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

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In general, however, commentators placed great emphasis on the benefits of standardized production for product quality. “US auto manufacturing is distinguished by standardized production techniques” observed one journalist, continuing, “Europeans often think this results from a ‘quantity technique,’ but in fact it is all about quality control.”42 There were in fact real advancements in that area during the interwar years. Modern quality control techniques were invented in the 1930s by A. Shewhart, who, while working for AT&T, developed the first systematic manufacturing product inspection regime, employing statistical sampling of product characteristics to ensure that basic design parameters were being met (Busch 2011, pp. 126– 29). The ultimate benefit of standardized production was supposed to be the improved quality ofered by standardized products as well as cost savings to the consumer.

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3. Standardization of Products

Standardized techniques of production thus yielded standardized products, and standardization was most often justified by the supposedly superior characteristics of those products. For some, the benefits of standardized products were continuous with those of standardized production—uniform products would make society as a whole more eficient. Herbert Hoover, for example, felt that the standard of living for the American people would be raised if they could be persuaded to buy a smaller range of more standardized products. He consequently advocated a great “elimination of styles” of consumer goods in order to increase the overall eficiency of the economy and improve living standards.43 As president, Hoover continued to advocate strongly for standardization, defending the practice in trenchant terms during a 1931 radio talk: “Critics talk about the evils of standardization. Well standardization helps individualism; the standardization of bathtubs and radios, motor cars and a thousand other things actually built up individualism by increasing the horizon of the individual; by adding to his chances, his comforts and his opportunities.”44 P. G. Agnew, secretary of the American Standards Association, made explicit the connection between the standardization of commodities and raising the living standards of the population to middle-class levels. Standardized products, endowed with substantial and precisely measured amounts of utility, would, according to Agnew, facilitate a felicitous embourgeoisement of the population. Agnew consequently urged that all products be made to conform to national specifications, averring that “such a regulation would constitute a major advance in national economy.”45 The National Bureau of Standards certainly made a heroic efort to comply with Agnew’s wishes. In 1931, it published a ten-volume encyclopedia of product specifications, while ofering a certification program for manufacturers whose products were in compliance with the specifications.46 Lyman Briggs (1934, p. 154), director of the NBS, claimed that the advantage of specification standards for consumers was that they “established quality as a basis for competition among manufacturers.” The Bureau of Home Economics, a division of the Department of Agriculture established in 1923, with responsibility for “homemaking,” went even further, pushing specifically for government imposed specifications for consumer commodities (Lynd 1933, p.  884). By the late 1930s, the Federal Trade Commission was actively promoting what it described as “permissive standards” for goods—those arrived at and policed by associations of producers—as part of its efort to establish fair trade practices.47

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Part of the motivation behind pinning down products through the creation of standard specifications was the felt need to bring some stability to what was becoming a very dynamic marketplace for consumer products, especially durables. The idea was that standard specifications for goods, made accessible to the public through certification and labeling, would bring some clarity to what had become a confusing flux of consumer products. Economist Charles Wyland (1937) reports that in 1928 the US consumer market ofered around 1,000 brands of canned peach, 2,500 brands of perfume, and 10,000 brands of wheat flour. In the late 1920s, sewing machine needles came in nine diameters and varied in length by as little as one-thirty-second of an inch (Chase and Schlink 1927, p. 174)). Robert S. Lynd noted in 1934 that “in a single city the size of Milwaukee, the consumer must choose from among 250 kinds of toothbrushes, 100 kinds of washing machines, 160 kinds of fountain pens, 50 kinds of motor oil and so on through the long list of things he must buy,” while a department store like Macy’s ofered 350,000 “possible choices” (p. 6). Standardization would, so its advocates argued, incrementally reduce this chaotic plenitude of products to a more manageable selection of choices. But the justification for standard specifications for commodities to which most weight was given was that standards would establish minimum acceptable quality levels for products.48

While the National Bureau of Standards cooperated with the American Standards Association (ASA), which represented industry, in creating standards, it was not clear that both organizations were on the same page when it came to protecting the public interest. When in 1933 the Department of Commerce suggested for budgetary reasons that the functions of the Division of Simplification be outsourced to the ASA, the response from the standards community was suficiently negative that the Commerce Department was moved to reconsider the matter. “There can be no substitute for standards promulgated by or under Federal auspices,” commented Dr. F. M. Williams, chairman of the Home Economic Association’s Committee of Consumer Standards.49 Robert Lynd, who was a prominent member of the Consumers Advisory Board, which had been set up by Roosevelt as part of the National Recovery Administration, went even further. He wrote a well-publicized report (the ‘Lynd Report’) in which he suggested that both the ASA and the NBS were too beholden to business (Agnew 1934).

The greater eficiency with which standardized goods could be produced, of course, meant cheaper product prices, and much was made of the savings passed on to consumers. According to one estimate, given by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the standardization of parts and the pooling of patents by 1930 were in combination responsible for reducing the cost of automobiles by 30 percent.50 However, the advantage of standardized products was not just a matter of their cheapness. In addition, standardized products were, as we have seen, represented as being more reliable, more uniform in quality, and more transparent in function. The idiosyncratic and therefore often unpredictable products of the prestandardized era were to be replaced by standardized products with stable and regular properties. The point of standardization, as early consumer activists Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink put it, was to set standards for consumer goods, which would ensure “performing excellence” in products, while forcing “persistently inferior types of the market altogether.”51

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The connection between standardization and product quality was clearly laid out by H. M. Leland, general manager of Cadillac: “You may call me rabid if you like on the subject of standardization, but sooner or later, every man who buys a touring car will insist on this qualification before every other . . . why should the buyer of an automobile not be entitled to the same degree of mechanical certainty that is guaranteed to the buyer of a sewing machine or typewriter?”52 The durability of standardized goods was an ongoing theme for Leland, who declared two years later: “We are actually face to face, today, with motor cars which will last the ordinary lifetime of the average owner— or at any rate, grow old in his service; or in the service of subsequent purchasers. It is all a question of standardization. All over the country there are cars in service which are as sound and as eficient as the day they were built eight years ago. These cars endure because they possess a peculiar element of vitality which results, to put it crudely, from the perfection with which one part fits into its component part; and the harmony of operation that exists between all the parts which constitute the car as a whole. . . . The greater [the] degree of standardization, the lesser the degree of friction, the longer the life.”53 Especially in the auto industry, standardization of products was primarily represented as being about increasing durability—standardizing parts would ensure longer lasting, more durable vehicles.54

The greater durability of the standardized automobile was to be accompanied by improved reliability. Journalist F.  E. Moskovics, writing in 1910, drew attention to the reliability of standardized cars.55 A publicity spokesman for car maker Abbott-Detroit similarly emphasized the reliability of the standardized automobile, among other qualities: “The man who puts his money in a new Abbott-Detroit gets the only standardized mid-priced car in America. He gets a car that can be relied upon to do more than its daily work on account of the standardization of every individual part in the machine. He gets a car that we stand behind—that will deliver and operate above specified rating—that the manufacturer will guarantee for one year.”56 The application of standardization to improve product quality was seen as a response to consumer demand. According to a 1910 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, “The era of standardization has arrived, for it is clearly apparent that the designers have come to a realization of the needs of the users of automobiles and are endeavoring to give the people what they want.”57

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A further advantage of standardized products was that they ensured parity of quality across samples of a given product. For example, an oficial spokesperson for Maxwell, a car manufacturer, argued that standardization brings uniformity of product quality, which is essential from the point of view of fairness for consumers. For, he claimed, it is “only fair to consumers to make cars uniform, so that two cars bought by diferent customers do not vary in quality.”58 Interpreting this reasoning in terms that resonate with the theory argued for in Chapter 4, fairness obtains when the purchasing power represented by a given wage (and therefore by a given quantity of labor), measured by the objective use value endowing properties of wage goods, is invariant. Arbitrary diference in product quality violates this condition, insofar as it results in arbitrary diferences in the purchasing power of identical wages. Invariance in the quality of standardized products was interpreted as having the added benefit of reducing risk for the consumer. Frank Hughes, sales manager of the Greer-Robbins Company, Chrysler distributers for Southern California, commented in 1927 that “standardized quality at one step eliminates ‘purchaser’s risk,’ ends the buyers doubts and fears as to quality. . . . This is because . . . cars are built to the same quality standards, and must pass the same inspections in relation to the tasks they are asked to perform.”59

As noted, the paradigmatic standardized consumer good, the most prominent representative of the new class of products fabricated by modern techniques of manufacturing, was the automobile. Commentators were sometimes quite absurd in their breathless enthusiasm for the standardized automobile. Homer McKee, auto advertising executive, marketing guru, and enthusiastic exponent of standardization, in trying to convey the great virtues of the standardized motor car, was moved to deploy his most lyrical voice (and most purple prose): “Thus it came about that the strength of the oak, the speed of the winds, the soft pad-footed stealth of the panther, the tirelessness of the seasons, and the beauty of the vines that cling were gathered together by the great Brain and the great Hand and put into a single thing which should be the all-powerful servant of man. And they called that thing—the Motor Car.”60 Even as early as 1910, commentators noted how widespread standardization was in car design and manufacture. Journalist Earle C. Anthony, attending an early automobile show in LA, found that, “The most striking feature of the exhibit . . . was standardization of models. All of the manufacturers are working toward an ideal car, which is sure to come. Then we will have embodied in one car all the good features of many.”61 The degree to which early automobiles were commonly seen as standardized products suggests that Henry Ford’s vision of the standardized car, characterized by business historians Richard Tedlow and Thomas McCraw (1998) as unique and even quirky, was in fact continuous with quite widespread conceptions about how automobiles and other mass-produced consumer durables should be built. The ideal characteristics of the standardized industrial product—reliable, durable, free of waste and excess, eficient—reflected a general understanding of the desiderata in the industrial design of early mass consumer goods. This conception of what industrial products should be informed the early consumer testing organizations, Consumers’ Research and Consumers Union. As economist Edith Ayres (1934, p. 161) noted, these organizations: “By emphasizing the engineering point of view in consumption [sought to encourage] a change in consumers’ values away from standardization on the basis of appearance and towards standardization on the basis of physical function.”

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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.

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The era of the rise of standardized goods was accompanied by a standardization of the regulation and measurement of those goods. Part of the drive toward regulative convergence was the need to coordinate state laws in an increasingly integrated national economy. One area of particular concern was the need to coordinate the regulation of road trafic across the country, and significant progress was made in the 1910s and 1920s toward “standardizing” (such was the terminology) laws covering motor vehicles across state lines.65 These early moves toward standardizing local and state regulations in order to better integrate the nation were to continue through the first half of the twentieth century. In the economic realm, they culminated in the passing of the Uniform Commercial Code in 1952, a comprehensive piece of legislation intended to harmonize disparate state laws covering commerce. As we shall see in the following chapter, the Uniform Commercial Code, significantly, also extended the implied product warranty to every state in the nation, marking a significant move away from the principle of caveat emptor.

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Much of the work in standardizing product measurements was carried out by the National Bureau of Standards. The bureau introduced a wide range of standardized measures, from the creation in 1909 of an international standard for candlepower as a measure of luminosity to the development of “color meters” to established “objective” standards for colors.66 Although arguably some of the activities of the bureau simply expressed a technocratic fetish for precision (which was sometimes ridiculed), standardization of measurement was justified primarily in terms of the protection of the interests of the consumer.67 Indeed, standardizing weights and measures was seen as merely the first step toward standardization of product quality. T. N. Carver, marketing expert, giving voice to this view, saw the two forms of standardization, of quantity and of quality, as being of a piece. According to him, in both cases “economy of efort” is achieved by reducing transaction costs incurred by consumers having to carefully inspect goods prior to purchasing them. Standardization would eliminate that efort by institutionalizing quality assessment for the consumer. Time saved in shopping would then be time made available for increasing production and for increasing the “velocity of trade” (Carver 1917).

The idea that standardization of measurements had the benefit of making things clear and explicit for consumers was also embraced by engineers working in the manufacturing sector. Coker F. Clarkson, secretary and general manager of the Society for Automotive Engineers, wrote in 1908 of the benefits to the buying public of the standardization project pursued by the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. In particular, he drew attention to the development of horsepower as a measurement of car engines: “The primary purpose of the formula is to give light to the public as to the motors rated high, as ofering big value, and those rated modestly.”68 Likewise industry observers argued that truck payload capacity measurements should be standardized so as to make comparison across diferent models as easy as possible for consumers.69

In the 1920s the Bureau of Standards joined forces with the Department of Agriculture to bring greater transparency and consistency to the marketplace by standardizing scales used to weigh produce.70 In its eforts to standardize measures the bureau often worked in close consultation with business and professional associations.71 But business figures were often independent advocates for the development of standardized product measures. Samuel W. Reyburn, president of the department store chain Lord and Taylor, addressing the eleventh annual meeting of the Textile Color Association, gave a speech in 1926 entitled ${ } ^ { \mathfrak { c } } \mathrm { O n }$ the Importance of Color and Color Standardization to Retail,” in which he argued that regularizing color categories would benefit both merchants and the general public.72 Similarly Michael Schaap, president of Bloomingdale’s, at a 1935 meeting of the Housewares Club of New York, called for greater standardization of household products and advocated the use of standardized color cards for products.73 In 1927, Macy’s, the department store chain, went as far as to establish its own bureau of standards, complete with laboratory testing facilities, in order to provide precise product information for its customers. The idea was that “responsible retailers” should ensure that their customers are furnished with as much information as possible about how products would behave in use.74 Macy’s example was followed by other big department stores, including Hearn Inc., which created an in-house bureau of standards in 1937. The Hearn bureau introduced a “quality assurance” tag indicating the fabric content of garments—an innovation that mirrored the National Bureau of Standards’ certification labels. The new tag was applauded by consumer groups.75 The value of commercial product testing, measuring, and certification was in part seen in its deterring fraud on the part of manufacturers, but it also served the goal of maximizing product transparency for the consumer. Consumers were not, however, just passive bystanders to moves by business and government to make knowledge about products easier to obtain. Ephraim Freedman, head of Macy’s standardization bureau noted in 1937 that customers were becoming increasingly insistent about having their goods described in terms of “reliable standards.” Given the pressure from consumers, according to Freedman, “the retailer for his own protection must continue to refuse to buy blind, as he refuses to sell blind.”76

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4. Standardization of Wages and Purchasing Power

As well as production and product properties, standardization was also applied to work and wages. That the standardization of work should go hand in hand with the standardization of production and of products is not at all surprising. Standardized production, after all, entailed a regularized labor process, along broadly Taylorist lines, while standardized products also meant standardizing the skills required to make and service those products. The “standardization” of wages, however, was a more complex and contentious matter. What after all, might it mean to standardize a wage? The answer is not obvious. Diferent conceptions of the logic according to which wages ought to be standardized were advanced by diferent interested parties— business, labor unions, and the state.

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The best-known early experiment with standardized wages is surely Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay his automobile factory workers five dollars per day. The logic of standardization in that case was that wages should be set at levels that would permit workers to aford the mass-produced commodities they made while also encouraging quiescence and greater intensity of efort in the labor force (Raf 1988; Meyer 1981; Gartman 1986).77 Although Ford’s experiment was relatively short-lived, it indicated the establishment of a normative connection among production, product, work, and wage. Standardized production, yielding a standardized product, was linked to standardized pay, with the value of the wage measured by its purchasing power over the goods produced by the labor given in exchange for it. In advocating the five dollars a day Ford also showed some understanding of the importance of mass buying power in an era of industrialized mass production. For this reason, Ford’s policy is often seen as presaging the postwar era of industrial capitalism, with its technocratic management of demand and supply (Aglietta 2000).

Ford’s version of standardized wages was, however, not the only one in the early twentieth century. The labor movement called for “standardized wages” in order to improve the conditions of its members. Labor leader Samuel Gompers, for example, speaking to the Senate in 1918, made an impassioned plea for the “standardization of wages.”78 To some extent labor activists used the term standardized wages in ways that made it interchangeable with other terms frequently used in this period—family wage, fair wage, American wage. All these terms were intended to mean higher real wages. Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that calls by unions for the standardization of wages took place at the same time as the question of the American standard of living became a central concern for American labor. Yet the term was often used in a more particular sense to mean rationalizing wages in an upward direction, by increasing the pay of all workers within a given category to match that of the highest-paid worker in that category.79 In that sense it meant something distinct from calls for a more general increase in real wages. For some political economists and management scientists, standardization of pay, in the sense of making wages uniform for a given category of worker, stood in some tension with the standardization of inspection methods used to assess the product of labor (Dunaway 1916). Their suggestion was that piece rates should be adopted, only adjusted to take account of the quality of a worker’s output. For once standardized inspection regimes were introduced, new means became available for diferentiating the quality of work done by different workers in the same job. The introduction of systematic assessment of product quality would thus facilitate more accurate assessments of quality of work, which should, according to this line of reasoning, then be reflected in compensation. In a spirit somewhat like Ford’s, progressive technocrats, who supported the welfare capitalism that many in the 1920s viewed as the key to resolving industrial strife, approached the issue of standardization from the angle of work conditions, as opposed to pay. The argument was that for a given wage, conditions of work ought to be standardized. Doing so would have the beneficial efect of “steadying labor,” thus ensuring that employers would get “a fair return in work for the wage they pay, from a non-shifting, contented, and physically fit working force” (Erskine and Roach 1917, p. 82).

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