The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
also absorbed in investment aimed at technological innovation, such as radios, motion pictures, rayon, chemicals, aviation, mechanical refrigeration, and the power laundry. All this activity came full circle to more construction of industrial and commercial structures, from factories to movie palaces to service stations. As Corey noted, the expansion of new or relatively new industries was especially significant because it required greater levels of capital investment than similar expansion in older industries.23
Driving all this was the capitalist imperative to continuously expand production, increase productivity, and create a standard of wages based on factory discipline that turned workers into consumers. Two ways to achieve these ends lay in the systematic organization of mass production and a “scientific” approach to industrial management. The first, known as Fordism because it flowed from the pioneering approach to auto production by Henry Ford, involved the division of assembly-line processes performed by workers engaged in successive stages of the manufacturing process. Based on the rational use of labor operating in systemic cohesion, production became as interchangeable as the different parts of the commodities produced, and like the parts just as easy to replace.24 But Fordism established more than a new organization of work. It was also, as the historian Michel Beaud succinctly described it,
a new model for producing the capitalist commodity (with relatively high wages for a fraction of the working class, and a strong increase in productivity due to mass production and rationalization), and a new model for realizing the value thus created (with development of mass consumption, which spread to part of the working class, whose conditions of living approached those of the middle strata).
No one saw this more clearly than Ford himself, whose managers systematized production by stationing workers on the assembly line, because, as Ford noted, “walking is not a remunerative activity” and because even the “most stupid man” could learn his one defined task in a couple of days. In 1926, 79 percent of the workers in all of Ford’s factories went through less than a week of training. But for this level of skill, Ford began paying his workers $5 per day and lowered the working day from nine to eight hours. The daily wage continued to go up, to $6 in 1919 and $7 in 1929.25
As Fordism became the norm in mass production, industrialists recognized the need for a more disciplined worker who had a better grasp of the job and therefore was more capable of adhering to the dictates of “scientific management.” This approach, according to the historian Tom Kemp, was implicit in the ideas of “Taylorism,” which sought to give management undisputed control over the workplace and consequently the leverage it believed it needed to mitigate the influence of unions and the tendency of workers to control their own labor processes. According to Kemp, these efforts did not entirely succeed. “Workers did not give up trying to enforce their concept of work.”26
The benefits derived from these rational approaches to production made U.S. corporations like Ford, DuPont, and General Electric global models of capitalist enterprise. Turning the least skilled worker into a highly efficient cog in the wheels of production was no mean accomplishment, especially if it justified paying higher wages just so the worker could buy what he made. In the end, however, industrial capitalist ownership reaped the benefits of rising productivity. According to George Soule, output per man-hour in industrial production grew 32 percent from 1923 to 1929, which resulted in lower labor costs but not higher wages. Instead, for much of the decade, the biggest rise in income from productivity increases went to stockholders, whose dividends rose to 65 percent by 1929.27 The rich got richer. But the disparity carried ominous consequences for the future, though hardly anyone cared.
Meanwhile, U.S. capitalism pumped out capital and consumer goods at unprecedented levels. Rising exports created a big trade surplus. U.S foreign investment rose dramatically. By 1929, U.S. industry was producing one-quarter of the world’s goods and 40 percent of all manufactured items.28 Exports increased from $3.9 billion to almost $5.4 billion from 1922 to 1929, as U.S. companies went beyond their traditional European markets to Africa and South America where the increase was roughly 130 percent. Imports also grew from $3.2 billion to $4.5 billion. By and large, the figures show an impressive trade surplus and balance of payments.29
SALESMANSHIP AND ADVERTISING IN THE SPECTACLE OF ABUNDANCE
If the volume of goods produced by American capitalists between 1922 and 1929 was unprecedented, so was the means by which it was marketed. No longer was it sufficient to present an item for sale, promote its usefulness, and then take the order. Salesmen going door to door needed thinkers back in the office, whose mission was to determine how to persuade the consumer to buy even if the item was not needed just so the bosses could stay ahead of the constant worry of too much product in backroom storage or the large warehouse. Market imperatives to sustain profits required a qualitatively new approach. As never before, wrote journalist Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, business in the 1920s had recognized that continuous prosperity depended on the consumer “to buy and buy lavishly”:
The whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super-heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its outlet. The salesman and the advertising man held the key to this outlet. As competition increased their methods became more strenuous. No longer was it considered enough to recommend one’s goods in modest and explicit terms and to place them on the counter in the hope that the ultimate consumer would make up his mind to purchase. The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying,—“to break down consumer resistance.”30
For the salesmen—women were conspicuously absent from their growing ranks—this meant big changes. For one thing, salesmanship now depended on a growing arsenal of marketing tools, from neon signs to slick deliveries aimed at manipulating consumer needs. Psychologists took care of that. Salesmen learned to sell themselves more effectively so they could sell more product. Gadgets and mind-altering messages aimed at convincing the consumer to buy things that made his or her life easier, or to make them more personally appealing, or to make an ordinary man feel like a millionaire altered the mind of the salesman as well. To sell the commodity by selling himself made him a model citizen whose thinking and existence, his self-identity, was supposed to mirror the ideal market he lived for and sustained.
Such was the world of George F. Babbitt, the eponymous protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel whose daily existence as the consummate salesman was as packaged as the world of commodities surrounding him. A real-estate broker who lived and worked in the fictitious midwestern city of Zenith—the literary counterpart to Warren Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio—Babbitt awoke each morning at precisely 7:20 to “the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial.” As a respected businessman in the city, Babbitt lived up to the virtues of his trade “as the servant of society,” finding homes for families and shops for businessmen by demonstrating “steadiness and diligence.” He was honest, experienced in the matters of titles and leases, and had “an excellent memory for prices.” For Babbitt, this was the bottom line. No matter if “his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders.”31 For Babbitt serenely believed that
the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters’ Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker’s Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn’t you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn’t imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn’t jew you down on the asking-price.32
For Stuart Ewen, who has written masterfully on the history of public relations in the United States, George Babbitt was the ultimate