The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Democracy began a cautious advance even in deeply aristocratic Meiji Japan. At the purely formal level this was recognized when, on 6 April 1868, the young Meiji Emperor accepted a Charter Oath under which ‘all classes, high and low’ would be represented.102 If taken seriously this would have meant the abolition of the entire caste establishment of the old Tokugawa system.103 In reality the suffrage included all males but with such restrictive property qualifications that only one per cent of the population (half a million) could vote.104 The new constitution, enacted in 1889, drafted by Itō Hirobumi, the first Prime Minister of Japan, ensured that, ultimately, power would remain concentrated in the hands of the Council of State (the dajōkan). It was necessary, Itō explained, to bolster the monarchy, otherwise ‘politics will fall into the hands of the incontrollable masses; and then the government will become powerless, and the country will be ruined’.105 The constitution contained ‘Western’ phrases, declaring that the government would govern ‘with the consent of the National Assembly’. Some thought this was too daringly democratic but, given the highly restricted franchise, there was little to worry about.106 The numbers of those enfranchised grew slowly over the years, though in 1914 the electorate was still below 10 per cent.107 Real universal manhood suffrage was reached only in 1925.

  Japan was irrevocably changing as a bourgeois ethos was beginning to descend on what Westerners (but not the Japanese) liked to call the ‘land of the rising sun’. Members of the Japanese intelligentsia started questioning aristocratic values. While the government wanted the franchise to remain narrow, the opposition wanted it widened; but neither wanted genuine democracy. Those who called for a wider suffrage used the increasingly frequent argument that Western strength rested on greater democracy.108 Yukichi Fukuzawa, the founder of Keio University and of the influential newspaper Jiji-Shinpo (see Chapter 3), opened his famous 1872 essay ‘Encouragement of Learning’ with a clear statement of equality: ‘Heaven does not create persons above other persons, nor does it create persons below other persons.’109

  In the United States the issue of who had the right to vote was particularly contested, thus underlining the importance of elections. The level of electoral participation in the first decades after independence was exceptionally high, especially by modern standards: there was an 80 per cent turnout in New Hampshire in 1814 and over 96 per cent in Alabama in 1819. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the USA and Canada had the highest turnout in the world.110 Then turnout decreased, though with ups and downs. After the Civil War, it dropped severely in the defeated South from 50 per cent in 1872 to 30 per cent in 1908.111 Turnout improved after that but remained low by Western standards: in the 2016 presidential election turnout was a paltry 60 per cent.

  It was not clear who could decide the extension of the suffrage – the Federal Congress or the individual states. Since the Constitution was ambiguous, it was left to the US Congress to decide who was a citizen, while leaving each state the right to decide who could vote – hardly a recipe for clarity. For several decades after the adoption of the Constitution (1787) only white males with some property (5 per cent of the population) were enfranchised. In 1856 property restrictions for all white males were finally removed in the last state to preserve them: North Carolina. In 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that blacks, even if free, could not be American citizens. In 1866, after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery (enshrined in the first of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth), Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, extending citizenship and the right to vote to black men. President Andrew Johnson (who had succeeded Lincoln) twice attempted to block the measure. He was a man who believed that blacks should be kept ‘in order’ and be civilized by whites.112 A two-thirds majority in Congress overruled him and, eventually, another Reconstruction Amendment, the Fifteenth (1870), enshrined in law the right of black men to be full citizens and hence to vote. Native Americans had to wait until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 before becoming fully fledged citizens with voting rights.

  The Republicans, the leading force in the abolition of slavery, remained a minority force in the South for the rest of the nineteenth century (and most of the twentieth), though they dominated presidential politics. Between 1861 and 1933 all presidents but two (Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson) were Republican.113 In the decades following the Civil War the Republicans used their power to promote Northern business interests rather than civil rights in the South. In the South, the dominant Democrats restricted the suffrage to whites through measures such as poll taxes, voters’ registration, and levels of education. When this failed they resorted to naked violence.114 Literacy test were also instituted in Northern states in the years after 1889, mainly to keep immigrants off the electoral register. In the years following the First World War most of those born in the United States, including women and Native Americans, acquired the right to vote (in 1956, Utah was the last state to give Native Americans the vote).

  However, the eventual enfranchisement of blacks and women did not bring about any significant change in the American political-party system. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twentieth-first, elections were fought almost exclusively between Republicans and Democrats. No serious third party emerged to challenge this duopoly. A contributing factor behind this apparent immobility was the instability of party ideologies. In the nineteenth century the Democratic Party was in favour of states’ rights whereas Republicans were, in American political parlance, ‘federalist’. In the course of the twentieth century the position reversed. Similarly, the Republicans who in the nineteenth century were the party of industrial progress had become by the late twentieth century the defenders of traditional values. Unfettered by anything resembling ideologies, embracing a somewhat à la carte belief system, the two parties, elected by a diminishing proportion of the electorate, seldom higher than 60 per cent since the beginning of the twentieth century, carved up the entire political system to an extent unparalleled in Europe.

  In the United States class did not play a significant role. Voters cast their vote on the basis of geographical location, religious affiliation, ethnicity, or issues such as prohibition, and Sunday closing (and more recently abortion, gun control, and gay marriage).115 In Europe the pattern was different. The enlargement of the franchise brought about a new party system, and, notably, the rise of two formidable forces: Social Democrats and ‘social’ Christians. The socialists were based on the working class and the trade unions but extended their influence well beyond these. Their ideology was somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand they held a vision of a future post-capitalist society leading to a classless and stateless society; on the other they promulgated a series of reforms (welfare states, civil rights, control of markets) that strengthened the existing state of affairs and improved capitalism. On the one hand they denounced nationalism and appealed to the ‘workers of the world’; on the other they were intransigent defenders of the nation state once it became the main instrument of reformist policies.

  Only after the First World War did parties of the left become one of the two leading contenders for power in most of Europe’s democratic countries. They were not insignificant before 1914: socialist parties obtained 47 per cent of the vote in Finland; over 30 per cent in Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and Germany; over 25 per cent in Austria and Denmark; and 16 per cent in France. In Great Britain, one of the most industrialized countries in Europe, the trade unions and the workers still favoured the Liberal Party over the recently formed Labour Party. Only after 1918 did they shift their position.

  The second force that emerged in Europe after the enlargement of the franchise were the social Christian parties – parties such as the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands, the Zentrum in Germany, and various agrarian or farmers’ parties in the Scandinavian countries. In Belgium there was a powerful Catholic Party, which dominated politics during the decades prior to the First World War.

&
nbsp; Social Christians were, in their own way, as ambivalent as the socialists. On the one hand they were committed to the defence of traditional values, especially those of the rural world, their electoral basis; on the other they had to engage with modernity, with capitalism, with consumerism and, in so doing, abandon their commitment to tradition. Like the socialists, the social Christians despised the state as an alien force celebrating modernity and individualism, but, when in power, they used the state machinery uninhibitedly to favour the social groups who supported them, namely small farmers and artisans.

  Suffrage had shifted with the rising prosperity brought by industrialization. Previously, voting restrictions were based on class, property, income – in other words fear of propertyless masses – whereas by the twentieth century, if they existed at all, they tended to be based on age, nationality, ethnicity, and gender. The suffrage exacerbated the contradictory nature of modern politics. Parties had to appeal to a fragmented electorate where each person had only one vote but different desires and different identities: class, region, religion, age, prejudices, etc. Parties had to be in favour of capitalism since that seemed to ensure a modicum of progress for the majority; but they were never sure what kind of capitalism would meet the aspirations of their electors. The world of electoral politics, born in the nineteenth century, reserved endless surprises for the politicians of the twentieth century. Neither the economy nor politics could stand still in the new modern era.

  14

  Private Affluence, Public Welfare

  Voting is important in nation-building, but living standards are more important. It is difficult, though not impossible, to build a nation on empty stomachs. Nevertheless, throughout the decades leading up to 1914, the evolving consensus around capitalism was constructed largely on constantly growing prosperity. Of course, we were still far from the consumer society so often celebrated and occasionally criticized in the 1950s by social scientists such as David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, 1950), and John K. Galbraith in The Affluent Society (1958), but the concept was in the air much earlier. The Christian socialist historian R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (1920) lambasted capitalism for producing so much ‘waste’ and so much stuff that ‘should not have been produced at all’, stuff ‘which fill[ed] shop windows in Regent Street …’1

  Keynes, writing in 1919, was more positive:

  perhaps a day might come when there would be enough to go round … In that day overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding would come to an end, and men, secure of the comforts and necessities of the body, could proceed to the nobler exercise of their faculties.2

  Even earlier, another economist, Simon Patten, in his 1905 Kennedy Lectures had noted the remarkable improvements in the condition and consumption of workers and assumed that it would be possible to eliminate poverty in a few decades.3 He did not deny that ‘the working people of industrial centres are ill paid, that employment is uncertain, housing is bad, sickness frequent, and that the abnormally short working life ends in an old age of poverty and fear’, yet no one, he claimed, could deny the evidence of growing prosperity.4

  Americans were already discussing the question of abundance and consumption at a time when few in Europe were doing so. Around 1900, as we have seen (Chapter 2), the average American family spent most of their income on food, fuel, and rent.5 Yet, there were already signs of an emerging consumer society: a shorter working week, the display of goods in department stores, and the growth of popular entertainment.6 Advertising began to be a real industry, even though, at the time, most traded goods were consumed predominantly by the top layers of society.7 There was even the beginning of ‘ethical’ consumption, started by the National Consumers League, founded in 1891, which opposed child labour and poor working conditions, declaring that this stance should be reflected in the selections of goods one bought. This lead was followed in France by ‘La ligue sociale d’acheteurs’, started by Henriette Jean Brunhes, a socially inclined Catholic hostile to industrialism.8 The League had a list of stores and suppliers that did not force their staff to work excessive hours or on Sunday.9

  Americans could already detect the embryonic elements of a consumer society in which workers would be earning a ‘living wage’ and hence acquire dignity.10 Conservatives were already moralizing about the profligacy of the poor, while social theorists such as Thorstein Veblen, in his celebrated The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), castigated the consumption habits of the rich. Consumption, he claimed, was decreasingly aimed at satisfying genuine wants and increasingly directed at establishing status (though aristocrats had been at it for centuries). The consumption of the higher classes reinforced their domination: ‘the consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is, therefore, the mark of the master’.11

  David Hume was aware of this, but, less puritanically than Veblen, he thought the consumption of luxuries was a sign of civilization:

  The increase and consumption of all the commodities, which serve to the ornament and pleasure of life, are advantages to society … In a nation where there is no demand for such superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public …12

  There is, as everyone knows, a cultural-class element in consumption: it is often the case that a worker who gets richer lives like a rich worker and not like a professional middle-class person.

  Americans did not just produce more and better. They consumed. The department store was invented in Europe, but the Americans created a multiplicity of chain stores, large retailers that exploited their size by mass purchasing, sometimes using catalogues for mail orders – the precursor of online shopping – causing fierce resistance from shopkeepers, some of whom ceremoniously burned catalogues in public.13 The key was in the marketing. Richard Sears created Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago; F. W. Woolworth’s small shop in 1879 became the largest retailer in the world; John Wanamaker, whose first store opened in Philadelphia in 1861, invented (it is said) the price tag, offered a money-back guarantee to his customers and allowed them to wander freely in the store examining the merchandise. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T Ford, having announced ‘I will build a motor car for the great multitude … But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.’14 Edward Filene, the department store magnate and philanthropist, had no doubts: consumption trumped democracy. ‘The masses of Americans,’ he declared in 1932, ‘have elected Henry Ford. They have elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company and Woolworth’s and all the other great industrial and business leaders of the day.’15

  In 1884 the National Cash Register Company was founded in Dayton, Ohio (the machine had been invented in 1879). It soon employed 1,000 people to produce 15,000 cash registers annually.16 The supermarket trolley too was invented in America. It was devised in 1936 by Sylvan N. Goldman, who had noted that one of the obstacles to purchasing was not always financial or taste but simply a physical constraint: an individual could only carry a limited amount. One of his advertisements sang the praises of being able to ‘wend your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm …’17

  Much of what is still present on people’s breakfast and dinner plates has its origin in pre-1914 America: Quaker Oats, Campbell soups, Heinz baked beans, Libby tinned and processed meat.18 Shredded Wheat breakfast was already advertised in 1902, Whitman’s Chocolate in 1902, and Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum in 1913.19 In 1906 the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company was created (it changed its name to Kellogg’s in 1922) to develop the production of breakfast foods that would transform daily morning habits first in the United States and later in Europe.

  Not all the innovations in everyday living started out in America: the first
department store was Le Bon Marché, founded in Paris 1838 and completely redeveloped in 1852; the first automated vending machine selling food and drink opened in Berlin in 1895. Nevertheless it was in America that such innovations in the organization of consumption developed and expanded to unprecedented levels.

  The true basis of the great consensus that legitimized American capitalism was the transformation of citizens into consumers. This developed in the decades after the Civil War. The system could work not just for the robber barons and the filthy rich but also for ordinary people. What was coming into being was not just an industrial society but a world of consumers united by their position in the marketplace and unconnected to religion and traditional values.20

  Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887 imagined a young American, Julian West, waking up in the year 2000 to discover that Boston had become a gigantic shopping centre where everyone had a home full of appliances such as telephones and machines producing recorded music.21 They even had credit cards – a term used in the book, though the cards themselves were not introduced until the 1920s. In the novel, however, the cards were the mode of payment in what appeared to be a socialist society: ‘A credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen … at the beginning of each year, and a credit card issued him with which he procures at the public storehouses … whatever he desires, whenever he desires it.’22 Competition between firms had long been replaced by a single giant corporation, in effect the government. Bellamy had dreamt up a communist-capitalist utopia based on consumption in which the people shopped constantly, no one was poor, and everyone was happy.