At the same time, the standardization of products began, by the early 1930s, to become a target for some criticism, on the grounds that it slowed or halted progress in product design. Charles Kettering, vice-president in charge of research at General Motors, questioned whether product standardization over the decade preceding 1931 had been an altogether good thing, suggesting that it had contributed to industrial stagnation. In part this reflected the emergence of a new approach to design at General Motors, to counter Ford’s success with the model T. Kettering’s comments were motivated by GM’s move away from Ford’s hyperstandardized approach and the beginnings of its segmented marketing strategy.62
Still, even after the inception of GM’s segmented approach to marketing and product design, the standardization of commodities remained a powerful normative ideal. The normative force in the early part of the twentieth century behind the notion that goods should be standardized is indicated by expressions of anxiety about products not being suficiently standardized. Calls for standards for products had an air of urgency about them and carried something of a moral charge. In 1910, for example, women were encouraged by activist Ida M. Tarbell to organize to pressure government to set standards for fabrics: “The primary trouble here is, of course, that we have in this country no standards for textiles,” Tarbell wrote.63 Tarbell’s concerns were shared by the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), which actively campaigned for the standardization of textiles and clothing (Mack 1934). The issue for the AHEA was the need to provide consumers with clear information about products. The following decade, a legislative bill intended to correct the situation described by Tarbell, by standardizing the measurement and manufacture of cotton duck, was presented to the state assembly in California. Andrew Swanfeldt, chairman of the Southern California Tent and Awning Manufacturer’s Association, who was responsible for the proposed new law, commented that “the bill, as proposed is badly needed as it regulates a commodity in which there has been a great deal of jugglery in the past and should be standardized so that the consumer, regardless of where he buys his cotton materials, will receive absolutely the same weight, construction, and width.”64 Part of what lay behind the calls for standardized consumer products was a desire to make wage goods in the marketplace maximally legible to consumers.
Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages
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