[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Consumerism: an Historical Perspective

[Bill Totten]

by Sharon Beder

Culture Change (February 21 2009)


The Pacific Ecologist, whence this article came, provided this editorial
note: Sharon Beder explores the history of consumer societies from the
1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of
stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work
around, which would have brought more leisure time for all,
industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the
working classes. The social decision to produce unlimited quantities of
goods rather than leisure, nurtured wastefulness, obsolescence, and
inefficiency and created the foundation for our modern consumer culture.
People were trained to be both workers and consumers in a culture of
work and spend.

Consumption was promoted through advertising as a "democracy of goods"
and used to pacify political unrest among workers. With the help of
marketers and advertisers exploiting the idea of consumer goods as
status symbols, workers were manipulated into being avaricious consumers
who could be trusted "to spend more rather than work less". But if we
admired wisdom above wealth, and compassion and cooperation above
competition, we could undermine the motivation to consume.


The development of consumer societies meant the erosion of traditional
values and attitudes of thrift and prudence. Expanding consumption was
necessary to create markets for the fruits of rising production.
Ironically this "required the nurture of qualities like wastefulness,
self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly negated or
undermined the values of efficiency" and the Protestant Ethic that had
originally nurtured capitalism. {1} Advertisers sought to redefine
people's needs, encourage their wants and offer solutions to them via
goods produced by corporations rather than allowing people to identify
and solve their own problems, or to look to each other for solutions. {2}

Consumerism also played a major role in legitimising a social system
which rewards businessmen and top corporate executives with incomes many
times those of ordinary workers. The consumer society gives ordinary
workers some access to the good life. Surrounded by the bounty of their
work - the television set, stereo, car, computer, white goods - they are
less likely to question conditions of their work, the way it dominates
their life, and the lack of power they have as workers. Advertisers
constantly tell them these are the fruits of success, that this is what
life is all about. To question a system that delivers such plenty would
seem perverse.

Over-production and the shorter working week

The growth in production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries required growing markets. This meant expanding the consuming
class beyond the middle and upper classes to include the working
classes. Production between 1860 and 1920 increased by twelve to
fourteen times in the US while the population only increased three
times. {3}  Supply outstripped demand and problems of scarcity were
replaced by problems of how to create more demand.

By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation,
"over-production" and lack of consumer demand were blamed for recession.
More goods were being produced than a population with "set habits and
means" could consume. {4} There were two schools of thought about how
this problem should be solved. One was that work hours should be
decreased and the economy stabilised so production met current needs and
work was shared around. This view was held by intellectuals, labour
leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America and in
Europe, it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could
be reached and production beyond those limits would result in increased
leisure time for all. {5}

The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was
over-production could and should be solved by increasing consumption so
economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually
expand production so as to increase their profits. Employers were also
afraid of such a future because of its potential to undermine the work
ethic and encourage degeneracy amongst workers who were unable to make
proper use of their time. Increasing production and consumption
guaranteed the ongoing centrality of work. {6]

Keen to maintain the importance of work in the face of the push for more
leisure, businessmen extolled the virtues and pleasures of work and its
necessity in building character, providing dignity and inspiring
greatness. Economists too argued that the creation of work was the goal
of production. John M Clark, in a review of economic developments,
stated: "Consumption is no longer the sole end nor production solely the
means to that end. Work is an end in itself."  Creating work, and the
right to work, he argued, had a higher moral imperative than meeting
basic needs. {7}

Manufacturer, H C Atkins, along with president of the National
Association of Manufacturers, John E Edgerton, warned a five-day week
would undermine the work ethic by giving more time for leisure. {8} If
work took up less of the day it would be less important in people's
lives. Edgerton, observed: "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, instead of upon leisure". {9}

Most businessmen believed shorter hours meant less production, which
would limit the growth of America's business enterprise. They argued
they could not afford shorter work weeks, that they would become
uncompetitive and go bankrupt. They also feared that given extra free
time, people would spend it in unsociable ways, turning to crime, vice,
corruption and degeneracy and perhaps even radicalism. "The common
people had to be kept at their desks and machines, lest they rise up
against their betters". {10} And Edgerton, argued "nothing breeds
radicalism more quickly than unhappiness unless it is leisure. As long
as the people are kept profitably and happily employed there is little
danger from radicalism". {11} In the US consumption rates were
increasing in the mid-1920s and the "new economic gospel of consumption"
gained many adherents. {12} The idea there were limits on consumer wants
began to be eclipsed by the idea such wants could be endlessly created.
In 1929 the President's Committee on Recent Economic Changes stated:
"wants are almost insatiable; one want satisfied makes way for
another... by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific
fact-finding, and by carefully pre-developed consumption, a measurable
pull on production ... has been created". {13}

The public was urged by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)
to "end the buyers' strike". {14} However the desire to consume did not
come naturally, it had to be learned: "People had to move away from
habits of strict thrift toward habits of ready spending". {15} From the
1920s corporations began advertising to the working classes in an effort
to break down these old habits of thrift and encourage new consumerist
desires. At the same time they sought to counter anti-corporate feelings
generated by the conditions of work in their factories. {16}

Hooking work and leisure to consumption

Higher wages helped in this shift from the Protestant ethic of
asceticism to one of consumerism that fitted with the required markets
for mass production. {17} In boom times, workers were given increased
wages rather than increased leisure. Between 1910 and 1929 the average
purchasing power of workers in the US increased by forty percent. {18}
With these rising wages they bought more and the upward spiral of
production and consumption was maintained. In earlier times higher wages
might have encouraged workers to work shorter hours, but once workers
had been coached into becoming consumers there was little danger of
this. With the help of marketers and advertisers, workers could be
trusted "to spend more rather than work less". {19}

In this context it was important leisure was not an alternative to work
and an opportunity to reflect on life but rather a time for consumption.
In this way the forty-hour week, rather than threatening economic growth
would foster it. Leisure goods such as radios, phonographs, movies,
clothes, books and recreational facilities all benefited from increased
leisure time. {20 } At the same time leisure had to be subordinate to
work and importantly, a reason to work.

Business people still wanted to limit the reduction of work hours and
believed that by 'educating' workers to become consumers, the demand
from workers for reduced working hours would also be limited. {21}
Manufacturers expanded markets by expanding the range of goods they
produced, moving from the basic requirements of living such as food,
clothing and building materials to items such as cars and radios that
provided entertainment and recreation. {22} US unions fell in with the
consumption solution to overproduction in the late 1920s and
concentrated on fighting for higher wages. Union leaders promoted
increased production and economic growth as a way of increasing wages.
It was not till the Great Depression of the 1930s that they again fought
for a shorter working week as a solution to
unemployment. {23}

After the Second World War the idea of solving unemployment by reducing
working hours disappeared from mainstream thinking. During the war a
demand for consumer goods built up and following it workers tended to
prefer wage rises to shorter hours. {24} Unions no longer pressed for
shorter working hours and workers themselves became wedded to a consumer
lifestyle that required long hours to support. Many unions in fact gave
up their fight for control of production in favour of a share of the
fruits of production and "ever-increasing levels of material well-being
for their workers". {25}

The promise of full-employment assuaged fears that long work hours might
create unemployment. Leisure became consumer-oriented, revolving round
the home with its entertaining and convenience goods and the vacation
where workers could enjoy living in luxury for a short time. {26} As
Cross noted: "The identification of leisure with consumption won many to
hard and steady work in disagreeable jobs". {27}

Juliet Schor noted in her book, The Overworked American that by 1991
productivity in the US had increased steadily from the 1940s: "we could
now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed
goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We
could actually have chosen the four-hour day, or a working year of six
months" ... Instead, workers work more hours now than in 1948 and
consume more than twice as much. {28} It was the "social decision to
direct industrial innovation toward producing unlimited quantities of
goods rather than leisure" that created the foundation for our modern
consumer culture, "a culture of work and spend". The movement for more
free time for workers and leisure time free of market forces, was
defeated by the middle of the 20th century when mass consumer culture
took off. {29} The consumer culture, rather than eroding the work ethic,
tied people even more closely to working long hours in order to earn the
money for their consumer desires.

Consumerism as opiate of the masses

Stuart Ewen in his book Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the
Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (2001) showed that advertising for
mass consumerism was not only aimed at increasing markets for goods but
also at shifting the locus of discontent from people's work to arenas
that advertisers could promise would be satisfied by consumption. Their
frustrations and unhappiness could then be directed towards buying
rather than political protest against working conditions or other
elements of industrial society. {30}

Ewen claims that consumerism: "the mass participation in the values of
the mass-induced market", was not a natural historical development but
an aggressive device of corporate survival". Discontent in the workplace
could lead to a challenge to corporate authority but discontent in the
consumer sphere provided an incentive to work harder and reflected an
acceptance of the values of the capitalist enterprise. {31} Similarly
Robert Lane claims in his book on Political Ideology (1962) that: "The
more emphasis a society places upon consumption - through advertising,
development of new products, and easy installment buying - the more will
social dissatisfaction be channeled into intraclass consumption rivalry
instead of interclass resentment and conflict ... the more will labor
unions focus upon the 'bread and butter' aspects of unionism, as
contrasted to its ideological elements". {32}

If people were dependent on the products of the factories they were less
likely to be critical of the appalling working conditions within them.
The good life attained through this consumption was also compensation
for the unpleasantness of work and distracted attention from it.
Advertisements were careful not to depict people working in factories. A
leading copywriter in the 1920s, Helen Woodward, advised consumption
could help sublimate and redirect urges that might otherwise be
expressed politically or aggressively. "To those who cannot change their
whole lives or occupations", she argued, "even a new line in a dress is
often a relief". {33}

Department store merchant Edward Filene, a spokesperson for
industrialists in the 1920s and 1930s, spoke frankly about the need for
social planning in order to create a consumer culture where industry
could "sell to the masses all that it employs the masses to create" and
the need for education to train the masses to be consumers in a world of
mass production. He argued that consumer culture could unify the nation
and, through education, social change could be limited to changes in the
commodities that industry produced. {34}

Consumption allows people at the bottom of the social hierarchy to feel
they have some measure of access to the good life for all their
troubles. The escape from real life provided by leisure activities
allows people to continue what might otherwise be a dreary and
downtrodden existence. Lisa Macdonald and Allen Myers from Green Left
Weekly, claim workers attempt to gain ownership of what they produce and
overcome their alienation through consumption: "it is only as
purchasers, 'shoppers', that we are treated with the courtesy worthy of
a human being". {35} Employers encouraged workers to think of
consumerism as the rationale for their work but measures of success were
moved from the realm of production and work to the realm of consumption.
Advertising messages affected people's aspirations. They portrayed a
bounty of consumer goods as the fruits of the American Dream. Rather
than aspiring for their children to become leading businessmen or top
executives or political leaders, advertisements offered messages such as
"Some Day your Boy will own a Buick". {36}

Advertisers also undermined the nineteenth century "culture of
character" which was the basis of the myth of the self-made man, someone
who succeeded as a result of hard work, morality and discipline. In its
place a "culture of personality" evolved which promoted the importance
of presentation and appearance, things that advertisers were so
helpfully offering to assist with. What mattered in getting ahead and
influencing people was the impression a person made on others. Things
like their clothes, their home furnishings, their personal cleanliness
were all used by others to judge their character. {37} Also advertising
and consumerism played a major role in the acceptance of the capitalist
vision and its associated inequalities. Roland Marchand in his book
Advertising the American Dream (1986) argued advertisers repeatedly used
"the parable of the democracy of goods" to sell their products to the
middle classes. In this parable, although there was a social hierarchy
with wealth concentrated at the top, ordinary people could enjoy the
same products and goods that the people at the top did. Joe Blo could
drink the same brand of coffee as the wealthiest capitalist. Mary Jane
could buy the same soap as the lady with the maid in waiting. The most
humble of citizens (although not the poor who were not the targets of
these advertisements) could afford to purchase the same quality products
as a millionaire. {38}

The social message of the parable of the Democracy of Goods was clear.
Antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute
wealth were unnecessary. The best things in life were already available
to all at reasonable prices. Incessantly and enticingly repeated,
advertising visions of fellowship in a Democracy of Goods encouraged
Americans to look to similarities in consumption styles rather than to
political power or control of wealth for evidence of significant
equality. {39}

According to Filene, the process of buying goods was a means by which
people were supporting industry and thereby electing the manufacturers,
who made the goods, to a government which would satisfy their needs.
They were voting industry leaders into positions of leadership in
society. In this way "the masses have elected Henry Ford. They have
elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company,
and Woolworth's and all the other great industrial and business leaders
of the day." {40} Not only was the desire for social change displaced by
a desire for changes in commodities, but political freedom was equated
with consumer choice and political citizenship with participation in the
market through consumption. Consumption was promoted as democratising at
the very time it was being used to pacify the political unrest of
workers. {41} According to well-known sociologist Daniel Bell: "If the
American worker has been 'tamed' it has not been through the discipline
of the machine, but by the 'consumption society', by the possibility of
a better living which his wage, the second income from his working wife,
and easy credit all allow". {42}

Production, consumption and status

Vance Packard, in his book The Status Seekers (1959) argued the use of
consumer goods as status symbols was a deliberate strategy of
advertisers, or "merchants of discontent", who took advantage of the
"upgrading urge" people felt. The message that workers could improve
their status through consumption was particularly aimed at people who
had little chance of raising their status through their work because
opportunities for promotion were slim. {43} employers sought to divert
the dissatisfaction of workers with the nature of their work into a more
personal dissatisfaction that could be fed with consumer goods:
"offering mass produced visions of individualism by which people could
extricate themselves from the mass". {44}

The advertiser offered workers the possibility of gaining social status
through buying goods that were better than their neighbours. With the
help of installment plans and credit, they could purchase the signifiers
of success even if they weren't achieving success in their workplace.
This was not something that came naturally to working people who were,
for the main part, resigned to their position in life. According to
Packard "they need prodding and 'educating' to desire many of the
traditionally higher-class products the mass merchandisers want to move
in such vast numbers, such as the electric rotating spits or gourmet
foods". {45}

Car manufacturers, particularly, exploited people's desire for status,
spending "small fortunes exploring the status meaning of their product".
They found, for example that people in housing developments where all
the houses looked similar, were most likely to leave their large new
cars parked on the street in front of the house rather than in the
garage where no-one would see them. Plymouth advertisements pictured a
family in front of their car saying "We're not wealthy ... we just look
it!" Dodge advertisements featured a man saying to a Dodge car owner
"Boy, you must be rich to own a car as big as this!" And Ford
advertisements showed the back of one of their cars and stated "let the
people behind you know you are ahead of them!" {46}

Such advertising was so successful people began diverting funds from
other purchases into the purchase of a car to enhance their status, and
by the end of the 1950s Americans "were spending more of their total
income on the family chariot than they were in financing their
homestead, which housed the family and its car or cars". {47} Not to be
outdone home builders and sellers ensured the home became a status
symbol that rivalled the motor car.

Chinoy observed consumption provided automobile workers in the 1950s
with a way of rationalising their failure to advance in their work:
"Advancement has come to mean the progressive accumulation of things as
well as the increasing capacity to consume ... If one manages to buy a
new car, if each year sees a major addition to the household - a washing
machine, a refrigerator, a new living-room suite, now probably a
television set - then one is also getting ahead". {48} Rather than
question the American Dream, workers would either blame themselves for
their failure to live up to it, or find other ways to interpret it.

Such trends were not confined to the US. The consumerism that
proliferated in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, spread to other
industrialised nations after the Second World War, particularly in the
1950s. {49} In his book on the rise of a consumer society in Australia,
Greg Whitwell said: "The ownership of certain sorts of consumer goods,
each ranked according to brand names, came to be seen as guides to an
individual's income which in turn, so it is believed, said something
about his or her inner worth. Consumer goods became external signs, used
to give a sense of hierarchy by members of a society characterized by an
emphasis on change and on social and geographical mobility". {50}

More pay needed to buy "goods"

In a British study of the working class in the 1950s Ferdynand Zweig
found: "a steep rise in acquisitive tendencies and pre-occupation with
money in work attitudes". There was far less difference between middle
class and working class purchase of consumer durables (cars, white
goods, electrical appliances) than previously and class
self-identification had come to depend more on factors such as house
ownership than type of work. In fact Zweig found workers impatient with
questions about class. They were more interested in status as a way of
organising the social spectrum. {51}

Increased consumerism led to an increased emphasis on the importance of
pay. Many people work so as to earn the money to buy consumer goods and
some measure of status that accompanies them. A European study by the
Henley Centre in 1991 found "better pay" was the priority for new jobs
for seventy per cent of those surveyed, compared with enjoyable work,
which was a priority for 58 per cent. {52}

A US study found those who believed "having lots of money" was
"extremely important" had gone up to almost two thirds in 1986 from less
than half in 1977. It ranked higher than any other of goal in life. {53}
Americans born since 1963, those referred to as Generation X, are more
likely to agree that "The only really meaningful measure of success is
money" than any previous generation. They spend more money on stereos,
mobile phones, beepers and cars than older people and are more likely to
take a less interesting job if it pays well. {54}

Jimmy Carter, as President of the US noted: "Human identity is no longer
defined by what one does, but by what one owns". {55} Consumption has
become a more important source of self-identity and status than work for
many people. Compton Advertising undertook a survey of public attitudes
to the economic system in 1974 and found two thirds of those surveyed
identified their role in the economic system as that of "consumers and
spenders of money" rather than workers or producers. This included one
half of those in the labour force. {56}

More recent opinion surveys show that in countries like the US and
Japan, "people increasingly measure success by the amount they consume".
{57} In a society where people don't know each other very well,
appearances are important and social status, though more securely
attained through occupation, can be attained with strangers through
consumption. When people are uprooted and move to the cities they are
strangers to each other. Previously everyone knew one another's business
and the status that should be accorded to each person. In an anonymous
city a person can adopt a certain lifestyle, clothes, car that is higher
up the status ladder than their occupation would indicate, particularly
if they are willing to go into debt to do it. Consumption then becomes
an indicator of achievement. {58}

The desire to consume is often portrayed as a natural human
characteristic that cannot be changed. However it is clear populations
have been manipulated into being avaricious consumers. What people
really want, more than the multitude of goods on offer, is status.
History has shown the determinants of status can change. If we want to
live in an ecologically sustainable society, then we need to award
status to those who are happy with a basic level of comfort rather than
those who accumulate possessions. If, as a community, we admired wisdom
above wealth and compassion and cooperation above competition, we would
be well on the way to undermining the motivation to consume.

_____

This article was first adapted for publication in Pacific Ecologist from
Chapter Twelve of the book Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit
to Corporate PR (2001) by Sharon Beder. Professor Sharon Beder is head
of the Science, Technology and Society Programme at the University of
Wollongong, NSW, Australia. She writes a regular column for Engineers
Australia and has written several books including Power Play Toxic Fish
and Sewer Surfing (2003); The Nature of Sustainable Development (1993).
Professor Beder was awarded the 2001 World Technology Award in Ethics.

References

[1] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making way for
modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
page 158.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social
Roots of the Consumer Culture( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pages 70, 108.

[3] David J. Cherrington, The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that
Work (New York: AMACON, 1980), page 37.

[4] Gary Cross, Time and Money (London: Routledge, 1993), page 38;
Rodney Clapp, 'Why the Devil Takes Visa', Christianity Today, Vol 40, No
11 (1996).

[5] Cross, note 7, pages 7-8, 28.

[6] Ibid, pages 7, 9, 39; Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End:
Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988), pages 42, 67.

[7] Ibid, pages 62-3.

[8] Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), page 157.

[9] Cross, note 7, page 16.

[10] Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in
Leisure (USA: BasicBooks, 1991), page 74.

[11] Quoted in Hunnicutt, note 9, page 41.

[12] Hunnicutt, note 9, page 42.

[13] Quoted in Cross, note 7, page 41.

[14] Quoted in Ibid, page 38.

[15] Clapp, note 7.

[16] Ewen, note 5, page 19.

[17] Ibid, page 29.

[18] Cross, note 7, page 7.

[19] Hunnicutt, note 9, page 43.

[20] Ibid, page 45.

[21] Ibid pages 46-7.

[22] Robert Eisenberger, Blue Monday: The Loss of the Work Ethic in
America (New York: Paragon House, 1989), page 11.

[23] Hunnicutt, note 9, page 79.

[24] Cross, note 7, page 85.

[25] Schor, note 15, page 78; Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr,
'Putting the Work Ethic to Work', Society, Vol 21, No 2 (1984), page 59.

[26] Cross, note 7, page 155.

[27] Ibid, page 153.

[28] Schor, note 15, page 2.

[29] Cross, note 7, pages 5, 9.

[30] Ewen, note 5, pages 43-5.

[31] Ibid, pages 54, 109.

[32] Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man
Believes What he Does (New York: The Free Press, 1962), page 80.

[33] Ewen, note 5, pages 77-8, 85-6.

[34] Ibid, page 54.

[35] L Macdonald and A Myers, 'Malign Design', New Internationalist
(November 1998), page 21.

[36] Marchand, note 4, pages 162, 222.

[37] Ibid, pages 209-10.

[38] Ibid, page 218.

[39] Ibid, pages 220, 222.

[40] Quoted in Ewen, note 5, page 92.

[41] Ibid, pages 89, 91.

[42] Daniel Bell, 'Work and Its Discontents (1956)', in A R Gini and T J
Sullivan (editors), It Comes with the Territory: An Inquiry Concerning
Work and the Person (New York: Random House, 1989), pages 122-123.

[43] Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class
Behaviour in America (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pages
269-70.

[44] Andrew Hornery, 'Family Pack aims for the children', Sydney Morning
Herald, 24 September 1998, page 45.

[45] Packard, note 84, page 271.

[46] Ibid, pages 273-4.

[47] Ibid, page 274.

[48] Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2nd edition
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinios Press, 1992), page 126.

[49] Stewart Lansley, After the Gold Rush: The Trouble with Affluence:
'Consumer Capitalism' and the Way Forward (London: Century Business
Books, 1994), page 85.

[50] Greg Whitwell, Making the Market: The Rise of Consumer Society
(Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1989), page 7.

[51] Ferdynand Zweig, The New Acquisitive Society (Chichester: Barry
Rose, 1976), pages 15, 21-2, 26-7.

[52] Cited in Lansley, note 90, page 136.

[53] Alan Thein Durning, How Much is Enough: The Consumer Society and
the Future of the Earth, ed. Linda Starke, Worldwatch Environmental
Alert Series (London: Earthscan, 1992), page 34.

[54] Dan Zevin and Carolyn Edy, 'Boom Time for Gen X', US News and World
Report (20 October 1997)

[55] Quoted in Thomas H Naylor, William H Willimon and Rolf Osterberg,
The Search for Meaning in the Workplace (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1996), page 69.

[56] Compton Advertising, 'National Survey on the American Economic
System', (New York: The Advertising Council, 1974), page 17

[57] Durning, note 94, page 22.

[58] Bell, note 71, page 68.

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