Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  There was also, however, a genuine appreciation of the positive role of play in human development. The pursuit of pleasure was a ‘normal impulse’, the secretary of New York’s recreation committee emphasized in 1912. Psychology ‘teaches that joy is power; that right recreation is not merely wholesome but developmental’.135 The problem was not leisure but cities’ failure to channel it in healthy directions. Dance halls and candy stores were to be supervised and regulated, not shut down. Above all, cities needed to offer more leisure themselves. Parks were laid out. Swimming pools opened. By 1890, Worcester’s Lake Park in Massachusetts attracted 20,000 visitors a day, roughly one in five of its population. In Cologne, the city built its first municipal sports ground in 1892; twenty years later, in the district of Poll, it added an athletic field, five football pitches, one hockey field and ten tennis courts. In England, Manchester bought Platt Field in 1908 and turned the former country park into a municipal leisure complex with 46 tennis courts, 13 football and 9 cricket pitches, a boating lake and a paddling pool. American cities built playgrounds with sports equipment. ‘Shall we Provide a Playground? Or Enlarge the Jail?’, leaflets asked. In 1910, Worcester offered the first of its summer playground programmes. The city paid for fifty staff and offered athletics, singing, games and sewing lessons at twenty locations. Close to 7,000 children took part every day.136 Investment in public recreation continued to grow after the First World War. Between 1925 and 1935, leisure budgets doubled. By then, there were almost 10,000 playgrounds and 8,000 softball diamonds across the United States.137 Commercial and public recreation, then, grew in tandem. Leisure in the city was a mixed economy.

  The biggest beasts were the amusement parks within easy reach of the big cities. The famous Tivoli Garden opened in Copenhagen in 1843, with a merry-go-round, scenic railway and oriental buildings. The years around 1900 witnessed a dramatic expansion. Coney Island, in Brooklyn, encompassed Dreamland, Steeplechase and Luna Park. Luna Park alone occupied 36 acres with a 200-foot high Electric Tower, reflecting pools, waterslides, a ‘trip to the moon’ and a submarine ride inspired by Jules Verne. It was a fairyland with 1,200 towers, domes and minarets. Two hundred thousand lights glimmered in the night sky (see Plate 27). Resorts such as Luna Park blended nostalgia and technology, relaxation and thrill, carnival and curiosity. In one tour, a visitor could enjoy a daring rollercoaster ride, visit a freak show, flirt and take in an Inuit village.

  What were the effects of this cocktail on urban crowds? One thesis is that commercial leisure blended diverse immigrant cultures into a more homogeneous crowd. True, in its early years, Coney Island attracted a wide range of visitors, although there was always an informal colour bar. Social and cultural mixing must not be overstated, however. By the 1920s, the elite had abandoned Coney Island, and affluent workers started to retreat to the more respectable Jersey shore. In other parts of the world, amusement parks developed their own distinct flavour, reflecting the particular social and cultural composition of their surroundings. Blackpool, the premier English resort, with a pleasure beach that catered for up to a quarter of a million visitors on a bank holiday, made much of its democratic quality. In the words of the Blackpool Times in 1904, the resort brought together, ‘the merchant and the mechanic, the lady of fashion and the factory lass . . . the mightiest and the meanest’.138 By comparison with Coney Island, Blackpool was always more uniform, a Protestant crowd from the same industrial hinterland, with a shared sense of respectable, orderly fun. Still, a class divide ran through the resort, and the town made sure to keep fairgrounds out of the middle-class North Shore. In colonial Singapore, the New World amusement park opened in 1923. Previously segregated public space was opened to all classes and races. From six o’clock to midnight there were boxing matches, gambling, movies, theatre and restaurants. The cabaret had the longest dance floor in Malaya. Its success, however, depended less on hybrid fusion than on the range of cultural genres it offered different ethnic audiences. Next door to a bangsawan Malayan opera, a Chinese troupe performed Chinese opera. Popular dances included the Malayan ronggeng but also European dances including flamenco. Theatre programmes alternated between Shakespeare, Dutch plays and Hindustani fairy tales.139

  By 1914, cities in industrial nations were networks of gas, water and communication with a material lifestyle fundamentally different from that in the country. In summertime, residents in small towns and rural areas, used to fetching their water from wells in buckets, watched with trepidation the arrival of tourists from the city accustomed to baths and constant running water. At the same time, department stores, discount stores, advertising and mail-order catalogues spread urban tastes and fashions to the provinces. Consumer culture did not stop at the few remaining city walls. In that sense, the city was beginning to lose some of its uniqueness.140 It was no longer necessary to live in Paris to look like a Parisian. As important as these general movements, however, was the diversity within and between cities. Metropolitan modernity was not cast from a single mould. Innovation and adaptation overlapped. Cities accommodated department stores and street sellers, cinemas and public playgrounds, hot running water in private bathrooms and standpipes in alleys and courtyards. Instead of a monotonous lifestyle and blasé mentality, cities were home to a diversity of practices, rhythms and spaces of consumption. It is unhelpful, then, to view this period as a solid shift from custom and community to commerce and individualism. Cities and their inhabitants were not passively swept away by a tsunami of goods and desires. At the same time as shops were mushrooming, cities were also forging new communities through consumption.

  5

  The Consumer Revolution Comes Home

  Bruno Taut hated clutter. One of the leading modernist architects in Weimar Germany, Taut was responsible for iconic housing developments such as the Horseshoe Estate in Berlin (1925–33), a 350-metre-long semicircle of three-storey apartment blocks surrounded by several hundred terrace houses with gardens. The modernists’ mission was to build new, better homes to create new, better people. The flats on the Horseshoe Estate had separate bathrooms and kitchens, revolutionary at the time. Modernists prized flat roofs, unadorned exteriors, functional steel and glass. But eliminating external frills was only half the answer. Reform also had to work from the inside out. Taut’s The New Home, which he dedicated in 1924 to ‘all women’, was a declaration of war on stuff: ‘Pictures of all kind, mirrors, throws and doilies, curtains over curtains, pillows on top of pillows, carpets, door-mats, clocks, photos and souvenirs on display, consoles crowded with trinkets . . .’ Cultured elites bemoaning popular taste was nothing new, but for Taut the problem ran deeper. People had developed a superstitious fear of losing their precious little possessions. They were no longer kings in their castles: they had become serfs to things.1

  This ‘tyranny of the lifeless’ was slowly eating away at family harmony and, most of all, at the housewife. Women – ‘the true creators of the home’ – had become slaves to dusting. The liberation of women required liberation from stuff. Taut’s manifesto for simplicity was inspired by a mix of sources. In addition to the social-reform atmosphere of the Weimar years, he drew on Christine Frederick, the American prophet of domestic efficiency, whose time-and-motion studies had shown how much energy housewives could save in a more rationally designed kitchen. But his true passion was for Japan and the simple, clear lines of its interiors; after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Jewish Taut would flee to Takasaki. German homes needed to be more Japanese. Knick-knacks, tassels and fringes, little craft objects made by the children, all these had to go; together with excess chairs and ‘shoddy department-store stuff’. Taut was not especially concerned whether things were art nouveau or Biedermeier. It was the cult of the ‘ensemble’, the seemingly endless combinations of objects that did not belong together that galled him. Built-in cupboards and functional furniture would take their place, restoring the housewife’s health and sanity (see Plate 31). And people had to be educated out of the false sentimenta
lism inspired by all the stuff and into a more authentic appreciation of cultural objects. ‘Mental hygiene’, he wrote, was just as important as bodily cleanliness. Like the Japanese, Europeans should keep their pictures and objects locked away in a trunk, bringing them out only when they wanted to appreciate them. Unlike his fellow modernists, Taut was never a pure functionalist. He allowed for distinct colour combinations – on the Horseshoe Estate, front doors were painted yellow, red or green – but, otherwise, the walls should be bare.

  Taut’s programme for a domestic revolution carried a particular charge in Weimar Germany, where the project of building a democracy made architecture and design highly political.2 Yet soul-searching about the home as a space of consumption was taking place across Europe, the United States and Japan. If fears (and hopes) about what consumption was doing to society had focused on the city and public space in the late nineteenth century, in the first half of the twentieth they increasingly revolved around private space. Inside the homes of the European elites and middling sort, the separation of private from public spaces had already begun in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, giving rise to a new ideal of separate male and female spheres. With greater privacy came a new culture of comfort, epitomized by upholstered chairs and, later, sofas. Around 1900, these longer trends took on a new significance. Industrialization had dramatically accelerated the exodus of paid work from the home. It left behind the domestic sphere as the quintessential space of consumption, a material haven managed by the housewife and waiting to be filled with possessions, new technologies and leisure activities.

  We are entering the era of the living-room suite, the washing machine, the radio and home ownership. Mass-manufactured goods brought standardized comfort to the common man. Gas and electricity were filling the home with machines. The radio and gramophone opened it up to a new world of entertainment and sound. And the home itself became a prized possession.

  This invasion of goods was about more than how much stuff people had. It transformed the heart and soul of everyday life, its rhythms and routines. Would these machines liberate people from drudgery and dependence and nourish a richer personality, thereby strengthening family and society? Or would they feed an addiction to ever higher levels of comfort and consumption, fostering a selfish materialism and withdrawal from the world? As with all revolutions, so with this one: there was no inevitable direction and no foregone conclusion. Home economists and manufacturers, politicians, designers and novelists, vied with each other for control of the home. In the end, however, the home was shaped by the people who lived in it, and by local norms and conventions

  HOME, SWEET HOME

  What was an affront to taste to some was big business to others. Across Europe and the United States, the last third of the nineteenth century saw a boom in home furnishing. Incomes were rising and, with them, spending on the home. In Boston and London as in Paris and Berlin, these were golden years for home decorators as the aspiring middle classes sought to bolster their social position and identity by tastefully arranging their domestic interior. Young couples setting up home were urged to view the living room as an ‘important agent in the education of life’, in the words of the popular American guide The House Beautiful, first published in 1881.3 Decor expressed a family’s culture, and was said to have long-lasting effects on its members. The spread of wallpaper captures the cult of home furnishings. By 1874, British wallpaper manufacturers produced 32 million pieces, six times as many as only a generation earlier.4 In middle-class homes, porcelain pugs and brass peacocks jostled with Japanese radiator covers.

  Better-off working families, too, were expanding and updating their furnishings, especially in the United States, where real wages were highest. For contemporary observers, carpets were the litmus test of home comfort. They were one of the benchmarks used in a pioneering survey of skilled workers in Massachusetts in 1874. One machinist’s family earned just over a thousand dollars a year. Half of it went on food, yet all six rooms in their home had carpets. In half the houses visited, at least the parlour had a carpet.5 Many homes had a sewing machine and an organ or a piano, the ultimate proof of respectability.

  The lives of most industrial workers in Europe and Asia were a far cry from this level of comfort. In St Petersburg, some married workers had pillows and covers, but most single seasonal tenants slept on bare wooden planks in overcrowded flats, without any place for personal belongings.6 Still, even outside the United States, there were signs of change. In Europe, miners bought pianos on instalment plans. The parlour became sacred, invested with the decorative ‘superfluities’ so hated by social reformers; workers bought things even when they could not afford to use them, like the brass fender which was kept in a locked parlour.7 In late-developing Scandinavia, skilled workers, too, began to enjoy more home comforts. In Christiana (now Oslo), a textile worker’s family still shared a kitchen with the neighbour but now had their own living room (12 by 15 feet), with ‘two windows, with short lace curtains across the top . . . a bed made up as a single one; a wo[o]den sofa or settee that could be used for a bedstead; a table, cupboard, clock, pictures, flowers’.8

  The sheer size of the new mass market in home furnishings raised a trinity of fears: it threatened to standardize life and culture, produce artificial desires and imprison women in a gilded cage. These fears tended to be voiced together. Typically, Taut complained that living rooms had begun to look like international hotel rooms, uniform and florid, preventing nations from cultivating their own style of living.9 Cheaper chairs and sideboards were a threat to creative artists, but they were a boon for consumers. Attempts to counter this trend, such as the Arts and Crafts movement, often achieved the opposite: artist-designed wallpaper and carpets were also mass produced.

  The late nineteenth century saw a vigorous interplay between the unique and the mass-produced, as individualization and standardization pushed each other to new heights. It reached its climax in the homes of the Parisian bourgeoisie. On the one hand, drawing rooms and corridors were filling up with copies and imitations, made possible by new materials and methods of large-scale reproduction. Rubber had a lot to answer for. Initially used for medical purposes, from the 1860s caoutchouc revolutionized the art market. Suddenly, it was possible to mass-manufacture hard-rubber figurines in their thousands and to produce decorative vases, frames and embossed photo albums on the cheap. Aluminium, linoleum and celluloid enhanced the scope of mass reproduction further. Vulcanization brought artificial flowers and miniature greenhouses. Electroplating made it possible to make zinc and brass look like bronze. In Ferdinand Barbedienne’s legendary foundry in Paris, hundreds of workers were busy releasing from their casts armies of fake-bronze Davids shouldering their slingshots and Mozarts complete with violins in all sizes. The bourgeoisie had caught statuomanie, it was said. What rubber and bronze did to statues, lithography did to paintings. La Maison Legras in 1870 carried 2,000 different reproductions in its catalogue, from still lifes to landscapes. It was no longer necessary to visit the Louvre. For 20 francs, famous statues and paintings now came home.10

  Fears of falling into shallow conformism spurred a feverish pursuit of individualized taste. By the late nineteenth century, the bourgeois home had become a sanctuary of the private self. In part, this was a retreat in a very real, physical sense, as the middle classes turned their apartments into safe havens from the revolutionary danger of the street. But, from the middle of the century, privatization was also increasingly visible in people’s relationship to objects. Safety meant more than a lock on the front door. Cabinets, desks, wardrobes, boxes and many other personal belongings were fitted with locks by enterprising locksmiths. Personal items had to be secured against servants but also against family and peers. Carpets and curtains became more elaborate to create a cocoon of silence. The longing for safety was reinforced by a quest for individual comfort, control and order through things. The growing fixation with personal cleanliness in these years extended to possessions. With du
sting, disinfectants and special ‘Chinese powders’, the bourgeoisie brought their material world up to their standard of personal hygiene. Genuine confort, a term the French adapted from the English in the 1840s, did not only concern the ‘satisfaction of the body’ or even the spirit, one manual stressed, but ‘even more so that of the heart’.11 Drapes artistiques over chairs, coverlets and a harlequin statuette on a side table showed one’s individual taste and character. Le Journal des demoiselles and similar home magazines which took off in this period ran articles on ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and proffered advice on how to give the interior the right personal touch. In Britain, it has been argued, liberalism strongly encouraged people to develop their individual style in home decoration,12 but a similar trend can be found in countries which did not enjoy the same liberal climate. The home emerged as a temple to the self across Europe.

  By 1914, middle-class families could choose from thousands of differently designed chairs, sofas, beds and side tables. The London department store Liberty began to experiment with lifestyle marketing, offering Moorish-style furniture alongside Eastern pots to customers fearful of ‘common’ taste.13 And the production of the new sparked a craze for the old. Early modern Paris had already seen a profitable trade in ‘demi-luxe’ furniture, sold via upholsterers from cash-strapped aristocrats to an aspiring bourgeoisie.14 But, in general, the demand for the old was limited. A survey of the apartments of Parisian merchants, bankers and shopkeepers found that antiques were completely missing in the 1830s–’50s. By the 1890s, they were full of them. Paris and London experienced an antiques boom. Curiosity shops, antique dealers and furniture brokers multiplied by leaps and bounds.15 There was a craze for copies of Louis XVI consoles and rococo chairs. For the lover of trinkets, there were monthly magazines such as La Curiosité (1886) and Le Bibelot (1907). Collecting antiques became a shared pastime among the bourgeoisie. The desire for the authentic ranged far and wide, from Asian vases and Turkish carpets to spinning wheels from Brittany, which wove a thread between the Parisian bourgeoisie and an idealized bygone rustic past. Far from destroying the old and ‘authentic’, the spread of mass comfort increased the value of such objects, leading to an almost archaeological interest in all things past, both common and elite. People hunted down old furniture, had it repaired or simply broken up and rebuilt with other pieces. For upholsterers, it was the best of times.