In West Germany, Chancellor Erhard courted women as ‘chancellors of the exchequer’, echoing the slogan circulating in Britain and America before the First World War, when the power of the purse had been linked to the demand for women’s right to vote. Families could receive tax credits for buying consumer durables, a subsidy with a Nazi past; Erhard had worked for a marketing firm during the Hitler years. What changed was the social project: the housewife was now recruited to build a democratic rather than a racial state. As citizen consumers, women had not just duties but rights, most notably the right to choose.
The consumer was the lynchpin of the conservative restoration more generally, too. In the 1950s, even public administration and schools were referred to as consumers.115 In leisure magazines for their workers, German companies circulated articles from Reader’s Digest that explained how all business hinged on happy customers.116 It was the consumer, not the boss, who determined work and wages. Consumer satisfaction provided a shared goal for boss and workers: growth without social conflict.
The conservative restoration, however, was fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, it preached choice. On the other, it wanted individuals to stick to traditional roles. Not surprisingly, this created a zone of conflict with the group that, more than any other, turned to goods and fashion for their identity: youth. The 1950s saw a wave of youth riots. On New Year’s Eve in 1956, several thousand youths fought running battles with police on the Kungsgatan in the centre of Stockholm. There were riots in Vienna (1957) and smashed concert halls during rock and roll performances in Milan (1957) and Hamburg (1958); in 1958, German youths clashed with police almost every other day. In Paris, the blousons noirs inspired fear and gangs fought each other in the 15th arrondissement. In Moscow, young men flâneured up and down the left side of Gorky Street – Broadway or simply ‘Brod’ to them – in extra-long jackets, tight trousers with wide flares and thick-soled shoes that could weigh up to 2.5kg. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, authorities, journalists and cultural elites voiced the same moral panic: youth was in crisis.117
These confrontations had particular local ingredients; West Germans, for example, worried about how to build a new army with young rebels. But it is helpful to see things in the round. How consumption redefined generations is a theme that will be explored in greater depth in a later chapter. Here we should note what the preoccupation with rebellious youth tells us about nervous elites as well as about teenagers. The actual number of youths in gangs and riots in the 1950s was tiny compared to those who dutifully went to Boy Scouts, saved for their trousseau or pottered about on an allotment. Fears of moral decay were circulating prior to mopeds and jeans. Already in 1952, a Dutch commission reported on youths running wild. It found a dangerous mix of excess and lack of purpose. Gerard and Piet, fourteen-year-old twins, for example, returned home from a family party with their parents at 4 a.m., ‘drunk as a skunk’. Youth mirrored a world that had ‘lost its form’.118 They were whirling madly, dancing boogie-woogie. In Buiksloot, an Amsterdam suburb, seventeen-year-old workers spent most of their earnings on clothes, cinema and cigarettes. When they did not go dancing on the Nieuwendijk, they were ‘hanging about’ on street corners. Where would it all end? In fact, half of office girls never went dancing. But to the commission it seemed that parents and youth organizations were losing their grip – most boys and girls came home after 10 p.m., and membership of youth organizations was falling.119 In many ways, youths in the 1950s were simply reclaiming the streets and some of the freedoms their grandparents had lost in the crackdown over juvenile delinquency at the beginning of the century. To the establishment, however, the behaviour of ‘wild’ youths raised doubts whether war-torn societies could ever rebuild themselves.
As the tide of goods rose in the 1950s and ’60s, cultural authority looked ever more like a sandcastle at the surf’s edge. Goods and images gave youths a chance to fashion their own identity, rituals and etiquette. The next decade saw the diffusion of subcultures. Rock’n’roll and denim, initially the preserve of proletarian and ethnic groups at the margins, spread to middle-class kids. Styles of consumption were so contested because they signalled two rival cultures. The bourgeois model had prized self-discipline and self-improvement. Pleasure required restraint, education and work first – ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). Youth culture, by contrast, was about emotional release and was intensely physical. It prized instant gratification. It was about sweat, speed and sex. It meant rock ‘n’ roll, the swinging hips of Elvis the Pelvis and the Italian urlatori – literally, ‘the screamers’ – with a young Adriano Celentano twisting as if he were a spring (il molleggiato). Its literary heroine was Françoise Sagan, who wrote Bonjour Tristesse at the tender age of eighteen and swapped her Catholic upbringing for whiskey and an Aston Martin, which she crashed in 1957 in a much-publicised accident. Critics deplored the ‘animalistic’ behaviour and ecstasy of the young. Rock’n’roll, teachers’ magazines warned, was an expression of ‘the philosophy of all that was ugly’.120
Governments’ initial reflex was to shore up cultural authority. Stiffer juvenile protection laws were introduced to keep the under-eighteens from dance halls and dangerous movies. Many radio stations banned Elvis. But popular demand proved too strong. Spaces of consumption were expanding and ever easier to reach. In the Netherlands, a million people had a moped in 1960; it was in these years that stealing cars, motorbikes and scooters entered the list of ‘delinquency’.121 If songs were banned on public radio, there was always the jukebox in the ice-cream parlour. Kids were cleverer than censors – a survey in Paris and Amiens found that half the boys and girls watched censored films one way or another.122
And the young commanded growing purchasing power. In the United States, advertisers began targeting fashion-conscious college students as early as the 1920s. In Western Europe, the big leap came in the 1950s, when teenagers’ discretionary spending doubled. In America in 1964, 22 million teenagers spent around $12 billion, while their parents spent another $13 billion on them. In West Germany, ten–fifteen-year-olds controlled DM180 million spending money. This meant a lot of records, suits and dresses. A twenty-year-old plumber’s mate remembered his 1940s childhood in the East End of London: ‘I think I had one new suit . . . but usually I wore second-hand clothing from Brick Lane.’ In the course of the 1950s, ‘things changed . . . Things just seemed to get much better. We started to buy new things.’123 Adolescents like him had around £9 to spend a week, while a seven-inch single cost 6s 8d.
The expansion of the school system reinforced greater segregation between the generations. Peer groups flourished. By 1937, 80 per cent of all American teenagers attended high school. In France, half of eleven–seventeen-year-olds were in school by 1962.124 It is no surprise that the term ‘teenager’ spread from the 1940s onwards. Cliques used fashions and accessories to mark who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. Better-off cliques went bowling, poorer ones roller skating. Peer culture was competitive and acquisitive. A 1949 study of high-schoolers in the Midwest reported how for the typical boy ‘the value of money is to use it to satisfy his search for pleasure; he has to have money to go places and to do things. The girl has to have dresses, hats, stockings, shoes, coats, purses . . . perfume, cosmetics, and the “right” hair-do.’125 This was the constituency targeted by the new teen magazines, Seventeen (1944) in the States, followed in Europe by Bravo (1956), Salut des copains (1962), Ciao amici (1963) and Jackie (1964).
The international circulation of goods and styles, too, increased – in no small part thanks to the movement of armies in the Second World War and after. Western Europe saw hybrid styles of native and American genres; in youth gangs, ‘Pierre’ and ‘Heinz’ suddenly became ‘Bob’. This phenomenon crossed the Iron Curtain. On the streets of Prague in the 1950s, the pasek teenagers pinned US cigarette labels to their Czech ties.126 Tarzan films were hugely popular in the Soviet Union after the first one was released in 1951, and
youths tried hard to copy Johnny Weissmuller’s hair. Movies from Italy and Germany were equally popular. The Georgian capital, Tbilisi, came to a halt in 1947 when the German wartime movie Girl of My Dreams (Die Frau meiner Träume) was shown, starring the glamorous Marika Rökk, the Hungarian singer-dancer. In the Eastern Bloc there were also signs of a new age-specific culture of pleasure, separate from the demands of work and politics. In a Russian underground publication, a writer charged the older generation: ‘You propose to spit on the operetta, study only [Friedrich Engels’] Anti-Dühring? and discuss politics? How boring are your ideals . . . How can a person live without jazz, funny songs, dance and laughter?’127
The moral panic about young consumers was so sharp because of related concerns about sexual promiscuity and a loosening of class and gender hierarchies. Sex was becoming an ‘obsessional activity’, of ‘purely animal satisfaction’, Seebohm Rowntree wrote in 1951.128 Such fears drew on an earlier association between the temptations of the flesh and the lust for things, especially among the weaker sex. In 1917, in an earlier war on ‘delinquency’, one investigator in Cleveland, Ohio, met a girl keen on dating and dancing who claimed to be eighteen: ‘What she wanted, she said, was a good time; she didn’t care how she got it. If going to a hotel with a man was the price she had to pay, she was willing to go through with it.’129 These girls wanted ‘fun’. The 1950s cry over ‘wild youth’ extended these fears to men. And it expressed class fears.
Strictly speaking, the 1950s were the scene of a war between classes rather than between generations. Most youths did not have a problem with their parents but with the social conventions of other classes. In France in 1958, three quarters of young people felt very or reasonably happy and did not think their generation would be any different from that of their parents.130 The rockers, blousons noirs and Halbstarke marked out as ‘delinquents’ were predominantly working class. Those arrested mainly came from the bottom of society and had little education. Leather jackets and wild screams threatened not only elders but also their bourgeois sons and daughters, whose superior status rested on manners instilled by the lyceum. In the words of one German teenager in 1960, she preferred parties where guests ‘drink Cola or syrup’, danced a bit of rumba and listened to music, ‘but please without such screaming’.131 ‘Jailhouse Rock’ drowned out ‘The Well-tempered Clavier’. At early rock concerts, university and A-level students volunteered as security guards to keep mechanics and unskilled workers from dancing in the aisles.132
It would be too simple, however, to tell the rise of youth culture as a story of rebellion from below. There was also encouragement from above. By embracing consumer sovereignty, conservatives had opened Pandora’s box. If voting in the marketplace was equivalent to democracy, how could the hundreds of thousands buying the latest Elvis record be wrong? The sales figures spoke for themselves, youth magazines and their readers pointed out. The authorities switched from outright prohibition to co-option. The need to break with the Nazi past had always limited the scope for prohibition; ‘jazz’ would be allowed in the West German army. If it was impossible to insulate civic life, perhaps a civic note could be injected into commercial culture? In Britain, children flocked to their local Odeon for Saturday-morning clubs, where, before the show, they had to sing the national anthem and pledge: ‘I promise to tell the truth, to help others, and to obey my parents.’133 Ciné-clubs, Jugendfreizeitstätten and youth clubs opened their doors, with help from governments and town councils. Designed as nurseries of citizenship, these turned into additional channels for commercial music, dance and entertainment. By the early 1960s, even churches had beat services.
Most academics have been critical of consumer society, and this has led them to follow earlier critics who, as it happens, were mostly also academics. We must not exaggerate their importance. What distinguished the 1960s and ’70s from earlier periods was a growing acceptance of consumer culture. If ‘choice’ was one impetus for this shift, the other was self-expression. Critics of the ‘affluent society’ inherited the belief that mass consumption led to conformity. Rock’n’roll, it was said, bred bendy legs and empty heads, leaving the young susceptible to totalitarianism. This argument always rested on shaky ground. After all, with their subcultures, teenagers were challenging the conformist lifestyle of their elders, including that of the intellectual elite.
Goods enabled people to find themselves. We saw earlier how ideas of a ‘material self’ blossomed in the late nineteenth century. In the 1950s and ’60s these ideas received fresh support from three sources: technology, advertising and a new generation of cultural leaders. Electric guitars (and later synthesizers) gave teenagers who had never taken a music lesson a chance to play and innovate – one reason for the rapid change and diversity in musical styles since. Business nurtured and harvested counter-culture from the outset. Advertisers and marketing helped elevate youthful nonconformity into the dominant idiom. Everyone and everything was turned into an act of creative self-expression, from the purchase of Booth’s gin – a ‘Protest against the Rising Tide of Conformity’ – to Suzuki motorcycles, with their ‘power to free you’. The generation of admen who arrived on Madison Avenue in the 1960s had read their Galbraith and Packard and consciously reinvented themselves as agents of nonconformity.
Men were urged to take off their grey suits and express their individuality through more fashionable and colourful clothes; by the late 1960s, menswear in America was growing almost as fast as women’s fashion.134 Opting for a VW showed that you were not a member of the herd but a critical, responsible driver who was not fooled by changing tail-fins and other gimmicks of planned obsolescence. Anti-advertising converted a bad conscience about ‘consumerism’ into a reason for buying more.
Self-expression also provided a bridge between the arts and commerce. Actors, like intellectuals, had had a deep suspicion of advertising. By 1959, serious artists like Vittorio Gassman and Anna Maria Ferrero were appearing in a promotional sketch for Baci chocolates on the Italian show Carosello, mocking precisely such high cultural pretensions.135 Older critics such as Marcuse (born 1898), Adorno (1903) and Galbraith (1908), were overtaken by a new generation of public intellectuals who adopted a more balanced tone towards the world of goods. In 1964, Umberto Eco (born in 1932) came to the defence of mass culture. All of us might read Ezra Pound’s poetry at one moment and pulp fiction the next. Sometimes, Eco wrote, mass culture diffused ready-made emotions and aided conformism, but at others it opened up social questions. It satisfied a genuine need for entertainment. And it was democratic, broadening access to culture and world affairs and diminishing the influence of class and caste. Eco noted that mass media had aided the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria.136
The guru of this more positive approach was the market researcher Ernest Dichter. Another refugee from Vienna – his psychoanalytic practice had been across the street from Freud’s home – Dichter had moved to Paris in 1937, where he worked as a salesman (following in his father’s footsteps), before settling in the United States in 1938. In one of his first jobs for advertisers he interviewed ordinary Americans about soap and hit on the basic premise of Motivational Research (MR): products had a ‘personality’ that spoke to deeper psychological needs. Objects were more than utilitarian. They had ‘real expressive powers’, even ‘a soul’.
Dichter was a clever showman rather than an original thinker, adding a dash of Freudianism into a cocktail of pop psychology and marketing lingo. He gained notoriety as the target of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957). Equally interesting was Dichter’s response to his critics. ‘Growth of life,’ he wrote in The Strategy of Desire in 1960, ‘can be understood as an ever increasing variety of objects that we come into contact with and an ever increasing intimacy with these objects.’ Wanting stuff was not frivolous. It was about self-fulfilment. This idea had affinities with the Enlightenment as well as with recent psychological theories of self-realization. Where Dichter went further was to see the prof
usion of possessions as a passage in human liberation. Market researchers were akin to therapists, teaching people ‘to forget the guilt of original sin’. This psychological defence of the right to shop acquired added significance at the height of the Cold War. ‘We are in the midst of a silent war,’ Dichter wrote in 1960: ‘on the outside with Russia, and on the inside with our old concepts of thinking.’ Not only would the economy ‘literally collapse overnight’ if critics had it their way and consumption was scaled back to ‘immediate and necessary needs’. It would weaken the American psyche. ‘The real defenders of a positive outlook on life, the real salesmen of prosperity, and therefore of democracy, are the individuals who defend the right to buy a new car, a new home, a new radio.’137
Feminists pointed out how MR recycled gender inequality by glorifying housework.138 Dichter, however, was no simple defender of the social order. Like Crosland, he believed that the spread of affluence would slow down competitive status-seeking. Instead of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, individuals would spend more energy developing their ‘inner Joneses’, retire earlier, bake their own bread and design their own distinct outfits and home interiors. By developing a pleasurable relationship with things, we would make them ‘our tools’, ‘freeing ourselves from their tyranny’. Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964) took readers from food and shelter to things of a ‘higher order’, including art, patriotism and plants. It mirrored his vision of personal progress from ‘the human being as a thing person to the human being as a think person’.139 There were affinities here with Christian Democrats in Europe who also embraced goods and appliances as a way of overcoming the brute materialism associated with communism. Dichter’s plea for a new hedonism was not ‘spend now, worry later’. Looking forward to leisure would encourage people to plan ahead and save, he believed – optimistically, as it turned out in the case of America.
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