LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to a nearer realization the dreams of those Utopians who looked to the day when poverty would be banished and all men could enjoy a greater share of the good things in life.”¹² Because the “good things in life” were now broadcast, Macfadden imagined an American citizen rebuking a “Frenchman” as follows: “There are no peasants here. Our proletariat are more prosperous than your bourgeoisie.”¹³ Despite the language of economic law, classless societies, and the rising of the proletariat, True Story's “economic revolution” should not be confused with Marx's never-quite-materialized revolution. According to True Story's model, the economic revolution had already happened—albeit “without our being conscious of the fact”—and equality was a present reality rather than a motivating ideal. Macfadden himself recognized the difference: “To-day, the New World offers the spectacle of a proletariat so prosperous that the term, itself, is paradoxical.”¹⁴ With no acknowledgment of enduring inequalities, Macfadden argued that contemporary America marks “the closest approach to absolute equality that the human race or any other form of animal life has ever known.”¹⁵

      Macfadden illustrated this purported equality with the story of a certain Jim Smith. Ten years ago “any Jim Smith” working in “any American factory” came home “sour and tired,” he “joined strikes and threw brickbats.” He was unhappy, exploited, and politically active. As the reference to “brickbats” suggests, this unreconstructed Jim Smith criticized authority and “along the way,” Macfadden writes, “Coxeys and Debses sprang up.” “Then came tremendous economic change” and a corresponding “miraculous change in the life of Jim Smith.” Ten years later, his workday had been cut nearly in half, his earnings multiplied sevenfold, his body fresher, his leisure longer, his comportment more genial, and his political engagement tempered if not altogether eliminated. The new Jim Smith drives an automobile home to the suburbs, “he goes to shows, he studies, he reads and writes.” No longer the brickbat-throwing, Eugene Debs–producing agitator, the new Jim Smith “has learned moderation.”¹⁶ Like “Jim Smith,” “the Missus” had once “risked her manicure in the Monday wash tub; now she threw the switch and let George Washing Machine do it.” Likewise, the doughboy now “found that his new job paid enough to shift the family quite a bit uptown.”¹⁷

      Between the two books, there are countless “Jim Smiths,” “Missuses,” and “doughboys,” who together constitute Macfadden's “wage-earning class.” As a class, they are happy, leisured, suburban, blue-collar commuters who have been transformed by their newfound disposable income. Macfadden concludes, “A great upsurge of the common people of America has found itself on an economic level never even hoped for out of all its past.”¹⁸ And if common people are surging upward, this is a signal that the worker's labor is both intellectually and financially lucrative: “We have, in short, released labor from much of the drudgery, conserved its energy for tasks requiring higher intelligence and in effect made of each worker a foreman of mechanical forces who earns and can be paid a foreman's wages.”¹⁹

      From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that a classless society of intellectually stimulated, well-paid wage earners was a fiction designed to sell advertising. It is important to remember, however, that it was a fiction that once captivated an age. In 1926 the J. Walter Thompson Company—the “leading advertising agency in the country”—proclaimed the working class the “New National Market”: “Millions of families regarded almost as recently as a few months ago as poor prospects for many kinds of merchandise, are now the best sort of prospects.”²⁰ Likewise the Chevrolet Motor Company proclaimed in 1937 that “tens of thousand of [working-class] men on one single payroll have money for themselves and their families to spend.”²¹ Propped up by the likes massive advertising agencies and national brands like Chevrolet, the well-paid, eager-to-spend laborer proved a resilient image. The historian Lizabeth Cohen explains that while “hard times forced many Americans to struggle to find and keep work, to feed their families, and to hold on to their homes or pay their rent,” the working class was nonetheless increasingly envisioned—by themselves as much as by policy makers—as a consumer class.²² After all, as Richard H. Pells has noted in Radical Visions and American Dreams, in the 1920s “American society began to take on the look of a white-collar paradise, complete with chain stores, suburban housing booms, the dependence on recreation as an escape from work and on advertising as a guide to life.”²³ So many were taken in by these appearances that by mid-century it became almost a sociological commonplace to celebrate the death of classes in American society.²⁴ Even the New Republic—along with The Nation the leading liberal organ of 1920s America—proclaimed in 1929, “To believe that a proletarian philosophy may be brought into being in this country where the germs of class-consciousness are scarcely discernible is to submit to self-delusion.”²⁵

      The image of a spending, liberated working class may have been resilient, but historians agree that it was one-part fiction. Commenting on “True Story's version of the fate of the factory worker,” Cohen insists that “a truer story” needs to be told. Contrary to the mythology of The American Economic Evolution, Cohen argues that workers “did not enjoy nearly the prosperity that advertisers and sales promoters assumed they did.” Addressing True Story's narrative, Cohen continues, “If factory workers could have depended on these slowly rising wages from year to year and year round, they might have consumed more like Jim Smith. Instead, unemployment remained high throughout the decade, even for people with so-called steady work.”²⁶ Likewise, Richard Pells writes:

      Largely hidden from view were the more unpleasant realities of life in the 1920s, particularly the rise in technological unemployment as machines replaced men in the factory, together with the decade-long depression in agriculture, mining, and textiles. For most Americans the 1920s was a period not so much of prosperity as of sheer survival, with little money left over after the bills were paid to enjoy the party others seemed to be throwing. And as the years wore on, it became increasingly difficult for the average man to consume what the economy could produce—an ominous sign which the pitchmen of the “new era” chose to ignore.²⁷

      All ominous signs were certainly ignored by Macfadden Publications. In 86% of America and The American Economic Evolution, 1920s America was an unqualified, classless paradise.

      Although the “wage earner” was certainly fictitious, Macfadden and True Story refined this immensely popular fiction to full effect. In the pursuit of advertising dollars, the most important characteristic of the “wage earner” was his disposable income (the worker was always cast as masculine). “The real money of America has finally landed in the pockets of several million pairs of overalls,” Macfadden proclaimed.²⁸ In 1926 alone, he reported, the “wage earners” grossed $3.6 billion.²⁹ And this money did not stay overalled for long; it went straight to “radios, motor cars, and up-to-date appliances”:³⁰ “With bricklayers making $14 a day and other trades in proportion, it is easy to understand why their wives can afford to spend 41 billions of dollars a year for foodstuffs, nearly 6 billions of dollars a year for house furnishings, and proportionate amounts for other staples and moderately priced luxuries.”³¹ A True Story ad in the Chicago Tribune put it this way: “Money is everywhere. More money than America has ever known before. And more widespread. And deeper down. This present prosperity has penetrated and permeated stratum after stratum of American Society until today that great mass of millions once casually known as ‘labor’ now controls the destinies of every factory in the land.” They control the factories, not only because of “an economic equality that has never been equaled,” but also because their disposable income has provided them the purchasing power that keeps the “whir of production … at concert pitch.”³² For these reasons, the “wage earners” are “unquestionably the richest and readiest market to any manufacturer whose fortune rests on selling.”³³ In short, they are the “great consuming outlet.”³⁴

      True Story thus defined its readership as the ideal American consumer: leisured enough to desire the amenities of mass culture, moneyed enough to buy them, and temperamentally disposed not to challenge authority. That such a demographic did not in

Скачать книгу