Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Still, there are interesting parallels when it comes to the growing appreciation of things. Like James, Heidegger tried to put the world back into the self. And, like James, this led Heidegger to emphasize the importance of ordinary things to the human spirit. In Being and Time, published in 1927, the handling of everyday objects acquired an almost spiritual force; Heidegger had started out as a theology student. The authentic self required authentic living, or Dasein. The true person did not arrive ready-assembled but was created through ‘beingin-the-world’. A person was grounded in a world of everyday objects. It was through handling things that the world announced itself to us. Dasein involved our caring for things, by eliminating the gap between them and us through appropriate use. Using a hammer created a deeper, more authentic relationship with the object than looking at it, what he christened, in typical linguistic overkill, Zuhandenheit, as opposed to Vorhandensein; or ready-to-handness versus simple prior existence.37

  What William James and Heidegger illuminate is the wide spectrum of thought that registered a new respect for things in the early twentieth century: things are us. Of course, Heidegger’s was a deeply masculine philosophy, one of the hammer rather than the needle; as a boy he had hammered barrels for his father, a cooper. Still, the sense he gives that things involved feeling and caring suggests that it is unhelpful to see the emotional history of objects as the domain of women alone, or to separate the symbolic from the functional qualities of consumption. Where Heidegger differed from James was over the kind of things that enriched the self, and those which debased it. The thinker from the Black Forest prized a simpler, more intense and unified life with things; the one from the Charles River a multilayered existence where some things supported routine tasks and freed up others to satisfy more emotional and creative faculties. These two positions would recur again and again as societies debated the good or evil of new technologies, from washing machines to computers.

  In Heidegger’s world, new technologies were dangerous intruders. Cookers, fridges and other domestic machines stifled our sense of smell and touch, robbing us of age-old sensations of being in nature, gathering food and making fire.38 Behind this view of technological disenchantment lurked a deeper pessimism. For Heidegger, unlike for earlier Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, public opinion encouraged conformity, not critical reason. Most humans were like a herd following what ‘people’ liked and did. The tyranny of ‘people’ led to a culture of the average, blind to the distinct qualities of things.39 Philosophically, Heidegger’s quest for the primordial meaning of ‘Being’ presented itself as a deliberate break with all of Western philosophy since Plato. Politically, it led to the dangerous idea that authentic ‘Being’ might be nurtured in the pure racial community of the Nazis. Today, it is common to hear that we need greater respect for things in order to encourage a more sustainable lifestyle. Heidegger is a reminder that such respect is not automatically benign. Sympathy for things could mean a nasty indifference to human beings.

  PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY

  Home furnishings need a home. This is an obvious point, but one worth making. Residents of shack settlements in South Africa today, for example, have different attitudes to consumer goods than those who have moved to regular homes. In the latter, there is a drive to conformity, to show one is part of modern life. In the former, limited privacy and high visibility discourage people from bringing home new goods for fear of unleashing gossip and ostracism; some prefer to park them with relatives.40 Not being able to put up a house has a palpable effect on what people buy. This was one reason why African mineworkers in Branch Hill in 1930s Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) spent barely anything at all on furniture but almost 60 per cent of their hard-earned cash on clothes: they were a convenient movable asset and allowed people to wear their status literally on their backs.41

  It is wrong, therefore, to think about the things people put in their homes as if they were free-floating objects. They derive part of their significance from their relation to the brick and mortar that surrounds them. This relationship underwent a fundamental change in the course of the twentieth century, as nations of tenants turned into home-owners. The home became the single largest consumer good in people’s lives. This trend was uneven, influenced by tax regimes and financial systems that fall beyond the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, by 1980, the majority of homes in Western Europe were no longer rented but owned – only the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany were just below the halfway mark.42 What concerns us here is the shift in attitudes to the home as a consumer good.

  The history of home-ownership is essentially a long experiment in ‘behaviour change’. People do not have an innate desire to own their home. Like virtually everyone else in the nineteenth century, Mr Pooter was content to rent. In the twentieth century, ownership became the norm, not to own a home a stigma, first in the United States and Britain but then also more widely. Ownership also turned the home into a nest egg. This called for new habits of financial prudence and long-term commitment. And it encouraged a more intense and intimate love affair with the home and its possessions, making it feel more like ‘ours’.

  The roots of this ideal lie in the inter-war years. The man who first made home ownership a political mission was Herbert Hoover. Building more homes, raising standards of comfort and standardizing construction and fixtures were central planks in his programme to modernize America during his years as Commerce Secretary in the 1920s. Hoover’s reputation would be tarnished by the Great Depression of 1929–32, but before his doomed presidency (1929–33) he was a much-admired new force: the progressive businessman. Hoover had a nose for gold – it was his discovery of it in Australia that launched his international career as a mining engineer in 1897. In character, Hoover could not have been further removed from the ‘conspicuous consumers’ derided by Veblen. A plain dresser, he was reserved, a man of action not appearances. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa in 1874 and orphaned at the age of nine, he had a serious outlook on life. Life was service: to oneself, to others, and to God. Many Quakers (and others) before him had held these values. What was extraordinary about Hoover was how he channelled them into a programme of material comfort and little luxuries for all: the American dream.

  Hoover laid out his worldview in American Individualism, a slim book published in 1923, written in the shadow of the First World War. The war had given Hoover a large field in which to exercise his social conscience, first by organizing the Belgian relief effort, later at Versailles by advising President Wilson on the reconstruction of Europe. It also convinced him that the United States possessed a material civilization all of its own. The European war and the revolutions that followed were the result of backward hierarchical societies, of autocracy and class. In contrast to their vicious cycle of poverty, oppression and fanaticism, America had discovered a virtuous cycle of individual freedom, social mobility and democracy. ‘Progressive individualism’ was in part a way to increase efficiency. Give workers a chance to better themselves, and they will be more productive. Greater standardization of production, in turn, would cut costs and mean more goods for everyone, without having to raise wages.

  Yet Hoover was a Quaker as much as a businessman. America ‘cannot march toward better days unless it is inspired by things of the spirit’. There was a ‘divine spark’ in every heart. The key to unlocking it was to raise the standard of living. The ultimate goal of efficiency was happier homes. For Hoover, property and comfort were the ‘real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life’. Governments were to concern themselves no longer just with basic food and education. They needed to promote better homes, clothes and ‘nonessentials’. Tenants had to be raised to property-owners for their own good and that of the nation. The ‘right of property’ stimulated individual initiative, he explained, not only so ‘he may gain personal comfort, security inlife, protection of his family, but also becauseindividual accumulation and ownership is a basis of selection to leadership in adm
inistration of the tools of industry and commerce.’43 Individuals with a stake in their community were better parents, better neighbours and better citizens.

  How novel was Hoover’s American dream? Some historians have echoed his view of a clash between a dynamic, individualist America and a class-ridden, miserable Europe.44 This is too harsh. In reality, Europe was dynamic, too, as we have seen. Similarly, the idea of possessions and comfort as ways of nurturing character and celebrating the richness of God’s creation had cropped up at least since the seventeenth century. What was novel was the democratic quality of Hoover’s aspiration: everyone should be a home-owner and enjoy a rising standard of living.

  Some writers have approached these years as yet another stage in the battle between consumerism and citizenship fought by civic-minded thinkers since Rousseau.45 To Hoover there was no such conflict. He christened his philosophy ‘progressive individualism’, but we might just as well call it ‘civic consumerism’. It grafted consumer desire and accumulation onto the civic ideal of the propertied, active citizen. Owning a home gave people a stake in the community and at the same time opened the door for more possessions, bathrooms and electrical appliances. In turn, having a more comfortable home would give people the self-assurance to join civic clubs and engage in mutual advancement. The view of patriotic consumers here is much larger than in later appeals to shop for the sake of the country. Property led to civic engagement – as indeed it had, unbeknownst to Hoover, in the Victorian water wars.

  These ideas expressed a growing conviction that home-owners were more stable and cared more strongly about their community. This message had a middle-class flavour, but it was equally attractive to reformers striving for greater social equality. In his pioneering study of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the African-American W. E. Du Bois, for example, concluded that slavery had destroyed ‘proper home life’. This was the reason African-Americans spent too much money on showy clothes and too much time in church or at amusements. ‘The mass of the Negro people must be taught sacredly to guard the home, to make it the centre of social life and moral guardianship.’ 46 To Du Bois, those who joined building societies represented a sign of hope. ‘Home ownership,’ the home economist Hazel Kyrk wrote in 1929, ‘is a widely accepted symbol of a family’s thrift, industry and financial success.’ It ‘connotes order, good citizenship, prosperity, good housing’.47

  In practice, building a property-owning democracy was not easy. Mortgages were few, down payments high. Banks introduced loans for real estate from the 1870s, but mainly to big customers. In Chicago, for example, where owner-occupied suburban developments took off after the great fire of 1871 saw rents skyrocket, Polish and other immigrant workers distrusted banks and instead borrowed from friends and family. From the 1880s, real estate developers started to offer them direct payment plans, typically with a 10 per cent down payment, and the rest in monthly payments, ‘just like rent’. A two-bedroom house, with a parlour and kitchen, near Chicago’s lumber docks, could be had for $1,000, although it was left to the new owner to finish the basement and attic themselves, and, in many cases, accept life without an indoor toilet and sewer system, which would not arrive until the 1920s; a factory worker typically earned $590 in 1890.48

  The overall trend is impressive, nonetheless. In the United States almost a million new homes were constructed in 1925 alone. By 1930, virtually every other home was owner-occupied.49 In most big cities, the number of renters was higher, but even here ownership was spreading fast. In New York and Philadelphia, 87 per cent and 61 per cent were renting in 1920. In 1930, this was down to 80 per cent and 42 per cent.

  Government and business worked hand in hand to promote civic consumerism. One of the main companies was the Aladdin Company, which sold the 22 by 30 feet, two-storey ‘Standard’ house. A new home made a new person. ‘The most uncouth,’ a 1921 advert explained, ‘would not dare stick his muddy brogans on the top of a finely polished mahogany table, or expectorate [spit] on a valuable rug. But in a hovel . . . would the same individual have any hesitancy about propping his feet on a barrel, and expectorating on saw dust?’ A good home would ‘subtly impart happiness and refinement.’50 That home ownership should nurture family and community spirit was taken literally: Aladdin organized meetings for its extended ‘family’ of homebuyers, held photographic contests and announced children born into Aladdin houses.

  Home ownership created new customers for home appliances. Moving house triggered new purchases to upgrade the interior. Things that had looked just fine suddenly appeared out of place in a new home. In the 1920s, this meant, above all, a ‘modern’ makeover of bathroom and kitchen. With the support of almost 2,000 local committees, the ‘Better Homes in America’ campaign promoted the ideal home across the country. In 1930, it sponsored over 6,000 home shows. Three million people stepped into the model Cape Cod-style cottage, which had running water, a built-in bath and a standardized kitchen with electric fridge and stove. These offered national belonging, a share in what Hoover had dubbed the ‘American standard of living’, as well as personal cleanliness and convenience. The Kohler Company set up an Anglo-Saxon model village in Riverside, Wisconsin. It had a simple message: modern bathrooms and kitchens turned immigrants into Americans. Walter Kohler, himself of Austrian stock, understood this well. At the same time, civic consumerism tempered innovation with tradition. Kohler’s Cape Cod model family home advertised new fixtures in the bathroom, but the living room mixed colonial revival furnishings with hand-me-downs to show the continuity of family life across generations.51 Making the family home the pivot of a national culture, then, gave consumption a new legitimacy, connecting past, present and future. Instead of being a threat to family and social stability, consumption now appeared its rock. This message would not be lost on future conservatives.

  Not everyone agreed. A two-storey 22 by 30 feet home was not exactly a McMansion – by 2005, the median American home had ballooned to almost twice this size (2,300 square feet). Still, the spread of standardized homes raised fears about shallow conformity. No single source expressed this better than Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s great American novel. Published in 1922, Babbitt sold a phenomenal 140,000 copies in its first four months.52 H. L. Mencken, the leading critic of the time, praised it for showing the ‘real America’.

  Lewis had grown up in Minnesota, just across from Kohler’s Wisconsin, and used the fictional mid-Western town of Zenith to unveil the darker side of home ownership. Babbitt is the story of a real estate agent who lives in the suburban development of Floral Heights, where only three houses are more than a few decades old. Part of it reads like an ideal home catalogue:

  In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet gramophone. (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had one.) Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious, and a ‘hand-coloured’ photograph of a Colonial room – rag rug, maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace. (Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Fait la Toilette print, a coloured photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

  The room, like Babbitt’s life in general, was more comfortable than that of his boyhood. ‘Though there was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that was offensive. It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice.’ The piano was unused. The books on the table were ‘unspotted and laid in rigid parallels’. The grenadier dog-irons in front of the fireplace were ‘like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of commerce’.53

  The bedroom had two plain beds, with a table and ‘standard electric bedside lamp’ between them, and ‘a standard bedside book with coloured illustrations’ that had never been opened. ‘The mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had c
ost a great deal of money.’ The hot-water radiator was of the exact standard size for the room. ‘It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else.’ The house was five years old, with all ‘the latest conveniences’. It was a temple to electricity. There were plugs for lamps, the vacuum cleaner, the piano lamp, the electric fan and, in the dining-room, for the coffee maker and the toaster. ‘In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home.’54

  It is unlikely that either Heidegger or Taut read it, but Babbitt expressed many of the concerns they had. A true home involved the art of dwelling, not just accumulation. Babbitt did not care about the things around him, because he did not use them. Things had lost their distinctiveness. Even books had been cut to standard. Once, when he was young, Babbitt had hopes of becoming a lawyer. Then he embarked on the restless pursuit of social expectations. The more expectations he fulfilled, the more possessions he stockpiled, the further he moved away from happiness and himself. In the end Babbitt finds he is nobody, an empty shell.