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

According to Rexmond Cochrane (1966, p. 138), author of the oficial history of the National Bureau of Standards, these early eforts to promote a scientific approach to consumption decisions “made so great an impression on the public that for years the Bureau was identified in the public mind with the testing of household materials and appliances and besieged with correspondence requesting personal help with home problems.” The bureau’s tentative efort in the 1920s and 1930s to provide scientific, test-based guides to consumer products for the buying public was to a large extent in response to increasing demand for such information. Consumer product testing had always been one of the bureau’s areas of activity, but over time, the demand for that service increased. George K. Burgess, director of the bureau, estimated that between 1922 and 1927, the number of tests undertaken for consumers and producers doubled. By 1924, the volume of requests from consumers for bureau product tests of radios, as well as requests for information about tests of radios conducted by the bureau, had grown so large that an announcement was made that further requests would not be considered.10 Yet in the 1930s, the Bureau of Standards was still being overwhelmed by inquiries from the general public about the relative merits of various commodities. Public demand for the testing of consumer goods presented the bureau with something of a problem, for while it was committed to disseminating objective information about products, the information it produced tended to be rather technical and, therefore, not expressed in terms easily understood by laypersons. Moreover, while the bureau was responsive to public demands for consumer product testing, its primary role was to support industry. Given this role, some consumer activists expressed skepticism about the degree to which the National Bureau of Standards could adequately represent consumer interests as opposed to the interests of business (McConnell 1934).

There were occasional bills proposed in Congress to expand the NBS’s testing of consumer goods, but these encountered resistance because of the expense involved (Briggs 1934). But even in the absence of consistent political support, the amount of consumer product testing by the bureau, often in collaboration with industry and consumer groups, increased substantially in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1927, thirty-six American industries had established their own testing facilities, jointly operated with the bureau.11 In the later 1920s, the bureau launched its specification program, in which it worked with manufacturers and consumers to define acceptable parameters for a vast range of products. In 1928, it set up a special Commercial Standards Unit, to deal with what one commentator described as “the pitfall of the consumer and the bane of the conscientious manufacturer . . . the maker of inferior goods.”12 The unit tested consumer products to ensure they met minimum quality specifications. As noted in Chapter 6, the bureau also ofered to certify products that met specifications so that manufacturers could indicate this to consumers. By 1931, it had received fifteen thousand requests for certification, along with thirty thousand notifications from manufacturers indicating that they were “willing-to-certify.”13 Manufacturers wanted certification so that they could display “certified” labels to reassure consumers about the quality of the products they sold. The new labels worked, to use historian Norman Silbur’s (1983) words, as a “certificate of character issued to an inanimate object” and spread rapidly through the marketplace, especially for consumer durables. By 1934, for example, three quarters of all gas burning appliances bore labels indicating that they met “nationally recognized specifications” (Agnew 1934, p. 61). Certification was in a way quite analogous to early branding. In both cases the point was to pin down products, ensure their quality, and remove uncertainty from the marketplace.

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In addition to policing established standards, the Bureau of Standards conducted some research on how to improve consumer products. This work received a good amount of positive publicity and was commended and given support by various organizations. In 1924, for example, the American Automobile Association (a service member organization founded in 1902, known more commonly by its acronym, AAA) urged Congress to increase funding of the automative section of the Bureau of Standards. The AAA argued that the research activities of the bureau were “of greater value to automobile owners of the country than any other activity of government on behalf of motorists.”14 In particular, the AAA cited work done by the bureau that had doubled the life of brake linings, at no additional expense to the consumer.15 In the same year, perhaps to promote its activities, the Bureau of Standards conducted well-publicized tests of golf balls, using a purpose-built machine, in order to encourage the golfing industry to adopt a standardized ball. According to one newspaper report, the bureau’s golf ball testing machine “demonstrated that whereas [prestandardized] balls left the tee with a velocity of 156 feet a second, the new balls of standard manufacture had a speed of nearly 175 feet a second.”16

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The promotion of product standards and testing by the state, and by engineers working in industry, had, as mentioned, a good deal of influence on the consumer movement. Many of the important figures in the consumer movement who advocated a systematic program of product testing had backgrounds in engineering and sympathized with the ethics and aesthetics of the standardization movement. Schlink, one of the founders of Consumers’ Research, was a trained engineer, as were many other influential figures in the movement. Schlink was also a former employee of the Bureau of Standards, and so was Arthur Kallet, cofounder along with Schlink of Consumers’ Research. Chase, a key figure in Consumers Union (which broke away from Consumers’ Research in 1936) and author of Your Money’s Worth, one of the founding texts of the consumers’ movement, had a background in accountancy. Under these figures, CU and Consumer’s Research preached a gospel of eficient consumption. Influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s ideas, the early consumer testing organizations criticized status-driven consumerism and espoused a narrowly utilitarian approach to consumption. Consumers were to be taught to be skeptical of the claims made by corporations about their brands and encouraged to spend their income in a maximally eficient fashion. In addition, the state was tasked with protecting consumer interests and promoting this rational approach to consumption (Schlink 1934).

Given the prominence of zealous members of the eficiency movement in early consumer testing organizations, it is tempting to see the difusion of testing as being a result of the eforts of an enlightened reforming elite to educate the public about how to consume in a rational manner. It would be wrong, however, to interpret the rise of consumer testing solely in a “topdown” fashion, as the work of a vanguard of reformers, or of an increasingly technocratic state. For such an approach gives little sense of why product testing became so popular with the public and increasingly so as the century wore on. Moreover, how consumer product testing began (and who its pioneering figures were) did not determine the meanings it took on and what it subsequently became. While product testing might in its early years have been closely associated with reformist politics and the eficiency movement, it evolved into something quite diferent. The growth of consumer product testing was not just a manifestation of a grand historical process of technocratic rationalization. Rather, it also reflects changes in thinking about the locus of utility and in general attitudes toward commodities that took place in the context of the growing legitimacy of wage labor as a form of exchange.

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One way to track the development of consumer product testing over the course of the twentieth century is by examining the evolution of the most popular and influential publication devoted to the testing of consumer products, Consumer Reports, along with its parent organization, Consumers Union. Both were very much at the center of the development of product testing as a mainstream, institutionalized practice in the postwar period. As the NBS consumer circulars became templates for CR, so CR became a model for product testing in other publications. Of course, interpreting the content of product testing, as it shifted over time, as indicative of changing consumer attitudes toward commodities raises the question of just how representative CR was of views among the great buying public. But Consumers Union was, from the end of the Second World War onward, increasingly concerned with expanding its membership and so tried to be finely attuned to the public mood. As CU moved from being an advocacy organization with an attached publication to being primarily the publisher of a magazine, attracting a sustainable subscriber base became a matter of great importance (N. D. Katz 1977).17 The organization consequently became very sensitive to CR reader preferences and began to employ market research to better tailor consumer product testing to the interests and tastes of the public. The history of Consumer Reports and Consumers Union, then, to a fair degree does reflect broader changes in the orientation of consumer capitalism. The general trend evident over the history of the organization, and its increasingly popular magazine, was toward greater focus on the scientific testing of consumer durables, with less attention given to the political and social context of consumption and production.

1. Historical Trends in Consumer Product Testing in Consumer Reports

1.1. Rapid Expansion

The growth in the number of CR subscribers, especially in the postwar period, was dramatic. In 1946 the magazine had 80,000 subscribers. By 1949, the number had increased to 250,000; by 1950, to 400,000; and in 1957, there were close to 1,000,000 subscribers (N. D. Katz 1977, p. 308). In the early postwar years, CR became commonly available in public libraries, so the number of consumers consulting the magazine was certainly much greater than the number of subscribers. Moreover, as noted earlier, test results published in the magazine undoubtedly spread further afield by word of mouth. The influence of CR on consumer purchasing decisions was considerable. Its editor, Robert Brady, writing in CR in 1955, estimated that between 5 percent and 10 percent of “buying units” in the country were influenced by CR—a figure that Brady thought greatly underestimated the true extent of CR’s influence on consumer decisions.18 Following the success of CR, other periodicals began to introduce product testing, and testing of consumer goods soon became common across the public sphere.

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1.2. Depoliticization

As Consumer Reports expanded, it rapidly shed the political agenda it had been committed to in the 1930s. Early issues of the magazine had paid considerable attention to the working conditions under which consumer commodities were produced. Each issue featured a report on conditions of work in particular parts of the consumer goods industry. Readers were encouraged to assess products both from the standpoint of the consumer and from that of the workers who made the products. This reflected Consumers Union’s explicit political and ethical objective to make connections between the concerns of consumers and those of workers, a goal which was clearly set out in the first issue of the magazine, published in May 1936. The justification given for this goal was that consumers are always at the same time also workers— and so it made no sense for consumer organizations to restrict their concerns to consumer interests alone. This point was made repeatedly in the magazine during its early years, becoming something of a mantra. For example, an editorial in July 1936 complained of the widespread tendency to fall “into the old confusion of treating consumers and workers as separate beings.”19 Helping consumers was taken to mean improving their material conditions as workers, following the logic that “the only way in which any organization can aid them materially as consumers is by helping them in their struggle as workers to get an honest wage.”20 At the same time, the editors of CR noted that “fighting for higher wages is not enough. Workers must fight also for fair prices and good quality in the products they buy.”21 Consumer and worker were thus seen as two sides of the same coin, both subject to the exploitative tendencies of the business class in America.

The prewar consumer movement thus took a holistic approach to assessing the welfare produced by industrial capitalism, considering the conditions under which goods were manufactured, as well as the properties of the goods themselves. In the postwar period, this holistic, political perspective was gradually replaced by a much narrower concern with testing—with an emphasis on the objective material characteristics of consumer products. The change in CR was reflective of a shift in the wider consumer movement in the middle part of the century. The 1950s witnessed what historian Gary Cross (2000, p. 135) characterizes as a “narrowing of scope of the consumer movement” as it came to focus solely on the “pricing and attributes of goods.” Most significantly, in the late 1940s Consumer Reports ceased reporting on working conditions. In the postwar period, its parent organization, Consumers Union, took on a more technocratic perspective and became much less critical of the general contours of industrial capitalism.

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The decrease in the attention given to the working conditions under which consumer goods are produced in part reflected the changed political environment in postwar America. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, CU leaders were very eager not to be seen as tarnished by the brush of communism. Yet after the McCarthy witch hunts had receded into historical memory, there was no return to the more explicitly political agenda of the 1930s. A more politicized version of consumer activism did emerge in the 1960s, with Ralph Nader’s campaign against corporate negligence in product design and manufacture. But the environment- and health-and-safety-centered agenda of Nader’s new incarnation of the consumer movement was quite diferent from the concerns about labor that had animated the movement in the 1930s.

The change in orientation of CR, away from politics, to some degree reflected the changing socioeconomic profile of its subscribers. In the early years after the war, the expansion of CU’s membership was predominantly middle class, and these new members were not very interested in labor issues of the sort that preoccupied consumer activists in the prewar period. Yet it would be wrong to take the middle-class perspective of CU in the postwar period as reason to think that the organization no longer had any relevance to the concerns of labor. For, as seen in earlier chapters, those concerns shifted in the postwar era. Although self-identified consumer activists tended to be middle class, consumer consciousness became incorporated into the labor movement. This was reflected in the reorganization of labor politics around the concept of purchasing power, which brought together labor and consumer interests.22 Meg Jacobs (2005) and Lizabeth Cohen (2003), among others, have argued that over the course of the twentieth century the identity represented by “consumer” became universal in a way that transcended diferences of class. But the universality of consumer identity (and of the supposed interests of the consumer) was itself an indirect consequence of mass participation in the labor market, against the backdrop of widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of wage-labor exchange and emergent corporatism in industrial relations. To a significant extent, the American public converged in the postwar decades on an acceptance of what could be described as an afluent compact. In exchange for working hard and accepting the broad parameters of American political economy, wage earners would be ensured decent and improving living standards. That this exchange appeared to be self-evidently reasonable and fair depended, in part, on a particular understanding of what consumer commodities are and how they relate to use—one in which use became to some degree abstracted from concrete, socially embedded practice, instead becoming a hypothetical function of the narrowly material use powers of products. The growing prominence of this understanding is evinced by the changing history of Consumers Union and Consumer Reports. The approach to consumer products expressed and promoted by CU, and by the broader practice of product testing, played an important role in relieving some of the attendant tensions of the contradictions of labor under capitalism, if not fully resolving them.

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1.3 Changes in the Set of Objects Tested and in the Guide to Testing

A significant percentage of the products tested by consumer organizations in the prewar era were perishables. Increasingly in the postwar era, however, testing shifted to consumer durables. The obvious explanation for this is that as incomes increased, consumer durables came to form an increasingly important part of household consumption. Indeed, the relatively greater amount of attention paid to testing perishables and other nondurable goods in the early issues of CR could be interpreted as just a reflection of the dismal economic conditions of the 1930s. However, Consumer Reports in its early years, as noted, very much catered to a middle-class readership, which was therefore relatively insulated from the economic ravages of the Depression. Moreover, the great era of expansion of the market for consumer durables—the so-called consumer durables revolution—took place roughly between 1910 and 1940 (Olney 1990, 1998). Even against the background of deteriorating economic conditions in the 1930s, demand for consumer durables remained high, and continued to increase. And if we compare the post-Depression period to later periods, the same trend is evident. For example, in the 1947 Consumer Reports Buyers Guide, the annual compendium of test results, out of 373 pages, 75 were devoted to food, and a further 136 pages were taken up by pharmaceuticals and personal care products, leaving only 129 pages of tests of durable goods. By comparison, in the 1985 Buyer’s Guide 375 out of a total of 385 pages were devoted to tests of consumer durables.

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As suggested, to some extent this change in the kind of objects tested can be explained by changes in the consumer product mix. As real incomes increased, which they did steadily in the postwar period, the market for consumer durables expanded, and so durables became more prominent in household purchasing decisions. Since consumer durables are typically expensive, and tend to be complex artifacts, expert advice and test results would be comparatively more important for purchasing decisions about them.23 There were also organizational factors involved in the predominance of cheap goods over durables in testing by CU in the 1930s. In its early years, Consumers Union and Consumers’ Research operated on shoe-string budgets, and so could not aford to buy many consumer durables to test. These explanations go some way toward accounting for the diference between the kinds of products tested pre- and postwar in Consumer Reports. At the same time, the increasing preoccupation, in the postwar period, with scientifically interrogating durable goods in order to disclose their useful powers (or lack thereof), is consistent with the theory that mass consumption was driven by wage-labor commensuration. For if wages are fairly exchanged by virtue of the use power contained in wage goods, then getting clear about just how much use power they contain becomes very important. Durable goods, construed as repositories of potential free activity, are uniquely able to make the wage commensurable with the labor given in exchange for it. This means that it is particularly important for worker / consumers to gain information about them—which would explain the increasing prevalence of durable products in consumer testing.

Another change in CR testing over the course of its history is in the size and content of the guide to how tests should be interpreted and used. In 1947, the “how to” section took up six pages and included a guide to shopping judiciously, as well as a statement about the objectivity of the testing procedures. By 1987 that section had been cut to just three pages, containing a description of the layout of the book, an account of the reasoning underlying the decisions made by the organization about what items to test, a note on how to interpret symbols used in product assessment, and a statement about the objectivity of the organization. The shrinking size of the guide section, which in the 1930s and 1940s had included advice about how to get the best price for a given good, indicates a change in focus from the practice of shopping, with the emphasis on promoting prudence in the marketplace, to the characteristics of the goods themselves.

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1.4. The Rise of Scientific Testing and Quasi-Quantitative Ratings

From its beginnings, CU was eager to use scientific testing to pin down the properties of consumer goods. Consumers Union had always emphasized the scientific nature of its work, describing itself as above all else “a technical organization.” The first issue of Consumer Reports set out its primary goal as follows: “The main efort of its staf, and the main use of its funds will be to conduct research and tests on consumer goods,” with the aim of “giving technical aid” to the consumer. Products were to be systematically rated based on “laboratory tests.” At the same time, it was acknowledged that both objective and subjective criteria are important in establishing the quality of a given product, and there was some recognition of the limitations of scientific testing. An editorial preface to an early issue admitted that while for example, “stockings may be carefully tested in the laboratory . . . experts are far from being in agreement as to the value of such tests in determining how well a pair of stockings will wear.”24 Nonetheless, the mission of the organization was, as far as possible, to promote consumption decisions made on a purely “technical” basis, and the organization was eager to assure the buying public of the rigor of its methods. The introduction to the yearly guide published by the organization set out the mission of the organization in the following terms: “The technical staf gives its assurance to members of Consumers Union . . . that it will exercise greatest care in testing and judging products, in checking data, and in preparing ratings . . .” [with the objective of substituting] “. . . the best technical knowledge that can be made available for haphazard guessing; and it does give the consumer the satisfaction of having his buying choices determined by technical tests rather than by the cleverness of an advertising copy writer or the ingenuity of a manufacturer in making a shoddy product look like a good one.”

Over time this emphasis on the technical, scientific side of product testing intensified. The concern to conduct rigorous scientific testing led CU to make increasing investments in sophisticated laboratories and testing facilities, and between 1944 and 1954, the laboratory space at CU underwent a massive expansion. The scientific prowess and technological sophistication of CU increasingly became the major selling point of its publication, Consumer Reports. As the century wore on an increasing amount of space in Consumer Reports was given over to elaborate descriptions of testing procedures, in order to indicate their rigor and objectivity. Greater prominence was also given to the scientific credentials of those doing the testing. Also evident over this period is a move from loose assessment of objects as imagined under conditions of daily use, to subjection of tested items to extreme conditions, to chart the ultimate limits of their useful properties. In pushing products to their breaking point, testing moved away from the conditions under which products would likely get used, to focus instead on probing their physical limits. A further change in CR’s testing objectives between the pre- and postwar periods was a shift in emphasis from protecting the public from dangerous products, to making fine distinctions between acceptable ones—distinctions which, for an average user, would often be of little practical consequence.25

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While objectivity and scientific precision were the guiding principles in product testing, the early ratings system was purely qualitative. In the prewar era of testing, products were placed in one of three qualitative categories: “acceptable,” “also acceptable,” and “not acceptable.” These later became “best buy,” “acceptable,” and “not acceptable.” The assessment system was explained in early issues of CR as follows: “The ratings are determined by both quality and price. If Brand A wears half as long but costs only a quarter as much as Brand B, then Brand A will get the higher rating.” “Best buy” therefore is not the highest-quality product, but the one that gives “best value (in use terms) for money.” The postwar period, however, witnessed a gradual shift from qualitative assessments toward the use of quantitative product ratings. An important change in this direction took place in the 1970s, when CR adopted “Harvey Balls,” a system of ideograms to represent product quality developed by (and named after) business consultant Harvey Poppel. CR’s lead was followed by many other publications, and Poppel’s ideograms became widespread in the 1970s. With the use of Harvey Balls product test reports started giving, in efect, quasi-quantitative assessments of qualitative characteristics. As shown in Figure 8.1, degrees of quality are signified by each symbol, with quality increasing progressively in each row as we move from right to left. Quality is denoted by the proportion of a circle that is shaded. There are diferent versions of the system—the one adopted

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