[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Gospel of Consumption

[Bill Totten]

And the better future we left behind

by Jeffrey Kaplan

Orion magazine (May / June 2008 issue)


PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances 
were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had 
not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, 
electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the 
streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, 
and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, 
refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and 
popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first 
commercial radio station didn't begin broadcasting until 1920, the 
American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, 
bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what 
appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the 
well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal 
habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. 
Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity 
for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than 
people's sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of 
General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called "Keep 
the Consumer Dissatisfied". He wasn't suggesting that manufacturers 
produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he 
was defining a strategic shift for American industry - from fulfilling 
basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation's Business, Secretary of 
Labor James J Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that 
the New York Times called "need saturation". Davis noted that "the 
textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six 
months' operation each year" and that fourteen percent of the American 
shoe factories could produce a year's supply of footwear. The magazine 
went on to suggest, "It may be that the world's needs ultimately will be 
produced by three days' work a week".

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a 
society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new 
"labor-saving" machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a 
threat to their position at the center of power. John E Edgerton, 
president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their 
response when he declared: "I am for everything that will make work 
happier but against everything that will further subordinate its 
importance. The emphasis should be put on work - more work and better 
work." "Nothing", he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness 
unless it is leisure".

By the late 1920s, America's business and political elite had found a 
way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a 
radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called "the 
gospel of consumption" - the notion that people could be convinced that 
however much they have, it isn't enough. President Herbert Hoover's 1929 
Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the 
results: "By advertising and other promotional devices ... a measurable 
pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise 
tied up". They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: "Economically we 
have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will 
make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied".

Today "work and more work" is the accepted way of doing things. If 
anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s 
have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go 
idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, 
the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that 
as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the 
owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of 
labor, but "higher productivity" - and with it the imperative to consume 
virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.


FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One 
of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, 
Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected 
officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that "failure to shorten the 
length of the working day ... is the primary cause of our rationing of 
opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of 
competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic 
imperialism". Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed 
at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was 
necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. 
"By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in", he 
suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of 
spiritual needs". For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it 
wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is 
solace to our souls".

There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, 
the world's leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all 
of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a 
six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W K Kellogg 
noted that if the company ran "four six-hour shifts ... instead of three 
eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of 
three hundred more families in Battle Creek".

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly 
descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains 
in his book Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more 
than save jobs. They hoped to show that the "free exchange of goods, 
services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless 
consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources". 
Instead "workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and 
shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of 
Independence - the pursuit of happiness".

To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the 
company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on 
shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing 
power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases 
of goods, including cereals.

A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But 
Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided 
for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company 
eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work 
their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a "personal 
letter" to employees, Brown pointed to the "mental income" of "the 
enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your 
neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate 
into dollars and cents". Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to 
"higher standards in school and civic ... life" that would benefit the 
company by allowing it to "draw its workers from a community where good 
homes predominate".

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg 
prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek 
reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the 
shorter workday. One reporter described "a lot of gardening and 
community beautification, athletics and hobbies ... libraries well 
patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers ... 
becoming richer".

A US Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews 
Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The 
government interviewers noted that "little dissatisfaction with lower 
earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in 
the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted". One man spoke 
of "more time at home with the family". Another remembered: "I could go 
home and have time to work in my garden". A woman noted that the 
six-hour shift allowed her husband to "be with four boys at ages it was 
important".

Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish 
things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt 
describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began 
talking about ping-pong. "We'd get together. We had a ping-pong table 
and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we'd all play 
ping-pong by the hour." Eventually she went on to win the state 
championship.

Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often 
chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled 
how canning food at home became "a family project" that "we all 
enjoyed", including her sons, who "opened up to talk freely". As 
Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the "medium for something more 
important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, 
practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The 
modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older ... 
more convivial kind of working together."

This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, 
almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and 
neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in 
much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we 
allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or 
intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.

Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household 
spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had 
been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods - the big 
stuff such as cars and appliances - was thirty-two times higher. 
Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working 
almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to 
reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over forty percent 
of American families spend more than they earn. The average household 
carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio 
of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled 
over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into 
a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. 
By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor 
was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen 
another thirty percent. In other words, if as a society we made a 
collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed 
seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week 
to 5.3 hours per day - or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 
1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 
and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg's vision 
offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of 
materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, 
and neighbors. We simply don't have time for them. Unlike our 
great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer 
might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a 
modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built 
around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree 
on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages 
while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well 
know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.

Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of 
its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and 
other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by 
underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for 
many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other 
disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is 
centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, 
marketing them - and counting the profits.


KELLOG'S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little 
support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg's book had a 
major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black 
who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. 
Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black's bill, he soon 
sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, 
Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to 
the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.

By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the 
gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques 
for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the 
public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large 
corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal 
legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal 
program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an 
unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a 
serious threat. James A Emery, general counsel for the National 
Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a "call to arms" against the 
"shackles of irrational regulation" and the "back-breaking burdens of 
taxation", characterizing the New Deal doctrines as "alien invaders of 
our national thought".

In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General 
Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, 
decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for 
"re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and 
benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy". NAM launched a massive 
public relations campaign it called the "American Way". As the minutes 
of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link 
"free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free 
press and free religion as integral parts of democracy".

Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also 
recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J Walter 
Thompson advertising agency told readers that under "private capitalism, 
the Consumer, the Citizen is boss", and "he doesn't have to wait for 
election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his 
verdict. The consumer 'votes' each time he buys one article and rejects 
another".

According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public 
relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices 
available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department 
store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are 
carefully determined by what Bernays called an "invisible government" of 
public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business 
leaders. Bernays claimed that in a "democratic society" we are and 
should be "governed, our minds ... molded, our tastes formed, our ideas 
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of".

NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from 
J Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school 
curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable 
articles in newspapers (often citing "independent" scholars who were 
paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to 
children and adults with such titles as "Building Better Americans", 
"The Business of America's People Is Selling", and "America Marching On".

Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way 
campaign was the 1939 New York World's Fair. The fair's director of 
public relations called it "the greatest public relations program in 
industrial history", one that would battle what he called the "New Deal 
propaganda". The fair's motto was "Building the World of Tomorrow", and 
it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled 
the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the 
exhibits was General Motors' 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors 
toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its 
citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the 
skyscraper-packed central city.

For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American 
Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for 
American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did 
lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second 
World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our 
post-war society.

The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had 
never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment 
would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working 
forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were 
ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them 
were able to do so, for a while. But W K Kellogg and Lewis Brown had 
turned the company over to new managers in 1937.

The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and 
almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to 
undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of 
financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a 
vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women 
wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In 
making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings 
from artificially high wartime levels.

The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special 
deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets 
of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture 
of a post-war, post-Depression US, that strategy was largely successful. 
But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, 
albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the "mavericks", 
who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that 
had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it 
once and for all in 1985.

The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and 
many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an 
eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in 
societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the 
mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was 
almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. 
One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, "He has 
no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the 
other things he really loves to do".

Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and 
consumerism. One man said, "I was getting along real good, so there was 
no use in me working any more time than I had to". He added, "Everybody 
thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal 
and it really didn't make a big difference ... Some went out and bought 
automobiles right quick and they didn't gain much on that because the 
car took the extra money they had".

The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, 
called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime "work hogs". 
"Kellogg's was laying off people", one woman commented, "while some of 
the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime - that's just 
not fair". Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, "We 
will either share the work, or take care of people who don't have work".


PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to 
be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours 
for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in 
the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We 
could, as a society, make a similar choice today.

But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out 
against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the 
marketplace didn't offer them a choice to work less and consume less. 
The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the 
marketplace itself - at least as it is currently constructed. The men 
and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society 
understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a 
powerful political movement to change course today.

Bernays's version of a "democratic society", in which political 
decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. 
Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W Bush's former chief of 
staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before 
making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, "You don't roll out 
a new product in August". And in 2004, one of the leading legal 
theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared 
that "representative democracy ... involves a division between rulers 
and ruled", with the former being "a governing class", and the rest of 
us exercising a form of "consumer sovereignty" in the political sphere 
with "the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose 
though not to create".

Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the 
working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent 
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's 1975 contribution to a 
Trilateral Commission report on "The Crisis of Democracy". Huntington 
warns against an "excess of democracy", declaring that "a democratic 
political system usually requires some measure of apathy and 
noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups". Huntington 
notes that "marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are 
now becoming full participants in the political system" and thus present 
the "danger of overloading the political system" and undermining its 
authority.

According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant 
for self-rule. "Commoners", who are viewed as factors of production at 
work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in 
order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a 
proposal for a national day of deliberation as "a small but not trivial 
reduction in the amount of productive work". Thus he appears to be an 
ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing 
the imperative for "more work and better work" breeds "radicalism".

As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours 
declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: "We 
have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and 
members of society". As those workers well understood, any meaningful 
democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create 
their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely 
choose from what is offered by an "invisible" government. Citizenship 
requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot 
make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of 
work and consumption.

We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have 
created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to 
re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge 
with Kellogg's six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the 
overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who 
own them. We can create a society where people have time to play 
together as well as work together, time to act politically in their 
common interests, and time even to argue over what those common 
interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary 
for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining 
a healthy planet.

If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from 
ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just 
find that there is plenty of both to go around.

_____

Jeffrey Kaplan has long been an activist in the Bay Area. His articles 
have appeared in various publications, including Yes! and the Chicago 
Tribune.


Consume More on Consumption

Watch segments from the BBC documentary "The Century of the Self" and 
learn who originally masterminded modern consumerism - and why the 
phenomenon shows no signs of slowing. This fascinating and chilling film 
begins by chronicling the life and work of Sigmund Freud's nephew, 
Edward Bernays, the man behind modern public relations. Bernays used all 
manner of political propaganda, psychological manipulation, and 
celebrity endorsement to peddle his wares, control the masses, and build 
an empire on the profits. View the first three of twenty-four segments here:

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rmC_rvPsPQ
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYTrFokPHY
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsSOmSnomnY
Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhsd8-Y0gA0
Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKA8Xahp-tI
Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ4anTDESmU

View related newsreel clips of the World's Fair, Atomsville USA, 
Westinghouse's Time Capsule, and General Motors' Futurama here: 
http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/interact.html

Watch extended vintage video footage of the World's Fair, and see how 
modern society matches up with General Motors' Futurama below:

GM Futurama Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4
GM Futurama Part 2 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7dT2HId-c&feature=related

Read a historic New York Times article about the 1939 New York World's 
Fair here:
http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/1939.html

Read sound bites from the original 1929 "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied" 
article by Charles Kettering, General Director of Research Laboratories 
at General Motors, and find out why Americans must continue to buy new 
stuff here:
http://websupport1.citytech.cuny.edu/Faculty/pcatapano/lectures_us2/consumerdis2.html

View pages of text, historic newspaper clippings, and old ad campaign 
imagery from inside these seminal books on the history of consumerism:

Creating the Corporate Soul by Robert Marchand
http://books.google.com/books/ucpress?id=HIbliHr2IKwC&pg=RA2-PA300&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=0_2&sig=sY1HECv4-gNlaEvv_0QTzWWexzc#PRA3-PA324,M1

Advertising the American Dream by Robert Marchand
http://books.google.com/books?id=hqafM0xZjqIC&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153&dq=%22advertising+the+american+drem%22+illustrations&source=web&ots=1kYIauxH5e&sig=1_yCRRm2DXLhm0SOKwcGlU2sdd4&hl=en#PPA78,M1


Read the introduction to Kellogg's Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline 
Hunnicutt here.
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1155_reg.html

See related articles by Benjamin Hunnicutt here:

"The Pursuit of Happiness"
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Hunnicut.htm

"The New Economic Gospel Of Consumption"
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Hunnicut.htm#NewGospel


The Orion Society, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/


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