The Art of the Commodity: Print Culture, Postcards, and Politics in Progressive Era America

Abstract

This dissertation examines the long history of the postcard craze in the United States, from its roots in the 1870s through the early decades of the twentieth century. An examination of the medium sheds new light on America’s rapid transition from a society based on production to one based on consumption. As a crucial new form of mass media, the postcard was a material node operating at the intersection of the nation state, the private sector, and—through its inclusion of a handwritten inscription—the agency of the modern individual. Engaging critically with the fields of art history, material culture studies, and design studies, across four primary chapters, this dissertation asks what key components of the medium—its reproducibility, color, spatiality, and materiality—can reveal about the nature of mass produced goods as they proliferated throughout American society. In doing so, it expands on established materialist methodologies placing them in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on themes of gender, race, and disability as crucial axes of discrimination. Through a central focus on the postcard as an exemplary instance of a craze, this dissertation interrogates a dialectic inherent to industrial modernity between liberation and oppression, between pleasure and violence, and between the individual and society.