In Nation of Strangers, Packard argued that the increasing mobility of the American workforce was destined to have unforeseen and deleterious effects on society. To begin with he stated the fundamental problem :

Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time. A great many people are disturbed
by the feeling that they are rootless or increasingly anonymous, that they are living in a continually
changing environment where there is little sense of community.

He then identified several major traffic flows of the nation's populace.

He discussed the reasons for these phenomena, mostly employment related, and acknowledged the benefits that such mobility might arguably provide, but then he listed the negative effects of what he called the "Curious Life Styles of Loosely Rooted People"

Surprisingly, for it's age, even some of the book's remedies are still germane. Packard called for : greater corporate responsibility to limit compulsory relocation of employees; people to work closer to their homes in order to be able to spend more time with their families and in their neighborhoods; people to acquire fixed second homes, vacation homes that the family would all return to regardless of where individual members were located; improvement of four year community colleges to encourage the young to stay closer to home during their college years; strengthening family ties, most controversial among the methods would be steps to salvage marriage and to reduce the growth of "one layer communities," the types of massive retirement communities whose location you can see on the map in Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere--as he puts it, the self-segregation of older Americans represents a neglect of the responsibility to nurture and share wisdom, "independence at the expense of generational interdependence." The electoral evidence offers us a probable additional remedy that would help, removing the Social Welfare Net that makes such isolation feasible.

In these proposals, as in most of the book, Packard demonstrates a really canny understanding of problems that other people of the time had not even yet recognized. It is well worth reading now, but one wishes it had been read and understood better then. Had it been, that map might look a lot different and be a little less frightening.

GRADE : A

What is perhaps most interesting about the early market researchers is the amount of attention paid to class: they imagine, for instance, that the subtle gradations in difference between Buick and cadillac is a telling sympton of American class differences. That is one reason that the Edsel failed, because it was based on the idea that families would "trade-up" to an Edsel if it was positioned as slightly higher-class than a Ford. You can also learn a good deal about life in the 50s: before flouride, people brushed their teeth in the morning, and not for hygiene but for cosmetics. It is a testament to the power of the advertising (and the research) that we now all brush our teeth at night. Packard is long on examples and short on analysis, and he waffles between being golly-gee-willickers impressed with the "scientists" and their methods or repulsed by the cynicism and naked manipulation of their backers. Their definitely is the sense, which is so unfamiliar today, that these guys in lab coats are really strange birds, but surely they must represent progress. After all, isn't it a good thing that people brush at night? Packard is not your standard culture curmudgeon like Galbraith or, much worse, Adorno. Class, of course, is much less important today than then, but it is still important. Packard relates the fascinating story of why people went to loan sharks instead of the wood-panelled banks (and just think of how wood-panelled station wagons have been replaced with the plastic wheel-rims of SUVs): because the borrowers could feel superior to the loan sharks, even if they had to pay higher rates. I suggest that the publisher reissue Packard.

Written at the cusp of the 'consumer revolution', this book is both a quaint historical piece and a prophesy of what was to come. The tangential thesis of the book is that by the mid-fifties, the standard problems in capitalism -- those of production and distribution of goods -- were solved, but that this introduced another problem: all of these goods must be consumed. So, it became necessary to step up the techniques used to market these goods.

Advertising was nothing new, but the psychological intricacy and sophistication in it was ratcheted up significantly. Using Freud, Jung, and whatever other foundation proved workable, social scientists and psychoanalysts honed their skills to develop an ever-growing repertoire of tricks that would induce us all to spend and consume at ever-higher levels.

Two things make the book relevant today: 1) nothing has changed either in the economic situation or in the techniques, except that both have become even more intense (two thirds of the 2002 U.S. GNP depends on consumer spending); and 2) no other book has yet come forward to do a better job at showing, in great anecdotal detail and for a broad audience, what depth marketing is all about.

It is hard to believe that one of the most perceptive and important books on the shaping of modern society is out of print. This book shows how the workings of our minds have been scientifically evaluated, and this knowledged used to manipulate them. Not in any 'X-Files' manner, just straight out appealing to our basic desires and needs. Read this book, and then as yourself what every ad and salesperson is doing to you when you see them. It's all there, so they aren't hard to work out.

Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers" is a well known compendium and analysis of the nature and development of social classification during the 1950's-a period marked by explosive growth of the U.S. economy, especially among young white families. The thesis of the book, as explained by Packard, is that rather than the creation of a largely classless society in which "all" were gaining the benefits of democratic capitalism, the creation of an "affluent" society simply highlighted and created new stratifications, both horizontal, and vertical, of social class based on race, religion, behavioral and consumptive practices.

Packard sought to demonstrate his thesis by compiling and synthesizing then current sociological studies, as well as conducting informal interviews among members of various economic classes, policy experts, and professionals in different cities, towns, and states. There is little in the book that represents original thought, but the form, promotion and style of the book made it a best-selling nonfiction work among the general public.

It was precisely these qualities that drew so much ire from many critics, especially those drawn from the circles of New York intelligentsia-it was often attacked for its own pretense to provinciality and romanticism of an agrarian, frontier past. The Status Seekers nonetheless stands as a significant work in American Studies, precisely because of its ability to bring scholarly information, especially regarding the vertical stratifications of race and religion, to bear on the nature of class in America, and stands out as a dissenting voice in the consensus ideology and politics of containment that ruled public discourse at the time. Other criticisms of the book, such as the charge that it portrayed status seeking voyeuristically and hypocritically--- insofar as buyers used it to advance their own status---- are charges more appropriate to the willingness of the buying public to commodify and use as a tool any weapon in the fight to gain greater status. While books are meant to be read, conveying information about such timely topics is bound to get caught up in the politics of the very phenomenon studied. That is not Packard's fault.

There are other criticisms, more from a contemporary standpoint, that could be made of Packard's work. It is true that he took from conservative liberalism a predisposition to see affluence as the problem, rather than the lack of it for so many people within the society he studied. It is also true that he played more to the prejudices of the day, especially regarding race and gender, and failed to aggressively question some of the roots of the problems he sought in terms of these prejudices. But the point of his text was not to make a critique of American institutions as such, but rather the interpretations of those institutions as held and manipulated by consumers for their own benefit.

On the one hand, we should chalk this up to Packard's Cold War liberalism. Moreover, as pointed out in the excellent introductory essay by Daniel Horowitz, Packard was once a socialist radical, but experienced the realpolitik of Stalin's Soviet Union negotiations with Hitler, and correctly understood the USSR as a form of state capitalism (much like C. L. R. James). It would be worst sort of ex post facto presentism to hold these sorts of criticisms too hard against Packard.

Christopher W. Chase - PhD Fellow - Michigan State University

I was not entirely startled by how important a role class played in the 50s (two decades before my birth) but this was eye-opening in some ways - it seems that status played a larger role in peoples' lives then. Packard does a wonderful job of documenting all of this and it is certainly more interesting than your average sociological research book. Some of it is quite dated, some is still relevant, but overall it presents a good look at how life was 40 years ago. Recommended, if you can track down a copy.