The Making of European Consumption

Facing the American Challenge

P. Lundin, T. Kaiserfeld, P. Lundin, T. Kaiserfeld

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137374035
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137374042
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

American ideals and models feature prominently in the master narrative of post-war European consumer societies. This book demonstrates that Europeans did not appropriate a homogenous notion of America, rather post-war European consumption was a process of selective appropriation of American elements.

1

Negotiating American Modernity in Twentieth-Century Europe

Mary Nolan

Throughout the twentieth century, America presented itself to the world as the model of economic modernity. Europeans—from Britain to Russia, from Sweden to Italy—contended with America’s ideological claims and material goods. America represented stunning economic prowess (the Great Depression notwithstanding); pioneering models of capitalism (from Fordism to the IT economy to the most recent model, financialization); and innovative technology and managerial practices. For Europeans, this aroused both admiration and anxiety, often simultaneously. Initially, Europeans regarded the mass consumption of cars, appliances, and televisions as economically impossible and culturally undesirable. But these commodities spread rapidly after the Second World War, first in Western Europe and later and more partially in the East. So, too, did computers, cell phones, and iPods later in the century. American mass culture—from Hollywood movies and TV programs to jazz, rock, and rap, as well as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s—was embraced by many Europeans, especially the young. Others in Europe condemned American mass culture as morally corrosive, politically dangerous, and threatening to their national identity.

Europeans were contending with elements of the American consumption regime, with Fordist mass production, and with ideologies of productivism and consumer choice. But did Europeans’ attraction to, aversion to, and appropriation of American elements create a recognizably Americanized Europe? And what, indeed, do we mean by that elusive term? Americanization refers to the adoption of American forms of production and consumption. It also refers to technology and techniques of management, political ideas, and social policies; high- and mass-cultural goods and institutions, gender roles, and leisure practices. Americanization encompasses how such borrowings were selectively appropriated and negotiated—how they functioned and acquired particular meanings. Americanization was (and is), in turn, shaped by the images and discourses that present America as a—if not the—sterling example of economic, social, and cultural modernity. Americanization, whether real or imagined, anticipated or dreaded, was central to European–American relations in the twentieth century. It was what American business and government sought to export; it fostered concrete images and practices that Europeans used to debate modernity. Many narratives have analyzed the penetration of American capital, goods, ideas, and practices in Europe. Some of these narratives are celebratory, others critical of America; some posit an empire by invitation while others emphasize cultural imperialism. But virtually all narratives assume the one-way movement of consumer technologies from west to east and measure Europe in terms of its proximity to American practices and values.¹ This is one assumption that the authors of this volume seek to revise.

In fact, ideas, techniques, and products did not flow only from the United States to Europe—not even in the classic “American Century” from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, when American economic might and political influence were greatest. Europeans drew on both rich national traditions and shared European discourses when discussing economy, culture, design, and domesticity. America was neither the only referent nor always the most important, and European commodities and cultural goods moved around the continent along multiple east–west and north–south trajectories. Rather than either enthusiastically receiving or sullenly resisting American elements, the European stance was far more nuanced. Specifically, Europeans debated, negotiated with, and altered the economic and cultural forms and norms that the United States established—and often sought to impose.

This was a complex circulation of cultural norms, economic models, goods, and people. The spread of these elements took place across national borders, the Atlantic, and the Iron Curtain. This created hybrid values, products, and processes rather than simply reproducing America in Western Europe and creating envy of it in Southern Europe and the communist east. American economic and cultural influence was always partial and contested; Americanization and anti-Americanism accompanied and constructed one another in ever-changing ways. Becoming modern—and European economies and ways of life became dramatically more modern after 1945—did not mean becoming Americanized. Various components of modern life—mass production; a Fordist consumption regime; mass culture; and commoditized, technology-based domesticity—emerged at varied rates across Europe. But these components were shaped as much, if not more, by national traditions, distinctive economic conditions, political systems, and emerging shared European values than by America. The United States offered inspiring visions of affluence but it was Europeans who constructed the specific forms of mass production and consumption, the meanings assigned to them, and the contexts in which they were embedded. Different European countries developed hybrid models of modernity and ways of living over the twentieth century. And these models came to look more like one another than like the American model, which so many Americans regarded as superior and destined to triumph.

Americanization and alternative modernities can be studied through many products and processes, ranging from motorization and management to mass media. Domestic consumption, to borrow Gary Cross’s term, or consumer domesticity—the label preferred by others—is my entry point in this chapter. It refers to both the household consumption of foods, appliances, radios, and televisions, which America pioneered, and to models of domesticity, with their underlying assumptions about family, gender, and sexuality.² Architecture and housing policy will also be considered, for they significantly shaped the kinds of domestic consumption that evolved in Europe and America.

Domestic consumption loomed large in the economic exchanges, cultural competition, and political conflicts between the United States and Europe from the early twentieth century. This was the time when modern, rationalized, appliance-filled homes emerged as a middle-class privilege in America; the pattern persisted through the post-Second World War household modernization and the kitchen debates. The single-family apartment or house—and the technologically modern kitchen—were seen as the creator, the experiential center, and the symbol of prosperous, efficient, hygienic, and commoditized living that would transform women, promote new forms of family life, and legitimate very different social orders. They were integral parts of the political project of social democratic, conservative, and communist states. Modernity found its everyday habitus in the home and domestic consumption.³

Yet modern homes, appliances, and design choices took distinctive forms in Europe and America. European products, practices, and ideologies drew on national traditions of architecture and design; on the input of national professional groups; on women’s associations; as well as on international influences. American influences were significant but not hegemonic. Domestic consumption was shaped by different social policy regimes and gender norms. In Western Europe, the production and consumption of washing machines, refrigerators, electric stoves, vacuum cleaners, and TVs fueled economic growth while transforming family life, expectations, and identities. In the communist east, the pursuit of consumer domesticity proved a source of unending, intractable problems. Europe’s domestic consumption regimes, whether successful or failed, were not simply robust or pale imitations of America. In terms of the timing and scale of domestic consumption, the design choices, and the role of the state, European countries, both east and west, shared more with one another than with the United States.

Before the First World War: Domestic Consumption and Images of Modernity

Factories, skyscrapers, railroads, steamships, and automobiles symbolized modern production and ways of living before the First World War; the home was neither a key site nor an alluring symbol of modernity. Of equal importance, most Europeans did not regard American domesticity as worthy of emulation, even though they purchased American products, such as Singer sewing machines, Heinz ketchup, and Kodak cameras.⁴ Anxious middle-class British observers feared that American products were invading everyday life. In 1902, Fred McKenzie lamented that:

The average citizen wakes in the morning at the sound of an American alarm clock; rises from his New England sheets, and shaves with his New York soap, and a Yankee safety razor. He pulls on a pair of Boston boots over his socks from West Carolina, fastens his Connecticut braces, slips his Waterbury watch into his pocket and sits down to breakfast. Then he congratulates his wife on the way her Illinois straight-front corset sets off her Massachusetts blouse, and begins his breakfast at which he eats bread made from prairie flour,...tinned oysters from Baltimore, and a little Kansas City bacon...The children are given Quaker Oats.⁵

Consumer durables were notably absent from his list. William Stead, who coined the phrase “Americanization of the world” at the turn of the century, worried more about American market competition and imperial aspirations than new models of domestic consumption.⁶ The Germans and the French were not troubled by similar concerns about American economic products and processes.

There were several reasons for this. Quantitatively and qualitatively, the gap between European and American consumption was not as great before the First World War as it became thereafter. Industrialization, urbanization, rising real incomes, and expanded trade transformed consumption in similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans and Americans purchased an increasing amount of food and clothing on the market, and people moved around by mechanized public transportation or bicycle. Working-class women prepared dinners on gas cookers, and they and their middle-class counterparts could choose from a growing array of canned goods. Tea, cocoa, and coffee; sugar and bananas; rubber and cotton; and a variety of tropical oils were widely consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. The sewing machine, used both for family needs and earning income, spread across America and Europe. Americans consumed more of many types of goods than did Europeans and certainly prided themselves unequivocally about so doing, yet the industrialized parts of Europe did not live in a radically different consumption regime.⁷

To be sure, Americans did excel at motorization. In 1913, Great Britain had 106,000 cars; France, 91,000; Germany, 61,000; and Italy, 22,000. By contrast, the United States had 1,190,000 cars.⁸ Automobiles were a harbinger of the new form of American mass production that would catapult America far ahead of Europe after the First World War and put household consumer durables at the center of a new consumer economy. This new economy would encompass rural as well as urban households; all classes, but not all races, would participate.

Before 1914, however, class and geography exerted the strongest influence on consumption. Bourgeois consumption on both sides of the Atlantic bore many resemblances, for the middle classes traveled, read about other countries, and emulated the styles, cuisines, and furniture they encountered.⁹ Working-class consumption was very sensitive to income, but everywhere mixed a large dose of necessities with as much fashion and entertainment as possible. Everywhere men had more access to discretionary income and consumption possibilities than women. Rural areas, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe and the American South, were largely excluded from this new consumption regime, although sewing machines were purchased surprisingly widely.

Goods produced in America or sold by American firms were not necessarily coded as American. Mona Domosh notes that in Imperial Russia the Singer man on horseback, selling sewing machines and collecting installment payments, was “a common, everyday sight,” and there were Singer shops in towns, large and small. Yet, “in many cases, the fact that the product was American—whatever that meant—was not part of the conversation. Many of the machines were produced in Russia at Singer’s factory in Podolsk, just outside Moscow. Although decorated with the Singer logo, these machines were stamped with the Kompaniya Singer mark and were sold by Russian agents.” The agents, in turn, were supervised by Germans, Englishmen, or ethnic minorities from Russia.¹⁰ Even when goods were identified as American, they were often used in distinctive ways and carried different cultural meanings. American goods did not create homogeneous consumers and consumer cultures in Europe any more than they did at home.

Goods were sold in similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic. The late nineteenth century saw the development of department stores, with European ones modeling themselves on the pioneering Parisian Bon Marché rather than on those in New York or Boston. These “cathedrals of consumption,” however, accounted for only a small proportion of sales. Mail-order sales were more popular. Sears and Roebuck was the largest and most famous catalogue company, but the French Bon Marché sent out 1.5 million catalogues in 1894 and even Moscow’s Muir and Mirrielees department store had a mail-order business. Although new forms of marketing garnered the most attention, the traditional small store, where goods were displayed behind the counter and purchases negotiated with the owner or employee, continued to predominate. What Victoria de Grazia labeled the Fordist mode of distribution, with mass-produced and widely advertised goods sold in self-service stores, was emerging but not yet triumphant in America and scarcely present in Europe.¹¹

European domestic consumption was not Americanized, although American domestic consumption was becoming globalized. In 1914, the United States exported $2.4 billion in goods, but imported $1.9 billion, and many of these imports reshaped everyday life. Women decorated their homes with orientalist motifs; immigrants brought their own foods with them; and cookbooks and women’s magazines introduced middle-class housewives to such exotic foods as Hun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Negotiating American Modernity in Twentieth-Century Europe
• 2 Americanization as Creolized Imaginary: The Statue of Liberty During the Cold War
• 3 Forging Europe’s Foodways: The American Challenge
• 4 Tackling Norwegian Cold: The Breakthrough of Home Freezing
• 5 Americanization and Authenticity: Italian Food Products and Practices in the 1950s and 1960s
• 6 Love and Hate in Industrial Design: Europe’s Design Professionals and America in the 1950s
• 7 Confronting the Lure of American Tourism: Modern Accommodation in the Netherlands
• 8 Exploring European Travel: The Swedish Package Tour
• 9 Coping with Cars, Families, and Foreigners: Swedish Postwar Tourism
• Select Bibliography
• Index