Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  125. Frederik Nebeker, Dawn of the Electronic Age: Electrical Technologies in the Shaping of the Modern World, 1914–1945 (Piscataway, NJ, 2009), 133f.

  126. 15,000 of 35,000 schools; Archives Nationales Luxembourg, FI-547, Radio-Revue Luxembourgeoise, Ire année, no. 8 (April 1932), citing Der Schulfunk (June 1931), at 115–16.

  127. John Tigert, Radio in Education (New York, 1929). Of course, the rise of entertainment did not mean that the radio ceased to be a tool for education or propaganda, including at the colonial village level; Joselyn Zivin, ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer: Village Broadcasting in Colonial India’, in: Modern Asian Studies, 32/3 (1998), 717–38.

  128. Archives Nationales Luxembourg, FI-547, Radio-Revue Luxembourgeoise, Ire année, no. 9 (May 1932), 140; no. 7 (March 1932), 104 for the Telefunkensuper 653; 2e année, no. 6 (July 1933), 68; and Shaun Moores, ‘The Box on the Dresser’, in: Media, Culture and Society 10/1 (1988), 23–40.

  129. One radio for every six persons; Archives Nationales Luxembourg, FI-547, Commission d’Études Radioelectriques, ‘Rapport sur l’exploitation de la radio-diffusion, 1936’, 3–4. The figure for Argentina is for 1938, cited in Paul F. Lazarsfeld & Frank N. Stanton, (eds.), Radio Research 1941 (NY, 1941), 227.

  130. In 1943, 3.5 hours for a single-person household, 6 hours and 8 minutes for a family of five in America: Matthew Chappell & C. E. Hooper, Radio Audience Measurement (New York, 1944), 203.

  131. Michael Brian Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson and London, 1991), 76.

  132. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis, MN, 2004), 77; and Andrew Stuart Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim, 1923–53’, in: German Studies Review 24, no. 1, 2001: 83–113.

  133. Beng, ‘Record Industry in Malaya’, 15.

  134. Archives Nationales Luxembourg, FI-547, Radio-Revue Luxembourgeoise, 2e année, no. 4/5 (May–June 1933), 41–2.

  135. For example, the Methodist Revd G. Reid Smith in Georgia, 1936; Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (Berkeley, CA, 2004), 81–2.

  136. Marian Parker, quoted in Roland R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, MD, 2000), 123.

  137. A woman from Chicago’s South Side, interviewed in 1946, quoted in Ruth Palter, ‘Radio’s Attraction for Housewives’, in: Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 1, 1948: 248–57, 253.

  138. Quoted in Palter, ‘Radio’s Attraction for Housewives’, 251; Azriel Eisenberg, Children and Radio Programs (New York, 1936); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (New York, 1940); and Matthew Chappell & C. E. Hooper, Radio Audience Measurement (New York, 1944).

  139. T. W. Adorno ‘The Radio Symphony’, in: Paul F. Lazarsfeld & Frank N. Stanton (eds.), Radio Research 1941 (New York, 1941), 131.

  140. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge, 2005), 46.

  141. Adorno, ‘Radio Symphony’, 112, 131, 137; and T. W. Adorno, ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, I (1932), esp. 373.

  142. Quoted in Edward Suchman, ‘Invitation to Music’, in: Lazarsfeld & Stanton, Radio Research 1941, 149 and 186. In the United States, sales of pianos declined in the 1920s but, looking at the whole twentieth century, what is remarkable is the relative resilience of music making. See p. 463 below.

  143. Karin Nordberg, ‘Ljud över landet: Centrum och periferi i tidig svensk radiohistoria’, Lychnos, 1995, 145–78, quoted at 160, my translation.

  144. Douglas, Listening In, 93–6; Drew McDaniel, Broadcasting in the Malay World: Radio, Television and Video in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (Norwood, NJ, 1994), 21–48; Cantril & Allport, Psychology of Radio, 28; Sato, New Japanese Woman, 86; Nott, Music for the People.

  145. John Gray Peatman, ‘Radio and Popular Music’, in Paul. F. Lazarsfeld & Frank N. Stanton, Radio Research 1942–1943 (New York, 1944), 354; all programmes together amounted to 60,000 hours in 1938.

  146. Marshall D. Beuick, ‘The Limited Social Effect of Radio Broadcasting’, in: American Journal of Sociology, 32/4 (Jan. 1927), 622.

  147. Cantril Allport, Psychology of Radio (London, 1935) 10.

  148. A Chicago woman in 1946 about why she liked Pepper Young’s Family; Palter, ‘Radio’s Attraction for Housewives’, at 255.

  149. Herta Herzog, ‘What Do We Really Know about Day-time-serial Listeners’, in: Lazarsfeld & Stanton, Radio Research 1942–1943, 8, 24. For the mix of solidarity and self-gratification, see also the study of Professor Quiz, in: Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (New York, 1940), 64–93.

  150. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: If Socialism Comes, 2000–1887 (London, 1887/1925), 71.

  151. John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim & Elizabeth W. Loosley, Crestwood Heights (London, 1956), 221. Crestwood Heights was Forest Hill.

  152. For a moving ethnographic study of the importance of things in people’s lives today, see Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge, 2008). A fictional treatment is Orhan Pamuk, Masumiyet Müzesi/Das Museum der Unschuld (Munich, 2008).

  153. Seeley, Sim and Loosley, Crestwood Heights, 58.

  154. J. M. Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood (Oxford, 1956), 73; Kirsi Saarikangas, ‘What’s New? Women Pioneers and the Finnish State Meet the American Kitchen’, in: Ruth Oldenziel & Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology and European Users (Cambridge, MA, 2009), ch. 12.

  155. Hole & Attenburrow, Houses and People, 36, from a 1956 survey.

  156. Leslie Kent from Luton, quoted in Fiona Devine, Affluent Workers Revisited: Privatism and the Working Class (Edinburgh, 1992), 161. See further: Dennis Chapman, The Home and Social Status (London, 1955); Margaret Tränkle, ‘Neue Wohnhorizonte’, in: Flagge, ed., Geschichte des Wohnens: Von 1945 bis Heute, esp. 722–37.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany, B 146/394, f.532 (5 Dec. 1952), name changed.

  2. Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV, ch. 8, 179.

  3. Robert Schloesser, ‘Die Kriegsorganisation der Konsumenten’, in Genossenschaftliche Kultur 19/20, 1917, 1–31; and Carl von Tyszka, Der Konsument in der Kriegswirtschaft (Tübingen, 1916).

  4. Schloesser, ‘Kriegsorganisation’, 25f.

  5. Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989); Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).

  6. Hamburger Staatsarchiv: Konsumentenkammer Hamburg (371-12), X A II 1b; Arthur Feiler, ‘The Consumer in Economic Policy’, in: Social Research 1, no. 4, 1934, 287–300; Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, ch. 4; and Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-century Britain, 53–78.

  7. Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices and Consumption, 1917–53 (Princeton, NJ, 2004). In the 1930s, the gap between manual and brain workers narrowed, according to Hessler’s data (227–30).

  8. In 1933, see Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (Armonk, NY, 2001), 84.

  9. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Dover, 1937/2004), 85.

  10. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, in: Past and Present 50, 1971: 76–136; Bernard Waites, ‘The Government of the Home Front and the “Moral Economy” of the Working Class’, in: Home Fires and Foreign Fields: British Social and Military Experience in the First World War, ed. Peter H. Liddle (London, 1985), 175–93. For critiques, see Frank Trentmann, ‘Before “Fair Trade”: Empire, Free Trade and the Moral Economies of Food in the Modern World’, in: Environment and Planning D 25, no. 6, 2007: 1079–102.

  11. Staatsarchiv Hamburg: Konsumentenkammer (371-12), I A IV 2 (1926); Bericht der Konsumentenkammer, 1924, 23; VI A II 14: Automatenverkauf, my translation.

  12. Claudius Torp, ‘Das Janusgesicht der Weimarer Konsumpolitik’, in: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt & Claud
ius Torp, eds., Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland, 1890–1990 (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), 264; Claudius Torp, Konsum und Politik in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 2011); and Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford, 1994).

  13. Robert Millward & Jörg Baten, ‘Population and Living Standards 1914–45’, in: S. N. Broadberry & Kevin H. O’Rourke, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2010).

  14. Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. III, Part C (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 271.

  15. Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld & Hans Zeisel, Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein Soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit. (Suhrkamp, 1933/1975), 55, my translation, and 83–92 for changing rhythms. Lazarsfeld was responsible for method; Jahoda wrote the narrative. Interviews on the ground were mainly conducted by Lotte Danzinger.

  16. Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel, Marienthal, 72, my translation, and 73.

  17. Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel, Marienthal, 76, my translation.

  18. Maurice Halbwachs, L’Évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières (Paris, 1933). See now : Hendrik K. Fischer, Konsum im Kaiserreich: Eine statistisch-analytische Untersuchung privater Haushalte im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Berlin, 2011).

  19. Vaile, Research Memorandum on Social Aspects of Consumption in the Depression, 19, 32, 35. The number of cars visiting national parks went up by 20%.

  20. Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York, 1937), 265–7.

  21. David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-earners in Inter-war Britain (London, 1995); and Selina Todd, ‘Young Women, Work and Leisure in Inter-war England’, in: Historical Journal 48, no. 3, 2005: 789–809.

  22. Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham, 1992).

  23. Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York, 1933), 31–40.

  24. Blumer, Movies and Conduct, 156, and 159 and 64 for the above.

  25. J. P. Mayer, British Cinemas and Their Audiences: Sociological Studies (London, 1948), 25 (shoes); 74 (neat appearance).

  26. Mayer, British Cinema Audiences, 116, undated c.1944; she was looking back on the previous ten years.

  27. Nolan, Visions of Modernity; Jackie Clarke, ‘Engineering a New Order in the 1930s’, in: French Historical Studies 24, no. 1, 2001: 63–86; and de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.

  28. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Z3 14/14, Bericht der Konsumentenkammer, 1926, 40.

  29. Published in English as Georges Duhamel, America: The Menace – Scenes from the Life of the Future (Boston, 1931).

  30. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London, 1930/1932), 19, 46–7, 108–10.

  31. J. Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Distemper of Our Time (London, 1935/1936), 119, and 25, 115, 157, 187, 193 for the above. He developed the theme of play in his Homo ludens in 1938.

  32. ‘Saving and Spending’ (1931), in: John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London, 1931/1972), 137–8. The line of thought has most recently been refreshed by Robert Skidelsky & Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough?: The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life (London, 2012).

  33. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 330–1. Keynes’s argument here was about ‘absolute needs’; he allowed that ‘relative needs’ might continue, such as the satisfaction of feeling superior to others.

  34. W. H. Hutt, Economists and the Public (London, 1936); Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France, 275ff.; and further: Trentmann, ‘Genealogy of the Consumer’, 43–8.

  35. The American Way: Selections from the Public Addresses and Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1944), 32.

  36. Lizabeth Cohen, ‘The New Deal State and the Making of Citizen Consumers’, in: Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern & Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998), 111–26; and Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995).

  37. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-century America (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 104–35; Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947, 145–65; and Lawrence Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009).

  38. Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), ch. 6.

  39. E.g., Speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, 19 April 1926; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=393; and Coolidge, The Price of Freedom (1924).

  40. Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (New York, 1934), 274, 308.

  41. 1937, in Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 213; and 48–87 for AT&T.

  42. Marchand, Corporate Soul, 278–82.

  43. ‘The Need for a New Party’, in: New Republic 66 (18 March, 25 March, 1 April & 8 April 1931), repr. in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. VI: 1931–1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, 1985), 159–81. Public letter to Roosevelt, May 1933, in: Dewey, Later Works, Vol. IX, 265f.

  44. See esp. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York, 1922); Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995); and Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations of a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA, 2005), ch. 7.

  45. Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family, 396; Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (London, 1923); F. W. Innenfeldt, ‘Teaching Consumer Buying in the Secondary School,’ in: Journal of Home Economics, 26/5 (1934); and H. Harap, ‘Survey of Twenty-eight Courses in Consumption’, in: School Review (September 1937), 497–507.

  46. Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer (New York, 1936), ix. Kallen wanted consumers to be self-organized, not by New Deal agencies.

  47. See, e.g., Steigerwald, ‘All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought’.

  48. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York, 2006); and Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Träume und Alpträume: Konsumpolitik im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland’, in: Haupt & Torp, eds., Konsumgesellschaft, 268–88.

  49. See Adam Tooze, ‘Economics, Ideology and Cohesion in the Third Reich: A Critique of Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Volksstaat’, http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/tooze-aly.pdf. Cf. Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State (New York, 2007).

  50. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (London, 1987/2005).

  51. Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 154–6.

  52. S. Jonathan Wiesen, ‘Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Public Relations and Consumer Citizenship in the Third Reich’, in: Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-century Germany, eds. Geoff Eley & Jan Palmowski (Stanford, 2008), 146–63.

  53. Moscow Sonderarchiv, 1521-53-1, Richard RichterPössneck, ‘Eine K.d.F Seereise nach Norwegen’, 1936, 17.

  54. Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004).

  55. Henkel Archiv, Düsseldorf, Henkel-Bote 14/6, 10 July 1937, 262–65. W. E. Maiwald, Reichsausstellung Schaffendes Volk (Düsseldorf, 1937); and Stefanie Schäfers, Vom Werkbund zum Vierjahresplan (Düsseldorf, 2001).

  56. Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism? (1907) in Works, I: 1901–07 (Moscow, 1953).

  57. The complete score was reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald and performed in 2003 in Den Bosch, Holland, and in 2006 in London. For Odna, see Denise Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–35 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985), 226 f.

  58. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (
Oxford, 1999); Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003); and Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 1999).

  59. At the All-Union conference of Stakhanovites, quoted in Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–41 (Cambridge, 1988), at 228. For Western Europe, see Charles Maier (ed.), In Search of Stability, (Cambridge, 1987).

  60. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–41, 228.

  61. Elias, The Civilizing Process; Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 164–230; and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1995).

  62. Hessler, Soviet Trade; Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, 25; for distinctions, see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 107–9.

  63. Sarah Davies, ‘Us against Them’, in: Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions, 64f.

  64. Julie Hessler, ‘Cultured Trade’, in: Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions, 182–209; and Amy E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s (Basingstoke, 2008), esp. 134–57.

  65. Hessler, Soviet Trade, 207–9, 241.

  66. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, esp. 60–71.

  67. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad, 1908/1996), 33.

  68. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 55.

  69. C. A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’, in: The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986), 285–321.

  70. Young India, 15 January 1928, repr. in M. K. Gandhi, Khadi: Why and How, ed. B. Kumarappa (Ahmedabad, 1955), 66.

  71. Young India, 22 September 1927, repr, in Gandhi, Khadi, 104f.

  72. Young India, 8 December 1921, repr. in Gandhi, Khadi, 14.

  73. Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington, ID, 2007), 30–6. For distinct elite styles, see also: Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 105–17.