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

1. In the 1930s, the issue of work time was more about reducing unemployment by redistributing work hours than curtailing subjection to wage slavery. During the Depression years, the state also sought to limit the length of the working week or, at least, to ensure that overtime rates were paid for time at work in excess of forty hours, which would have a similar efect. This objective lay behind the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. But the goal of ensuring overtime pay and, at the same time, limiting work time had for the New Deal state a macroeconomic rationale. At one and the same time, it boosted the purchasing power of labor, stimulating demand, and spread employment more evenly across the population. Following the same logic, during the Depression the AFL pushed for a thirty-hour work week, in order to redistribute scarce work and provide relief for the unemployed.

1. Although Cutler suggests that the issue of hours remained of great importance for workers in the postwar period, it should be noted that his study rests heavily on inconclusive evidence from just one factory, so provides a very limited basis for generalization. As noted in Chapter 3, note 27, after 1945 there is a dramatic decline in shorter hours as a reported reason for strikes.

1. Of course, absolute conceptions of decent living standards—those deserved in exchange for labor—were very vague. What exactly is it for a home to be “comfortably furnished”? What does it mean to “maintain” a family?

1. The general historical pattern in the United States, from debate over the legitimacy of wage labor and struggles over the length of the working week, to a corporatist industrial politics based on purchasing power, is evident elsewhere in the industrial capitalist world.

1. The broader influence of autoworkers’ attitudes was mediated by well-publicized industrial negotiations.

1. Status-centered accounts of consumption, such as Thorsten Veblen’s, arguably assimilate all social positions to that of the Weberian capitalist. Conspicuous consumption involves the semiotic conversion of commodity objects back into their money value. The value of those objects is then read as indexical of the value of their owner, by virtue of what ownership of the objects demonstrates about the owner’s capacity to generate money.

1. According to an automobile finance oficer interviewed by the Lynds (1929, p. 255), between 75 percent and 90 percent of cars were purchased on an installment plan.

1. The fascination with cars among the industrial workers studied by the Lynds and Chinoy might in addition reflect a dialectic between the subjection of industrial workers to the discipline of the machine during the labor process (on a production line), which made workers into mere appendages of technology, and an urge to invert this relation by becoming masters of technology in leisure. If that is right, then as production becomes ever more technological, and as humans become ever more subjected to technology in the workplace, then the desire to dominate machines—to use them to express agency—in consumption should increase. The consumption of technological objects then counterbalances subjection of human beings to technology in the workplace.

1. The relatively more prominent place given by Chinoy’s informants to accumulation as justification for work, when compared to Lynds’ workers, is all the more surprising because the American working classes in the postwar years were significantly more afluent than in the interwar period.

302

Notes to Pages 132–143

1. Note that Chinoy’s workers’ comments on the satisfactions (or lack thereof) of work echo more recent research on the sources of happiness discussed in the introduction of this book.

1. The Lynds (1933, pp. 467–68) write: “This illustrates Veblen’s point of the paramount importance of ‘conspicuous consumption’ as an identifying device in a community grown too large for more subtle means of appraisal. This would suggest a tendency, as a community grows, for its citizens to put more of their possessions ‘on their backs,’ into cars and other seeable goods.”

c h a pt e r 6 : st a n d a r d i z a t i o n o f c o n s u mpt i o n , w o r k , a n d w a g e s

1. Standardization, understood on a very general level as a means by which rationalization is achieved, is a feature of almost every domain of modern society. For a general overview of diferent forms of standardization see Timmermans and Epstein (2010).

1. Busch has a very broad concept of what a standard is, stretching the idea even to cover conventional forms of language usage.

1. That the word should first have appeared in the context of science, only later taking on its economic sense is not at all surprising given that standardization of production was largely a matter of applying of scientific methods to industrial processes (Noble 1977).

1. Analysis of article titles in which the term standardization appears in major US newspapers shows the following distribution over time: 1800–1899: 0; 1900–1909: 54; 1909–1919: 268; 1920–1929: 348; 1930–1939: 178; 1940–1949: 149; 1950–1959: 77; 1960–1969: 29; 1970–1979: 28; 1980–1989: 40; 1990–1999: 194. The term standard, which obviously has a broader range of meanings than does standardization, is distributed as follows: 1800–1849: 9; 1850–1859: 46; 1860–1869: 126; 1870–1879: 772; 1880–1889: 2,043; 1890–1899: 5,018; 1900–1909: 9,535; 1910–1919: 11,495; 1920–1929: 17,968; 1930–1939: 15,619; 1940–1949: 8,176; 1950–1959: 9,903; 1960–1969: 10,962; 1970–1979: 8,175; 1980–1989: 6,216; 1990–1999: 2,818. So, even though standard can be used in ways that have little to do with the late nineteenth-century neologism standardization, the pattern of distribution of the two words is quite similar. The terms are either absent, or else have relatively little presence, for most of the nineteenth century but begin to appear with increasing frequency around the turn of the century. Both terms peak between 1920 and 1929 and decline thereafter in a fairly steady fashion (the newspapers surveyed include the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, New York Post, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam Times, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Atlanta Daily World).

1. For example, the discussion about standardization in a 1928 issue of the American Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Lansburgh 1928) portrayed standardization as one end of pole at the other end of which lies variation and individualism. Both principles, “sameness and variation,” are described, in a manner reminiscent of Simmel, as “essential,” both in nature and for civilization (Whitney, 1928, p. 33). Too much of one demands a corrective rebalancing toward the opposite pole.

1. The fact that talk about standards and standardization picked up again at the end of the twentieth century can be explained by the so-called third industrial revolution—the rise of information technology.

Notes to Pages 143–154

303

1. “Standardization Work Nearly Complete,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1910, p. 6.

1. Albert W. Whitney, “The Faults and Virtues of Standardization,” New York Times, September 2, 1923, p. XX10.

1. “Standardization,” Chicago Defender, March 29, 1913, p. 2.

1. The example of a charismatic religious movement seeking to revive its flagging flock by finding more standardized methods of conversion would give Weber food for thought.

1. “Urges Standardization of Evangelism Methods,” Boston Daily Globe, January 8, 1918, p. 6.

1. “Standardization of Everything,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1920, p. W2.

1. The AESC coordinated the standardizing activities of government, industry, and professional organizations, in efect serving as a national clearing house for standards.

1. “What Others Think about It: Problems in Standardization,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1930, p. A4.

1. “Standardization and Improvement,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 1906, p. 6.

1. “Says Nation Sufers from Scientific Fads: Standardization Is Killing Common Sense and Individuality,” New York Times, October 19, 1924, p. 21; William S. Packer, “Declares Standardization Bedevils Our Life,” Boston Daily Globe, January 26, 1931, p. 13; “Fleming Asks Originality in Architecture: Expert Deplores Trend to Standardization as Foe of Beauty,” Washington Post, July 22, 1934, p. R6. For ironic comment, see “Let Standardization Thrive!,” New York Times, January 17, 1922, p. 13.

1. “Standardization,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1922, p. V3.

1. Llewelyn Powys, “Dark Age of the Literary Essay,” New York Times, June 1, 1924, p. BR7.

1. John Barry, “Clever Men Are the Aids of Curley at the State House,” Boston Daily Globe, February 24, 1935, p. A30.

1. “The Blight of Standardization,” Washington Post, June 7, 1925, p. E1.

1. Thomas L. Masson, “Life as It Is: Standardization,” Boston Daily Globe, December 26, 1923, p. 13.

1. James R. Beniger takes the Chandler argument a step further. Taking his cue from a cybernetic theory, Beniger (1986) sees standardization as one element of a broad efort to mobilize information to control the disastrous consequences of an unprecedented speed up of production and distribution caused by new technologies that appeared in the nineteenth century in transportation and manufacturing.

1. The Bureau of Standards was created by act of Congress on March 3, 1901. Prior to 1901, a bureau of standards had existed, but in a very specialized capacity, as a small branch of the coast and geodetic survey, which dealt exclusively with fixing standards of length, mass, and time. The new, enlarged bureau was initially set up as a part of the Treasury Department (the Treasury had previously housed the Ofice of Weights and Measurements, founded in 1832, which was superseded by the new bureau). It was moved to the Department of Commerce and Labor when that department was created in 1904 and stayed a part of the Commerce Department when the Department of Labor was created in 1913. The bureau had two branches, one that undertook scientific and technical research and conducted product testing, the other concerned with commercial standardization. In addition to its testing activities, the research branch of the bureau invented entirely new products and manufacturing processes. For example, it created a radio-beacon system to guide aircraft, developed a new process for chromium plating, created stronger paper for use in currency and improved the design and construction of tires (Cochrane 1966; Silbur 1983; N. D. Katz 1977; see also Milton E. Ailes, “National Bureau of Standards,” Washington Post, January 10, 1921, p. 7).

304

Notes to Pages 154–158

Notes to Pages 159–163

305

306

Notes to Pages 163–169

Notes to Pages 169–172 307

308

Notes to Pages 172–178

c h a pt e r 7 : st a n d a r d i z i n g u t i l i t y

1. Although there were changes to trademark law in 1870 and throughout the 1880s, the most important legal change occurred in 1905. Earlier trademark statutes had been overturned by the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1870 and 1876, in accordance with common law tradition, that property rights only applied to physical things. However, legal thinking on the issue gradually changed, in part under the influence of energetic lobbying from business, and trademark legislation was finally passed and kept on the statute books in 1905. The 1905 trademark laws provided the definition of a brand that has carried through to the present day: a brand is defined as “a name, term or design—or a combination of these elements that is intended to clearly identify and diferentiate a seller’s product from a competitor’s product” (quoted in Twitchell, 2004, p. 18).

1. Although it should be noted that it is not clear that branding per se was responsible for the increase in value of those companies, despite the Lynds’ suggestion to that efect.

1. George Burton Hotchkiss, “Prestige of Advertised Brands Aids Marketing,” Washington Post, September 6, 1925, S2.

1. Margaret Dana, “Continuity of Quality Is Hallmark of Brand Name,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1967, p. N20.

1. The notion that attaching a brand name to a product ensures its quality underlies the argument often made by pharmaceutical companies that name-brand drugs are more reliable than their generic versions, even though the two are in theory identical. See for example the arguments made before Congress by a spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry, as reported by John Jacobs in “Drug Spokesman Defends Emphasis on Brand Names,” Washington Post, November 17, 1977, p. B15. And indeed the continued success of over-the-counter name-brand drugs such as Bayer, Excedrin, and Tylenol, despite the fact that they cost significantly more than generic versions sold on the same shelf, suggests that consumers buy this reasoning.

1. Consumer Research Bulletin, November 1949.

1. “Names on Cigar Boxes: Explanation of Terms Most Commonly Used,” Boston Daily Globe, June 2, 1889, p.  20; “Names of Cigars,” Washington Post, June 23, 1889, p.  13; “The Raisin Crower,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1893, p. 13.

1. “Americans Brand, Quality Conscious,” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 11, 1962, p. C5.

1. “Brand Lines Found Favored by Stores,” New York Times, January 20, 1945, p. 17.

1. “Sears Own Brand Names Recognized as Standards of Quality and Value,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1938, p. 8.

1. “Preaching National Brands,” Literary Digest, March 7, 1931, p. 4.

1. “Town Plugs National Brands,” Business Week, November 1, 1947, pp. 42–48.

1. “Buyers Want National Brands,” Business Week, July 5, 1947, pp. 65–66. The analysis given of the experiment’s result by the writer of the Business Week article was that the shift in retail toward self-service had amplified the power of advertising. The absence of “thicker” interactions within stores between salespersons and consumers meant that only advertising was left to “do the talking” (p. 66).

1. “Marketing: Brands on the Way Up Again,” Business Week, April 1954, p. 83.

Notes to Pages 181–186 309

1. This is very much in line with the analysis given in the contemporary economics literature. Economists interpret brands as information conveying devices, the function of which is to reduce uncertainty for the consumer. The predominance of branded goods in the marketplace reduces the variance of product quality, as producers have an interest in “defending” their brands.

1. Although as Katz points out, this conception of brands was not shared by the pre– World War II consumer movement. Early consumer activists saw branding as obfuscation by producers (N. D. Katz 1977, p. 278).

1. “Fair Trade Protection of Name Brand Integrity,” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 18, 1951, p. A10.

1. Carter 2006, Table De482–515, Advertising Expenditures.

1. See also Belk and Pollay (1985).

1. Pollay controlled for the influence of changes in the product mix by restricting his analysis to advertisements for manufactured goods and found a similar pattern. Pollay’s findings cast some doubt on the Thorsten Veblen thesis. If, as Veblen and his followers suggest, increasing accumulation of products was driven primarily by status competition, this was not reflected in the degree of prominence of status as a theme in advertising content.

1. In some states, express warranties negate implied warranties, while in others the implied warranty holds over and above the express warranty.

1. Express warranties apply to any statement made by a company about the performance of a product. So if during a television commercial a manufacturer promises 100,000 hours of use for a light bulb, this can count as an express warranty, even if the written warranty is limited to thirty days. The legal implications of the express warranty then forces companies to be circumspect about claims made about their products, because they can be held accountable for the failure of their products to perform as described.

1. “The Free Sewing Machine,” Boston Globe, July 11, 1920, p. 4.

1. Sheafer “Lifetime” advertisement, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 24, 1924, p. 5.

1. “Sell on Quality, Not on Price—Says Pen Head,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1935, p. 3; “Small Town Jeweler’s Acumen Guided Sheafer Pen to the Top,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 5, 1959, p. 5.

1. David and Mark Shepherd Parker “51, Surrenden Pens Limited, 2004; Dr. S. S. L. Hettiarachchi, “The Most Wanted Pen in History,” Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. There is still a very active secondhand market for Parker 51s and “Lifetime” Sheafer pens, not just as collector’s items but as everyday working pens. Some of these pens are now over seventy years old and are still used as everyday writers.

1. The durable and reusable fountain pen, which reigned supreme through the first twothirds of the twentieth century, eventually became superseded by the disposable ball point pen, the most famous example of which was introduced into the American market by Marcel Bich (later shortened to Bic) in 1959.

1. “Manufacturers Make Progressive Strides in General Standardization Work,” New York Times; June 9, 1912, p. X15.

1. “The Roosevelt Policies—In the President’s Own Words” New York Times, March 4,

1934, p. XX3. In the 1930s, Roosevelt was, in theory at least, quite sympathetic to the cause of

310

Notes to Pages 186–191

the consumer movement. He gave it an institutional voice through the creation of the Consumers Advisory Board (CAB) as part of the National Recovery Administration. However, as Lizabeth Cohen (2003) and Glickman (2006) note, in practice the influence of the CAB was quite limited.

1. “We Buy Dollars with Merchandise,” Chain Store Magazine 3, no. 6 (July 1931): pp. 3–9.

1. Although Hamilton’s essay was written over eighty years ago, it remains the most widely cited historical analysis of the development of the legal principle of caveat emptor prior to the twentieth century.

1. At the same time, many states outlawed “as is” clause exceptions.

1. During the war, enormous levels of public spending required to fuel the military effort resulted in high inflation. The OPA then had the role of intervening to set prices at levels deemed reasonable.

1. Max Freedman, “Mr. Kennedy Champions the Consumer,” The Guardian, March 16, 1962, p. 13; Joseph A. Loftus, “Kennedy Submits Broad Program to Aid Consumer,” special to New York Times, March 16, 1962, p. 1.

c h a pt e r 8 : pr o d u c t t e st i n g a n d pr o d u c t r e g u l a r i z a t i o n

1. Although, given how vague normative notions of satisfactory product quality were, it is not at all clear what it would take for expectations to be met.

1. Of course, product testing was not just about ensuring product quality. It was also an important part of the process of the standardization of products, to ensure that products met specifications. As we have seen, standardization was the application of science to production, and clearly product testing was a manifestation of this (Noble 1977).

1. The insurance industry was heavily involved in the early movement to use testing as a basis for standardized products. Underwriters Laboratories, an organization that promoted standards and conducted research on behalf of the insurance industry, sought to make construction more insurable by applying labels to wires and fixtures certifying their resistance to fire (Silbur 1983). Other independent testing laboratories also emerged in the early part of the twentieth century to serve firms too small to be able to aford their own facilities.

1. Good Housekeeping established a prototype laboratory, named the “Experimental Station” in 1900.

1. “Sign of the Times,” Journal of Home Economics 29, no. 4 (April 1937): p. 248.

1. Editorial, Journal of Home Economics 19, no. 4 (April 1927): p. 207.

1. “Plan to Cut Cost of Sales to Nation,” New York Times, November 19, 1922, p. 44.

1. Stuart Chase and F.  J. Schlink, “A Few Billion for Consumers,” New Republic, December 30, 1925, pp. 153–55.

1. Ibid.

1. “Standards Bureau to Curtail Testing,” Washington Post, November 16, 1924, p. EF7.

1. “Standards Bureau Tests Are Doubled,” Washington Post, November 22, 1927, p. 12.

1. “Inferior Goods Meet Obstacle,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1928, p. 15.

1. “Standards Bureau Facilitating Plant,” Washington Post, December 31, 1931, p. DC3.

Notes to Pages 191–203

311