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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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United States was caveat emptor, meaning that the consumer was responsible for ascertaining whether products would perform in a satisfactory manner (Hamilton 1931). So the growing influence of the principle that consumers have a strong moral entitlement to “fair” quantities of use value from the goods they purchased has to have a more historically proximate explanation.

I would suggest that the explanation has to do with the grounds on which wage labor became acceptable as a legitimate form of exchange. In the context of the moral economy of wage-labor exchange, consumers were seen as being entitled to fair quantities of use value in the commodities they acquired. The assumption was that consumers deserve decent products in exchange for their hard-earned wages. Reflecting this moral imperative, the state was increasingly viewed as responsible for ensuring fair exchange in the consumer marketplace. The right of consumers to high-quality, functional goods was a natural extension of the right of wage earners to fair levels of compensation. On the one hand, commodities, viewed as stores of potential free activity, made the wage—the purchasing power of which was measured in quantities of these commodities—more easily commensurable with labor. At the same time, the urge, on the part of wage earners and capitalists alike, to make wage labor thinkable as a potentially fair exchange of equivalent substances contributed to a tendency for commodities to be represented so as to facilitate this—that is, as standard quantities of potential utility. The sense of consumer entitlement that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century has then much to do with the increasing influence of the idea of wage labor as a fair form of exchange that was outlined in the last chapter. Wage labor became legitimate insofar as the purchasing power of the wage became stable and quantifiable, such that it could represent a capacity to capture a set of use values potentially suficient to compensate workers for their loss of free life activity to labor. Standardized products, which were promoted on the basis of their predictable qualities, and the quantity, transparency, and robustness of their useful powers, provided a means by which purchasing power became more easily imaginable, and in this way provided a kind of material-cultural substrate for the legitimacy of wage labor in the era of mass production.

The remainder of this chapter consists of a general discussion of standardization, primarily as it became manifested in the sphere of consumption. The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First it sets up the context in which the more particular features of standardization that I go on to analyze— the development of brands, commercial warranties, the emergence of the implied warranty, and consumer product testing—should be interpreted. Second it draws attention to the fact that standardization, especially where it concerned commodities meant for final consumption, was understood in moral as well as technical terms. As noted, the moral dimension of standardization has to do with the increasing sense that consumers deserve clear and fair quantities of use value from the commodities they received in exchange for their earnings. In making this argument, I draw extensively on the discussions that took place about standardization in the first three decades of the twentieth century while also analyzing institutional developments accompanying the shift to standardized goods. Following this general account of standardization, Chapters 7 and 8 go on to examine certain aspects of standardization in more detail. These include the rapid expansion of brands as signs of standardized consumer products, the emergence of the standardized commercial warranty, and the regulation of standardized products by way of consumer product testing.

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1. Varieties of Standardization

Standardization, in economic terms, primarily refers to various eforts to rationalize the economy, encompassing both production and consumption.1 In the secondary literature, three kinds of standardization are identified, as are three methods whereby standardization is implemented. The three general categories are standardization of product performance, standardization of measurement, and standardization to ensure compatibility between parts. The modes of implementation of standardization are de facto, where standards evolve spontaneously; de jure, which is standardization imposed by government regulation; and voluntary consensus, where various interested parties come together to agree on standards (Tate 2001; Russell 2008). The major agencies implementing or promoting standardization have been the state, business, professional organizations, the judiciary, unions, and various social movements, especially the consumer movement.

While standards of various sorts are probably, as sociologist Lawrence Busch (2011) has suggested, as old as culture itself, the concept of standardization has fairly recent origins.2 The earliest recorded appearance of the term standardize, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is in 1873, used in relation to chemical solutions. Similarly, standardization was first used, in 1896, in the context of pharmaceuticals. The first recorded use of the either term to denote economic rationalization occurred in 1901 (the year in which the Bureau of Standards was created).3 Over the next three decades there was a veritable explosion of discourse about standards and standardization. If the number of newspaper titles in which the term appears is any indication of the topicality and urgency of the issue, the most intense period of discussion about standardization clearly took place in the first half of the century, especially between 1910 and 1930.4 Talk about the issue subsided in the postwar era, although in the 1990s it increased again with discussions about standards in information and communications technology. In the first half of the century, the term is most commonly used in accord with its social scientific sense, to refer to the standardization of economic production. However, across the whole century the word has a multitude of meanings, used variously to refer to the rationalization of wages, to a tendency toward aesthetic conformity, and often as a vague term to denote a principle diametrically opposed to individuality and creativity.5

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The rise of the concept of standardization coincided with the tail end of the second industrial revolution—the electrification and mechanization of the American economy, which took place roughly between 1880 and 1920. Common standards were needed in order to eficiently apply the new technologies that emerged in that era to industrialized mass production.6 But although standardization is often associated with modernization, it was not, as economists have tended to suggest, an automatic consequence of marketled economic development. Standardization was a project as much as a developmental process, championed with great enthusiasm by its advocates, and actively promoted by a set of actors who arguably constituted a movement of sorts. It was led by crusading engineers, technocratic-minded politicians, and consumer activists, as well as by business figures—and indeed many of its most prominent promoters, people such as Herbert Hoover, Frederick J. Schlink, and Arthur Kallet, were several of those things at once.

Some sense of the fervor with which people took up the cause of standardization is indicated by a sign hanging over the door in 1910 of the superintendent of equipment of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co. building, which served as a mission statement for the department: “Early to bed and early to Rise / Work like hell—to standardize.”7 In response to criticisms of the standardization movement in 1923, Albert W. Whitney, chairman of the American Engineering Standards Committee, issued a robust defense. Standardization, he proclaimed, lies “at the bottom of both natural evolution and of civilization” and amounts to “essentially only the selection of the best among a mass of the inferior.” It “not only opens the way to a fuller material life, but it is a condition which makes the spiritual life possible.”8 So pervasive was this new gospel of standardization that some commentators felt the need to deflate its claims: “Standardization is not by any means the new and revolutionary thing that eficiency engineers and scientific managers would have you believe. Standardization is in fact as old as the hills,” we are told in a short piece in the Chicago Defender, which went on to cite as examples of premodern standardized products buggy wheels, circus rings, and ladders.9

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The most intense period of concern about standardization, during which the term became common currency in discussions about the workings of the economy, was the first three decades of the twentieth century. During those years, the passion for standardization was directed toward all parts of the economy, from raw materials to manufactured goods, styles of construction, regulations, and measures and weights. Urgent calls were made for the standardization of a vast range of materials, products, and services, including public utilities, freight cars, trucks, automobiles, trafic control systems, munitions, currency, education, color charts, textiles, all manner of produce, credit arrangements, real estate agent qualifications, worker’s accident compensation rates, tennis balls, golf balls, bowling balls, the list goes on and on. There were even appeals for the standardization of methods of evangelizing. Reverend A. N. Archibald of Lowell, Massachusetts, surveying in 1918 what he took to be the dismal state of the national evangelical mission, concluded that the essence of the problem was a deficit of standardized method.10 “There can be no success in this [spiritual] war without standardization,” he pronounced, continuing: “If the fight is to be won swiftly, definitely, and completely, evangelism and its methods must be standardized.”11 In the early decades of the century standardization was frequently identified as an element of the zeitgeist: “This is an age of the standardization of everything” announced a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, an opinion frequently echoed in newspapers and periodicals.12 In the first Yearbook issued by the American Engineering Standards Committee in 1927, standardization was breathlessly described as “the outstanding note of this century,” reaching “the remotest details of our industrial regime” and making use of “all sources of scientific knowledge and [afecting] every phase of design, production, and utilization” (quoted in Cochrane 1966, p. 256).13 Indeed such was the enthusiasm for standardization in this period that it became a target for humorous comment. The

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Los Angeles Times, for example, ran a piece in 1930 in response to standard specifications issued by the National Bureau of Standards, the federal organization responsible for overseeing standardization, for mop sticks: “Recently the Bureau devised an instrument to measure the energy required to fold a sample of fabric, the energy recovered when the sample is allowed to unfold. Describing how this device is used, Textile Maintenance Notes reports that ‘the energy lost when a sample is folded is dissipated in producing a crease in the fabric. This energy loss . . . may be taken as a measure of the wrinkle ability of the fabric.’” The piece goes on to make the droll observation that similar thinking could be applied to “the powder ability of nutmegs . . . the eraser ability of rubbers,” asking “are there any standards for shoelace tips, key rings or soup ladles? If not, why not?”14 This piece of satire draws attention to the way in which consumer commodities were standardized, in essence, to the degree that they came to be measurable as precise quantities of stored usefulness; for although standardization began as a difuse project to rationalize production, it soon came to encompass consumption.

Opinion about the trend toward standardization of the economy was far from being uniformly positive. There were dissenting voices, together forming a rather consistent current of opinion that bemoaned the alienating character of a standardized world. Some expressed the fear that standardization would slow or even halt the march of industrial progress by ossifying techniques of production and product design. “It has never been my experience that ‘standardization’ means the cessation of active improvement” commented one industry spokesperson, trying to allay this fear.15 Others were concerned that standardization would result in the death of competition and the rise of monopolies (Hoyt 1919). A more typical complaint was that with standardization comes monotonous uniformity, the collapsing of all that is unique and interesting into bland repetition—a bleak vision of industrial society that resonates with Chaplin’s in “Modern Times.”16 The worry that standardized production would lead to a standardization of values was very much in line with theories later developed by the members of the Frankfurt School: “The efort of the reformers seems to be to standardize the world. To standardize its commerce, its morals, its religion and everything else,” complained one commentator.17 Another voiced fears that standardization would soon creep into creative literature, with the efect of expunging the “creative” from literature.18 Concern was also expressed that standardization would somehow debase the “art” of politics.19 Standardization of things would, according to this critical current of opinion, inexorably leads to standardization of people.20 Thus, perhaps reflecting a more general dichotomy in discourses about modernity, there were two opposed visions of standardization, one that pictured it as an essentially progressive force, the other that saw in it a threat to human values. Opinion about standardization was suficiently divided that one commentator opined: “If the controversy about standardization keeps up, there will soon develop a pro and anti-standardization party in this country.”21

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Despite the variety of things and processes to which the term got applied, historians and social scientists have tended to interpret standardization primarily in terms of the logic of production in an industrial capitalist economy. The classic case study of industrial standardization is Alfred Chandler’s (1977) account of the agreement on a standard gauge for railroad tracks in the nineteenth century. Chandler sees standardization as the means whereby technical economies of scale and scope were realized in a developing industrial economy. The increasingly complex division of labor after industrialization meant that there was pressure on firms and public organizations to agree to implement common standards for products and parts. Standardization provided a solution to coordination problems in integrated, technologically sophisticated national economies.22

But while standardization was certainly driven to a large extent by technical considerations of the kind described by Chandler, I want to approach the topic from a diferent angle, by emphasizing the significance of standardization in an emerging Fordist moral economy, at the core of which lay the relationship between wage labor and consumer entitlements. Standardization certainly served to increase the eficiency of industrial production, but at the same time, it entailed the stabilization of the properties of consumer commodities. The professed motivation for standardizing product properties was not just to make production more eficient but also to improve the quality, and especially the durability, of consumer products. The engineer’s focus on product function thus came to inform the way in which consumer products were regarded more generally. Standardization thus concerned consumption as well as production. And the project of standardizing consumption was bound up in an emerging moral economy concerning the entitlement of wage-earning consumers to a fair share of the use values churned out by industrial production.

The importance of the perspective and interests of consumers in standardization is indicated by the fact that, when making decisions about product standards, the National Bureau of Standards (at least in theory) gave equal weight to input from consumers and industry.23 The purpose of standardization, for the bureau, was to give “better value” to the consumer while also making the properties of products more transparent in the marketplace. So, while standardization was, to be sure, one part about the rationalization of production, it was also about endowing mass-produced consumer commodities with stable quantities of use value. Stabilizing the use value of commodities had the efect of reinforcing the moral economy underlying the wage relation, by facilitating what Meg Jacobs (2005) calls the “purchasing power paradigm.” For Jacobs, the commitment to increasing the purchasing power of wage workers—a commitment that was shared by organized labor, the state, and to a significant extent industry also—defined the political economy of the great compromise that began to emerge in America in the 1930s and continued into the Golden Age years of the postwar period. Yet this focus on the purchasing power of the wage could only make sense if the quality of wage goods was reasonably stable and invariant. As mentioned earlier, this is because in order for purchasing power to be meaningfully measurable, the properties (and hence quality) of consumer goods must be held at least relatively constant. Standardized consumer goods were therefore an important element in what the political economists of the regulation school have described as the Fordist regime of accumulation (Aglietta [1977] 2000; Boyer 1990; Boyer and Saillard 2002).

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The main forms of standardization over the first forty years of the twentieth century were standardization of production, standardization of products, standardization of measures, and standardization of wages. In the following sections, I give a brief overview of the issues at stake in each of these areas during those years. My objective is to give some sense of the overall shape of the preoccupation with standardization.

2. Standardization of Production

Standardized production was typically seen as a particular phase of industrial development, one that heralded the arrival of a brave new future. It was opposed to simple “manufacturing,” the older approach to production, which the standardized approach was supposedly set to supersede. While with manufacturing, at least in its archetypical form, most of the parts of a product would be made in one factory, standardization involved the distribution of its production over an entire industry. This would be facilitated by increasingly complex forms of industrial organization, which could coordinate the production process across diferent factories and enterprises.24 More generally, standardization entailed a regimentation of the economy around the principle of maximizing eficiency. In order to achieve deep eficiencies, standardization had to be extended from the sphere of production proper to distribution and consumption.

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In 1925, the secretary of the American Standards Association, P. G. Agnew, gave a retrospective assessment of the accomplishments of the standardization movement over the previous two decades.25 He noted that there had been a broad reorganization of American society around standardized systems, especially in production, where, alluding to Taylorism, standardized techniques had gone a long way toward eliminating “unnecessary motions.” Looking forward at a bright future, Agnew predicted that further standardization “will make for eficiency and economy in production, distribution, and consumption.”26 Similar sentiments were expressed by other prominent industry figures. For example, Bernard Gherardi, vice-president of AT&T, in his retirement address chose to speak about the great progress made toward standardization since 1918.27

Standardization of production in the early twentieth century was most closely associated with the automobile industry. Inspired by the success of the standardization of railroads in the nineteenth century, auto manufacturers began very early on in the history of the car industry to create intercompany technical standards. These eforts, which were spear-headed by a combination of engineers and forward-looking industrialists, began in earnest around 1910. By the 1920s, other American manufacturing industries realized the usefulness of shared standards and embarked on similar standardizing projects (G. Thompson 1954).

Engineers were not just at the cutting edge of the standardization of the auto industry but also leaders of the broader standardization movement. They were to be found at the helm of standardizing projects in various state bodies and consumer organizations, as well as in a variety of industries. Their disparate eforts were brought together under the auspices of the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), founded in 1918, which actively worked to persuade businessmen of the benefits of standardization.28 The AESC included nine engineering societies, seven government departments, and nineteen industry organizations, which met regularly with the aim of hammering out standards for all aspects of the economy.29 The mission of the organization was to advance standardization against the often ineficient and chaotic ferment of the free market. The standardizing activities of engineers and their associations did not go unnoticed—in the popular press engineers were singled out for praise for their eforts to improve the economy.30

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While standardization was supposed to bring some order to the chaos produced by unregulated competition, the standardizing work of engineers was also seen as a preferable alternative to state regulation.31 The role of professional engineering organizations was to encourage voluntary standardization, as opposed to top-down standards imposed by government. Pioneering engineer and entrepreneur George Westinghouse, addressing a meeting of engineers from diferent national associations, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, proclaimed: “By a combined efort of all the engineering societies, with the financial support of all manufacturers . . . it seems to me that such a bureau [of standardization] could be established and could work a reform of incalculable value in our present practice and thus forestall government activity in the same direction.”32 As Westinghouse’s comments indicate, to an extent the voluntary movement toward shared standards on the part of business was motivated by a desire to preempt rulings by the National Bureau of Standards. In the vanguard of the efort to advance voluntary standardization was the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which was founded in 1905. The standardization work of the SAE was widely known and, like that of other crusading engineering organizations, not infrequently extolled. An article in the Boston Globe described the SAE in the following glowing terms: “Its work is of interest not merely to the technician but to the layman who demands eficiency, safety and comfort in the use of his motor car, but who has little idea how largely these desired qualities are the fruit of vast research and labor.”33 Similarly, a piece in the New York Times to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the SAE depicted those who led the organization as the unsung heroes of the rise of the industry, saving the American consumer huge amounts of money as a result of production of standards for auto parts while conducting vitally important research on automobiles.34

The appeal of standardized production was then not just that it resonated with the eficiency-driven engineering mind-set. Standardization was also supposed to secure concrete material benefits for consumers. The 1930 Year Book of American Standards, for example, promised that standardization would ofer great benefits to the “ultimate consumer.”35 At the same time, the interests of the consumer were seen as being in alignment with the broader goal of economic eficiency. J.  N. Willya, maker of the Overland automobile, emphasized the advantages to consumers of standardized mass production: “Quantity of production gives quality of product. It also ofers a fixed and definite dollar value to the consumer, much greater dollar for dollar than do the small operations of the concern that tries to accomplish big things on a small scale” [and all this is a result of the fact that] “standardization is absolute.”36 Harry Lord, of the Lord Auto Company made similar arguments about the new era of standardization, commenting that; “The automobile world is fast awakening to the importance of standardization. In standardization two great principles are involved. First, the elimination of useless and needless variations from the normal. In lessening the field of certainties, logically you enhance the opportunities for maximum eficiency. Second is the selection and combination into a single product of all that is most useful and best adapted to its purpose. . . . The motor vehicle industry [following an early period of disorder and chaos brought about by] countless crass attempts at individualism .  .  . is entering into the Utopian stage of standardization.” Reduction of waste, improvements in eficiency, and the perfecting of products were seen as complementary consequences of standardization, distinct virtuous dimensions of the same process.

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Various organs of the state were fully in support of the project to standardize the economy. In addition to the ongoing special work of the Bureau of Standards, standardization was more generally actively promoted by the Department of Commerce, especially in the early 1920s, under Herbert Hoover.37 An engineer by training and a leading light of the eficiency movement, as Secretary of Commerce Hoover enthusiastically advocated “the elimination of waste in industry through standardization.”38 With this objective in mind, he created, in 1922, the Division of Simplified Practice, as a department within the Bureau of Standards. According to Hoover, the division was to be “the medium through which producers, distributers, and consumers could agree upon simplification of production by reducing the number of sizes and models of products” (quoted in Noble 1977, p. 81). From the point of view of the state, the benefits of standardization were increasing eficiency, improved and cheaper products for consumers, and greater economic stability. E. T. Pickard, chief of the textile division of the Department of Commerce, speaking at an industry meeting, afirmed with great enthusiasm the advantages of standardization for industry while also noting its broader importance for national wellbeing: “Standardization, simplification and the elimination of waste, when confined to reasonable measures and operations, may be interpreted in terms of national welfare. . . . They lead to stabilization of trade and industry and equilibrium of employment. The resulting economies of production and distribution enhance the purchasing powers of the consuming public, thus enabling them to enjoy a progressively higher standard of living.”39 The New York Times in 1919 published an article making a similar point, suggesting that the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism could be tamed by the mindful application of a standardized approach to production: “Debt to standardization: It Has Brought Order Out of Chaos in the Machinery World,” ran the headline.40 Thus, even before the era of Keynesian macroeconomic policy, standardized production, which entailed a coordinated economy, was seen as a means whereby economic stability could be maintained. The perspective of the Commerce Department was not, however, always shared by other government organizations. There was some suspicion that standardization of commodities would lead to monopoly. Indeed, rumors circulated in 1931 that the Federal Trade Commission would rule against guidelines for voluntary standardization drawn up by industry in collaboration with the Commerce Department (the FTC later denied that these rumors were true).41

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