Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The golden years from the 1950s to the early 1970s – das Wirtschaftswunder, il miracolo, les trente glorieuses – brought annual growth rates of 5 per cent to Western Europe, unprecedented in history. Affluence, however, came in the wake of an equally extraordinary series of transformations that compressed into a single generation total war (1914–18), a world depression (1929–31), the rise of totalitarian regimes and another even more brutal world war (1939–45). To explore the connections between these eras does not mean to propose a simple continuity. Some of the drive for cream cakes and Coca-Cola in the 1950s can be understood as an immediate reaction, a liberation from rationing and austerity. But longer trends were at work as well. The 1950s and ’60s bore marks of the ’30s, in politics, culture and in the lives of ordinary people. Young parents who set up a home and bought their first TV and car in the 1950s had grown up as children of the Depression. Fascism cast a shadow long after the defeat of the Nazis; elites continued to fear that mass consumption might resurrect it. The inter-war years were a formative period for the growing power of consumption in public and private life.

  Hard times nurtured dreams of a better life, in politics, cinemas and local committee rooms. The 1930s were the golden years of consumer activism. The consumer had found their voice in the Victorian period. Now, in countries reeling from war, inflation and world depression, everyone began courting the consumer – national governments, social reformers and advertisers. All mass ideologies promised their supporters a better life and developed strategies to harness consumption to their particular ends. This included the progressive New Deal as well as Nazism and Stalinism, colonial nationalists and popular imperialists. However limited the delivery on these promises, people acquired a taste for more. Even regimes marked by low growth, deprivation and colonial exploitation played their part in boosting consumption.

  Modern societies had entered the twentieth century with an ideal of separate spheres. Culture was to be kept apart from commerce, private from public life, male from female spheres, reason from emotion. Social classes had distinct diets, clothes and amusements. As the flow of things and tastes accelerated, these divides became harder and harder to maintain. This made affluence a battleground in the 1950s – ’60s. Societies that had been accustomed to coping with too little found themselves worrying about having too much. Yet, once the ideal of freedom was linked to personal lifestyle, no sphere was immune. To consume was endorsed as a liberating process of self-discovery, available to all. That this fundamental clash of values gave way to accommodation rather than class warfare or counter-revolution was one of the most remarkable outcomes of the twentieth century. In different ideological dialects, people had been promised a better life. Now they took their leaders at their word: was not everyone entitled to a TV, new clothes and satisfaction? A more intensive, material lifestyle was becoming a shared goal, East and West. Governments might roll in tanks, but none dared to roll back consumption. Instead of being controlled by elites, consumption gained control of culture and politics. By the 1980s, what to Adam Smith had been ‘the sole end and purpose of all production’,2 looked almost like the sole end of being.

  CLASH OF MATERIAL CIVILIZATIONS

  For consumers across Europe, the First World War was a transformative experience. Before the war, consumer activism had been limited to liberal societies or middle-class groups such as the shoppers’ leagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Total war made consumption a matter of national survival everywhere. All belligerents faced unprecedented problems in securing their food supply. Germany and its allies had to cope with a blockade, Britain with submarines sinking convoys of grain, and all with the internal dislocation wrought by recruiting, feeding and killing armies. Shortages sparked inflation and unrest. People who had previously seen themselves as workers or clerks discovered that they, too, were consumers. Whether they liked it or not, governments were driven to adopt what contemporaries called ‘war socialism’, running the economy, setting prices and commandeering resources. A tug of war developed between an increasingly organized consumer interest and governments making ever greater demands for frugality and self-sacrifice.

  The heat of war forged a new consumer identity, and nowhere more so than in central Europe. In Germany, in December 1914, barely four months into the conflict, a national committee for consumer interests was set up. The Kriegsausschuss für Konsumenteninteressen represented a total of 7 million households, over one quarter of the population. Similar organizations sprang up in Allied Vienna, Budapest and Prague, as well as in neutral Switzerland and Luxembourg. The German committee included co-operatives and housewives’ organizations, but now also those on fixed salaries, men working for the state railways and Christian trade unionists.3 Inflation made the consumer outgrow the inherited clothes of the female shopper: Workers, too, were consumers, many argued. This left as the enemy the ‘producer interest’ – a small bastion of rich businessmen and cartels. Not all groups were happy with this shift away from status based on work and professional identity. Civil servants preferred to keep their distance, as did doctors and judges. Still, ‘the consumer’ could no longer be so easily dismissed as a sectional, selfish interest.

  The German committee expressed the new confidence in the consumer as a source of national strength. By 1917, there were almost two hundred district bodies fighting against profiteers and for greater self-sufficiency. They offered everything from cooking demonstrations to advice on recycling and how to avoid being cheated. They distributed blacklists of profiteers and hoarders, set up complaints centres and introduced spot-check inspections to compare the price, quality and availability of goods in rival shops. Here were the hallmarks of the testing organizations that would spread everywhere in the next two generations, such as the Consumers’ Union, Which?, Stiftung Warentest and Que Choisir. In their hands, greater awareness of price, quality and safety would increasingly focus on individual welfare. In the Great War, by contrast, individual and collective interests were two sides of the same coin. Robert Schloesser, a leading advocate of consumer representation, announced in 1917 that the war had forged a new collective mentality. In addition to looking for a good deal, consumers would concern themselves with raising the condition of the lower classes. And they would strengthen the nation, ‘so that when an external enemy threatens Germany the next time, the nation will never again have to simultaneously fight an internal enemy, the exploitation of Germans by Germans.’ 4

  The ink had barely dried before this optimistic vision was put to a devastating test. As it was failing to break through the Western Front in 1918, Imperial Germany lost the battle of the home front. Rather than unifying the nation, the regime’s rationing system exacerbated tensions, producing a widening gulf between entitlements and a sense of unfairness that eventually swallowed up the old regime.5 Poor consumers attacked soldiers’ wives and mothers with many children for their ‘unfair’ special allowances.

  In the short run, peace proved less favourable to the new consumer bodies than war. This was true for losers and winners alike. In Russia and central Europe, revolutionary councils were organized around workers and soldiers, not consumers. In Britain, the Consumers’ Council died in 1920, divided and impotent. The government saw little reason to keep it alive; with the end of wartime controls, its raison d’être had gone. Soldiers returned to their industries and to the strike as their primary weapon for defending their livelihoods. In Weimar Germany, consumers still sent a few representatives in 1921 to the economic council, the Reichswirtschaftsrat, but they were quickly outwitted by corporate producers; tellingly, on the Coal Council, it was industrial users and coal dealers who spoke as the consumer interest, not housewives or tenants.6

  Still, the war had important legacies. At one extreme, the new Soviet regime in Russia turned war socialism to its own use. The Bolsheviks applied the lessons of centralized control with harrowing consequences. The 1917 revolution started a brutal rollercoaster for shopkeepers and customers alike. After initial
rationing and the suppression of private shops (1917–21), open buying and selling was encouraged (1922–8), before war was declared on shops once again (1929–35). Rationing was not abolished until 1935. By 1930, less than 6 per cent of the retail market was left in the hands of private traders. Shopping now meant a state shop, barter or the black market. By 1932, most workers in key industries ate their main meal in state cafeterias. All this had catastrophic consequences for people’s standard of living, which by the following year was below that at the time of the October Revolution.7

  Consumption marked one’s place in the socialist order. That goods are markers of distinction was nothing new. Under the Bolsheviks, the state could manipulate distinction because it controlled the goods. The rationing hierarchy placed workers and engineers at the top, housewives and clerks in the middle, receiving only half as much food, and peasants at the bottom, receiving nothing. Entry to shops and cafeterias was screened. Peasants, for example, were not admitted to state stores, which offered cheaper prices than commercial stores. Even the bill in a cafeteria reflected one’s rank in the workers’ state: a construction worker paid 84 kopecks for lunch, an engineer two and half times that amount.8 As is well known, Soviet Russia threw its energies into collectivizing land and nationalizing industry. For everyday life, the state was equally significant. The clothes people were able to buy (or not), the price they had to pay, whether they obtained things in a state store or from a speculator – people’s lives as consumers were defined by their relation to the state.

  Scarcity only bolstered state power. One of the first to appreciate this was Leon Trotsky. At the time he was exiled in 1928, it was routine for people to line up outside state stores and co-operatives to wait for goods to arrive, secure a share and then sell them on, a process known as ‘queueism’ (ocherednichestvo). To have blat, or good connections, was vital. In The Revolution Betrayed, written from his Mexican exile in 1936, Trotsky described scarcity as the breeding ground of state power. ‘When there is [sic] enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little [sic] goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.’ This was how Soviet bureaucracy grew. ‘It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait.’9

  Even in countries that axed state controls, consumption remained on the political agenda. Consumer co-operatives had mushroomed during the war. Housewives’ clubs, patriotic leagues and salvage councils trained millions of civilians in the art of thrift. Government propaganda and public opinion asked people to think of the public consequences of what they bought and used. To save the fatherland (or mother country), kings promised to eat fish rather than meat. Social movements instructed the young in how to salvage tins. Here was a reservoir for future appeals to consumption as a collective endeavour.

  The war left behind a sense of a social bargain between state and consumers. Treating consumption as a civic project encouraged a greater sense of entitlement. Consumers expected to be protected against scarcity and profiteers. After inflation gave way to stability in the mid-1920s, governments proved unwilling to clamp down on cartels and price-fixing. Yet neither in Britain nor Weimar Germany were they entirely able to ignore demands for state supervision of fair prices. Some have seen this as a return to an older ‘moral economy’, where authorities confronted by food riots in the eighteenth century would temporarily step in to restore a ‘just price’.10 It was more than that. A fair price became part of social citizenship. Rent control in Weimar was one example. Wartime experiments emboldened social democrats and progressive liberals to look for permanent ways to stabilize prices and regulate food supplies.

  Consumer politics was also expanding its repertoire. The Hamburg Konsumentenkammer, one of the local councils to survive until the Nazis, gives a sense of their broadening ambition. In addition to fighting the ‘price terror’ of guilds and cartels and supporting municipal market-halls, the council also defended the new self-service vending machines that offered cigarettes, chocolate and hot sausages outside legal opening hours. By 1929, there were 200,000 of these in German cities, but the Hamburg police had repeatedly rejected permit applications. The Trumpf sweet machines offered people the ‘convenience’ of being able to buy when they pleased. After years of being treated as an ‘object’, the consumer needed to grow into the ‘subject’ of economic life, the council insisted. The state should be responsive to the public in the services it provided, such as transport and electricity. Did the burghers of the free city of Hamburg not have the same right to travel on trains with comfortable, upholstered seats as those in big cities elsewhere?11

  Having seen Fordism in America with their own eyes, some German trade unionists defended new desires as an engine of growth rather than a drain on productive resources.12 That the satisfaction of some needs gave rise to new ones was a good thing. The big question in the inter-war years was how long this expansion of needs could go on. With the world depression (1929–31) it hit a major roadblock. The issues were in part economic – how much spending could the state afford? Did wealth not have to be produced before it could be consumed? But these were tied to a deeper, moral conflict. What if more goods produced not stronger citizens but reckless individuals without soul or spine? Such fears reached back to Rousseau and beyond, but the inter-war crisis of capitalism and the rise of totalitarianism gave them fresh urgency. To understand how these tensions were resolved, we need to look at the Depression alongside the dual expansion of commercial leisure and consumer politics.

  The inter-war years were precarious times, but they were times with expanding horizons, in Europe as well as the United States. Europeans as a whole entered the Second World War better fed, over an inch taller and earning more than their parents; ironically, it was the Aryan master race that was not growing. These gains were, of course, unevenly distributed across class, regions and generations. In terms of income, the average European was more than 25 per cent better off, according to recent estimates.13 This might look modest compared to the growth spurt of the 1950s and ’60s, but contemporaries could only measure their lives against the past, not the future. For many, the gains were real enough; palpable in better housing, fancier clothes, cinemas, personal radios and cameras. The Depression was a step backwards in this slow movement forward. In 1929, for example, Americans purchased cars worth $9 billion. By 1933, this had sunk to $4 billion. Sales of furniture dropped to a third, that of radios and musical instruments to a fifth, of levels before the Wall Street Crash.14

  Old industries were particularly hard hit. Entire communities were thrown out of work. In 1932, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and his wife Marie Jahoda, a social psychologist, descended on Marienthal, a textile village south of Vienna, to find out how families were coping. The people of Marienthal had seen their share of ups and downs in the 1920s. In 1925, they had joined the national strike, then faced unemployment. A subsequent revival proved short-lived. By 1932, more than two thirds of the 478 families had lost their job. Mothers were no longer returning from day-trips to Vienna with toys and fashionable clothes but worrying about how to afford shoes; the researchers organized a clothes bank for the village. Depression really meant what it said. It sucked the life out of the town, turning a once-lively place into a ‘tired community’.15 The very rhythm of life was changing. Previously a blessing, leisure time was now a curse. Unemployed men were no longer in a hurry. Instead, they were ‘drifting’ through the day to kill time.

  In their consumption habits, however, families responded to the loss of income in strikingly different ways. Some sold their radios and fine cutlery, cancelled the newspaper and moved back to self-provisioning, growing vegetables or raising rabbits. Others, by contrast, desperately clung to the pleasures of better times. Some used their plots to grow roses and tulips rather than potatoes: ‘one cannot live by bread alone, one also needs something for one’s heart,’ as one villager put it.16 A fifty-year-
old woman, dependent on emergency aid, bought herself a curling iron on credit. Another welfare recipient purchased a coloured print of Venice. Many mothers skimped to buy their kids chocolates or doughnuts. Such responses looked like ‘irrational housekeeping’, but they were, in fact, quite understandable. People had become accustomed to a growing world of things. Children gave honest testimony to the resulting tension between harsh realities and rising expectations. Most downscaled their Christmas wish list for their poor parents but continued to dream of new clothes, picture books, toys and sports equipment. ‘I did not get anything,’ one eleven-year-old girl wrote, ‘only glasses. I really wanted an atlas and a compass.’ Jahoda and Lazarsfeld found many Christmas letters written in the subjunctive: ‘If my parents were not unemployed, I would have liked . . . ’17

  Levels of wealth and deprivation differed across Europe and the United States, but rising expectations had taken hold. In downward cycles like war and depression, people no longer fell back to an earlier norm of scarcity. The episodes from Marienthal were mirrored in Maurice Halbwachs’ contemporaneous study of workers in France, Germany and the United States. People cut back on necessities to preserve recent luxuries. The standard of living was not just a function of income or biological need. It was shaped by habits and expectations.18 Amidst the sharp drop in spending during the Depression, therefore, we find a remarkable resilience of consuming habits. People did not stop buying but tried to find cheaper ways to maintain their lifestyle. In American cities, expensive cafés went bankrupt. Yet people continued to eat out, simply at more basic diners. They still bought new clothes, just cheaper ones. There was no change in the fashion cycle; women’s dresses and hats went through as many transformations as before. Nor did the Depression reverse the trend to fill the home with electric helpers. Toaster sales were down, but American families bought four times as many electric refrigerators in 1932 as they had in 1929.19 Nor did the Depression make people sell their cars; they simply hung on to their old model a little bit longer. In their study of Muncie, Indiana, the Lynds even reported a slight rise in the number of registered cars: the car had become a ‘must’.20 For petrol stations and recreation, the slump was good news, as people took to the roads and visited national parks. Even that most horrible fate – house repossession – was turned into entertainment with a perfectly timed new board game: Monopoly.