Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  This was the main story, but Sinclair Lewis was too good a novelist – the first American to win the Nobel Prize – not to capture some of the positive feelings that attracted people to standardization. Seneca Doane, Babbitt’s college friend and a radical lawyer to boot, hated ‘the perpetual whine about “standardization” ’. To him, standardization was ‘excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in.’ William James could not have put it better. And standardization created a shared culture and national identity. When Doane was in London and saw a picture of an American suburb in a toothpaste ad, he was homesick. ‘There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if they are standardized. It’s a corking standard!’55

  In the real America, the job of the many real estate Babbitts was made easier by the housing shortage and by rent control. One reason for the rise in home ownership was that rental property was taken off the market and turned into a more profitable commodity for sale. A study immediately after the Second World War asked one thousand Americans why they had bought a home: 24 per cent saw it as an investment, 11 per cent were driven by a ‘desire for independence’. Yet for every fifth person who was motivated by the ‘ideal of home-ownership’, there was one who felt forced to buy because they simply could not find a home to rent. Many complained that rents had spiralled out of control and that, ultimately, ownership was cheaper.56 People were pushed into the property market as much as pulled.

  The rise of home ownership was not a peculiarly American phenomenon. ‘Small as it is, it’s my happy home’ was a line in the Japanese version of ‘My Blue Heaven’, a popular jazz hit in the 1930s.57 By then, life-size show homes were on display on London’s Oxford Street just like any other consumer good. In fact, Britons enjoyed a more liberal mortgage market than Americans, with low down-payments and thirty-year mortgages. People could borrow up to 95 per cent of the value of their home. The big difference between the Great Depression of 1929 and our recent one in 2008 was that, in the 1930s, silly mortgages got Britain out of the slump instead of causing it. ‘Cheap money’ made new homes affordable to clerks and workers. For a down payment of £20, it was possible to buy a three-bedroom house complete with bathroom and kitchen worth £400. By 1938, one in five working-class families owned their home.58

  Although rent and mortgages were a major part of the household budget, we have little systematic knowledge about their impact on people’s spending patterns, or vice versa. In English cities, for example, rents were galloping ahead of wages in the late nineteenth century – this must have put a brake on working-class consumption. The introduction of rent controls during the First World War offered some help but was soon rolled back. The proliferation of tenants’ associations and rent strikes was testimony to a growing anger. Countries took different roads to better housing. In Belgium, strikes pushed the government in 1889 to give the national savings bank the power to invest in better homes for the poor; France followed with a similar law in 1894. British cities opted for slum clearances. The results were mixed. American observers at the time concluded that, in Britain, provisions for rehousing the displaced were completely inadequate. In Belgium and France, small towns put housing loans to better use than big cities; the building of boulevards in Paris and the beautification of Vienna put many of the new homes beyond the reach of the poorest inhabitants.59

  In general, homes were becoming bigger, cleaner and more comfortable in the early twentieth century, but they were also getting more expensive. The first generation of public housing, too, charged high rents – when English workers moved into one of the new suburban council estates, their rents often shot up by a third or more. In 1928, a third of all tenants on Liverpool council estates were in arrears – and that is before the world depression hit. In the 1930s, workers spent around 20–25 per cent of their pay on rent and fuel – those who paid a mortgage, slightly more.60 There were already some initiatives with more affordable housing in Austria in the 1920s, but mainly it was only with the expansion of welfare states after the Second World War that public housing, more rigorous rent controls and social transfers put down a supporting floor for poor consumers; how critical such public transfers were for affluent societies we shall see in a later chapter. Since the 1970s, the cost of housing as share of household consumption has once again been on the rise, at least in Western Europe.61

  Better homes thus had many contradictory effects. Rising rents meant less spending money. A Liverpudlian woman recalls how in 1927 she moved with her husband and baby to one of the new suburban estates: it was an escape from living with her mother, aunt and cousin, squeezed into a two-bedroom terrace. It ‘was so different. It made life so much easier being able to wash indoors and to have the electricity . . . [and] hot water’. At the same time, she recalled how ‘we didn’t have any wardrobes, had to just hang the clothes on hangers on the picture rail. We had to . . . because you couldn’t afford to buy things once you had moved in with having to find the big rent.’62

  High rents encouraged other working-class families to take out a mortgage, but home ownership also had ambivalent effects. For some it was liberating to hold the keys to their own home. They devoted more money to home comforts. American surveys in 1950 show that owner-occupied homes were equipped with more private baths, fridges, air-conditioning and central heating than rental properties.63 For other, less fortunate households, the financial strain proved greater than expected. In inter-war Britain, working-class families who moved out to the suburbs in some cases switched off heating and even lights to save for the next mortgage payment. Home ownership, then, could constrain as well as unleash consumption.

  Owning one’s home was gaining in popularity in other European countries, too. By 1960, every second Finn, Belgian and Italian owned their home; in Britain, the number had reached 42 per cent of the population. Today, owner-occupation is just as high across the European Union as in Britain (69 per cent); in fact, it is the United States (58 per cent) that lags behind Belgium, Italy and Spain (all around 80 per cent).64 Belgian and German miners have for generations had a strong preference for ownership. Even where renting remained strong, the single family home had emerged as the dominant type by the middle of the century. In the Netherlands, 71 per cent of houses were single-family homes, although only 27 per cent contained owner-occupiers.

  Across Europe, conservatives, home-builders and Christian reformers were singing variations on the same tune of civic consumerism: a man who owned his home had a stake in his country, making him an upright, loyal citizen, a buttress of family life and freedom against collectivism. In fact, not even Stalin’s Soviet Union was altogether immune from the siren call. Late Stalinism dangled the ideal of domestic comfort and home ownership before its new elite, the over-achieving Stakhanovites. In a typical piece of middle-brow fiction from 1950 Russia, Dimitri returns home and muses about his new status in life: ‘Homeowner! How the sense of this world has changed! Homeowners in Rudnogorsk were now the best shock-workers and engineers, working people. Dimitri was impatient to go with Marina to look at their new home, but it was late. His dreams carried him along with her into their own house, their new house where they would begin their life together.’65

  MODERN LIVING

  Home ownership was part of a larger dream of modern living. Modern homes promised to liberate their inhabitants from tradition, waste and exhaustion. This vision had enormous appeal for progressives, the middle classes and social reformers in Cairo and Tokyo as much as in Chicago and Berlin. It focused on the housewife as a scientific manager, but its ambition was to transform family life more generally. Modern living had three core ideals. One was the glorification of comfort and cleanliness. A second was the emphasis on individual privacy within the family: a home should have one room per person. Finally, there was a belief that, as in a factory, domestic spaces should be
separated by function and equipped with machines to maximize efficiency. How much these ideals would be realized depended on material resources, such as purchasing power and housing stock, but equally on cultural traditions and practices. Inevitably, the diffusion of home technologies was uneven, but once we loosen the chronology slightly, interesting patterns of adaptation and resistance become apparent. Instead of a linear triumph of modernity, the outcome was a hybrid of old and new.

  So much of our image of modern living is tied up with the washing machine and other consumer durables that it is important to stress that several core ideas were already gathering force before electricity arrived in the home. The separation of private from public spaces, and consumption from production, were already visible in the redesign of middle-class homes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, as the more open hall gave way to the parlour, study and other private chambers. Private zones were not only for the rich. Social reformers blamed many problems of the poor on their lack of privacy. One of the first schemes for their physical separation was the three-room cottage designed in the 1770s by the architect John Wood. It had recesses to provide, if not fully separate bedrooms, at least a private sleeping space.66 By 1919, the one room per person standard had been accepted for government employees in the United States. For the ‘typical family’ of two adults and three children, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics now estimated that a kitchen–dining room, a living room and two ‘large, well ventilated and lighted bedrooms’ were the ‘irreducible minimum for decent, healthful living’.67 Families had a right to comfort as well as decency, social reformers insisted.68 Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the grim realities of communal living were pierced through with initiatives to cultivate the sense of private space and self-discipline necessary in order to turn backward people into modern Soviet men and women. One of the first things the wives of the Soviet elite did in their effort to build a ‘good society’ (the obshchestvennost movement, born in 1936) was to replace the shared bunks in workers’ barracks with free-standing individual beds.69

  The expanding culture of comfort drew on two competing ideals, well illustrated in the main house patterns of mid-nineteenth-century America. One sought comfort in an aesthetic union between the inhabitant’s body, the mind and the material environment. For architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing, the verandah was both a shelter from the elements and a place for the family to sit together. The other prized practicality. This was the approach of Catherine Beecher, a crusader for female education. For her, the mark of a comfortable home was a kitchen designed for efficiency, not a porch for lounging in.70

  It was the United States that spearheaded the industrial revolution in the home. The take-off of new domestic technologies was rapid in the 1920s. By its end, 18 million of the country’s 27 million homes were wired, 15 million had electric irons, 7 million a vacuum cleaner and 5 million a washing machine. In the top income group, 92 per cent had a bath, 63 per cent a radio and 83 per cent a car. Many skilled workers were now buying the things they were mass-producing. Every other Ford employee, for example, had an electric washing machine and a car.71 Race and income continued to make for sharp divides. By the mid-1930s, for instance, every second African-American home had a bath but only 19 per cent had a radio and 17 per cent a car.72

  By comparison, Europe, Japan and Canada were slow to adopt labour-saving devices. Electric irons and vacuum cleaners existed before the Second World War, but most families preferred to spend their disposable income on a radio or new furniture rather than a washing machine. In Western Europe, fridges and washing machines were almost exclusively found in middle-class homes until the late 1950s; in 1957, not even 5 per cent of the French and British population owned a fridge – in the USA it was 27 per cent.73 What were the reasons for this lag? Part of the answer is money. No European worker was able to compete with the high wases paid by the likes of Ford, made possible by early mass production and superior productivity. An average washing machine cost $125 in 1924. By 1934, it could be had for $50 or less, easily affordable for the average American who brought home $300 a month. In France, by contrast, a standard Mors vacuum cleaner would have sucked up the entire monthly pay packet of a skilled worker.74

  In addition to having money, and access to electricity and running water, people had to be convinced that it made sense to invest in these machines rather than spend on entertainment, traditional festivities, or looking good in a new dress. After all, as home economists at the time and historians since have shown, these labour-saving devices saved far less time than the producers and advertisers promised. The appeal of goods such as the automatic washing machine was far from self-evident. In the 1950s, the lower classes preferred to spend their hard-earned money on a TV set rather than a labour-saving appliance; by 1957, every second low-income household in Britain owned a TV set.75 The modern home as we know it was reached via a crooked path littered with all sorts of obstacles, some economic and infrastructural, others cultural.

  Modern consumption technologies depended in the first place on modern utilities. Societies, even individual households, often lived in several overlapping material eras at once. As we saw earlier, gas, electricity and running water did not arrive together but could be separated by as much as two or three generations. The United States was no exception. Urban America was quick to develop an appetite for new fuels. By the time of the Great Crash of 1929, three quarters of American homes were wired, and every second used gas for cooking.76 Modernity in the form of plumbing, however, was slower to arrive. When the Lynds studied life in Muncie, Indiana, in 1925 for their famous social study of Middletown, they found one third of homes had no bathroom, a quarter did not even have running water or sewage, but that it was ‘not uncommon’ to observe the same families ‘using an automobile, electric washer, electric iron, and vacuum cleaner’.77 This was pretty much the national pattern. There was a shocking discrepancy between social reality and the ideal standard of comfort and cleanliness summed up in the ‘one room per person’ formula. In 1920s Texas, 20 per cent of white families and 43 per cent of African-Americans lived two or more to a room. In New York City, gas and electricity were nearly universal, but 290,000 rooms had no windows.

  Nor did the eventual arrival of these utilities automatically modernize domestic life. In Paris and Birmingham, one third of homes still lacked a separate bathroom by the late 1950s. Diffusion of gas and electricity remained highly uneven, both between countries and between cities and villages in the same country. Societies that adopted gas early (like Britain) were not automatically slow to take up electrical appliances later. By 1938, for example, 1 million electric cookers stood in British homes, a quarter million more than in the German Reich, although here an impressive third of them stood in the kitchens of artisans and skilled workers.78 It has been said that, with their expanding networks and grids, electricity providers created their own demand.79 But this was far from smooth or simple. The electricity works tried hard to stimulate greater domestic consumption – a lot of capacity was under-utilized outside industrial peak hours – with the help of night-time storage radiators and special discounts for greater use. Outside the USA, however, the new clean power was slow to cross the threshold. Into the 1950s, most European homes used electricity for lighting and little else.

  Together, price and habits were formidable obstacles. Electric plugs and switches were unfamiliar and could be mysterious novelties. In Germany in 1928, a guide explained that ‘the only function of the switch is to switch electricity on and off. This observation may sound self-evident but it is not! Quite a few housewives think that the switch is a convenient point to hang up the broom or the shopping net or even a heavy coat.’ Switches could get hot. He concluded with a list of ten prohibitions: ‘avoid shaking lamps and appliances or throwing them about’ (no. 8) and ‘do not change a light bulb when the electricity is “on”; it could be damaged – and you too!’ (no. 9).80 After the Second World War, in the great rebuilding of European citi
es, it was often consumers who had to persuade developers and utilities to give them more electricity, not the other way around. A German survey in 1964 found that 41 per cent of all German flats had only a single socket in the kitchen; 4 per cent had none at all. And their circuits were often deficient. As one observer wondered aloud: ‘Is it “comfort”, if one has to switch off the radio in order to plug in the iron?’81

  Across the globe, cities went through modernization in similar fits and starts. In 1920s Shanghai, for example, the municipal council actively promoted electric cookers and radiators with demonstrations at a showroom on Nanking Road and special hire arrangements; in terms of total demand for kilowatts it was on a par with European cities. Among the rich, the electric ‘cooking apparatus’ was found increasingly ‘reliable despite the bad usage it is sometimes subjected to by the native servant’.82 What was going on in most people’s homes was another story. Most li, or alleyway houses, in the municipal settlement were turned upside down by landlords and tenants through a mindboggling range of partitions, lofts, enclosures and added floors, all designed to pack more people in and maximize rent. By 1935, houses that had initially been designed for a single family accommodated on average twenty-four persons, each with 30 square feet of living space. Not surprisingly in these cramped conditions, the kitchen was rented out as a living space. Instead of functional separation, modernity here meant the dissolution of the kitchen.83

  Even where functionalist comfort was achievable, it often met with resistance and adaptation. As power companies and producers learnt quickly, the benefits of gas and electricity and the goods they powered were not obvious. They had to be marketed. The first electric kitchen was exhibited at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. In inter-war Europe, some cities had ‘transparent restaurants’ to show diners how an electric kitchen worked.84 The masterwork of modern design was the Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926 by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, the first professionally trained female architect in Austria. It was exactly 1.9 by 3.44 metres (70 square feet). In this mini-factory, everything was functional, from the electric range to the continuous work surface with height-adjusted cupboards. Storage chutes and pouring spouts saved the housewife from having to open doors and containers to get to sugar and flour; the containers were aluminium, except for the flour shovel, which was made of oak – the tannic acid kept away worms. An ironing board folded up flat against the wall. There was even a suspended, movable lamp.85 As in modern kitchens advertised by the Everyday Life Reform League in Japan, this model had a single function: it was solely for cooking, not for eating or socializing. Not an inch was wasted. Everything had its standardized place and purpose, just as the average housewife was imagined to move along in a predictable rhythm established by scientific motion studies.