by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
SHORTER HOURS DURING THE DEPRESSION
Then on Black Friday in October 1929, it all collapsed. “Wall Street Lays an Egg,” declared the headline in Variety. Millionaires suddenly became paupers and leaped out windows. Breadlines formed. Millions were out of work and “buddy” couldn’t spare a dime. With so many people out of work, the idea of shortening work hours, “work sharing,” was back in vogue. Even Herbert Hoover called shorter hours the quickest way to create more jobs.
Once again, labor leaders like William Green were demanding “the six-hour day and the five-day week in industry.” Imagine their delight when word came from the Capitol in Washington on April 6, 1933, that the U.S. Senate had just passed a bill that would make thirty hours the official American workweek. Anything over that would be overtime. Thirty hours. That was nearly seven decades ago.
But the bill failed in the House by a few votes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed it because he was convinced that federal job creation programs—the New Deal—offered a better way to both reduce unemployment and keep industry strong.
But some businesses had already adopted thirty-hour workweeks, with excellent results. Cereal tycoon W. K. Kellogg took the lead, in December 1930. Kellogg was a paternalistic capitalist who ran his company with an iron hand. But he had a certain radical vision. In Kellogg’s view, according to Benjamin Hunnicutt, leisure time, not economic growth without end, represented the “flower, the crowning achievement, of capitalism.”12 The vision came to Kellogg because he mourned his rigid childhood and his own addiction to long hours of labor. “I never learned to play,” he once told his grandson, regretfully.
Kellogg offered his workers thirty-five hours’ pay for a thirty-hour week, and he built parks, summer camps, nature centers, garden plots, sports fields, and other recreational facilities for them. The plan immediately created 400 new jobs in Battle Creek, Michigan, where Kellogg’s plants were located. Productivity rose so rapidly that within two years Kellogg could pay his thirty-hour workers what he had previously paid them for forty hours. Polling of Kellogg’s workers during the ’30s showed overwhelming support for the thirty-hour week; only a few single males wished for more hours and higher pay.
OLD EIGHT HOURS HAS GOT US ALL
But after Kellogg died, the company waged a long campaign to return to the forty-hour week. The reason: benefits. As benefits increasingly became a larger part of the wage package, it made more sense to hire fewer workers and keep them on longer. But the thirty-hour week at Kellogg’s wasn’t fully abandoned until 1985, when the company threatened to leave Battle Creek if the remaining thirty-hour workers (about 20 percent of the company, and nearly all women) didn’t agree to work longer. The women held a funeral (complete with a casket) for the thirty-hour week at Stan’s Place, a local bar, and one, Ina Sides, wrote a eulogy:
Farewell good friend, oh six hours
’Tis sad but true
Now you’re gone and we’re all so blue.
Get out your vitamins, give the doctor a call
’Cause old eight hours has got us all.13
While writing his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Hunnicutt spent time with many former Kellogg workers in Battle Creek. Most remembered the thirty-hour week with deep fondness. They remembered using their leisure well—to garden, learn crafts, practice hobbies, exercise, and share in a vibrant community life. “You weren’t all wore out when you got out of work,” said one man. “You had the energy to do something else.”
Chuck and Joy Blanchard, a married couple who both worked at the plant, remembered that Chuck took care of the kids and was a “room parent” at their school “long before anyone heard about women’s liberation.”14 They also remembered that after the return to forty hours, volunteering in Battle Creek went down and crime went up. The Blanchards say they had little, but their lives, blessed with abundant leisure, were happier than those of young families today, who have so much more stuff but never seem to have time.
Never before or since in America had ordinary industrial workers traveled so far down that “other road”—the road of time instead of money. In that sense, the Kellogg’s workers were, as Hunnicutt sees them, explorers in a new and wondrous land that all Americans might have come to had World War II not intervened, and—in demanding a vast national outpouring of labor—locked the gate. Today, we meet people who cannot quite believe that more than half a century ago, in a corner of the United States, full-time workers were spending only thirty hours a week on the job. But it happened. And it can happen again when we get a grip on affluenza.
CHAPTER 18
An emerging epidemic
Man today is fascinated by the possibility of
buying more, better, and especially, new things.
He is consumption hungry. . . . To buy the latest
gadget, the latest model of anything that is
on the market, is the dream of everybody, in
comparison to which the real pleasure in use
is quite secondary. Modern man, if he dared
to be articulate about his concept of heaven,
would describe a vision which would look like
the biggest department store in the world. . . .
He would wander around open-mouthed in
this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided
only that there were ever more and new
things to buy, and perhaps, that his neighbors
were just a little less privileged than he.
—PSYCHOANALYST ERICH FROMM, 1955
During World War II, Americans accepted rationing and material deprivation. Wasteful consumption was out of the question. In every city, citizens gathered scrap metal to contribute to the war effort. Most grew some of their own food, in so-called victory gardens. Driving was limited to save fuel. Despite the sacrifices, what many older Americans remember most from that time was the sense of community, of sharing for the common good and uniting to defeat a common enemy.
But shortly after the war, pent-up economic demand in the form of personal savings, coupled with low-interest government loans and mushrooming private credit, led to a consumer boom unparalleled in history. The G.I. Bill sparked massive construction of new housing at the edge of America’s cities, beginning with the famous Levittown development on Long Island. The average size of a Levittown bungalow was only 750 square feet, but its popularity encouraged other developers to build sprawling suburbs with larger homes.
New families filled the new homes as the baby boom began. Each family needed lots of new appliances and—because transit service in the suburbs was nonexistent—cars. It’s fascinating to watch the many corporate and government films produced during that period, both documenting and extolling the new mass-consumption society.
THE GOODS LIFE
“The new automobiles stream from the factories,” the narrator cheers, in one late-forties film. “Fresh buying power floods into all the stores of every community. Prosperity greater than history has ever known.” In the same film, we see a montage of shots of people spending money and hear more peppy narration: “The pleasure of buying, the spreading of money, and the enjoyment of all the things that paychecks can buy are making happy all the thousands of families!”1 Utopia had arrived!
Another film proclaims that “we live in an age of growing abundance” and urges Americans to give thanks for “our liberty to buy whatever each of us may choose” (the words come with a heavenly chorus humming “America the Beautiful” and shots of the Statue of Liberty). A third reminds us that “the basic freedom of the American people is the freedom of individual choice” (of which products to purchase, of course).
One film appeals to women to take up where the soldiers of World War II left off and fight “the age-old battle for beauty.” We’ve been told “you can’t buy beauty in a jar,” the narrator says, “but that old adage is bunk. We have the money to spend and we want all the lovely-smelling lotions, soaps, and glamour goo we can get with it.”
Joy in a jar. As women try on perfumes in an upscale department store, the narrator continues: “Our egos are best nourished by a well-placed investment in real luxury goods—what you might call discreetly conspicuous waste.”2 “Waste not, want not,” Benjamin Franklin once admonished. But the new slogan might have been Waste More, Want More. Almost overnight, the good life became the goods life.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
“The immediate postwar period does represent a huge change in the kinds of attitudes that Americans have had about consumption,” says historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed.3 “Discreetly conspicuous waste” got another boost from what marketers called “planned obsolescence.” Products were made to last only a short time so that they would have to be replaced frequently (adding to sales), or they were continually upgraded, more commonly in style than in quality. It was an idea that began long before World War II with Gillette disposable razors, and it soon took on a larger life.
Henry Ford, who helped start the ’20s consumer boom by paying his workers a then-fantastic five dollars a day, was a bit of a conservative about style, once promising that consumers could have one of his famous Model T’s in any color as long as it was black. But just before the Great Depression, General Motors introduced the idea of the annual model change. It was an idea that took off after World War II. Families were encouraged to buy a new car every year. “They were saying the car you had last year won’t do anymore, and it won’t do anymore because it doesn’t look right,” Strasser explains. “There’s now a new car and that’s what we want to be driving.”4
INSTANT MONEY
Of course, none but the richest Americans could afford to plunk down a couple thousand dollars on a new car every year, or on any of the other new consumer durables that families wanted. Never mind. There were ways to finance your spending spree. “The American consumer! Each year you consume fantastic amounts of food, clothing, housing, amusements, appliances, and services of all kinds. This mass consumption makes you the most powerful giant in the land,”5 pipes the narrator in a cute mid-’50s animated film from the National Consumer Finance Association.
“I’m a giant,” boasts Mr. American Consumer, as he piles up a massive mountain of stuff. And how does he afford it? Loans, says the film: “Consumer loans in the hands of millions of Americans add up to tremendous purchasing power. Purchasing power that creates consumer demand for all kinds of goods and services that mean a rising standard of living throughout the nation.” You can probably already hear the drum roll in your mind.
A TV ad for Bank of America made about the same time shows a shaking animated man and asks, “Do you have money jitters? Ask the obliging Bank of America for a jar of soothing instant money. M-O-N-E-Y. In the form of a convenient personal loan.” The animated man drinks from a coffee cup full of dollars, stops shaking, and jumps for joy.6
It was a buy now, pay later world, only to become more so with the coming of credit cards in the sixties.
AMERICA THE MALLED
During the 1950s and 1960s, the rush to suburbia continued (it hasn’t stopped yet). In 1946 a government program, the G.I. Bill, spurred it along. Ten years later, another government program did the same. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the beginning of a vast federal subsidy to create a nationwide freeway system. In part the system was sold as national defense—roads big enough to run our tanks on if the Russians invaded. The new freeways encouraged a mass movement to even wider rings of suburbs. All were built around the automobile and massive shopping centers, whose windows, according to one early ’60s promotional film, reflected “a happy-go-spending world.”7
“Shopping malls,” the film continues, “see young adults as in need of expansion [interesting choice of words]. People who buy in large quantities and truck it away in their cars. It’s a big market!” The narrator continues gushingly: “These young adults, shopping with the same determination that brought them to suburbs in the first place, are the goingest part of a nation of wheels, living by the automobile.” Going to the mall was, for these determined consumers, an adventure worthy of Mount Everest, at least according to the film, which later describes the consumers’ hardest challenge as finding their cars again in the mall’s giant parking lots.
By 1970, Americans were spending four times as much time shopping as were Europeans. The malls encouraged Sunday shopping, then as rare in the United States as it still is in Europe. To its everlasting credit, the Sears, Roebuck Company opposed opening its store on Sunday, on the grounds that it wanted “to give our employees their Sabbath.” But by 1969 it caved to the competition, opening on Sundays “with great regret and some sense of guilt.”8
THE BOX THAT ENLIGHTENED
The big economic boom wasn’t the result of any one thing. A series of synchronous events made it possible: pent-up demand, government loans, expanded credit, suburbanization, longer shopping hours, and mallification. But perhaps no single cause was more responsible for the emerging postwar epidemic of affluenza than the ubiquitous box that found its way into most American homes by the 1950s.
Television showed everyone how the other half (the upper half) lived. Its programs were free, made possible only because of the sale of time to advertisers who hawked their wares during and between the features. Crude at first, the ads became increasingly sophisticated—both visually, because of improving technologies, and psychologically, as batteries of experts probed the human mind to find out how to sell most effectively.
The early TV ads relied a great deal on humor—“Any girl can find a good husband, but finding the right man to do your hair, now that’s a problem.” Like many print and radio ads before them, they played on anxieties about personal embarrassment, warning of horrors like “B.O.” (body odor). But mostly, they just showed us all the neat stuff just waiting to be bought.
On TV, convenience was the new ideal, disposability the means. “Use it once and throw it away.” Out of sight, out of mind. TV dinners in disposable aluminum trays. “No deposit, no return” bottles. Dinnertime, and the livin’ is easy. People danced onscreen with products. The airwaves buzzed with jingles. John still can’t stop singing one that must have been on the tube every night when he was a kid: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”
AFFLUENZA’S DISCONTENTS
Of course, not everyone wanted Americans to catch affluenza. “Buy only what you really need and cannot do without,” President Harry Truman once said on TV. By the early ’50s, educational films were warning schoolkids about overspending. But they were, in a word, boring. No match for TV’s wit and wizardry. In one, a nerdy-looking character called Mr. Money teaches students to save. One can imagine the collective classroom yawns it produced. In another, the voice of God says, “You’re guilty of pouring your money down a rat hole. You forget that it takes a hundred pennies to make a dollar.” The visuals are equally uncompelling: a hand puts a dollar in a hole in the dirt labeled—you guessed it—"Rat hole.”9
Meanwhile, far-sighted social critics from both left and right warned that America’s new affluence was coming at a high price. Conservative economist Wilhelm Ropke feared that “we neglect to include in the calculation of these potential gains in the supply of material goods the possible losses of a non-material kind.”10 Centrist Vance Packard lambasted advertising (The Hidden Persuaders, 1957), keeping up with the Joneses (The Status Seekers, 1959) and planned obsolescence (The Waste Makers, 1960). And the liberal John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that a growing economy fulfilled needs it created itself, leading to no improvement in happiness. Our emphasis on “private opulence,” he said, led to “public squalor"—declining transit systems, schools, parks, libraries, and air and water quality. Moreover, it left “vast millions of hungry and discontented people in the world. Without the promise of relief from that hunger and privation, disorder is inevitable.”11
The affluent society had met its members’ real material needs, Galbraith arg
ued at the end of his famous book. Now it had other, more important things to do. “To furnish a barren room is one thing,” he wrote. “To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic.”12
YOUNG AMERICA STRIKES BACK
During the following decade, many young Americans sensed that the critics of consumerism were right. Raised in the suburbs, they rejected the suburban lifestyle with its “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” (as songwriter Malvina Reynolds called them), where everyone grew up to be “just the same.” During Berkeley’s tumultuous Free Speech Movement of 1964, its leader, Mario Savio, attacked a school system that wanted students to be “well-behaved children in a chrome-plated consumer’s paradise.”13 A new “counterculture” arose, rebuking materialism. Thousands of young Americans left the cities for agricultural communes practicing simple living, the most successful of which still survive.
Many of the young questioned American reliance on the growth of the gross national product as a measure of the nation’s health. In that they were supported by the popular senator Robert F. Kennedy. During his 1968 campaign for president (which ended when he was assassinated) Bobby Kennedy stressed that
we will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. . . . The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior.14
By the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, young Americans were questioning the impact of the consumer lifestyle on the planet itself. Leading environmentalists like David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, were warning that the American dream of endless growth was not sustainable.