Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

47. Elmer E. Ferris, Who Says Old! (New York, 1933).

  48. Robert James Havighurst & Ruth Albrecht, Older People (New York, 1953), v.

  49. Havighurst & Albrecht, Older People, 130; the book shows the palpable influence of David Riesman’s reassessment of leisure.

  50. Havighurst & Albrecht, Older People, 141.

  51. Elaine Cumming & William E. Henry, Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (New York, 1961). Compare: Wilma Donahue, Harold L. Orbach & Otto Pollak, ‘Retirement: The Emerging Social Pattern’, in: Clark Tibbitts, ed., Handbook of Social Gerontology: Social Aspects of Aging (Chicago, 1960), 330–406. Paul B. Baltes & Margret M. Baltes, Successful Aging: Perspectives from the Behavioral Sciences (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

  52. Oskar Schulze, ‘Recreation for the Aged’, in: Journal of Gerontology, IV (1949), 312.

  53. Harry A. Levine, ‘Community Programs for the Elderly’, in: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 279, 1952: 164–70, quoted at 164 & 169; and Arthur Williams, Recreation for the Aging (New York, 1953). An earlier Three-quarter-century Club had been founded in New York City in 1932. I am grateful to Vanessa Taylor for bibliographical references.

  54. For Dewey, see 288–9 above.

  55. US Federal Security Agency, 1st National Conference on the Aging, Man and His Years (Washington, DC, 1951), quoted at 1, 43, 181, 199.

  56. Geriatrics, 6 (1951), 314–18. For this and other material for this period, I have found invaluable Nathan Wetheril Shock, A Classified Bibliography of Gerontology and Geriatrics. Supplement 1, 1949–1955 (Stanford, CA, 1957), nos. 15037–17250.

  57. ‘Recreation for the Aged’, in: American Journal of Nursing, 55/8 (Aug. 1955), 976–8.

  58. M. Zahrobsky, ‘Recreation Programs in Homes for the Aged in Cook County, Illinois’, in: Social Service Review 24, no. 1, 1950: 41–50, quoted at 47.

  59. Felisa Bracken, ‘Senior Citizens Go Camping’, in: Nursing Outlook, 2/7 (July 1954), quoted at 362.

  60. Ellinor I. Black & Doris B. Bead, Old People’s Welfare on Merseyside (Liverpool, 1947), 40–6.

  61. Havighurst, in Ernest Watson Burgess, ed., Aging in Western Societies (Chicago, 1960), 351.

  62. Dr Robert van Zonneveld, of the National Health Research Council, in: Burgess, ed., Aging in Western Societies, 447

  63. Havighurst, in Burgess, ed., Aging in Western Societies, quoted at 321.

  64. Paul Richard Thompson, Catherine Itzin & Michele Abendstern, I Don’t Feel Old: The Experience of Later Life (Oxford, 1990).

  65. J. Smith et al., ‘Wohlbefinden im hohen Alter’, in: Karl U. Mayer & Paul B. Baltes, eds., Die Berliner Altenstudie (Berlin, 1996), 497–524, table 4 (p. 532). 43% of those aged 70–84 practised sport, a level that dropped to 12% after the age of 85.

  66. Joëlle Gaymu & Christiane Delbès, La Retraite quinze ans après (Cahier no. 154 de INED) (Paris, 2003), 95.

  67. Fünfter Bericht zur Lage der älteren Generation in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 35ff. See also: Jay Ginn & Janet Fast, ‘Employment and Social Integration in Midlife: Preferred and Actual Time Use across Welfare Regime Types’, Research on Aging 28, no. 6, 2006: 669–90.

  68. M. Cirkel, V. Gerling & J. Hilbert, ‘Silbermarkt Japan’ in: Institut Arbeit und Technik, Jahrbuch 2001/2, 73–91.

  69. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 189/21915, ‘Taschengeld, 1965–82’: ‘Resolution’ of the Councils of Old-age Homes, Aachen, to Antje Huber, 11 Feb. 1982; Herr Radtke (Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Essen) to Huber, 10 Feb. 1982; the headline appeared in the Express, 22 Feb. 1982.

  70. Bernard Casey & Atsuhiro Yamada, ‘Getting Older, Getting Poorer? A Study of the Earnings, Pensions, Assets and Living Arrangements of Older People in Nine Countries’ Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2002, table 2.4.

  71. National Council of Social Service, Over Seventy: Report of an Investigation into the Social and Economic Circumstances of One Hundred People of over Seventy Years of Age (London 1954), 54.

  72. Peter Townsend, The Last Refuge: A Survey of Residential Institutions and Homes for the Aged in England and Wales (London, 1962), 244.

  73. See Ian Rees Jones, Paul Higgs & David J. Ekerdt, eds., Consumption and Generational Change (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), esp. ch. 6 by Martin Hyde & colleagues and ch. 7 by Fanny Bugeja.

  74. J. Vogel, ‘Ageing and Living Conditions of the Elderly: Sweden 1980–1998’, Social Indicators Research 59, no. 1, 2004: 1–34.

  75. Jones, Higgs & Ekerdt, eds., Consumption and Generational Change, ch. 6.

  76. S. Ottaway, ‘Providing for the Elderly in Eighteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change 13, 1998: 391–418.

  77. J. K. Wing & G. W. Brown, ‘Social Treatment of Chronic Schizophrenia: A Comparative Survey of Three Mental Hospitals’, in: British Journal of Psychiatry 107, no. 450, 1961: 847–61.

  78. The above draws on Gail Mountain & Peter Bowie, ‘Possessions Owned by Long-stay Psychogeriatric Patients’, in: International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 7, no. 4, 1992: 285–90, quoted at 290.

  79. ‘How Active are They?’, in: Recreation, May 1964, 228.

  80. From 13% to 37% after retirement, Dean W. Morse & Susan H. Gray, Early Retirement – Boon or Bane: A Study of Three Large Corporations (Montclair, NJ, 1980).

  81. Max Kaplan, Leisure, Lifestyle and Lifespan: Perspectives for Gerontology (Philadelphia, PA, 1979), 84.

  82. Morse & Gray, Early Retirement, quoted at 59. See further: Dorothy Ayers Counts & David R. Counts, Over the Next Hill: An Ethnography of RVing Seniors in North America (Peterborough, NH, 1997).

  83. Fünfter Bericht zur Lage der älteren Generation in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 441. For Mallorca, see Armin Ganser, ‘Zur Geschichte touristischer Produkte in der Bundesrepublik’, in: Goldstrand und Teutonengrill: Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland, 1945–1989, ed. Hasso Spode (Berlin, 1996), 185–200.

  84. Quoted in Russell King, Tony Warnes & Allan Williams, Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean (Oxford and New York, 2000), 85. See also: Andrew Blaikie, Ageing and Popular Culture (New York, 1999), ch. 7.

  85. Thompson, Itzin & Abendstern, I Don’t Feel Old, 247.

  86. Quoted in Marc Freedman, Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America (New York, 1999), 32.

  87. Kaplan, Leisure, Lifestyle and Lifespan: Perspectives for Gerontology, 101–4.

  88. E.g., see the senior weeks organized by the Austrian alpine club (OeAV), http://www.oeav-events.at/service/jahresprogramme/austria/2012/Inhalt/Aktiv-2012-web18-21.pdf.

  89. The British historian Peter Laslett was one of the trail-blazers: Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (London, 1989).

  90. Rylee Dionigi, ‘Competitive Sport as Leisure in Later Life: Negotiations, Discourse and Aging’, in: Leisure Sciences 28, no. 2, 2006: 181–96.

  91. My translation.

  92. A Leibing, ‘The Old Lady from Ipanema: Changing Notions of Old Age in Brazil’, in: Journal of Aging Studies 19, no. 1, 2005: 15–31. Robert H. Binstock, Jennifer R. Fishman & Thomas E. Johnson, ‘Anti-aging Medicine and Science’, in: Robert H. Binstock & Linda K. George, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (Boston, MA, 2006, 6th edn), 436–55; James Harkin & Julia Huber, Eternal Youths: How the Baby Boomers are Having Their Time Again (London, 2004).

  93. John W. Traphagan, The Practice of Concern: Ritual, Well-Being and Aging in Rural Japan (Durham, NC, 2004). See also: John W. Traphagan, Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan (New York, 2000).

  94. For the above, see Vera Gerling & Harald Conrad, ‘Wirtschaftskraft Alter in Japan: Handlungsfelder und Strategien Expertise’, a study for the German Ministry of Family, Seniors, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), 2002, http://www.ffg.uni-dortmund.de/medien/publikationen/Expertise%20Japanischer%20Silbermarkt.pdf.

  95. A. W. Achenbaum, Older Americans, Vital Communities: A Bold Vision for Societal Aging (Baltimore, MD, 2005), 4
0–1.

  96. E. Gidlow, ‘The Senior Market’, in: Sales Management, October 1961: 35–9, 108–11; L. Morse, ‘Old Folks: An Overlooked Market?’, in: Duns Review and Modern Industry, 1964: 83–8.

  97. See George P. Moschis, The Maturing Marketplace: Buying Habits of Baby Boomers and Their Parents (Westport, CN, 2000). For marketing studies in the 1970s, see H. L. Meadow, S. C. Cosmas & A. Plotkin, ‘The Elderly Consumer: Past, Present and Future’, in: Advances in Consumer Research 8, no. 1, 1981: 742–7.

  98. Carole Haber ‘Old Age through the Lens of Family History’, in: Binstock & George, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 41–75.

  99. As always, there are, of course, exceptions, such as Hungary and Northern Italy, where widows were expected to move in with their son’s families: Kertzer & Laslett, Aging in the Past.

  100. Committee on Ageing Issues, Report on the Ageing Population 52 (Singapore, 2006); and A. Chan, ‘Singapore’s Changing Age Structures’, in: Shripad Tuljapurkar, Ian Pool & Vipan Prachuabmoh, eds., Population, Resources and Development, Vol. I (Dordrecht, 2005), ch. 12.

  101. Ministry of Planning, Government of India, National Sample Survey Organization, ‘The Aged in India: A Socio-economic Profile: NSS 52nd Round (July 1995–June 1996); Report no. 446 (52/25.0/3)’ (1998); and Kumudini Dandekar, The Elderly in India (London, 1996).

  102. Penny Vera-Sanso, ‘They Don’t Need It and I Can’t Give It: Filial Support in South India’, in: The Elderly without Children: European and Asian Perspectives, eds. P. Kreager & E. Schroeder-Butterfill (Oxford, 2004), 76–105.

  103. John Van Willigen & N. K. Chadha, Social Aging in a Delhi Neighborhood (Westport, CN, 1999); Usha Bambawale, Ageing and the Economic Factor in Later Life’, in: Indrani Chakravarty, Life in Twilight Years (Calcutta, 1997); and Ashish Bose & Mala Kapur Shankardass, Growing Old in India: Voices Reveal, Statistics Speak (Delhi, 2004).

  104. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, 2003), xii; and Bauman, Consuming Life.

  105. Claudine Attias-Donfut, ed., Les Solidarités entre générations: Vieillesse, familles, État (Paris, 1995).

  106. Neidhart, Die Junge Generation, 64; any translation. For London, see Wilmott, Adolescent Boys of East London, 66–8.

  107. Assistance to children went up from 60% to 70%, to grandchildren from 50% to 71%, see Robert H. Binstock & Ethel Shanas, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (New York, 1985), 322.

  108. M. Kohli, ‘Private and Public Transfers between Generations: Linking the Family and the State’, in: European Societies 1, no. 1, 1999: 81–104. This paragraph further draws on Martin Kohli, ‘Ageing and Justice’, in: Binstock & George, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 456–78; and Attias-Donfut, ed., Solidarités.

  CHAPTER 12

  1. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.

  2. UK Audit Commission, ‘Acute Hospital Portfolio: Review of National Findings’ (2001): 220 million meals. McDonald’s sold around 700 million meals at the time in the whole of the United Kingdom.

  3. Eugene C. McCreary, ‘Social Welfare and Business: The Krupp Welfare Program, 1860–1914’, in: Business History Review 42, no. 1, 1968: 24–49.

  4. Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Siemens, 1918–1945 (Munich, 1995), 348–52.

  5. John Griffiths, ‘ “Give my Regards to Uncle Billy”: The Rites and Rituals of Company Life at Lever Brothers, c.1900–c.1990’, in: Business History 37, no. 4, 1995: 25–45; and Charles Delheim, ‘The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys,1861–1931’, in: American Historical Review 92, 1987: 13–46.

  6. See the calculations by Jakub Kastl & Lyndon Moore, ‘Wily Welfare Capitalist: Werner von Siemens and the Pension Plan’, in: Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History 4, no. 3, 2010: 321–48.

  7. Oliver J. Dinius & Angela Vergara, eds., Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-class Communities (Athens, GA, 2011); and Hardy Green, The Company Town (New York, 2010).

  8. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009).

  9. Stuart Dean Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago, 1976), 45.

  10. Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, 2003), quoted at 51, and ch. 8 for the above.

  11. Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London, 1995), ch. 6. For Pullman, see Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940, 16f.

  12. Quoted in Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘ “Unser Kunde ist unser Herr”: Le Corbusier trifft Bat’a’, in: Zlín: Modellstadt der Moderne, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (Berlin, 2009), 123, my translation.

  13. Katrin Klingan, ed., A Utopia of Modernity: Zlín – Revisiting Bat’a’s Functional City (Berlin, 2009). See also: http://batawa.ca/batawahistorys33.php; http://www.batamemories.org.uk/.

  14. For a nuanced discussion: Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise.

  15. Robert F. Wheeler, ‘Organized Sport and Organized Labour: The Workers’ Sports Movement’, in: Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 2, 1978: 191–210; and Gerald R. Gems, ‘Welfare Capitalism and Blue-collar Sport: The Legacy of Labour Unrest’, in: Rethinking History 5, no. 1, 2001: 43–58.

  16. For Peugeot: P. Fridenson, ‘Les Ouvriers de l’automobile et le sport’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 79, no. 1, 1989: 50–62, quoted at 53, my translation. For Germany: Hans Langenfeld in collaboration with Stefan Nielsen, Klaus Reinarz and Josef Santel, ‘Sportangebot und – Nachfrage in grossstaedtischen Zentren Nordwestdeutschlands, 1848–1933’, in: Reulecke, ed., Die Stadt als Dienstleistungszentrum, Adenauer quoted at 473, my translation.

  17. For the above, see Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940; and 38 for the 1916 survey. For data from the 1989 American Housing Survey, see US Department of Housing and Urban Development, ‘Public Housing: Image Versus Facts’, at http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/ushmc/spring95/spring95.html.

  18. Leonard James Diehl, Floyd R. Eastwood & Purdue University, Industrial Recreation: Its Development and Present Status (Lafayette, IN, 1942), 20.

  19. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999); and Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-being and Destitution (Oxford, 1993).

  20. Diehl, Eastwood & Purdue, Industrial Recreation, 52. Inhabitants in Canadian railtowns in the 1960s were much busier with sports and volunteering than those in neighbouring small towns: see Rex Archibald Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (Toronto, 1971), esp. 196.

  21. Arnold R. Alanen, Morgan Park: Duluth, US Steel and the Forging of a Company Town (Minneapolis, MN, 2007), ch. 7.

  22. Elizabeth Esch, ‘Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazialin Amazon’, in: Dinius & Vergara, eds., Company Towns, ch. 4, for this and the following.

  23. Jackson Moore Anderson, Industrial Recreation: A Guide to Its Organization and Administration (New York, 1955), 125.

  24. Enrica Asquer, Storia intima dei ceti medi: Una capitale e una periferia nell’Italia del miracolo economico (Rome, 2011), 19.

  25. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1934), 95, 100.

  26. S. E. G. Imer of the Industrial Welfare Division, in 1959, quoted in: Nikola Balnave, ‘Company-sponsored Recreation in Australia: 1890–1965’, in: Labour History, no. 85, 2003: 129–51, at 137.

  27. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940.

  28. Anderson, Industrial Recreation, 63.

  29. Anderson, Industrial Recreation, 64–8, and p. 8 for Christmas shopping during the war.

  30. http://www.skibacs.org/; http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/recreation/puget.html.

  31. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, ‘Industrial Recreation, the Second World War and the Revival of Welfare Capitalism, 1934–1960’, in: Business History Review 60, no. 2, 1986: 232–57, 256.

  32. For Lincoln Plating, see t
he article at the Society for Human Resource Management: http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/benefits/Articles/Pages/CMS_013248.aspx; B. W. Simonson, ‘Corporate Fitness Programs Pay Off’, in: Vital Speeches of the Day 52, no. 18, 1986: 567–9; and Richard L. Pyle, ‘Performance Measures for a Corporate Fitness Program’, in: Human Resource Management 18, no. 3, 1979: 26–30.

  33. Buck Consultants, ‘Working Well: A Global Survey of Health Promotion and Workplace Wellness Strategies’ (2009).

  34. Assemblée Nationale, no. 2624, annexe no. 33, ‘Jeunesse et sports’, esp. section 4 c), at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/budget/plf2001/b2624-33.asp. See also: B. Barbusse, ‘Sport et entreprise: des logiques convergentes?’ in: L’Année sociologique 52, no. 2, 2002: 391–415.

  35. Walter Schmolz, ‘Freizeit und Betrieb’ in: W. Nahrstedt, Freizeit in Schweden (Düsseldorf, 1975).

  36. E. Roos, S. Sarlio-Lähteenkorva & T. Lallukka, ‘Having Lunch at a Staff Canteen is Associated with Recommended Food Habits’, in: Public Health Nutrition 7, no. 01, 2004: 53–61; NPD Insight, ‘Report on Away-from-home Eating’, Aug. 2003. The figure for company subsidies is for 1993, see John S. A. Edwards, ‘Employee Feeding – an Overview’, in: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 5, no. 4, 1993: 10–14. For France, see the series of articles in Libération, Oct. 2003. B. E. Mikkelsen, ‘Are Traditional Foodservice Organizations Ready for Organizational Change? (A Case Study of Implementation of Environmental Management in a Work-place Canteen Facility)’, in: Foodservice Research International 15, no. 2, 2004: 89–106; Marianne Ekström, Lotte Holm, Jukka Gronow, Unni Kjærnes, Thomas Lund, Johanna Mäkelä and Mari Niva, ‘The Modernization of Nordic Eating’, in: Anthropology of Food S7, 2012. In Denmark, ‘food on wheels’ and public catering for the elderly alone makes up 10% of the entire food sector; see Instituttet for Fødevarestudier & Agroindustriel Udvikling-IFAU, Food service i Danmark 2007: Udvikling og tendenser i QSF markedet (Hörsholm, 2007), with thanks to Karen Hamann at the IFAU. For Sandoz, see Jakob Tanner, Fabrikmahlzeit: Ernährungswissenschaft, Industriearbeit und Volksernährung in der Schweiz, 1890–1950 (Zürich, 1999), 193–5.