There were patches of light as well as darkness. For those in work, life was getting significantly better. As we have already seen, affluent workers were joining the ranks of homeowners and radio listeners. There were now growing islands of comfort and entertainment, especially among workers in new industries such as electrical engineering, people on fixed incomes who benefited from the drop in prices, and among the young. In 1930s Britain, young working-class men had considerable spending power; their income had more than doubled in a generation. Most handed half of their wages over to their parents, but this left another half for their own pleasure. Young women joined a new army of clerks, typists and shop assistants, earning less than their brothers but enjoying unprecedented independence nonetheless.21 Here were the core customers for cinemas, dance halls, fashionable clothes, lipstick and brilliantine. The triumph of these new commercial dream worlds was not complete; older forms of leisure, including street entertainment and ‘monkey parades’ (dating promenades), were still around in the 1930s.22 Their rise was breathtaking nonetheless. By 1930, more than half of all adolescent working-class boys went to the cinema at least once a week; girls only slightly less often. Consumerism was a life stage, separating members of the same class, indeed household. Young men would buy new shirts and suits, while their parents made do and mended. For most, it was the cry of the first child that meant the end of free spending.
While European societies as a whole, therefore, occupied rungs well below the high standard of living in the United States, some groups within them were climbing up the ladder fast, developing tastes and excitements similar to those of the better-off Americans. No space was more formative than the cinema. The effect on self-fashioning emerges powerfully from a study of 2,000 American students and pupils conducted between 1929 and 1932. One nineteen-year-old girl had studied Mary Pickford to learn the art of make-up. A high-school junior fell in love with Clara Bow’s sleeveless jumper dress in The Wild Party: ‘Nothing could be done about it. My mother had to buy me one just like it.’ Movies were an etiquette book for increasingly self-conscious teenagers. ‘Ways of address, conduct at the table, etc., have been incorporated into my conduct by seeing them in the movies,’ a male sophomore reported. Young women imitated Greta Garbo, not always successfully: ‘When I try to copy her walk, I am asked if my knees are weak. How insulting some people are!’ Many a girl adopted Pola Negri’s fierce look. Rudolph Valentino taught an entire generation how to be held and kissed. One nineteen-year-old recalled how at the age of eleven she had started putting perfume behind her ears, something she had learnt from Norma Talmadge, the glamorous star of the silent era.23
Movies are often condemned for lulling people into escapist fantasies, feeding day-dreams of ‘lavish wardrobes, beautiful homes, servants, imported automobiles, yachts and countless handsome suitors’, as one girl remembered. So it is worth stressing that they had liberating effects, too. ‘Often I get ideas of how much freedom I should have’ from movies, a black male high-school student noted, because there ‘fellows and girls . . . can wear the best of clothes, make plenty of money, go nearly any place they choose . . . and enjoy all the luxuries of life.’24 Movies encouraged girls in particular to challenge parental rules and press for greater freedom to go out or to receive company at home.
For Europeans, movies brought American style and a higher standard of living within touching distance. This did not mean a complete makeover. Most working-class girls did not aspire to look like vamps. Rather, celluloid dreams spoke to ideals of ‘neat’ appearance. Films ‘show me that the best mode of dress is the simple one, as it is neat and at the same time gives a finished appearance’, one female British bank clerk wrote. A private secretary recalled how in the early ’20s, when she was seventeen, her then boyfriend had commented on a film star’s ‘lovely little feet’ and how ‘her shoes are always beautiful.’ From that moment, ‘I always bought the nicest shoes and stockings I could afford,’ and shoes remained her ‘pet luxury’ into the years of war-time rationing.25 Inevitably, these aspirations led to frustrations with the material reality of the present. One young British woman, a shorthand typist who went to the pictures four times a week, found that seeing ‘marvellous places’ like New York and California on the screen left her ‘miserable and unhappy sitting in my stuffy little office all day with nobody to talk to but myself (which I don’t) and to go home to a house that should have been knocked down five years ago’.26 Such feelings were not all bad. Movies taught people to aspire to a better life. In societies marked by class, race and gender, greater expectations had public as well as private consequences. The screen encouraged a desire for travel and goods but also for greater equality of opportunities. People no longer resigned themselves to their fate so easily. Most viewers knew that the America on the screen was a glorified ideal, not the real thing, but this did nothing to diminish its appeal as a more classless society, nor the anxieties it provoked among elites.
That good times made people reckless had long been the complaint of social reformers. It was a leitmotif in studies of household budgets which sought to document how the standard of living might rise if only individuals drank less and gambled less. The 1920s heightened such fears, for three reasons. One was that people’s demands on the state were rising just as states had to shoulder the huge costs left behind by war. The second was universal suffrage – what if the multitude lost their head? Finally, there was the example of the United States, which advertised a future built on mass consumption and individual pleasure. There was no simple divide between European ‘traditionalists’ and American ‘modernizers’; France, Germany and Britain all had their modernizers.27 Still, there was a widespread suspicion that American cars and movies lured Europeans towards moral and financial bankruptcy. Even consumer champions, like the Hamburg council, were worried about the rising numbers buying clothes, furniture and watches on credit. Whatever experts returning from New York and Chicago preached, American conditions were not applicable to the continent, they insisted. Purchasing power was too low and instalment plans merely diminished it further.28
All this helps to explain why one of the products doing really well during the slump was bestsellers warning Europeans of the evil of affluence. Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930) went through 187 editions. The American dream was really a nightmare, he wrote. Mass production and mass consumption had turned people into materialist slaves. Americans had traded in their freedom for a fridge and a car.29
America was the menace, not so much for what was really happening in Detroit or Hollywood, but because of European elites’ deep-seated suspicion of mass society. Many of them had not believed women fit to vote, nor the many men without property and education. Now these same people were tempted by material desires they did not have the self-discipline or knowledge to control. Mass consumption challenged the intellectual elite’s position as the guardian of civilization. This was especially pronounced in those parts of Europe, such as Spain, where they had assigned themselves a leading role in national regeneration, with the curious result that plenty appeared the greatest threat where it was furthest away. Few matched the thundering critique of the ‘self-satisfied age’ launched by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in 1930 in The Revolt of the Masses; it would enjoy a second success in the 1950s. He supported the overthrow of the monarchy in 1931, but he was more against the king than for democracy. When civil war broke out he fled to Buenos Aires. Ortega y Gasset was a modernist, but when it came to culture, he was an elitist to the bone. ‘The mass is the average man,’ he wrote. ‘Anybody who is not like everybody . . . runs the risk of being eliminated.’ The cinema filled workers’ minds with visions of ‘fabulous potentiality’, creating an ‘inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitations’. Superabundancia was the enemy of civilization. Ortega y Gasset called ‘the mass’ ‘the spoiled child of human history’, obsessed with things, speed and instant gratification. Scarcity had been much b
etter for human development, for character was formed by challenges and self-discipline. Abundance, by contrast, made individuals ‘deformed’, vicious and false.30
Across Europe, cultural elites manoeuvred themselves almost instinctively into the position once occupied by the Church, that of defenders of the spirit against the temptations of the flesh. Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch historian, to take an example from the liberal north-west, in 1935 attacked the ‘permanent adolescence’ of the age and ‘the cult of self’. Morals were squeezed by materialism from two sides: by Marxism, with its appeal to class; and by Freudianism, with its obsession with sex. For Huizinga, these were symptoms of a deeper malaise. The Depression revealed how the world had lost its equilibrium. Spiritual and material values no longer balanced each other out. ‘A highly refined economic system daily puts forth a mass of products and sets forces in motion which nobody wants and which bring advantage to none . . . which many scorn as unworthy, absurd and mischievous.’ Artists and writers were no better. Everywhere, standards were declining, resulting in ‘cultural disorder’. ‘Serious activity’ and ‘play’ had contaminated each other. Slogans and PR ruled. Decorum and respect were on the wane. Radio could not teach people to think, as the printed book once had. The one good thing Huizinga had to say for consumer culture was reserved for film, where the happy ending had at least preserved a ‘solemn and popular moral order’.31
Eventually, consumption emerged stronger from this mid-life crisis. Consumers came to be seen not as the cause of the problem but as its cure. To some degree, this process can be summarized as the triumph of John Maynard Keynes, who justified public spending and condemned an older glorification of thrift. Keynes’s General Theory of 1936 followed a string of more popular pieces that asked contemporaries to turn their morals upside down. In times of recession, he wrote in 1931, saving was evil: ‘Whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day.’ He urged ‘patriotic housewives’ instead to ‘go to the wonderful sales’ and indulge themselves.32 Governments, too, needed to spend, not cut. Yet Keynes himself was not an unqualified hedonist. Unlike his teacher Marshall, he did not believe that needs were insatiable. In ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, published in 1930, he envisaged a future where absolute needs would be fulfilled and everyone devoted their energies to non-material purposes. ‘We shall honour . . . the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.’ In the short run, Keynes endorsed consumer spending. In the long run, however, he hoped for a return to ‘some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is vice . . . and the love of money is detestable’.33 In view of the rising level of consumption since, it is difficult not to conclude that Keynes had a better eye for the short than the long run.
Keynes was only one voice in a more general turn towards consumption. The consumer became an ever more frequent point of reference in the 1930s. French co-operatives started to address ‘consumers of health’, British teachers the ‘consumer’s view of adult education’, others the ‘consumer of art’. In South Africa, William Hutt, a classical liberal economist, coined the idea of ‘consumer sovereignty’. Consumers, Hutt argued, did not necessarily know what was best for them, but in a market society their demand ensured that power was diffused, rather than controlled by state or producers, thus facilitating social harmony.34 In Geneva, internationalists at the League of Nations looked to consumers to absorb excess production and restore world harmony. At the level of policy, the New Deal marked the capitalist apotheosis of this process, but we cannot understand it in isolation. All ideologies discovered consumption. The premise of cultural pessimists and old elites had been that goods bred a cult of the self. Mass ideologies had far fewer problems with mass society. The desire for things simply had to be turned into an instrument of collective strength. By the mid-1930s, gloomy predictions were drowned out by a chorus of ‘joy’, or Freude, which openly celebrated material pleasures.
In America, the transfer of power from the Republican Herbert Hoover to the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 changed the diagnosis of the crisis from over-production to under-consumption. New prescriptions brought new politics. The New Deal made the consumer an integral part of democratic state building. Freedom was ‘no half-and-half affair’, Roosevelt told the 1936 Democratic Convention. ‘If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.’35 And for this a strong state was needed. Mr and Mrs Consumer went to Washington. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), set up in the summer of 1933, included a Consumer Advisory Board to protect the public against unfair pricing, poor quality and misleading labelling. Similarly, in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and other branches of the New Deal state, there was an Office of the Consumer Counsel. The Federal Housing Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority delivered cheaper housing and electricity.
In practice, diffuse consumer interests found it hard to match concentrated business interests when it came to setting codes and prices for fertilizers, underwear or any other of the five hundred articles regulated by the NRA. Advances in consumer protection were piecemeal and imperfect. Roosevelt himself pursued a double strategy, looking sometimes to consumers’ political power, at other times to their purchasing power.36 The 1930s showed that it was much harder for government to change institutions than to increase spending, which is where the thrust of policy came to lie. Still, the New Deal raised the political profile of the consumer to a new height. It renewed the alignment between state and consumers first noticeable in the First World War. More than that, it turned consumers into instruments of social policy.
If consumers went to Washington, Washington also encouraged them to build the New Deal back home. Over a million volunteers signed up housewives to put a Blue Eagle sticker on their front door and pledge to buy only at stores that paid the minimum wage. On the radio, Consumer Time taught the art of civic spending. The New Deal emboldened shoppers to take the fight against high prices into their own hands and boycott profiteers; in the spring of 1935, boycotts forced the closure of several thousand butcher’s shops in New York City alone.37 Rather than building a welfare state, the New Deal turned to consumers to redistribute income and strengthen the purchasing power of workers and farmers. As the post-war years would show, this was a shaky foundation for welfare policies.
The New Deal was the culmination of a more general appreciation of the consumer as citizen. The National Consumers’ League had led campaigns for a minimum wage, the protection of women and to regulate child labour since the 1890s. In the course of the 1920s, it was joined by a new generation of muckrakers who exposed shoddy goods and fraudulent advertising. Consumers’ Research was set up in 1927 as a private testing agency to empower people by giving them better information. The pinch of the Depression further enhanced the appeal of self-help. Why pay more for a brand name or extra packaging? CR’s bimonthly bulletins and product checklist were shields against the onslaught of advertisers and salesmen. Stuart Chase and Fred Schlink, CR’s founders, came from a communitarian tradition that viewed goods and desires with suspicion. Following in the footsteps of Veblen, Chase stressed the wastefulness of electric food mixers and many other gadgets.38 At the same time, the recession upgraded the social function of spending. Mass unemployment was a serious shock to a value system based on work and self-denial. In the mid-1920s, President Coolidge had still preached that national strength and welfare rested on the simple virtues of industry and thrift.39 From this view, consumption was something that had to be earned. Consumers came after workers. For the progressive Chase, by contrast, these values were outmoded. High productivity meant more leisure and less employment. America had changed from a society of scarcity into one of abundance. The moral union between working and spending had dissolved. In an ‘economy of abundance’, there was no longer a
‘measurable relation . . . between work contributed and goods consumed’. The recession showed how society needed to ensure the ‘unhampered flow of goods to consumers, involving the right to a minimum standard of living, regardless of work performed – if no work is available’.40 People should spend more, not less; dividends and greater purchasing power should be extended to all. Consumers, in short, were productive citizens, too. Prosperity and stability rested on their shoulders.
Empire of Things Page 38