Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  In the 1950s, left and right were divided among themselves as well as between each other in their reaction. Among progressives, two texts marked the spectrum of responses: John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 The Affluent Society and Tony Crosland’s 1956 The Future of Socialism. Galbraith’s book was one of a string of 1950s American bestsellers (David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd; Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders) which have shaped transatlantic debate about the destructive effects of consumerism to this day. Our addiction to goods, he argued, was at the heart of a new historic order – ‘the affluent society’ – geared towards growth and production. Sustained growth had lifted the ceiling on the economy but at the same time spread a new social disease. Production no longer satisfied real wants. Wants were now created and manipulated by advertising and a value system that equated the good life with personal possessions. This cycle relied on an ‘inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation’, he warned, pointing to Americans’ growing use of instalment credit to buy new cars. Above all, it corroded public life. Affluence, in Galbraith’s famous phrase, bred ‘private opulence and public squalor’. It was this causal connection that was the core of his argument. In turning to private goods and leisure, people were turning away from their community. Private wealth led to the neglect of public welfare. With a prescient sense of environmental dangers, Galbraith described the average family driving their ‘mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered, and power-braked automobile’ through a city that is ‘badly paved’ and made ‘hideous by litter’, until they come to a picnic site where they enjoy ‘exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream . . . ’ ‘Is this,’ he asked, really ‘the American genius?’91

  In The Future of Socialism, the British Labourite Crosland offered a more optimistic view. Writing just as Britain was coming out of austerity, Crosland argued that growth and goods would strengthen social democracy, not undermine it: ‘[H]igher personal consumption must form part of any statement of the socialist goal on fundamental egalitarian grounds.’ As more people gained access to goods, class distinctions would soften. The very rich, he speculated, with a glance at the United States, would realize that the material rat race no longer made sense as a way to stay ahead of the crowd. In place of ostentation, they would turn to charity and education, a form of ‘conspicuous under-consumption’. Even if abundance did not lower the average level of unhappiness in the population, Crosland argued, it brought public and private benefits. It was much better for grievances to be personalized than for them to sow social conflict. And rising material standards increased ‘the individual’s range of choice and area of cultural possibilities’. True socialists needed to be more ‘anarchist and libertarian’ and less ‘the prig and the prude’. Crosland here targeted the anti-hedonist spirit in the Labour Party personified by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Fabian socialists whose devotion to research and parliamentary blue books meant they never took time for music or the theatre. A better society would not be built by ‘abstinence and a good filing-system’. People deserved to have fun. Crosland jumped to the defence of the Teddy-Boys. These teenagers with their dandyish long jackets and tapered trousers were not all delinquents or barbarians. Rather, they showed the ‘first awakening of a genuine, working-class interest in sartorial elegance’ and of a ‘genuine’ youth culture: jazz. Greater abundance needed greater tolerance of individual choice, including a move away from censorship, unfair divorce and abortion laws, and the ‘obsolete penalties for sexual abnormality’.92

  The differing diagnoses were underscored by the different personalities of the two authors. Crosland had been raised in London and had returned, from his wartime experience as a paratrooper in Italy and France with a love of food and drink – if anything, a bit too much of the latter. He lived as he thought, enjoying jazz and nightclubs. Galbraith, by contrast, grew up on a farm in Southern Ontario. Behind his discomfort with urban life and its bars and other temptations lurked a nostalgia for a simpler life. In The Affluent Society, he lamented that schools were unable to compete with private glitz. The ‘dubious heroes’ of the movies, ‘not Miss Jones, become the idols of the young’;93 he himself had gone to a one-room rural school; Vance Packard, the other great critic of consumerism, had also been raised on a farm, in Pennsylvania.

  It is, perhaps, ironic that it was Galbraith’s, a book that was self-consciously promoted as a challenge to conventional wisdom, that would itself become conventional wisdom. Crosland, meanwhile, found the time to write his book thanks to having lost his seat at the 1955 election. Many on the left insisted that affluence was tenuous and the poor more vulnerable than ever before. The path to the New Jerusalem could not be paved with fridges and TVs. Party activists were out of touch with a new generation of voters throughout the 1950s, one of the reasons for Labour’s years in the wilderness.94 Crosland’s time would come only in the 1960s, with the liberation of sex and pleasure.

  By contrast, Galbraith’s diagnosis has informed critics of ‘consumerism’ pretty steadily to this day. His characteristic mix of clarity and confidence was so seductive that it is easy to forget that The Affluent Society was not a sober empirical study but a piece of advocacy to justify greater public spending. In the short term, his plea for a tax on consumption to fund social services was unsuccessful; as a member of John F. Kennedy’s administration, Galbraith’s influence was marginal. His effect on public debate, however, was enormous, and his ideas helped drive the increased spending on health and education in the mid-1960s under JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.95 Yet as a historical source, however, Galbraith’s work tells us more about the unease with affluence than about the phenomenon as such. Galbraith, tellingly, drew a line between ‘simple modes of enjoyment’ (he included here sport, food and houses as well as cars and sex) and more ‘esoteric’ ones such as music, fine art ‘and to some extent travel’. The first group required ‘little prior preparation of the subject for its highest enjoyment’ and was thus the target of ‘modern want creation’. The latter, by contrast, were more distinctly individual and had to be cultivated.96 This was a classic middle-class trope of mass culture versus educated taste. Among the new generation of critics, there was little sense that individuals had the ‘material self’ that William James had identified half a century earlier, nor of the growing amount of preparation and sophistication contemporaries were devoting to food, the home and, indeed, sex.

  Galbraith’s worries about the end of thrift notwithstanding, Americans in the 1950s were, in fact, saving more, not less, than in the inter-war years – in 1957, the personal savings rate stood at 10 per cent,97 an eye-wateringly high figure for anyone concerned about debt today. As a percentage of GDP, public spending was rising with affluence, not declining, as the model would lead one to expect.98 Some of this can be reconciled with Galbraith’s argument, but only so far. Government home loans and highway programmes supported a suburban consumer lifestyle and racial segregation.99 Galbraith was right to attack the ‘shortcomings’ of municipal services, ‘overcrowded’ schools and ‘filthy’ streets. He was wrong, however, to presume this reflected a decline. Fifty years earlier, New York City waste had been dumped into the Hudson River. It was greater affluence and population growth that had led towns to introduce public parks, better schools and waste management in the first place. Arguably, The Affluent Society is itself the best evidence that private plenty led people to demand better public schools, hospitals and recreation.

  Books such as The Affluent Society, which sold millions, were successful because they hit a raw nerve, in the United States and even more so in Europe. The Second World War had destabilized class, gender and racial hierarchies and made consumer culture a lightning rod for all sorts of anxieties. Americans were already worrying about the decline of happiness in 1948. Alongside colourful ads for supermarkets and Westinghouse fridge freezers, Life magazine sponsored a roundtable at which Erich Fromm, the émigré psychologist, warned that people were using leisure to escape from
reality; he himself admitted to reading detective stories. Other participants worried about ‘moral anarchy’ and a reported rise in drink, crime, divorce and mental illness. With their false romantic ideas, movies endangered ‘the maintenance of a healthy democratic society’.100

  Most Europeans had no problem with America; a 1953 French survey found that only 4 per cent saw the United States as a cultural threat.101 For cultural elites, however, affluence was an American invasion, a glimpse of a dark future against which to measure the glorious national past. Few liked the look of it. The chorus was never shriller than in the 1950s. J. B. Priestley feared that Britain was turning into ‘Southern California, with its . . . TV and film studios, automobile way of life (you can eat and drink, watch films, make love, without ever getting out of your car), its flavourless cosmopolitanism . . . and bogus religions’.102 For the French, the Americans were les grands enfants, children fascinated by gadgets; all standard of living, no soul. The communist poet Louis Aragon labelled the United States a ‘civilization of bathtubs and Frigidairs’.103 Across Europe, the charge was the same. Consumer society bred shallow conformity and destroyed national traditions and communal spirit. In France, commentators feared that the American cult of busyness was destroying the national gift for flânerie and lounging about. In Germany, they bemoaned the retreat of deep thought and spiritual feeling before empty self-indulgence. Reader’s Digest was taking the place of Voltaire, Goethe and Dante.

  For Christian conservatives, materialism was as great a threat as Bolshevism in the immediate post-war years. It might nurture a new fascism. How could Europe be rebuilt as a Christian civilization if a new generation was sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of consumer culture? For several founders of the German Christian Democratic Union, the Nazis were proof that secularism bred materialism and destruction. Given the Nazis’ open pandering to material desires, this was not an irrational reading of recent events. Radio programmes exhorted good Christians to practise self-denial.104 Anxieties were not limited to Catholics and Communists. The Liberal Wilhelm Röpke, who had fled the Nazis to Switzerland in 1933, believed in free markets, yet was troubled when people bought goods on credit. The paternalism attacked by Crosland ran deep and wide. Welfarism was a wonderful ideal, but were the people ready for it? Many progressives were unsure. ‘In order to satisfy the Welfare State must we provide television plus a dog & a garden, and if so, what is to happen to any new form of amusement that may be invented?’ the British liberal Gilbert Murray wondered in 1955. Affluence was a dangerous spiral, tempting trade unionists to demand ever higher wages and wreck stability.105

  The decline of organized Christianity added fuel to these fears. It is sometimes said about the miracle years that Europeans traded in God for goods. This is too strong. In Britain, religious attendance was already in freefall in the inter-war years. This was one reason why contemporaries were so nervous. Traditional institutions had been crumbling. It now just needed a little push to knock them over. In his social survey of York, Seebohm Rowntree, the philanthrophic industrialist and social researcher, found that the church-going population had dwindled from 35 per cent in 1901 to a mere 13 per cent in 1948. The decline of religion seemed correlated with the rise in shoplifting; one shop in London had 5,000 garments stolen a year. Rowntree summarized the advancing mindset as ‘I see, I want, I take.’ Decent folk were being misled by American films that advertised wealth and luxury as ends in themselves. Television ushered in a new dark age. As TV viewers dimmed the lights, ‘not only intellectual pursuits such as reading, but also manual ones such as knitting and darning will become impossible’.106

  The Cold War gave these domestic worries world-historical importance. Earlier superpowers like the British empire had, at times, attributed to goods a civilizing mission, but the United States was the first to tie its ambitions to the export of a way of life explicitly organized around consumer goods. The historian Victoria de Grazia has christened America a ‘market empire’.107 Salesmen took the place of missionaries, the fridge that of the bible. Trade fairs and American show homes were the new churches in a foreign politics of plenty. In September 1952, the Berlin trade fair included an American pavilion with an electric kitchen, a TV, a car in a carport and a hobby shop with DIY tools. Almost half a million Germans saw it and had a chance to browse through a Sears catalogue. Under Dwight D. Eisenhower, US president from the following year, such exhibits became centrepieces of US policy. A special fund was set aside for cultural programmes. Corporate donors jumped on board. By 1960, there had been ninety-seven official exhibits in twenty-nine countries, from Leipzig to Zagreb and from Bangkok to Damascus. About 60 million visitors had a chance to step into life-sized American show houses to understand why separate bathrooms were a ‘basic dignity’ and how washing machines brought freedom.

  Earlier ambivalence towards consumer culture was settled by the Cold War. Left and right were pushed to take sides. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, had returned from the United States in 1946 with a fairly nuanced view of American life. By 1953, the Korean War and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage had convinced him that America was like ‘rabies’. French communists, with the support of wine growers, called for a ban on Coca-Cola – in vain. Marshall Plan exhibits faced an especially hostile reception from French labour. Elsewhere, defeat and ruin made labour movements more receptive.108 Liberation from Nazism made it much harder for Germans to think of America as an evil empire. Here, consumer society seemed to promise security, democracy and free unions.

  It was the Conservatives who were first to make peace with affluence. Christian Democrats could not at the same time be in the Atlantic alliance and denounce American consumer culture. By the late 1950s, doubts about soulless materialism had been replaced by celebrations of consumer democracy – ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ in Harold Macmillan’s 1959 British election slogan. Instead of worrying about Christ, the Conservatives discovered choice. This turned consumer politics upside down. Traditionally, the consumer champion had been the co-operatives, with strong links to Labour. The Conservatives had been the party of farmers and business. Now they reached out to housewives and workers, promising affluence for all. With the partial exception of Scandinavia and Japan, co-operatives were in decline by the 1960s, outflanked by a more competitive individualism manifest in popular testing organizations which compared and rated new products.

  Consumer choice offered a way to rebuild family and nation. Rather than destroying Christian values and community, perhaps kitchens and TVs would strengthen family life? This was the hope of Ezio Vanoni, the Italian finance minister, and Ludwig Erhard, West Germany’s economics minister. Erhard, the architect of the social market economy, was a chubby figure with a fondness for cigars and simple lentil-and-sausage soup. As early as 1950, he proposed an exhibition on the standard of living. The changing title captured the increasingly programmatic ambition. The initial name for the 1953 exhibition was ‘We Can All Live Better.’ It then changed to ‘We All Want to Live Better,’ before settling on ‘Everyone Should Live Better.’109 The official poster showed the benefits of productivity: a bulging wage packet. Visitors to the exhibition numbered 1.4 million. One pavilion was dedicated to the consumer’s central place in society. For the first time, organizers proudly announced, consumers were not merely visitors but were themselves on display. All Germans yearned for a ‘place in the sun’. This phrase was originally coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Whether intentionally or not, its reuse summed up the changing target of German ambitions: not overseas colonies, but a comfortable home.110

  In this familial consumerism, women were assigned a central place. Consumer durables would free up time for the family to spend together. The Catholic Church hoped that families would be so immersed in home life they would be immune to communism. Even buying on credit found religious approval. Far from being a sign of reckless excess, leasing arrangements such as hire purchase were good for society, the Church of Scotland d
ecided in 1957: regular payments taught people to plan ahead.111

  The sovereign consumer and the caring, homebound housewife were supposed to be one and the same. This was a shared image in the United States and Western Europe. Men’s function was to earn more for their families to spend. Acquisitiveness could spill over into family life. One American woman recounted the changes as she and her husband grew from a young couple in a small rented flat into a family with five children and an eight-room mansion on a lake. Her husband’s income had almost doubled, to $25,000 a year. They had a boat, a horse, the children expensive musical instruments. Her husband constantly bought them new things: ‘I feel he tries to own all of us in the family too much.’112 Suburbanization reached new heights, and the ambition of American college girls was to get married and raise children, rather than pursue an independent career, as was the aim of the previous generation.

  Historians have tended to view the post-war years as a new beginning. From a longer perspective, however, it might be better to see the 1950s as a conservative restoration, picking up and amplifying earlier trends. The cult of the home and family-centred leisure made affluence palatable, but it was hardly new. There were direct biographical connections between the 1930s and the 1950s. In Oakland, California, researchers followed children born in the early 1920s through the Depression and into their post-war adulthood.113 Boys who earned money in the 1930s selling newspapers or peddling handicrafts tended to save regularly in the 1950s, much more so than boys without earnings or girls without allowances. Among men, there was a strong correlation between deprivation while young and a fixation with work later. Earning power was a way to give their children the material comfort and stability they had missed out on. Children of the Depression were suddenly big earners – one of the causes behind the post-war baby boom.114