Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Yet, even now, plenty of goods and services reach people through collective channels where choice and markets are absent or limited, from public housing to the company car. In England and Wales, public hospitals in the National Health Service served over 200 million meals in 2000, more than KFC and Domino’s Pizza combined; only McDonald’s served more.2 In the twentieth century, the advance of consumption was as profound outside the marketplace as within it. If we want to understand the latter, we must therefore also appreciate the former, and especially the contribution of two institutions: the firm and the state.

  THE FIRM

  In 1792, Samuel Slater opened a free Sunday school to recruit boys for his cotton mill at Pawtucket in Rhode Island. A century later, company services had expanded to such a degree that many firms ran their own mini welfare state. In Europe as in America, industrialization and rapid growth confronted employers with the same dual challenge: how to attract skilled workers but keep out unions. Company housing, health clinics, sport and education were the price of a loyal, disciplined workforce. It is difficult to strike if it means eviction from the company flat. Many pension funds were introduced in the wake of strikes and limited entitlements to those with ten years of service or more. Krupp, the German steel maker, started out with seven employees in 1827. On the eve of the First World War, it had 42,000 workers in Essen alone. At that time, the firm owned or leased 7,000 flats for its workers. Their rent, on average, was 20 per cent less than on the open market. A first social insurance fund was set up in the 1860s. Krupp paid in half, the employee the other half. A dental clinic opened in 1903, a convalescent home followed four years later. Housewives bought their sausages and cheese at the firm’s own Konsumanstalt, at discounted prices. The 50,000 volumes in the company library provided educational uplift.3 The electrical giant Siemens started sending female employees and needy children to the Baltic coast before the First World War. In 1920, the firm’s five holiday homes accommodated 2,000 employees and 1,000 children across the year. At that time, the company pension was double that offered by the state.4

  For Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens, as for the Levers and Cadburys in England and countless paternalist entrepreneurs elsewhere,5 the head of the firm was like a father to its workers and their dependents. Founder’s days with fancy-dress competitions, a Christmas bonus for loyal staff, and – in the case of Lever – a co-partnership scheme with a share of profits, were ways of keeping the family together. Many bosses were driven by a genuine humanitarian impulse, but humanitarianism was also good business. The gains from fewer stoppages, higher retention and higher productivity easily outweighed the cost of pensions and other services.6

  The company town was the most complete version of this kind of collective consumption. It was genuinely global, stretching from Le Creuset’s iron works in northern France to the steel town of the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional in Volta, Brazil.7 There was never a single model, however. Most towns were erected in the middle of nowhere but, ultimately, the quality and scope of their social provisions depended on the type of business and skills needed. Where margins were low and company owners relied mainly on unskilled labour, exploitation trumped benevolence. The Panama Canal was built with blood, sweat and tears.8 Mining towns were notorious for poor conditions and lack of services. Decent company services could make all the difference between a loyal and a rebellious workforce. One lightning rod was the company store. It was notorious for cheating workers out of their hard-earned dollars. In the United States, an investigation during the New Deal found that food cost 2–10 per cent more in company stores.9 As late as 1968, workers at the American Can Company had their shopping bill from its grocery store in Bellamy, Georgia, deducted from their wages. Elsewhere, owners opted for peace rather than a quick buck and refused to run their own shops. In 1938, Frank Gilchrist designed a grocer, liquor store and dry cleaner for his mill town in Oregon, but did not own or manage any of them. Other bosses encouraged their workers to make use of mail order and itinerant traders. The most contentious issue by far was the quality and quantity of company food. A bad canteen was a recipe for unrest. In the Pacific Northwest during the First World War, army officers found that loggers received double a soldier’s ration and enjoyed six different pastries for breakfast. In Mason City, a reporter noted that a ‘man is not a man unless he can eat his own weight three times a day’, only mildly exaggerating. A daily T-bone steak with one third of a pound of bacon on the side was the norm.10

  In railway towns and shipyards, where skilled labour was needed, collective provision was in a different league. When the Pullman Palace Car Company built its town in Illinois in 1881 it featured a hotel, a theatre, an arcade of shops and a church, in addition to company housing. Pullman, Illinois, was a model of a closed-loop economy, creating a virtuous circle between farm and fork. In company shops, workers bought vegetables which had been fertilized on the company farm with their own human waste collected by the local sewage network. Recreational facilities were the pride of benevolent company towns. In Indian Hill, home of the engineering firm Norton, just outside Worcester, Massachusetts, workers could play ball on the company baseball diamond or go rowing and trap-shooting. There were company clubs for amateur gardeners, photographers and stamp collectors. On summer evenings, the Norton bathhouse offered a retreat on the local lake.11

  Company towns offered an important countervailing trend to the commercialization of leisure and its separation from communal life that is so often seen to be characteristic of consumer society. Production and consumption were one. Nowhere did this vision find a clearer expression than in Zlín, the Moravian base of the Bat’a shoe empire in what is today the Czech Republic. Tomáš Bat’a opened his first small workshop in 1894. By 1931, his factory produced 35 million shoes and, directly or indirectly, employed the bulk of the town’s 30,000 inhabitants. The firm also produced plastics, tyres and, from 1927, had its own film department. Tomáš Bat’a was the town’s employer, landlord and mayor. An admirer of Henry Ford, he turned the company town into a grand experiment in modern living. Standardized mass production was matched by standardized living. Housing colonies were a chessboard of functionalist two-storey, two-family cubes, each 8.5 by 9 metres. The company won over Le Corbusier, the pioneer of modernism, who judged the designs for workers’ flats – Bat’a’s town, the architect said, felt like ‘a whole new world with, it seems, enough happiness to go around’.12 What workers did in their leisure time was in one way or another organized by the shoe company. The local orchestra was the factory orchestra. Health and sport were company-based. Over the town towered the ten-storey ‘community house’ which contained the hotel and a bowling alley. Bat’a’s 2,500-seater grand cinema, the largest in Europe at the time, offered free shows to inhabitants. Appropriately, in a town built on shoes, films were also shown during pedicure sessions. By the time the Nazis marched into Moravia on 15 March 1939, the Bat’a empire extended to satellite towns across the globe, from Bataville near Strasbourg and East Tilbury in Essex all the way to Batatuba in Brazil, founded by Tomáš’s half-brother Jan. In Europe, Bat’a football teams played each other for the company cup (see Plate 66).13

  Company towns have largely been understood in terms of industrial discipline, their welfare services as a tool to keep workers quiet. American unionists a century ago denounced their ‘hellfare’ services. The historical verdict has been mixed. In some companies, better services bought loyalty and peace, while, in others, they failed to contain strikes.14 Our concern here, however, is not primarily with productivity and work discipline. Companies were equally important for consumption. They were schools of a new lifestyle that inculcated new habits and tastes and taught workers how to spend their time and money.

  Their contribution took several forms. The first is perhaps an obvious one about space, but is nonetheless worth emphasizing. Many company towns were literally in the middle of nowhere and the only place far and wide to offer workers any kind of entertainment. In th
e Pacific Northwest and many other distant regions, mining, logging and the railways put shops, bars and theatres on the map. More widely, companies played a crucial role in diffusing a new culture of competitive sports (see Plates 64 and 65). Manchester United, the English soccer team, started life as a railway team; the Green Bay Packers, the American football team, in the canned-meat industry.15 Dynamo Dresden, Lokomotive Moscow and similarly named clubs continue to wear their industrial origins on their sleeves. Already by the inter-war years, management and sport were entering a symbiotic relationship as businesses were discovering the value of sport for corporate image and company morale. Peugeot, in France, promoted sport as ‘the moral and physical educator of youth’ and stressed its psychological benefits in teaching employees to work together for a shared goal. When mayor of Cologne in the 1920s, Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s future post-war chancellor, similarly saw ‘sport as the practical doctor at the sickbed of the German people’. In the 1920s, in a city like Hamburg, 166 company sports clubs were competing with 14 run by the municipal authorities, none bigger than the police club.16

  Secondly, the scale of social services deserves recognition, for freeing up purchasing power and enhancing well-being. Siemens, in the mid-nineteenth century, gave workers an annual Christmas bonus worth a month’s salary. Not every company flat was a bargain but, overall, they probably enabled families to save on rent. At a time when government welfare was virtually non-existent, these company services were doubly important. In the United States in 1916, 1,000 firms provided housing for 600,000 workers plus their families; for comparison, there were 1.3 million units of public housing in 1989.17 Of course, not all services were free. A survey of Chicago in 1939 found that only one in eight firms paid for all their employees’ recreation.18 Other programmes were either self-supporting, or the cost was split with staff. However limited, such non-wage benefits made a significant contribution to the actual level of consumption which is missing from statistics relying on wages. Equally important were dynamic, long-term effects. Health and recreational services were not just savings now but raised the future quality of life and with it the potential to consume more later. Economists have emphasized such effects for developing nations,19 but they played a similarly important role in Western societies in the heat of industrialization. That companies had their own profit motives for introducing such services should not obscure their contribution to well-being.

  Many company towns were openly dedicated to what today would be called lifestyle change. Their mission was to socialize peasants and immigrants into a ‘wholesome’ pattern of consumption, not so different from what Stalinists tried in Russia in the 1930s. A good deal of this was about discipline and restraint. Dollars spent on flashy jewels and showing off might trigger jealousy among neighbours and demands for higher wages. In Granite City, Illinois, Commonwealth Steel had home visitors who checked on indebted workers and gave them lessons on how to live within their means. Idleness was disparaged. With their endless range of clubs and civic organizations, companies bear some responsibility for the spread of hyper-active leisure. In Indiana in 1940, an American researcher visited one large company where six hundred horseshoe teams were competing during the lunch break.20 Workers busy throwing horseshoes or competing for the best garden had neither time nor energy to be revolutionaries, managers said.

  At the same time, companies steered rural and foreign workers into a new world of comfort, convenience and material desire. In Moravia, Bat’a supervisors dropped in on housewives to ensure that their modern homes were matched by modern standards of cleanliness. In American company towns, ‘neighbourhood houses’ gave lessons in cooking with gas and electricity. It was here that many families listened to their first Victrola phonograph.21 Few had greater faith in the power of material civilization than Henry Ford, who, in an effort to create a rubber plantation (Fordlandia) in Brazil in the late 1920s and ’30s, brought electricity to the heart of the jungle.22 Radio, records and company films, he believed, would Americanize the mixed races working on the plantation. The scheme failed to deliver the rubber for a single car tyre. What it did do was to leave behind a taste for mass-manufactured goods.

  By the 1950s, American companies no longer just offered sport to their male workers but leisure activities for the entire family. A contemporary survey found that the fashion show was the most popular part of the recreation programme for women. Many companies put one on every season, with the help of local department stores, which gladly provided the latest styles and in many cases sent ‘live models to display them’.23 Company stores started selling apparel and electronic goods. In club rooms, vending machines sold soft drinks and candy bars to help pay for recreation programmes. The workplace often provided the basic units of the private world of consumption. When Giuliana married Antonio M. in Milan on 25 April 1966, her co-workers from the pharmaceutical laboratory presented them with a washing machine on their wedding day; his office mates contributed a fridge.24 Such gifts were customary in many European countries during the miracle years.

  Company services involved a contentious trade-off between free provision and free choice. When workers at Fordlandia were informed three days before Christmas 1930 that table service had been abolished, they smashed up the cafeteria. The anger was about more than being served. Their demands included the freedom to choose their own leisure activities and an end to the ban on liquor. In Europe and America, many company towns were a golden cage. In his English Journey (1934), J. B. Priestley stopped at Cadbury’s Bournville, outside Birmingham. ‘What progressive people all over the world are demanding for humanity,’ he wrote, ‘these workers have here.’ They enjoyed comfortable housing and pension plans, sports pavilions and club rooms. The factory had its own concert hall and ‘is almost as busy in the evenings as it is in the daytime. Games, music, drama, lectures, classes, hobbies, conferences, all keep the place in full swing.’ And yet, there was something unnerving about the place. The firm was a total society. Workers, he worried, were paying for their benefits with their independence. ‘I would infinitely prefer,’ he wrote on leaving the village, ‘to see workers combining to provide these benefits . . . [and] to see them using their leisure, and demanding its increase, not as favoured employees but as citizens, free men and women.’25

  By the 1950s and ’60s, the golden cage was losing some of its shine. The main reason firms had been able to control leisure was location. The main reason they lost their grip was the motor car. Mobility shrank physical space and reduced their monopoly on entertainment. The Australian experience is indicative. At the end of the Second World War, recreation and travel was still largely a collective endeavour. Going on an excursion meant going with co-workers on the company bus. By 1959, such joint, work-based activities were in decline. The ‘excitement and gaiety associated with a group travel to picnic sites by special train, ferries or buses’, a government official noted, was ‘losing appeal in the face of growing preference by families for travel in their own cars and in their own time’.26 Greater private access to planes and automobiles repeated this story across the rich world.

  Was this the end of corporate-led consumption? It has been customary to treat the 1930s as the high-water mark of welfare capitalism. Most writers have taken their cue from the American story. The New Deal, it is argued, took away the core attractions of company-based welfare by, on the one hand, providing alternative state services and, on the other, prohibiting firms from using recreation committees to sidestep unions.27 Why bother building a gym if the company had to give up control over its use? In the depressed 1930s, it is true, many facilities were shut down. One third of summer camps and a quarter of sports programmes were dissolved; half the women social directors were sacked.28 Company housing, too, was being sold off. Yet this does not mean workers were left with nothing. To focus only on the paternalist side of welfare capitalism distracts from how firms continued to contribute to collective consumption after the Second World War. The war did not see th
e end of company services but their mutation. This matters even for the American story. It matters still more for the rest of the world.

  In the United States, the demands of war production gave a new stimulus to plant-based recreation. Leisure was a way to integrate women and other new workers in the war effort, just as it had been for immigrants earlier. Patriotic spirit and support from the Federal Security Agency soothed fears that industrial recreation aimed to crush unions. ‘Play ball and win the war’ was the motto. Companies taught Americans to bowl together. More than ever, raising productivity and eliminating absenteeism were crucial. Some firms even did the Christmas shopping for employees, and took out their laundry. After the war, companies no longer had to worry about powerful unions, thanks to the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. However, they still needed workers to show up at work, be alert and do their best. Recreation was rediscovered as a management tool. By 1953, 30,000 companies spent some $800 million to organize recreational programmes for 34 million workers, more than was devoted to all the schools in the United States.29 The proliferation of clubs at Boeing gives a snapshot. A golf association was founded at Puget Sound on the Pacific coast in 1946 and has held company tournaments ever since. An alpine society followed in 1963, with mountaineering and snowshoeing courses. Three years later, the Ski Club, with support from the company’s recreation department, bought a seventy-two-bed lodge at Crystal Mountain, complete with game room, fireplace, a TV room and a ‘fully equipped commercial kitchen [with] pancake mix, syrup, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, creamer & some condiments provided’.30 At lower altitude, there was tango and foxtrot, basketball, canoeing, chess, shooting and, naturally, flying – and all these were just in the Puget Sound area.