{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":139,"pdf_page":147,"physical_index":147,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a8c3621271ea1da7cd6c0ddaf03f222fb53f6552eb5b19e211a5ce01a0392d9a"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"3.2. The Automobile as the Ultimate Consumer Commodity\n\nFor the workers of Middletown, the commodity that seemed more than any other to justify the alienating activity of labor—endowing work after the fact with “vital meaning”—was the automobile. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the difusion of the automobile in Middletown was rapid and dramatic, afecting all aspects of social life. “In 1890 Middletown was a ‘horse culture,’” the Lynds report, but “by 1920, Middletown had become a horse-power culture. By 1923, there were 2 cars for every 3 families. The ownership of automobiles substitutes, in many cases, for saving (and sometimes even for food and clothing). It is not uncommon to mortgage a home to buy a car” (p. 254). Even in the 1920s, before the era of interstates and large-scale suburbanization, people seemed almost irrational in the importance they attached to cars. “We’d rather go without clothes than give up the car,” one informant, a mother of nine children, told the Lynds (1929, p. 255). Most cars were purchased using finance, with car payments, according to the Lynds’ calculations, amounting to 25 percent of the average wage earned by working people.20 Yet cars were very much conceived of as objects of discretionary consumption. The Lynds note that one of the chief leisure time activities of Middletown workers was to go for a drive and that vehicles were more objects of pleasure than utilitarian tools. One gets the impression that the Lynds’ wage workers to a significant extent worked in order to be able to drive—or at least that the activity of driving to some degree justified the labor sold for a wage.\n\nIn Middletown in Transition, the Lynds’ second study, they observe that the obsession with automobiles continued into the 1930s, even against the backdrop of the Depression: “Car ownership in Middletown was one of the most depression proof elements of the city’s life in the years following 1929—far less vulnerable, apparently, than marriages, divorces, new babies, clothing, jewelry, and most other things, both small and large.” The Lynds note that “the passenger registrations in Middletown’s entire county not only registered scarcely any loss in the early years of the depression, but both in numbers and in ratio to population, stood in each of the years 1932–35 above the 1929 level” (1937, pp. 266–67). While the purchase of new cars declined, suggesting that hard economic times in the 1930s prompted people to hang on to their cars for longer, at the same time, gasoline sales dropped only 4 percent during the toughest years of the Depression, indicating that patterns of car usage did not change much. A union organizer interviewed by the Lynds claimed that it was because of their obsession with automobiles that workers in the town proved so hard to unionize. “It’s easy to see why our workers don’t think very much about joining unions,” he remarked, continuing, “So long as they [the workers] have a car and can borrow or steal a gallon of gas, they’ll ride around and pay no attention to labor organization; and if they can’t get gas, they’re busy trying to figure out some way to get it. . . . The automobile always comes first” (1937, p. 26).\n\nEconomic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background\n\n139","previous_page":138,"next_page":140}