'That kind of luxe just ain't for us': the progressive lineage of Macklemore's and Lorde's attacks on the pleasures of the poor.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus

MACKLEMORE AND LORDE, artists who have built their careers upon songs attacking the desire for luxuries among African Americans, received the highest commendations from the music establishment this year in the form of multiple Grammy awards. Their songs continue a long tradition, rooted in progressivism, of rich people protesting against the pleasures of the poor.

In the early 19th century, the great majority of Americans were confined to farms where they had to produce their own food and clothing. Their homes contained little other than utilitarian furnishings. Their only source of entertainment was books, and most that were available were moral parables. They rarely if ever traveled more than a few miles from where they were born.

By the end of the 19th century, the material conditions of the poor were radically transformed. Most bought their clothing from stores and most owned clothes whose sole function was to make them attractive. They ate food that had come from all over the country. They drank cold beer and ate ice cream. In cities they shopped at department stores. In the country they purchased goods via catalogs and mail order. They read dime novels whose sole purpose was to provide them with fun. They attended amusement parks, movie theaters, and vaudeville shows. They went dancing. They rode on trains. Most importantly, when the poor acquired these new pleasures, they usually did so with no apparent shame.

During this revolution, self-appointed champions of the poor admonished their charges for indulging in what liberals today derisively refer to as "consumerism." Thorstein Veblen, the son of a wealthy Minnesota farming family, produced the most influential progressive critique of consumption in a series of books and articles, most notably the scholarly classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen lamented that rising wages and the availability of consumer goods were leading working-class Americans to lives of undisciplined pleasure-seeking. Untrained in the art of restraint, when the poor did gain more than subsistence wages they spent it on useless fun. What others had "euphemistically spoken of as a rising standard of living" Veblen saw as simply the "cumulative growth of wasteful expenditures."

A host of progressive academic studies of working-class spending habits aimed to determine the exact degree of material wealth--and not one dollar more--that would provide, as one put it, "the power to ensure one's primary...