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It would be false to suggest that Americans have been unanimously thrifty in all earlier times. The settlement of the continent, as history teaches, was accompanied by a squandering of natural resources and wildlife on a tragic scale. By the ripening end of the 19th century, Thorstein Veblen could chart, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, the "conspicuous consumption" and "conspicuous waste" that had become the crass proof of status among the very well off. Still, most Americans were not in that privileged class. In fact, they still had the hang of their frugal daily ways when these became indispensable during the lean years of the Great Depression. World War II ended the Depression, of course, and also became the occasion—with everybody saving everything including tinfoil and kitchen fat for the war effort—of the last great popular conserving binge the nation has known.
Then, suddenly, old-fashioned frugality was out of style. What happened? The answer is that the consumer society got born, the fruit of the nation's determination to extend and expand the economic successes that war production had achieved. Growing production and high employment were the aims, and high and growing consumption was indispensable to the formula. Thrift survived in the moral code, but both commercial and political leaders urged people not to save what they had but to get more of what was available. In a business dip of the late 1950s, somebody asked President Eisenhower what citizens could do to help the situation. Ike's terse reply: "Buy anything." Americans, by and large, became used to doing just that.
The consumer society's success in achieving abundance was stunning, but not all of the costs showed up on the ledger sheets. One of them that did not was the spirit of frugality. It was over whelmed partly by a public atmosphere that construed consumption as almost a patriotic duty. It was, as well, violently broken down by the coming of a cornucopia of goods, from plates and cups to razors and lighters, that were made of synthetics and were designed to be used briefly and thrown away. The whole way of doing business soon produced what Futurist Alvin Toffler called a "throw-away mentality."
Now, at last, the success of the consumer economy, as well as its for has brought the country right back to the need for individual frugality. It may be that Americans will never again find and necessary, or even feasible, to save slivers of soap and the straight pins out of shirts. Still, the need to curtail waste seems to be homing in again. It is consoling to know that the spirit is there, needing only reawakening by the irresistible force of necessity.