Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Even children’s power over their own and their family’s spending is easily exaggerated. The previously mentioned 2005 German survey of ten- to seventeen-year-olds found that in only 11 per cent of families were children entirely free to decide what to buy. A third of parents advised their children, and almost half decided for them when it came to larger purchases; spending on mobile phones was the main source of conflict. Similarly, in only 14 per cent of cases did the young influence larger family purchases. Children may have gained all sorts of freedoms since the 1960s, but in financial affairs they continue to be kept ‘on a short leash’, at least in prosperous Germany.25

  The shift in relations between children and the adult world has nowhere been more dramatic than in China after Mao. In the past, adults might have reminisced about the favourite foods they enjoyed as children but, as late as 1979, dictionaries did not have a single word for ‘children’s food’. With the exception of ‘old rice powder’, children ate adult food. Since then, Chinese cities are full of American and home-grown fast-food outlets, shelves stacked high with baby food and children’s medicinal food (ertong yaoshan), and billboards targeting fun-loving kids. Peng, an eleven-year-old boy of the Hui Muslim minority, in 1997 recorded what he ate during a typical day:

  8 a.m.:

  One bottle of soda, no price given. One package of crisps (guoba), 1 yuan (c.15 US cents).

  12.30 p.m.:

  a cooked beef sandwich, prepared by his father. Three pieces of chocolate, from the family cupboard. One ice cream bar, purchased from a street store. 5 p.m.: another ice cream bar, purchased from a street store.

  5 p.m.:

  another ice cream bar, purchased from a street store. One banana, no price.

  7 p.m.:

  fried eggplant and fried egg, purchased from a restaurant down the street. 11 yuan

  8.30 p.m.:

  another package of crisps, 1.3 yuan.26

  The child consumer in China has been catapulted forward by several forces: a rise in discretionary income; the one-child policy; the transfer of leisure from a state-controlled workplace to family and home; and a backlash against the privations of the Cultural Revolution. By the late 1990s, there were some 65 million single-child families. As families shrank, so aspirations were more intensely focused on the single child – in the so-called ‘4-2-1’ family, all eyes are on the single child, much more so than in a family where the child has to compete with four or five siblings for attention. Arguably, it was in school, not at home, where the absence of siblings really intensified the pressure to consume. At home, many children did not act spoiled at all and ate conservatively. In their own peer groups, however, toys, new snacks and products became all-powerful communicators of identity, belonging and standing. Researchers who visited two primary schools in the Haidian district in Beijing in 1995 were struck by the importance of goods and brand knowledge for panbi, ‘climbing and comparing’. Children without trendy snacks were ostracized or beaten up. For parents, snack and spending money was, in part, a way to compensate for their own lost childhood during the Cultural Revolution. But it was also an instrument to exercise control and to incentivize and reward their children’s performance in an intensely competitive environment. After decades of conformity, parents more than anything wanted their children to be ‘special’ and stand out. It made it difficult to resist the latest fashion and novelty snack.27

  THE TEENAGER

  In 1914, the Collegiate Special Advertising Agency started targeting American youth with images of cigarettes and cars. In Europe, age-specific marketing had already been employed by the book trade. Now, young Americans received direct mailings advertising the ‘varsity’ look. By the 1920s, there were special promotions for free tobacco and billiard lessons. The Knox Hat Company led clothing firms in setting up a university-style advisory board. These boards recruited students from Ivy League colleges on the East Coast as well as from big state universities such as Michigan. Twice a year, student members met in New York to give new fashions their stamp of approval. ‘These men know style,’ promotional material assured customers: ‘Dunlap spring hats are fashioned to the ideal of the young man and the man who stays young.’28

  No one yet talked of the ‘teenager’ but, already by the 1920s, American companies and market researchers had their eyes on the youth market. Budget studies in 1929 revealed that daughters over the age of fifteen were the biggest consumers of clothing in rich and poor families alike. Eighteen- to thirty-year-old Americans ruled the market in dress goods, records, hosiery and, indeed, furniture. The focus on college students was no coincidence. Their wardrobes were bursting. A typical male Harvard student in the 1920s bought every year 7 shirts, 8 neckties, 6 pieces of underwear, 12 handkerchiefs, 12 pair of socks and 3 pair of shoes. At Penn, the average young woman added to her collection annually 7 dresses, 5 sweaters, 3 skirts, 3 hats, 4 pair of shoes, 3 purses, 25 items of hosiery and 12 pieces of lingerie.29 That was a lot of clothes at a time when two dress shirts and three ties were considered a ‘fair’ standard for an adult man, with one skirt and nine plain cotton stockings for his wife.30

  American students were merely a few steps ahead in the international rise of the youth consumer. By the 1950s, Britons, Germans and the French were discovering their own teenage markets.31 More than ever before, to be an adolescent meant to have fun and spend money. Initially a metropolitan and college story, by the 1940s it was reaching small towns and the countryside. A study of Danish birth generations shows how far-reaching the change in the experience of coming of age was in this period. Young Danish seamstresses, shop assistants and agricultural workers born before 1900 did not mention leisure once in their autobiographies. For those born in the 1930s, movies, excursions and Saturday-night dances until dawn were an essential part of their youth. This does not mean this age group stopped working, simply that identity was increasingly defined by leisure. Only a small minority now handed over their pay packet to their parents, in stark contrast to earlier generations.32

  The teenager emerged from several forces. For one, young men and women had more money to spend; their wages shot up during and after the First World War. Secondly, thanks to longer and more widespread schooling, they lived increasingly separate lives, magnifying the influence of cliques and peer groups. Finally, they responded to a cult of youth promoted by their elders. Some of this was commercial, as firms and advertisers started vying for the youth market. Yet the new generational identity was nurtured by politics, too. The contribution of Romanticism and nationalism to ideals of youth is well known. Just as critical were political efforts to cultivate new citizens after the horrors of the Second World War. For every commercial milk bar and dance hall in post-war Europe, there was a state-sponsored youth club. The French government targeted students with domestic-science competitions; Denise Chicault from Dijon was crowned the ‘fairy of the household’ in 1949. By the 1960s, over 300,000 youths frequented the maisons des jeunes (youth centres), which offered everything from ping-pong and creative arts to lectures. For its organizers, these were nurseries of citizenship, in the best Tocquevillian sense.33 The 1950s, too, were the golden age of the youth hostel, although its origins reach back to the early twentieth century.

  None of this fits the popular image of the teenage rebel, made famous by James Dean, which created a moral panic in the wake of the 1958 rock ’n’ roll riots in European cities. Yet the official courting of youth was just as important in endorsing the special status of the teenager, making it about more than sex and shopping. This may help explain why so few were willing to join the much feared war of generations. As we saw in Chapter 6, most teenagers looked up to their parents, valued work and saved for a moped or to start a family; it is worth recalling that in Western Europe in the 1960s every second marriage was to a man who had not reached his twenty-fifth birthday.34 Commentators such as Richard Hoggart, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies in Britain, scorned the ‘candy-floss world’35 and failed to see that hed
onism was often matched by civic engagement. After all, it was the young who would march for peace, civil rights and the environment in these years.

  The cult of the teenager has tended to conjure up an image of a single, homogeneous generation. In reality, this age group was just as divided by class as the rest of society. Young people longed for novelty, variety and mobility, for sure. But many poor teenagers were unable to afford any of these. A 1975 study of a housing estate in the south-east of England recorded the following conversation among a group of thirteen- to fifteen-year-old girls about their leisure pursuits. ‘When it’s raining, we listen to the wireless in our room . . . or we stand in the passage [between terraces]. When it is not raining, we go to the park, or go for a walk.’36 The local youth club was only for those aged fifteen-plus. Some of the girls did not even have the 5 pence to go to the movies. The bus fare ruled out a trip to town.

  The teenager struck so many alarm bells because it was feared that an entire generation was drifting further and further apart from their elders. But was this true? Were teenagers in the 1970s a more thorough, hardened generational type than their original trailblazers a few decades earlier? The American sociologist August B. Hollingshead had first observed the youth of Elmtown, a small Midwestern town, in 1941–2. He returned thirty years later to find the overall generational pattern of leisure had barely changed. The gap between what adults deemed ‘good’ and what kids desired had not narrowed, but it had not widened either. ‘The activities and behaviour of the present generation of adolescents,’ he wrote in 1973, ‘are only minimally different from that of their parents when they were adolescents.’37 A few smoked marijuana, but, by and large, teenagers were less transgressive or, at least, the community was better organized to prevent them from stepping over the line of decency. In the 1940s, clothes had been a constant battle between young and old. Now, the new high school operated a strict dress code. Boys and girls had to wear socks or hose at all times. Clothing with obscene writing on it was prohibited. Boys were banned from sporting a moustache or a beard. Girls had to wear ‘appropriate’ underwear and their dresses had to reach at least three inches below the buttocks; Hollingshead does not say who applied the measuring tape. Leisure patterns varied by social status as much as age. Most kids followed their parents’ habits.

  Of course, Elmtown was not frozen in time. By 1973, cinema had lost its central position in popular entertainment; only one screen survived. On the other hand, plenty of leisure continued to be organized by churches, unions and local women’s and farmers’ organizations. Commercialization had its limits. In many ways, the post-war decades were the golden age of local, self-organized shows and festivals. Elmtown held its first ‘corn festival’ in 1949. By 1972, it was the highlight of the autumn calendar. These were family events, and teenagers played their part. A thousand families had one or more members who devoted several weeks to setting up decorations and exhibits – not bad for a town with a total population of 14,211. High-school students decorated store windows. The 135 home-made floats were followed by a festival queen and twenty-seven bands. There was a football game and a roller-skating rink for several hundred teenagers. But the climax was the greased-pig contest at the local airport, in which contestants wrestled with slippery, half-grown pigs. The evening ended with rock music and dancing.

  It was not just in Elmtown that teenagers proved to be more than the passive prey of mainstream celebrity culture. There have been rebellious youth subcultures from the Scuttler gangs in 1890s Manchester to the blousons noirs in 1950s Paris, and Mods and Rockers in the 1960s (see Plate 56). It would be a mistake, however, to divide teenagers into two opposite camps, conformists on one side and deviants on the other. Young people have played an active role in developing their own fashions in a wide variety of ways. Subcultures have not been the preserve of rebelliousness, masculinity and adrenalin. In Japan, the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s saw teenage girls take flight in a whole series of new styles and identities. Pushed-down, loose white knee socks were one of the first fashion trends among high-school girls in this period. By 1996, shops stocked thirty-five kinds of such loose socks. In the mid-1990s, the Kogal look added the plaid skirt. Then came the Ganguro, or black-face, fashion with dark-tanned skin, bleached hair, short pants and platform boots. Teenage consumers became fashion producers, creating new markets as much as responding to them. Some looks split into their own distinct subsets, such as the Mamba, subdivided into the Lomamba style, which borrowed from Lolita, in contrast to the Coccomba, which championed the Cocolulu brand. The Gothic Lolitas, who blended Victorian and Gothic elements, would hardly have impressed the tough Manchester Scuttlers, but they were no less playful and original in creating their own style out of elements of consumer culture. Crucially, stars and celebrities had little influence on the evolution of these Japanese fashions. A Popteen survey in 1999 did not find a single celebrity among the top five role models. Instead, teenagers looked up to amateur high-school models and salesgirls, who played a key role in shaping new trends.38

  OUT OF THE ROCKING CHAIR

  In 1936, the Bradenton Kiwanis Club founded a trailer park in their town of Manatee County, Florida. Within fifteen years, it had over a thousand units. Most residents stayed for six or seven months a year, added patios and, sometimes, like on camping grounds, permanent structures, too. Unlike on a camping ground, everyone in the Bradenton trailer park was elderly. The mean age of the community was sixty-nine years, but some regulars reached ninety. The park was one of the first retirement communities, although a few of the early residents still did a bit of part-time or seasonal work. It was a self-conscious experiment in a new lifestyle of active ageing. Many initially came for the warm climate but stayed for the sociability and fun. The weekly schedule of events left no room for loneliness or boredom. On Mondays there was bingo, on Tuesdays square-dancing lessons and the star club. Wednesday offered bible classes for the devout and movies for the rest. Thursday belonged to the hobby club. There was choir and ballroom dancing on Friday. On Saturday, there was more bingo and a chance for people to give group performances. Each week ended with a Sunday Church service and a family hour. The park was generously equipped, with nineteen shuffleboard courts and eight horseshoe courts, framed by small grandstands for the two weekly tournaments. The card room was open every day from eight in the morning to ten o’clock at night.39

  The Bradenton trailer park was an early sign of what was arguably the most dramatic transformation experienced by any age group in the twentieth century. Consumption redefined old age. Mostly poor and dependent at the beginning of the twentieth century, elderly people were celebrated as active, well-off and fun-loving consumers by its end.

  The old have always been with us. It is a common mistake to presume that old age is an invention of the twentieth century. In the Italian town of Arezzo in 1427, for example, every sixth citizen was sixty or older. Elsewhere, numbers were lower, but elderly people were a common sight in early modern societies. What radically changed in the twentieth century was the proportion of older people, their longevity and their status in society. In the 1880s, those over sixty made up between 5 and 10 per cent of the population across Europe and the United States. A century later, their share had doubled. And more and more of them enjoyed longer lives. In 1953, there were 825,000 people who were eighty or older in the Federal Republic of Germany. Fifty years later, they reached almost 6 million.40 Longer life and better health were preconditions for active ageing. Although illness, disability and loneliness persist, it is easier to enjoy old age with a hearing aid, dentures and a good pair of glasses than ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, to quote Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600). This physiological transformation went hand in hand with a revolution in the material resources and cultural ideals of old age.

  As with children, the forces behind this change gathered early momentum in the United States. Pension plans made it not only easier to retire but possible to do so and retain i
ndependence. As late as 1880, three quarters of American men aged over sixty-four were in work. By 1930, the figure had dropped to 55 per cent, by 1990 to around 20 per cent. While modest by today’s standards, the Union Army pension – which reached 21 per cent of sixty-five to sixty-nine-year-old men in 1900 – indicated early on the close correlation between pensions and the decision to stop working. Union Army veterans were twice as likely to retire as their fellow Americans. These were federal monies. The first private pension fund was started by American Express in 1875. By 1930, around one in ten American workers was covered by a retirement plan. In other words, when elderly people continued to work, it was out of necessity, not choice. The retirement plan opened the door to leisure and independence.41

  It needed additional cultural and political factors to push the elderly across the threshold. Pensions loosened up the authority of family and work. In the nineteenth century, to be the head of a household meant that you were a worker. For the old and frail, to stop work meant having to move in with their children. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was possible to be a pensioner and yet continue to live on one’s own; by 1970, fewer than 30 per cent of retired Americans were living with their extended families. For some, of course, it has ended in loneliness – ‘solo living’ can be seen as one of the diseases of affluence. To many, however, it has meant greater independence. In the process, work lost a good deal of its authority as the essence of life.

  The embrace of leisure over work was not automatic. Companies, doctors, the government and civic groups all played their part. In the 1940s, only 3 per cent of elderly Americans collecting social security benefits gave a preference for leisure as the main reason for retirement. Leisure remained the privilege of the rich elderly. It was during the 1950s–’70s that it reached the rest; by 1982, 48 per cent of retirees cited leisure as the main reason for stopping to work.42 Companies and insurers introduced schemes to prepare workers for retirement and organized hobby clubs. The Prudential launched its pre-retirement programme in 1949. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, the General Electric Company started to counsel its workers five years prior to retirement and offered additional check-ups after it.43 In the hands of the pension business, retirement lost the bitter taste of ‘maladjustment’ and was reborn under the slogan ‘the best of life is yet to come’.44 Suddenly, old age was something to look forward to. The American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1955, began to promote an image of vigorous, independent seniors. Ten years later, as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘great society’, the Older American Act made it a duty for government to help the elderly not only in cases of need or poor health but to assist them in the ‘pursuit of meaningful activity’.45