Ode to the shopping mall

IN ALMOST all its modern crises, America has looked to its merchants for leadership. In 1914 John Wanamaker, the greatest retailer of the age, made headlines by dispatching 2,000 tons of food aid to Belgium—then suggesting America buy the little country to make the peace. In 1942 his New York rival, Macy’s, announced it was cancelling its annual Thanksgiving parade and donating 650 pounds of balloon rubber to the war effort: “We’ve enlisted!” Department stores, America’s temples of commerce, could always be relied upon to sell war bonds with panache. In a Younkers store in Des Moines, Iowa, a coffin for Adolf Hitler was lowered mechanically from the ceiling to the floor whenever a sale was made.

Masters of self-promotion, the great retailers did not suffer by being associated with patriotism. Yet rather than deplore their opportunism, Americans celebrated the consumption it was designed to promote. During the Great Depression, they rallied to the retailers’ “Buy Now” campaigns. Shopping was not merely the surest way to boost the economy; it was urbanites’ main community activity. As recently as September 2001, President George W. Bush hinted at that dual truth when urging Americans to shrug off terrorism and hit the stores. By contrast, the current crisis is the first in over a century in which retailers have provided no comfort....