Consumer capitalism

    The fundamental unit of meaning in capitalist and economic thought is the object , that is, capitalism relies on the creation of a consumer culture, a large segment of the population that is not producing most of what it is consuming. Since capitalism, like mercantilism, is fundamentally based on distributing goods—moving goods from one place to another—consumers have no social relation to the people who produce the goods they consume. 
    In subsistence economies, such as colonial American societies, people have real social relations to the producers of the goods they consume. But when people no longer have social relations with others who make the objects they consume, that means that the only relation they have is with the object itself. So part of capitalism as a way of thinking is that people become "consumers," that is, they define themselves by the objects they purchase rather than the objects they produce. 

The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village: http://www.hfmgv.org/museum/default.asp

From the Kingwood College Library, a web site on American cultural history of the 1920s: http://www.nhmccd.edu/contracts/lrc/kc/decade20.html

From a student, a rich site on The Roaring Twenties: http://www.louisville.edu/~kprayb01/1920s.html

Consumerism and the New Capitalism: An Essay by R.Cronk
http://www.westland.net/venice/art/cronk/consumer.htm