Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

Business and advertising endorsed the convergence of consumption and citizenship. To counter accusations of monopoly, American corporations presented themselves as mini-democracies. A 1921 advert for AT&T styled the giant telephone operator as ‘Democracy . . . of the people, by the people, for the people.’ General Electric likened the purchase of household conveniences to having the vote. Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats were master classes in marketing, eyed with concern and envy by advertisers whose job it was to rehabilitate the corporate image in an anti-business atmosphere. Advertisers pitched democratic consumers against dictatorial politicians – ‘under private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is the boss’ whereas in ‘state capitalism, the politician is the boss’, an ad by the J. Walter Thompson agency put it.41

  The increasingly popular idiom of the consumer as king had a touch of hypocrisy; privately, advertisers saw shoppers as irrational, stupid or easily distracted; feminine stereotypes that, by the 1930s, were extended to men as well.42 It did, however, capture an important political turn towards choice in American culture. In the inter-war years, choice stood for more than individualism and markets. It was also a way to foster citizenship. In addition to empowering people vis-à-vis state and business, progressives sought to develop their democratic character. Standardized goods threatened to replace individual taste and identity with conformity and anonymity. The Depression reinforced the sense that people were tossed about by an economic system too complex for them to understand. One remedy was to simplify the system – to return to the farm. This was, however, now the stuff of literary nostalgia, not practical politics. The other was to cultivate more intelligent citizens. This was the approach championed by the philosopher John Dewey and the home economics movement.

  Dewey was America’s most prominent public intellectual between the wars. His causes ranged from educational reform and women’s rights to a defence of Trotsky against the charges of the Stalinist show trials. In 1931, on retiring from Columbia University, he founded the Third Party to give greater voice to consumers. Later, he opposed Roosevelt for being too inflationary and not doing enough for the poor; one of the many contradictions of the New Deal was that it relied on consumption taxes.43 These skirmishes produced few results. Dewey’s main legacy ran deeper. Building on William James, Dewey turned pragmatism into an instrument of democratic freedom. The core of this idea was simple: thought and personality emerged through experience. Life was about becoming, not about reaching a particular goal. This outlook prized experimentation, and with it choice. Through making decisions and reflecting on them, people learnt to think about the consequences of their actions and developed a democratic disposition. It was a philosophy of the common man, with radical implications. Its influence on progressive education was profound; it prized learning by doing. For consumers, it was no less empowering. Instead of regulation from above, it looked to change from below, confident that people had the ability to make intelligent choices. Desires should be nourished through critical reflection, not suppressed.44

  Choice, then, was about more than calculating costs and benefits. This was almost a spiritual vision, a secular reworking of Christian ideas; Dewey himself had been raised a Congregationalist in Vermont. Actions were oriented outwards rather than inwards, connecting individuals to their communities and the universe at large. By the 1940s, his ideas had reached hundreds of thousands of young Americans in home economics classes in schools, colleges and local communities. Consumption, home economics taught, was about ethics as well as practical housekeeping. Key texts were inspired by Dewey. The consumer was more than a buyer, the leading home economist Hazel Kyrk stressed. Wise consumption raised ‘questions of motives, of values, of ends’, not just getting the best deal.45 It was such social ethics that gave choice its broader influence in the 1930s. It could be a tool of citizens, not just of the utility-maximizing individual. This marked a fundamental shift in values. In the older republican tradition, goods and desires tempted people away from active citizenship. Now, choosing in the marketplace nurtured stronger citizens.

  The sense that America was blessed with a mutually reinforcing union between freedom and plenty received an additional boost from totalitarian challenges abroad. Consumers, it seemed, saved America from Führers and commissars alike. Horace Kallen, a New York philosopher who had emigrated from Silesia, developed an entire worldview from the premise that ‘[w]e are consumers by nature and producers by necessity.’ Fascism and communism were only the latest manifestations of a servile mentality arising from a division of labour that accorded primacy to the producer. It was the consumer, Kallen argued, who was a whole person, someone who overcame the ‘false division of men’ into competing roles.46 True freedom lay with consumer cooperation. This association between freedom and consumption became increasingly central to America’s self-image.47 Yet this was not the only pairing. Totalitarian regimes discovered consumption, too.

  In Germany, the Nazis consciously presented themselves as a break with bourgeois politicians who preached austerity. For Hitler, the standard of living was one front in the battle against Jews and communists. Simple living was for primitives. The Aryan master race was entitled to more. Every German should be able to climb the ladder, like the Americans. The problem was that Germany was not the United States: it was plagued by lower productivity, lower purchasing power and fewer resources. Hitler’s answer was to break through these constraints by conquest. But, in the short run, rearmament sucked resources away from consumer industries like textiles and leather. The basic dilemma was that Nazi leaders, unlike the generals, were committed to defending private levels of consumption and not prepared to ask the German people to tighten their belts. They remembered with horror the collapse of the home front in 1918. Tourists were allowed to mingle, carefree, in the Black Forest. Cosmetics and toy production continued until the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.48

  Nazi policy was, consequently, shot through with contradictions. On the one hand, Nazis prophesied an era of abundance once the Aryan race had a chance to spread; the squandering of resources was hailed as a mark of racial superiority. On the other, the regime was struggling to pay for scarce resources and, in 1936, introduced a four-year plan to encourage the use of national materials – with very modest results. An unprecedented network of motorways was built, but the pursuit of self-sufficiency, with its restrictions on foreign fuel, put a brake on its use. The Nazis promised luxury for the masses and supported symbolic goods such as the Volksempfänger radio, which benefited from cartels and fixed prices. Newly-weds could get a special loan to fit out their first home, as long as the bride stopped working. At the same time, the regime’s militarism was costly and repressed consumption. The Nazis could not simply maintain Germans’ material comforts by making the enemy pay. The Aryanization of Jewish property and plunder in the occupied territories was brutal and rapacious, but it reduced only slightly the fiscal burden of war.49

  Nazism was forced to stretch the temporal horizon of desire. ‘Consumerism’ is often characterized as being all about instant gratification. This ignores the fantasies which public regimes helped to feed, especially those that saw themselves in timescales of a thousand years. Consumption was increasingly driven by a joy of longing, something the sociologist Colin Campbell has traced to ‘the Romantic imagination’.50 In this future-oriented mode, pleasure comes from dreaming about stuff. The eventual moment of acquisition can be disappointing. Then the anticipation of something new starts the cycle again. The Nazis vigorously encouraged people to shift their material desires to the future. The more the regime failed to deliver the goods, the greater its promise of future wealth. During the war, savers were promised 15 per cent interest and more, and deposited over 80 billion Reichsmark. An amazing 340,000 well-off Germans paid into the Volkswagen saving scheme run by the Nazi trade union, the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), for a VW beetle, without any receiving a car; they did not even receive any interest.51 Adverts continued to sing the pra
ises of brands of cigarettes and detergents which were rapidly becoming unavailable.

  The Nazis’ promise of affluence was underwritten by the name of the organization motto Kraft durch Freude (KdF), or ‘Strength through Joy’. There is a certain symmetry with post-Depression America, albeit in a different ideological key. Private pleasure and national power would reinforce each other. Even the pursuit of autarchy was conducted within these parameters. The cheese substitute Velveta was to be savoured as a delicacy. With Nivea, young women were told, a little lotion could build a perfect tan. In 1937, the laundry and cosmetics giant Henkel launched its own ‘two-front war against waste’ in production and consumption. People needed to be more discerning, not consume less. Market researchers in the Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung saw their job as raising consumers to a higher cultural level.52 Unlike the individual materialist in the United States, they argued, the German was a Kulturmensch with deep roots in the community. By 1938, the KdF catered for almost 9 million German tourists. Package tours were designed to pacify workers and to harden them for the collective struggle to come. They were also a relatively cheap way to show off the way in which race was erasing class. Cruise ships like the Wilhelm Gustloff introduced what recent budget airlines have since perfected: the classless cabin. Leisure provision was minimal; on board, travellers enjoyed sack races. Some lucky workers were able to enjoy a week in Norway, or Madeira, the most sought-after destination.

  At one level, tourism strengthened the racial state. Photo diaries show how travellers appreciated the racial traits of ‘our Nordic brothers’ amidst the Norwegian fjords.53 The problem was that – contrary to theories of ‘mass society’ – pleasure was intensely private. Once tickled, it tended to escape a uniform ‘mass’ taste. By endorsing hedonism, the Nazis inevitably created spaces for personal satisfaction and escape. KdF tours were notorious for heavy drinking and heavy petting. Once a ship had left the harbour, some passengers would simply drop the ‘Hitler greeting’. Women used Mediterranean cruises for erotic adventures with local men, to the horror of security agents.54

  The cult of the home only deepened these contradictions. In the 1937 exhibition Schaffendes Volk (A Nation at Work) a million visitors toured model houses and modern conveniences. Appropriately, the exhibition was opened by Hermann Göring, who had been placed in charge of the four-year plan the previous year and who embodied the taste for the good life; the organizers flew in his favourite chocolate Sachertorte from the Viennese patisserie Demel. Model homes reflected Nazi consumerism’s combination of tradition and modernity. Rustic beams and embroidered curtains mixed with the latest technology. Henkel had its own pavilion and model house (complete with a cinema in the basement), which it used to demonstrate new easy-to-use paints. These were no longer just for professional decorators, visitors learnt. Everyone could now paint their own four walls. New products met the autarchy goal for pure, 100 per cent German materials: rein deutsche Werkstoffe. At the same time, they deepened a private culture of comfort and pleasure.55

  It might appear self-evident that mass ideologies like fascism were a more receptive vessel for mass consumption than their bourgeois predecessors, but we must not exaggerate the natural affinities, nor imagine a clean break with older values. American movies were popular in 1930s Germany, while swing music developed into youthful resistance and was crushed. Nazi tourism did not eliminate an older middle- and upper-class travel culture. Regular tourists despised Nazi package groups, while the latter often complained about inferior food and accommodation on their holidays. In spite of its populist title, the 1936 Schaffendes Volk exhibition included houses built for a bourgeois lifestyle, with servants’ rooms and separate kitchen and dining rooms.

  The paradoxical relationship between mass ideology, mass consumption and bourgeois habits was nowhere more pronounced than in Stalinist Russia. In the 1920s, efforts to mould a new Soviet person focused on replacing petit-bourgeois with proletarian traits. Marxism stood for ‘everything for the masses’ according to Stalin; it was anarchism that looked to the individual (lichnost).56 By the mid-1930s, the proletarian leather jacket had been replaced by crêpe de Chine. Two movies, a mere five years apart, register the shift. Odna (Alone) was made by the great Soviet directors Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg in 1929–31. It was one of the first Russian movies to experiment with sound; the clicking of a typewriter and public announcements were added after filming. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score, lost during the Siege of Leningrad but reconstructed in 2003.57 The film opens with Yelena Kuzmina, a newly qualified teacher, first in her Leningrad flat enjoying modern utilities, then going on a shopping trip with her fiancé to pick out furniture for their future home. Such petit-bourgeois desires are quickly crushed when she is given her first posting: a village in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan. Neither shamen nor a corrupt village elder, however, manage to discourage her from her mission of bringing education to the ‘backward’ Asian brothers and sisters – Lenin, who had a strong belief that Asian ‘hordes’ needed to be civilized, would have been proud. About to report on illegal sheep-trading, she is left in the snow for dead. In the end, the villagers rescue her, and she is airlifted to safety. This was a typical Soviet Bildungsroman: individuals matured into comrades as they learnt to sacrifice personal comfort for the socialist good.

  By the mid-1930s, movies such as Odna had disappeared from cinemas, replaced by glamour, entertainment and melodrama. Tsirk (Circus) was a 1936 musical about an American circus artist – the star was the glamorous Lubov Orlova – and her black baby, who find love and acceptance among the welcoming Soviet people. Tsirk combined propaganda with vaudeville, parades, cheap jokes and sentimentalism; different ethnic groups of the Soviet people sing the baby a lullaby, each in their own language.

  The shift from Odna to Tsirk was part of a second revolution. In the 1920s, Soviet energies concentrated on transforming political and economic institutions. Now, they turned to the individual. In the mid-1930s, Stalin tried to plant the roots of a new material civilization. As in New Deal America and Nazi Germany, it was the state, not the market, which pushed consumption forward. Material desires would advance communism. ‘Life is getting better, life has become more joyous,’ Stalin pronounced in 1935. This slogan was trumpeted from department stores, the fun fair at Gorky Park and in popular song. After years of deprivation, comrades were told to enjoy tennis, silk stockings and jazz by Antonin Ziegler’s Czech band. Red Army officials learnt to dance the tango. Heroic workers, the Stakhanovites, received gramophones and a Boston suit (for him) and a crêpe de Chine dress (for her). A Soviet House of Fashions opened its doors in Moscow in 1936, and the USSR set out to overtake France in the production of perfume. Novelty was encouraged. Chocolate and sausage makers raced to expand their ranges; in 1937, Moscow’s Red October factory produced over five hundred different kinds of chocolates and candies. From Moscow to Vladivostok, there were exhibitions of radios, cameras, fashionable shoes and even a Soviet washing machine. The campaign for a plainer domestic lifestyle was abandoned. Housewives were urged to join embroidery classes and personalize their living quarters. Personal property received official protection in Stalin’s 1936 constitution.58

  The campaign for kulturnost (a cultured lifestyle) touched all parts of everyday life, from personal hygiene and appearance to cream cakes and social dances. Red consumerism challenged the divide between needs and wants. Luxury was no longer decadent. It was the socialist future, to be enjoyed by all. This approach can be understood as a particular Soviet version of the ‘politics of productivity’ which all inter-war regimes wrestled with. Dangling watches and phonographs in front of workers would make them work harder. ‘We want to lead a cultured life,’ Party leader Miron Djukanov, a miner, told fellow Stakhanovites in 1935: ‘[W]e want bicycles, pianos, phonographs, records, radio sets, and many other articles of culture.’59 Greater productivity, in turn, would allow socialism to overtake and crush capitalism. Stalinism aimed at an extreme version
of the ‘industrious revolution’. Hard work would catapult ordinary people into a new material era, as in the case of E. M. Fedorova, a garment worker in Leningrad’s Red Banner Factory who was rewarded with a watch, a tablecloth, an electric samovar, an electric iron and a phonograph and records for exceeding her targets – in addition to the works of Lenin and Stalin.60

  Stalin’s consumerism had a paternalist touch: the ‘father of the people’ looked after all workers. At the same time, individuals were asked to take an active role in refashioning themselves. It was a socialist variation of ‘the civilizing process’ that the sociologist Norbert Elias traced back to early modern court culture.61 Mirrors and soap would teach self-discipline. Polished shoes, clean shirts and a shaved face signalled an inner purity that could be monitored by others as well as by oneself. Caring for personal possessions would foster attentiveness at work. Cleanliness was now next to socialism, not godliness.

  What is remarkable in retrospect is how much of the Soviet ideal of material culture continued to spin in a bourgeois orbit. Prized goods were a Boston suit and silk stockings, a gramophone and a watch, vases and chocolates. Civilizing the socialist self involved a shared ensemble of goods and habits, not difference. Everyone would climb up the same ladder of cultural progress, with Stakhanovites leading the way. Champagne would flow for all loyal workers. Recent research suggests that in the 1930s the gap between workers and the elite did narrow somewhat, although this was primarily because of better food and clothing rather than luxuries; all of Leningrad had to make do with a mere 25,000 bottles of champagne during the anniversary celebration of the October Revolution in 1940.62 Class did not disappear, however. Rather, the drive for material uplift gave birth to a new communist elite; at the Kirov works in 1935, some workers demanded an end to the ‘fattening-up’ of managers.63 The mid-1930s saw a widespread inflation of ranks, prizes, orders and medals. Many came with serious stipends or cash awards. Stalinism transmuted into a hybrid of bourgeois manners and Tsarist hierarchies.