Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  ‘We must sensitively observe the colourful, stimulating and commercially busy urban scenes in the market squares in Central European cities in order to understand the contribution to community life the open spaces in our new shopping towns can make,’ he wrote in his 1960 book Shopping Town USA.14 He ‘systematized’ the shopping centre and developed the idea of an anchor store at each extremity to encourage people to stroll from one to another. The idea was to get shoppers out of their cars and on to their feet. He insisted on having public gathering places at strategic spots – open areas with benches, fountains and perhaps a piece of sculpture or two to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.

  In 1956, the year that the British novelist Aldous Huxley coined the much-needed term spending spree,15 Gruen’s utopian vision was given tangible shape with the construction of the Southdale Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Built at a cost of $20 million, it was the biggest shopping centre in the world, and the commercial wonder of its age. Reporters from almost every large newspaper and magazine in America came to marvel at its 10 acres of enclosed shopping area, 72 stores and 45 acres of parking with space for 5,200 cars. It became the model from which almost all other malls in America were cloned. Gruen followed Southdale with other malls in a similar vein – the Northland and Eastland shopping centres near Detroit, the Southland Shopping Center near Minneapolis, Valley Fair in San Jose, the Bay Fair Center in San Leandro, California, and the South Bay Shopping Center in Redondo Beach, California.

  Shopping mall design became a science. At their conferences, mall planners bandied about new concepts like Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation (essentially, the mix of stores necessary to keep people moving) and optimal positional isochrones (another way of saying that the best location for a shopping centre is near a highway interchange). No one any longer thought about the idea of encouraging people to linger or socialize. Benches were built without backs so that people wouldn’t linger on them, and food court tables given just enough crampedness to induce a sense of discomfort after about ten minutes. Victor Gruen’s vision of people sitting with cappuccinos, reading newspapers on gripper rods provided by a thoughtful management, or playing chess beside whispering fountains never materialized.

  Shopping centres didn’t just transform towns, they often effectively created them. In the late 1940s Paramus, New Jersey, was a dying little community with no high school, no downtown to speak of, and almost no industry or offices. Then two shopping centres were built along Route 4 – Macy’s Garden State Plaza and Allied Stores’ Bergen Mall. Within a decade Paramus’s population had more than quadrupled to 25,000 and its retail sales had shot up from $5 million to $ 125 million. Much the same thing happened to Schaumburg, Illinois. In 1956 it had 130 people. Then two things happened: O’Hare became Chicago’s main airport and the Woodfield Shopping Center, with over two million square feet of retail space, was opened. By 1978 Schaumburg’s population had increased to 50,000 and it was on course to becoming the second biggest city in Illinois after Chicago by the turn of the century.16

  As shopping centres blossomed, downtowns began to die. Between 1948 and 1954, at the height of America’s postwar economic boom, downtown retailers in America’s thirteen largest cities lost on average a quarter of their business.17 One by one downtowns grew more lifeless as stores and offices fled to the suburbs. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit closed in 1981 after watching its annual sales fall from $153 million in 1953 to $45 million in its last year – the victim, ironically, of the automobile, the product that had brought Detroit its wealth.18 Sears closed its flagship store on State Street in Chicago in 1983. All over America, where downtown department stores survived it was as a matter of pride or of tax breaks, and seldom one of commercial logic.

  By the early 1980s America had 20,000 large shopping centres, which between them accounted for over 60 per cent of all retail trade. They employed 8 per cent of the workforce, nine million people, and were generating sales of $586 billion – 13 per cent of the nation’s gross national product.19 By 1992 the number of shopping centres had almost doubled again, and new malls were opening at the rate of one every seven hours. Four billion square feet of America’s landscape was shopping centres, two-thirds of it built in the previous twenty years.20 Shopping centres weren’t just growing in numbers, but evolving into new types. One type was known as the large regional center – that is, a shopping centre with at least 400,000 square feet of shopping space, or more than most downtowns. There were almost 2,000 of these by 1990. Another type came to be known, somewhat ominously, as power centers, unenclosed developments, usually built in a U-shape around a central parking lot and containing at least one category killer store – a place like Toys ‘R’ Us or Circuit City selling a particular type of product in such volume and at such low prices as to deter any nearby competition.

  Mall shopping had become America’s biggest leisure activity. Mall of America in Minneapolis, the country’s biggest mall with 4.2 million square feet of consumer-intensive space (though still considerably less than the world’s biggest, the West Edmonton Mall in Canada with 5.2 million square feet), was forecast to attract more people than the Grand Canyon in its first year of business.21 By the early 1990s Americans were spending on average twelve hours a month in shopping malls, more than they devoted to almost any activity other than sleeping, eating, working and watching television.22

  And what of Victor Gruen, the man who had started it all? Appalled at what he had unleashed, he fled back to Vienna where he died in 1980, a disappointed man.

  13

  Domestic Matters

  If the British disliked Americans for their use of English, they liked them no more for their habits. In book after book through the nineteenth century – William Cobbett’s A Years [sic] Residence in the Unites States of America, Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, Dickens’s American Notes, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America, Thomas Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America – the British showed a strange and unfriendly preoccupation with American life and habits.

  ‘In regard to the passengers,’ wrote Thomas Hamilton in typical vein, ‘truth compels me to say, that any thing so disgusting in human shade I had never seen. Their morals and their manners were alike detestable.‘1 William Cobbett offered the opinion that ‘the natives are by nature idle, and seek to live by cheating’. Frances Trollope detested almost everything:

  The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.‘2

  Americans, she felt, suffered from a ‘universal deficiency in good manners and graceful demeanour’.

  The haste and indelicacy of American dining habits was a constant theme. Isabella Lucy Bird noted in 1856: ‘I cannot forbear mentioning the rapidity with which Americans despatch their meals. My next neighbour has frequently risen from his seat after a substantial and varied dinner while I was sending away my soup-plate.’

  Robert Louis Stevenson, generally a sympathetic observer, was startled in North Platte, Nebraska, when a fellow diner asked another to pass a jug of milk and was turned upon in a fury and told there was a waiter for passing things. ‘I only asked you to pass the milk,’ replied the first man meekly. To which the second cried: ‘Pass? Hell! I’m not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid for it. You should use civility at table, and, by God, I’ll show you how!’ To Stevenson’s considerable relief, and presumably tha
t of the milkless fellow, the threat was not carried out, and the meal was concluded in silence.3

  The widespread American habit of chewing tobacco and disposing of the excess juice by expectorating in the approximate direction of a brass spittoon also excited much comment. Both houses of Congress, Dickens recorded in American Notes, ‘are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described.’ (In fact, of course, he had just described them.)

  To be sure, there was something in this. Americans did often lack certain refinements. Louis Philippe, the future king of France, reported with dismay during a trip through the States in 1797, that when he asked for a chamber-pot his host told him there were none but invited him to make free use of the window.4 Even when they tried to haul themselves to a higher level of gentility, Americans often betrayed a certain misapprehension in regard to the conventions of society. A junior army officer named Nathaniel Tracy, charged with entertaining a visiting delegation of French officers, and being hazily aware of the peculiarities of French dietary habits, sent his men to a nearby swamp to gather a sackful of frogs, which were then boiled whole and served floating in a soup.

  Only recently had Americans become generally acquainted with an appliance that had been around in Europe for some time: the fork. Before that, diners in the New World got by with knives (which often had two prongs on the end for spearing meat) and spoons. Because they were accustomed to using the right hand for both cutting food and raising it to the mouth, they developed the habit – curious to the rest of the world – of transferring the fork from left hand to right between actions.5 But even as late as the mid-1840s, many Americans were still struggling with the concept, as The Art of Good Behavior, a best-selling etiquette guide of the day, tacitly acknowledged when it cautioned: ‘If possible, the knife should never be put in the mouth at all.’

  Having said this, the Europeans’ own manuals of decorum – such as the French tome that instructed its readers: ‘When the fingers are very greasy, wipe them first on a piece of bread‘6 – invite speculation as to the standards in their own dining salons.

  What is certain is that until about the 1840s levels of hygiene and social sophistication did generally lag in America. Well into the nineteenth century, the bulk of Americans lived lives that were, in the words of one historian, ‘practically medieval’.7 Most Americans were by modern standards abysmally poor. A survey of Delaware farmers in 1800 found that only 16 per cent had a barn and only half had even one horse. A farmer who could not afford a horse was unlikely to invest much in hygienic niceties. Although several words associated with cleanliness first appeared in America at about the same time as they did in England – bathing-house in 1760, bathing-room in 1791 – the contexts almost always make clear that these were luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich.

  Even among the middle classes bathing was a novel experience until well into the 1800s. At the turn of the century one Elizabeth Drinker noted in her diary that she had just had her first bath in twenty-eight years, and the tone with which she recorded the fact indicates that there was nothing particularly remarkable in allowing a quarter-century or so to pass between immersions.8 Not until the 1820s did bath-tubs begin to be produced commercially, though for their first half-century they would be called bathing-tubs. Bath-tub is not recorded until 1870, when it appeared in a story by Mark Twain.

  At about the time that bath-tubs first became commercially available, the toilet began its long, slow move indoors. At first it was generally installed in a small room separate from the bathroom, and was normally called the water closet in the British fashion, though there was a vogue – unfortunately short-lived if you ask me – for calling it a quincy after John Quincy Adams installed the first one in the White House. Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn’t found before 1880. Washroom also first appeared in 1880 and had been further euphemized into restroom by 1900.

  If America got off to a slow start in terms of civilizing comforts, by the 1840s it was racing ahead of Europe and the rest of the world – ironically at just about the time that British criticisms of American life were reaching full shriek. Department stores and restaurants brought a measure of democratic luxury and convenience to the middle classes that their European counterparts would not enjoy for at least half a century. American trains were plusher, faster and equipped with lavatories at a time when Europeans had to hope for either a strong bladder or a short trip, and her city streets were better lit at night. Above all, where America began to stand out was in the quality of its hotels.

  In the sense of a place to stay for the night, the word is, rather surprisingly, an Americanism. In French, hôtel signified a grand structure (as in hôtel de ville, ’town hall’), but as early as the eighteenth century Americans were using it to describe hostelries.9 America’s first grand hotel was the City Hotel in Baltimore, built in 1826. Three years later Boston’s Tremont House opened. Soon palatial hotels were opening all over the country – the Astor House in New York, the Burnet House in Cincinnati, the St Charles in New Orleans, the Maxwell House in Nashville.

  These establishments led the way in the development of all manner of comforts – central heating, spring beds, elevators (New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel was the first hotel to get one, in 1859) and, towards the end of the century, electric lighting and telephones. Just as elevators made department stores possible, so too did they transform hotels. Previously rooms on the upper floors had to be let at a discount since few guests would wish to drag suitcases up and down several flights of stairs. Suddenly, thanks to elevators, rooms on the upper floors could be let at a premium. As the Otis Elevator Company’s sales literature persuasively cooed, guests could now ‘enjoy a purity and coolness of atmosphere, an extended prospect, and an exemption from noise, dust and exhalations of every kind’.10 Even the most critical foreign observer was hard pressed to find complaint with American hotels. Anthony Trollope, the novelist son of Frances, was so impressed that he devoted a whole chapter of one of his travel books to this most marvellous of New World innovations.11

  Homes, too, became notably better equipped with conveniences like furnaces and artificial lighting than those of Europe, though the severity of the American climate made comfort an elusive goal even among the wealthier classes. In January 1866, the businessman George Templeton Strong lamented that even with both his furnaces and all the fireplaces going he couldn’t get the temperature in his house above 38°F.12 Even so, such matters are relative, and foreign observers continually remarked about the intolerable warmth and stuffiness of American households. The British consul-general in Massachusetts noted with quiet wonder that in the finer American houses ‘an enormous furnace in the cellar sends up, day and night, streams of hot air, through apertures and pipes, to every room in the house’ to the extent that ‘casual visitors are nearly suffocated’.13

  Summers could be equally unbearable. Not only was there no practical way of getting rid of the heat, but the lack of proper sanitary services in towns, and the proliferation of horses and other animals, meant that flies, mosquitoes and other insects thrived to an extent unthinkable today. At least, food could now be kept. By the 1840s many middle-class homes enjoyed the benefits of an icebox (an Americanism first recorded in 1839), and the ice industry was huge. By mid-century Boston alone was shipping out 150,000 tons of ice a year, some of it going as far as India and China.

  Improved lighting remained a constant preoccupation. Until the late 1700s illumination was limited to tallow candles and whale oil, but both were inefficient – it would take a hundred candles to create as much light as a single modern light-bulb – and beyond the means of most households. Until the early 1800s the average American home existed in nearly total darkness once night fell. For the middle classe
s, illumination improved dramatically with the invention in 1783 of the Argand lamp (named for its Swiss creator), which had greater intensity and less flicker. The next step forward was the invention of kerosene by a Canadian, Abraham Gesner, in 1858, and by petroleum a year later.14

  But the big transformation came with gas. Initially gas was used to light streets – Baltimore had gas-lamps as early as 1816, before Paris or Berlin – but the dirt, odours and volatility of gas meant it could not be safely relied on for domestic purposes until after the Civil War. Once these problems were dealt with, gas swept the nation. Each gas outlet, or gasolier, provided as much light as a dozen candles. By 1895, it was estimated, the average middle class home was twenty times better lit than it had been at mid-century.15 Even cleaned up and made more stable, gas remained dirty and dangerous. It emitted unpleasant, potentially lethal fumes that required special vents to clear the air. Even in the best-ventilated homes the carbonic acid and smoke that seeped from them took a heavy toll on books, curtains, wallpaper and soft furniture, as well as the eyes, lungs and clothes of the inhabitants.

  What was really needed was electricity, and not just for lighting but for scores of other appliances that Americans had the prosperity to buy if only the means existed to make them practical. Before electricity, labour-saving devices had about them a certain air of the ridiculous, most notably a rudimentary vacuum cleaner consisting of two bellows that the user wore like shoes. As the user plodded about the room, the exertions on the bellows created a suction action of sorts, which could be used to sweep up dust and crumbs. It was, as you might imagine, not terribly efficient. Simpler, quieter and far less exhausting was the carpet sweeper, an invention of the 1860s. Other offerings of the pre-electrical age were a gas-heated iron and an elaborate contraption called the ‘Water Witch’, which operated with pressurized water and which the makers boasted would not only vacuum the carpets, but could be employed to dry one’s hair and massage aching muscles.16