Frugality's American History: Puritan Sumptuary Laws to WWII Bacon Grease

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Behavioral science defines frugality as restrained acquisition and maximizing the use of what one already owns in service of a longer-term goal. The episode traces how that idea shifted in America. In the 17th and 18th centuries Puritans and Quakers tied simple living to moral purity, and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania passed sumptuary laws penalizing ostentatious dress, while the Great Awakening of the 1730s preached simplicity as a path to salvation. In the antebellum era Alexander Turney Stewart opened the Marble Palace department store at 280 Broadway in New York, and minister Lyman Beecher warned that materialism would rot the social order.

In the Gilded Age Thorstein Veblen coined conspicuous consumption, and department store magnate John Wanamaker grew rich selling luxury while preaching thrift in private. World War I recast thrift as patriotism, the Great Depression made it a survival skill, and World War II turned it into mobilization, with companies like Texaco and the Bell Telephone system buying ads that urged Americans to consume less. After 1945 frugality collapsed as a mainstream practice and reemerged in the 1970s as an environmental and philosophical choice, from thrift stores to the degrowth movement's idea of frugal abundance.

• During World War II Americans handed over 538 million pounds of kitchen waste fats for munitions production.
• The same war effort produced 50 million victory gardens, 800 million pounds of recycled tin and 23 million tons of collected paper.
• Research cited in the episode found a frugal mindset buffered college students against binge drinking.
• Stuart Chase was among the figures leading the National Thrift Movement during the Depression era.
• The 1976 National Science and Technology Policy, Organization and Priorities Act pushed frugal use of resources to sustain future technological development.