Previous Intro Note: The Anxiety of Leisure and the Search for "Wholesome" Recreation
Critics of the mass consumer society of the twenties made themselves heard in a great variety of ways -- through consumer protection efforts, product testing, articles in journals of opinion, diatribes against advertising, the Truth-in-Advertising Movement, Congressional hearings, and monographs on unemployment and on inadequate standards of living in the midst of widespread prosperity. There were also critiques of President Coolidge himself, and of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon.
The December 1924 issue of The Messenger: The World's Greatest Negro Monthly carried a post-election commentary observing that Coolidge was so non-committal in his pronouncements and actions that it was impossible to know what he stood for and that people could read into him whatever they wanted. An editorial in the February 8, 1928 issue of The New Republic claims that Coolidge's much boasted-of economy in government will finally result in only "minor savings." In its March 6, 1929 issue, dated three days after Coolidge left office, The Nation, offered a withering assessment of the Coolidge administration and the integrity of its officials.
Yet through it all, Coolidge remained popular. Perhaps more criticism might have been forthcoming had it not been blunted by the president's double-edged appeal -- to the business and advertising community, on the one hand, and to modest, quiet-living citizens on the other. In the midst of excess and hype, Coolidge's palpable reserve, frugality and personal rectitude, his association with familiar older values, exerted a calming influence and seemed to make consumerism safe. Samuel Strauss, writing in his own journal of opinion, The Villager, speculated repeatedly about Coolidge's evident popularity despite the fact that the thrifty values he represented were not those by which the economy kept growing or most citizens lived. (DETAIL NOTE Samuel Strauss)
Strauss was also particularly noted for his more broad-ranging critiques, focusing particularly those on the materialism of 1920s society. From time to time, in addition to essays in The Villager on President Coolidge and the consumer economy, shopping and holidays, department stores, and Henry Ford, Strauss also wrote essays of personal reflection for The Atlantic Monthly. In the November 1924 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, he published what became his signature essay, "'Things Are in the Saddle,'" a grand meditation -- inspired by an ode by 19th century American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson -- on the empire of "things" and the ethics of "consumptionism" that Strauss felt had taken over the country. "Consumptionism" he defined as "the science of compelling men to use more and more things." Strauss was of the opinion that, despite their differences, both capitalism and socialism were moving society in the same damnable direction, in a competition to see "which can ensure the distribution of the most goods to the people." (DETAIL NOTE Samuel Strauss)
Consumer activist Stuart Chase too published critiques in the journals of opinion. "Averting Calamity," a piece on advertisers' manipulation of the consumer which Chase wrote for the February 16, 1927 issue of The Nation, concludes by lumping public relations counsels Edward L. Bernays and Ivy Lee together with ad man Bruce Barton in a sardonic allusion to Barton's 1925 best-seller, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (not included in our collection), a retelling of the life of Jesus Christ as the first business executive and super-salesman. (INTRO NOTE Advertising) "And so, happily, the consumer may forever cease from buying what he freely wants; and the Kingdom of Heaven of the Salesman will come upon earth. High on the awful steps, above the Angel Gabriel himself, in morning dress, their honest faces transfigured with pleasure in a work well done, will sit Mr. Bruce Barton and Mr. Ivy Lee." (INTRO NOTE Spirituality)
Additional opposition to advertising and promotion practices appears in many other sources in Coolidge-Consumerism, among them the November 1923 issue of Forum, containing an attack on "The Billboard Curse"; the September 1924 issue of Forum, with an attack on aggressive subway advertisements; the January 1928 issue of Forum, containing the debate, "Are We Debauched by Salesmanship?", in which one of the debaters is Stuart Chase; the March 1928 issue of Atlantic Monthly, with "Caveat Emptor?", warning of the tricks of super-salesmanship and hyper-advertising; and the March 6, 1929 issue of The Nation, where in "Publicity Gone Mad" Sinclair Lewis rages against public relations professionals in politics, product advertising for Lucky Strikes cigarettes, Ponds cold cream, and auto bodies by Fisher, publicity hounds mobbing public figures such as Charles Lindbergh, and his, Sinclair Lewis's own, experience with companies trying to sell products through famous-author testimonials.
Author Stuart Chase, in addition to being one of the age's staunchest consumerism critics, in 1929 co-founded Consumers Research Inc., a consumer testing and watchdog organization that was the ancestor of today's Consumers Union. Selections from Chase's papers in Coolidge-Consumerism include a Memorandum Establishing the Consumers Foundation, which become Consumers Research, Inc., and the immensely influential expose Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar (1927), which started the ball rolling for the consumer protection movement. (DIRECTORY NOTE Stuart Chase)
Another kind of protest against the mass-consumer society was registered by the National Consumers League, which was concerned most directly with protecting workers who manufactured goods for consumers under exploitative, unsafe, or unsanitary working conditions. (DIRECTORY NOTE National Consumers League Papers) The circle connecting workers and consumers was closed when unsanitary conditions for workers potentially resulted in an unhealthy consumer product, as illustrated by the League's muckraking expose, Behind the Scenes in Candy Factories (1928). Attempts to educate women to exert their consumer purchasing power by refusing to buy goods manufactured under poor working conditions are documented by National Consumers League selections Consumer Labels and Labeling and Honest Cloth.
League material on "honest cloth" is part of an attack on fraudulent labeling and advertising of wool and wool clothing. (DETAIL NOTE Truth-in-Fabric) The General Collections monograph Truth in Fabric and Misbranding Bills. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, United States Senate (1924) documents the struggle on the legislative front.
Dr. Harvey Wiley's Letter to President Coolidge on Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Laws to Protect Consumers, with accompanying material, preserved in the papers of his wife, Wiley, also contributed to the body of criticism during the period. (DIRECTORY NOTE Wiley Papers) Dr. Wiley's letter and administration responses were put before the public, in condensed form, in two parts, beginning in the September 1925 issue of Good Housekeeping Magazine (not included in the collection) and concluding in the February 1926 issue, which is included in the collection. Harvey accused the government of putting consumers at risk through lax enforcement of the pure food and drug laws that he had fought to make a reality two decades earlier. (DETAIL NOTE Dr. Harvey Wiley)
The monograph Designation of Quality of Canned Goods. Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry United States Senate (1929) shows that there was subsequent controversy regarding the food-related issue of false or confusing labeling of canned goods.
The "Truth in Advertising" movement and the Better Business Bureau, developments within the advertising industry itself, further support the impression that consumers faced a state of affairs from which they needed protection. The June 1925 issue of Associated Advertising carries an article on the truth-in-advertising movement of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, which gave rise to the National Better Business Bureau (replacing the National Vigilance Committee) and a speech by Commerce Secretary Hoover, "Truth-in-Advertising Work is Achieving a Notable Success," which concerns the need for the advertising industry to monitor itself by erecting ethical standards and ideals, "exercising censorship over extravagant, distasteful and misleading copy."
Moreover, despite what is implied in the journals of opinion pieces about how widespread the consumerist ethos is, not all sectors of the population were able to participate fully in the consumer economy, and this reality generated criticism on yet other fronts. Among those whose participation in the consumer economy was effectively hobbled were the financially pressed farmers, white and black, and others in rural areas; and low-income families in the cities, including many African Americans and immigrants.
Stuart Chase's Prosperity: Fact or Myth? (1929), written before the collapse of the stock market, challenges some of the assumptions about the prosperity of the decade. The editorial "Equality for Agriculture" in the February 1926 issue of The Country Gentleman conveys the sentiments of farmers angry that they could not consume at the same level as industrial workers. Readers should also consult the Coolidge Papers case file
In his 1934 critique, Our Master's Voice: Advertising (not included in this collection), James Rorty observes that some seventy five percent of the American population in 1925 had incomes below the level at which advertisers deigned to notice them. "The poor, those having incomes of less than $2,000 a year, constituted in 1925, seventy-seven per cent of the population. Most of them live below the minimum comfort level. . . . During our most prosperous years, from 1922 to 1929, the majority of Americans were living on less than 70 percent of the minimum health and decency budgets worked out by the United States Government bureaus. . . . This class is not of much interest to advertisers or editors. The Daniel Starch studies show that only 34 percent of the circulation of twenty women's magazines goes to this group" (p. 83). (INTRO NOTE Labor)
[Final Intro Note]
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