Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  A simple example illustrates the point. Before the war most clothes were made to measure by tailors. But the need to manufacture tens of millions of military uniforms encouraged the development of standard sizes. In truth, the range of human proportions is not that wide; human height and width are normally distributed, which means that most of us are clustered around a median shape. During 1939 and 1940, about 15,000 American women participated in a national survey conducted by the National Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture. It was the first large-scale scientific study of female proportions ever undertaken. A total of fifty-nine measurements were taken from each volunteer. The results of were published in 1941 as USDA Miscellaneous Publication 454, Women’s Measurements for Garment and Pattern Construction. Standardized sizes allowed civilian clothes, as well as uniforms, to be mass-produced and sold ‘off the peg’ or ‘ready to wear’. Within a matter of a few decades, it was only the clothes of the wealthy elite that were tailor-made: men’s suits from Savile Row and women’s haute couture from Paris and Milan.

  In the post-war United States the consumer society became a phenomenon of the masses, significantly diminishing the sartorial differences between the social classes. This was part of a generalized levelling up that followed the war. In 1928 the top 1 per cent of the population had received nearly 20 per cent of income. From 1952 until 1982 it was consistently less than 9 per cent, below the equivalent share going to the top 1 per cent in France.85 Better educational opportunities for the returning soldiers coupled with a wave of house-building in the suburbs translated into a marked improvement in the quality of life. The parents of the baby boomers were the first generation to have significant access to consumer credit. They bought their homes on credit, their cars on credit and their household appliances – refrigerators, televisions and washing machines – on credit.86 In 1930, as the Depression struck, more than half of American households had electricity, an automobile and a refrigerator. By 1960 around 80 per cent of Americans not only had these amenities, they also had telephones. And the speed with which the new consumer durables spread just kept rising. The clothes-washing machine was a pre-Depression invention dating back to 1926. By 1965, thirty-nine years later, half of households had one. Air conditioning was invented in 1945. It passed the 50 per cent mark in 1974, twenty-nine years later. The clothes dryer came along in 1949; it passed the halfway mark in 1972, twenty-three years later. (The dishwasher, also invented in 1949, was slower to take off; it was not until 1997 that every second household owned one.) Colour television broke all records; invented in 1959, it was in half of all homes by 1973, just fourteen years later. By 1989, when the Cold War effectively ended, two-thirds or more of all Americans had all of these things, with the exception of the dishwasher. They had also acquired microwave ovens (invented in 1972) and video cassette recorders (1977). Fifteen per cent already had the personal computer (1978). A pioneering 2 per cent owned mobile telephones. By the end of the millennium these, too, were in half of all homes, as was the internet.87

  To societies for whom this trajectory seemed attainable, the appeal of Soviet communism quickly palled. Western Europe, its post-war recovery underwritten by American aid, rapidly regained the growth path of the pre-Depression years (though the biggest recipients of the programme named after George Marshall did not in fact grow fastest). The fascist years had weakened trade unions in much of Europe; labour relations were accordingly less fractious than before the war. Strikes were shorter (though they had higher participation). Only in Britain, France and Italy did industrial action increase in frequency. Corporatist collective bargaining, economic planning, Keynesian demand management and welfare states: the West Europeans took multiple vaccinations against the communist threat, adding cross-border economic integration with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. In fact the menace from Moscow had largely receded by that date. The Soviet exactions, the unrelenting emphasis on heavy industry, the collectivization of agriculture and the emergence of what Milovan Djilas called ‘The New Class’ of Party hacks – all of these things had already sparked revolts in Berlin (1953) and Budapest (1956). The real economic miracles happened in Asia, where not only Japan but also Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand all achieved sustained and in most cases accelerating growth in the post-war period. Asia’s share of global GDP rose from 14 per cent to 34 per cent between 1950 and 1990 and, crucially, Asia kept on growing in the 1970s and 1980s when other regions of the world slowed or, in the case of Africa and Latin America, suffered economic contraction. The performance of South Korea was especially impressive. A country that, in terms of per-capita income, had ranked below Ghana in 1960 was sufficiently advanced by 1996 to join the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, the rich countries’ club. Between 1973 and 1990 it was the world’s fastest-growing economy.

  The East Asian economic miracle was the key to the Cold War. If Vietnam rather than Korea had been the norm – in other words, if US military interventions had mostly failed – the outcome might have been less happy. What made the difference? First, the United States and its allies (notably Britain in Malaysia) were able to provide credible security guarantees to governments following military interventions. Secondly, post-conflict reforms created secure institutional foundations for growth, a perfect example being the 1946 land reform in Japan, which swept away the remnants of feudalism and substantially equalized property-ownership (something the Meiji reformers had omitted to do). Thirdly, the increasingly open global economic order upheld by the United States very much benefited these Asian countries. Finally, they used various forms of state direction to ensure that savings were channelled into export industries, of which the key first-stage sector was, of course, textiles. The consumer society provided not only a role model for East Asians; it also provided a market for their cheap cloth.

  It should be noted that almost none of the ‘Asian tigers’ that followed Japan’s example, industrializing themselves through exports of staples like cotton goods, did so with the help of democratic institutions. South Korea was steered through its industrial revolution by Generals Park Chung-hee (1960–79) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980–87), while Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Suharto in Indonesia were essentially absolutists (the former an enlightened one), and monopoly parties ruled in Taiwan and Japan. Hong Kong remained a British colony until 1997. However, in each case, economic success was followed after some lag by democratization. East Asia, in short, spun out of the Soviet gravitational field because it became a stakeholder in the American consumer society. It was a very different story in those countries – Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Chile – where US interventions were shorter in duration, and even worse in those – Cuba, Vietnam, Angola and Ethiopia – where Soviet intervention or assistance was more effective.

  That mass consumerism, with all the standardization it implied, could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism was one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilization. But the key to understanding how it was done lies in that very word: Western. The Soviet Union could perhaps be forgiven for its failure to invent and disseminate the colour television or the microwave oven. But not all the defining products of the consumer society were technologically complex. The simplest of all were in fact a kind of workman’s trousers invented on the West Coast of the United States. Perhaps the greatest mystery of the entire Cold War is why the Worker’s Paradise could not manage to produce a decent pair of jeans.

  THE JEANS GENIE

  It was once upon a time in the Wild West that the universal garment was born. Jeans started life as the no-nonsense trousers of miners and cowpokes. By the 1970s they were the most popular article of clothing in the world – and a politically potent symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet economic system. Why? Why could the Soviets not replicate Levi 501s the way they had replicated the atomic bomb?

  Jeans as we know them today were invented in 1873, whe
n the Bavarian-born dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss and the Reno tailor Jacob Davis secured the patent for using copper rivets to strengthen the pockets on miners’ ‘waist overalls’. The fabric they used was denim (originally ‘serge de NÎmes’, just as ‘jeans’ probably derives from ‘Genoa’) manufactured at the Amoskeag Mill in Manchester, New Hampshire, using American-grown cotton dyed with American-grown indigo. The original Levi’s factories were in San Francisco and it was there that the familiar leather label was first used in 1886, showing two horses failing to pull a pair of Levi’s apart; the red tab was added in 1936. Blue jeans are cheap to make, easy to clean, hard to ruin and comfortable to wear. But then so are workmen’s overalls of the sort that used to be worn in Britain (most famously by Churchill during the war), as are dungarees, named after cloth from Dongri in India. Why was it that Californian jeans – which were also issued to convicts in many state penitentiaries – came to dominate the world of fashion? The answer lies in two of the twentieth century’s most successful industries: movies and marketing

  It began when the young John Wayne traded in the elaborate fringed leather chaps of the early cowboy films for the plain jeans he wore in Stagecoach (1939). Then came Marlo Brando’s jeans and leathers in The Wild One (1953), followed by James Dean’s red (jacket), white (T-shirt) and blue (jeans) outfit in Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Elvis Presley’s black jeans in Jailhouse Rock (1957). The marketing men provided further support for the rugged new look with ‘Marlboro Man’, the cigarette-smoking, denim-clad cowboy devised by the advertising executive Leo Burnett in 1954. Marilyn Monroe was another early adopter of denim; one of her first modelling shoots featured a less than flattering convict suit. The key from the outset was the association between jeans and youthful misbehaviour. As early as the 1830s the Mormon leader Brigham Young had denounced trousers with button flies as ‘fornication pants’. In 1944 Life magazine caused a storm by publishing a photograph of two Wellesley College women in jeans.88 By the time Levi’s competitor Lee introduced zippers, the reputation of jeans as sexually arousing was established – a curious outcome, considering how very difficult it is to have sex with someone wearing tight-fitting jeans. Jeans were upwardly mobile. They began on the backsides of ranch-hands and convicts; were mandatory for defence workers during the war; moved on to the biker gangs of the post-war years; were adopted by West Coast and then Ivy League students; graduated to ‘beat’ writers, folk singers and pop groups in the 1960s; and ended up being worn publicly by all presidents after Richard Nixon. Levi’s growth was spectacular. In 1948 the company sold 4 million pairs of jeans; by 1959 it was 10 million. Sales of Levi’s increased tenfold between 1964 and 1975, passing the $1 billion mark. By 1979 they had reached $2 billion. And Levi’s was only one of several successful brands, with Lee and Wrangler also in contention.

  These all-American clothes were just as attractive to non-Americans, as became clear when Levi’s launched an export drive in the 1960s and 1970s. For young people all over the world, jeans symbolized a generational revolt against the stuffy sartorial conventions of the post-war era. The jean genie was out of the bottle, and the bottle was more than probably the distinctively curved glass container of the Coca-Cola soft drink. It seemed only a matter of time before Levi Strauss & Co. would fulfil their stated ambition of ‘clothing the world’. ‘The World is Blue Jeans Country Now’, proclaimed Life in 1972.89 In expanding overseas, Levi’s was taking a leaf out of the Coca-Cola playbook. The brown fizzy liquid, invented in 1886 when John Pemberton carbonated a mixture of cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine from the kola nut, managed to outdo even Singer as a global brand. Coca-Cola was already calling itself ‘the International Beverage’ as early as 1929, when it was for sale in seventy-eight different countries, including even Burma – where its distinctive Spencerian script logo could be seen, incongruously, at the entrance to the Schwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon.90 In the Second World War, Coke managed to run sixty-four different bottling plants in six theatres of war. It even managed to establish a bottling plant in Laos in 1973, at the height of the Vietnam War.

  For Levi’s and Coca-Cola alike, however, there was no more impenetrable barrier than the Iron Curtain drawn across Europe by the Cold War. Indeed, Coke boss Robert W. Woodruff refused on principle to be involved with the American National Exhibit in Moscow, personally blaming Vice-President Richard Nixon when Pepsi pulled off the coup of getting the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to test their rival soft drink after the two leaders’ televised debate at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959.91

  In Cold War rhetoric, it was always clear who the ‘West’ was and who the ‘East’ was. The East began where the River Elbe marked the end of the Federal Republic of Germany and the beginning of the German Democratic Republic. It ended at the border between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. But from the vantage point of the real East – from the Middle East to the Far East – the world seemed simply to have been carved up between two rival Wests, a capitalist one and a communist one. The people in charge looked roughly similar. Indeed, in many ways the Soviet Union longed to imitate the United States, to build the same weapons – and also the same consumer goods. As Khrushchev made abundantly clear in his ‘kitchen debate’ with Nixon, the Soviets aspired to match the Americans product for product. Sartorially there was little to choose between the two men. Clad in perfect black and white, as if to confound the colour television technology he was supposed to be marketing, Nixon looked like the dour Californian lawyer he was. In his light-coloured suit and hat, Khrushchev looked more like a Dixiecrat Congressman who had consumed one too many Martinis at lunch.

  Like young people all over the world, teenagers in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe were crying out for jeans. So it really is bizarre that the United States’ principal rival in the post-war world failed to replicate these supremely straightforward items of apparel. It might have been thought that the Western craze for denim had made life easier for the Soviets. After all, the Soviet Union was supposed to be the proletarian paradise and jeans are a lot easier to make than, say, Sta-Prest trousers (another Levi Strauss invention, introduced in 1964). Yet somehow the communist bloc failed to understand the appeal of a garment that could equally well have symbolized the virtues of the hard-working Soviet worker. Instead, blue jeans, and the pop music with which they were soon inextricably linked, became the quintessential symbols of Western superiority. And, unlike nuclear warheads, jeans were actually launched against the Soviets: there were displays of Levi’s in Moscow in 1959 and again in 1967.

  If you were a student living behind the Iron Curtain in the Sixties – in East Berlin, for example – you did not want to dress in the sub-Boy Scout uniform of a Young Pioneer. You wanted to dress like all the young dudes in the West. Stefan Wolle was an East German student at the time. As he recalls:

  Initially, it wasn’t possible [to buy jeans in the GDR]. Jeans were seen as the embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. And it was strongly frowned upon to wear them. And you couldn’t buy them. [But] many got their relatives from the West to bring them over … They wore them and that caused teachers, employers and policemen in the street to be angry. It gave rise to a black market in Western goods that seemed to threaten the state.92

  Such was the desirability of this article of clothing that Soviet law-enforcement officials coined the phrase ‘jeans crimes’, which referred to ‘law violations prompted by a desire to use any means to obtain articles made of denim’. In 1986 the French leftist philosopher and former comrade in arms of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, remarked: ‘There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army.’93 That much was becoming clear by the mid-1980s. But in 1968, however, it was anything but certain.

  Nineteen-sixty-eight was a year of revolution in all kinds of ways, from Paris to Prague, from Berlin to Berkeley, and even in Bei
jing.94 But the common factor in all these disruptions to the Cold War duopoly of power was youth. Rarely in modern times have people aged between fifteen and twenty-four accounted for so large a share of the population as in the decade after 1968. Having dropped as low as 11 per cent of the US population in the mid-1950s, the youth share reached a peak of 17 per cent in the mid-1970s. In Latin America and Asia it rose above 20 per cent. At the same time, the expansion of higher education, especially in the United States, meant that a higher proportion than ever of young men and women went to university. By 1968 university students made up more than 3 per cent of the entire American population, compared with less than 1 per cent in 1928. A more modest expansion had happened in Europe too. These were the post-war baby boomers – young, numerous, educated and prosperous. They had every reason to be grateful to their fathers’ generation, which had fought for freedom and bequeathed them opportunity. Instead they revolted.

  On 22 March 1968 French students occupied the eighth-floor faculty lounge of the University of Paris X Nanterre – ‘mad Nanterre’ as the ugly concrete campus became known. By May tens of thousands of students, including those from the elite Sorbonne, were clashing with police on the streets of Paris.95 A general strike swept the country as the trade unions seized the opportunity to press a weakened government for higher wages. Similar scenes played out at the University of California, Berkeley, the Free University, Berlin – even at Harvard, where members of the organization Students for a Democratic Society occupied the President’s house, and members of the Worker-Student Alliance stormed University Hall (temporarily renamed Che Guevara Hall), evicting the deans working there.