new immigrants were assimilated into American culture, so too were millions of American farmers, factory workers, and others as advertising exposed a wide variety of people to the same ideas, images, and products. As Americans became ever more mobile, they moved within the new national markets and expected to find familiar products wherever they went. The industrial revolution transformed the country from a land of excess
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