A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  where the display of expensive finery on the counters and its easy purchase by luxurious women had evidently played a part in her moral deterioration. Her most conscious desire was for silk underwear; at least it was the only one she seemed able to formulate! And this trivial desire, infinitely pathetic in its disclosure, told her story.

  This reaching beyond one’s social status was what Bertha Richardson called the “vulgar vanity” of the girls who were forced to work but lived to play. Leaders of the labor union that organized the shirtwaist strike were so disturbed by the finery of the strikers that they attempted to impose a limit on the amount of money that each member of the union could spend on clothes.

  Feminists were almost universally opposed to the new culture of young, working-class women. One feminist group, the New York Association of Working Girl’s Societies, counseled women to avoid lowbrow popular entertainment so “that the tone of womanhood be raised.” The group’s journal warned that young girls not “be anxious to acquire personal popularity in the work room, if the price of it be the sacrifice of purity of thought.” Some members of the NYAWG nonetheless complained of the group’s rejection of fun. One working woman noted in the journal that the group’s membership had declined and asked, “Is it not because, as our name implies, we are working girls and though desirous of mental, physical, and spiritual culture, we most need pleasant recreation?”

  At the center of the culture of leisure and pleasure were movies, amusement parks, and dance halls, three phenomena widely considered to be causes and exemplars of social disorder. The Reverend John J. Phelan of Toledo, Ohio, was one of many moral reformers who set out to study the dangers of the new fun. In 1919 Phelan conducted a survey of amusements in his city and was shocked to learn that in the downtown area alone there were “fifty-four rooms used for dancing purposes” and that they were all located “in the neighborhood of the picture houses.” The close proximity of the two types of venues was no coincidence, Phelan concluded: “From personal observation, it was noted that a hasty and promiscuous acquaintance is often made at the picture shows which later develops in patronage of these dances.” This slippery slope from movies to dance halls to sex was frequently noted by progressive and religious authorities concerned with the great numbers of young people who moved into the cities—either from rural areas or overseas—during the Industrial Revolution and especially during the military buildup of World War I. These people had left “the restraining and refining influences of the established home” and were “outside the fold.” Phelan found that because the cities lacked sufficient moral regulations, “ ‘cheap’ popular shows—in all that the name implies—and the many unsupervised and commercialized forms of amusement are greatly patronized.” The sheer numbers of potential renegades were overwhelming. In Toledo, a medium-sized city of just over 243,000 at the time, Phelan estimated “that at least 20,000 young persons live in the 300 rooming houses which are located within walking distance of the picture houses.” Most disturbing to Phelan was the report of “an authority in the business” that despite their relative poverty, “the larger part of these persons attend two or three times a week, and a considerable number, nearly every night in the week and Sundays.” Historians have found similar rates of moviegoing in Chicago and New York at the time.

  Reverend Phelan outlined an awesome number of “general dangers” at the movies, including “promiscuous mingling with undesirables,” “physical contact with the unclean,” “laxity of home-control,” “promiscuous mingling with feebleminded,” “incapacity of sustained mental application,” “creation of adult standards for immature youth,” “exaggerated viewpoints of life,” “awakening of morbid curiosity,” “lack of discrimination of what constitutes travesty and serious,” “false conceptions of sin,” “development of an abnormal imagination,” “creation of sickly sentimentalism,” “vivid portrayal of loose ethics as affecting home-ties, relation to state and society,” and “false delineation of what constitutes true Americanism.” The dangers for girls were especially acute: “It is estimated that two-thirds of the girls who appear before the Court charged with immorality owe their misfortune to influences derived directly from the movies, either from the pictures themselves or in the ‘picking up’ of male acquaintances at the theatre!”

  A REVOLUTION OF DESIRE

  In 1919, the year after the war in Europe ended, four million American workers—a staggering 22 percent of the country’s workforce—went on strike, the most ever in a single year in the United States. The immediate cause of the strikes was the government’s repeal of wartime price controls, which caused skyrocketing inflation. The strikes were so large that they shut down telephone service in New England, the police force in Boston, the fire department in Cleveland, and nearly the entire city government in Chicago. They halted almost all the railroads in the country, almost all the coal mines, the entire steel industry, and the whole city of Seattle. Many in the government believed that the strikes were led by radicals acting in concert with the Bolsheviks—the communist revolutionaries who had taken control of Russia. This belief provided the basis for what came to be called the Red Scare. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer initiated a series of mass arrests of immigrants who were suspected of being subversives. Several thousand people were detained during the Palmer raids, and some six hundred were deported back to their countries of origin. While most historians now condemn the Red Scare as an unwarranted attack on civil liberties, there is nonetheless wide agreement that most of the strikes of 1919 were, in fact, led by radicals. Some scholars even argue that the great strike wave was a moment of revolutionary, anticapitalist potential in the United States. Yet there is far more evidence that the strikes of 1919 were part of the emerging mass consumer culture than they were a move against capitalism.

  Though many labor leaders were radical anticapitalists, only a tiny fraction of the rank and file was associated with a left-wing organization. Virtually all the strikes of 1919, even the few that were led by radical labor leaders, were carried out to demand higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, or union recognition—and nothing else. Not one significant strike was carried out by workers with the goal of taking control of their industry. In fact, one would be hard pressed to identify a strike in 1919—or any strike in the United States in the twentieth century—that was not for the so-called bread-and-butter objectives of more money and less work. In other words, the so-called Red strikes were more likely an effort by millions of ordinary people to improve their material lives—to make more money so they could spend more money, and to work less so they could enjoy, among other things, the new pleasures available with that money.

  Indeed, several magazines and newspapers specifically blamed working-class consumption for the labor upheavals that were taking place. A writer for Harper’s argued that because of the scarcity of labor during the war, workers had become “so pampered, so flattered, so kow-towed to,” and that after the war they were “demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the luxuries … [They want] motor-cars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy rides.” Albert Atwood, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, announced that workers “are today gratifying wants long felt and never before possible of realization.” He criticized working-class people, but especially women and African Americans, for their attempts to live above their station. Atwood mocked factory girls and black workers who bought fancy clothes without asking about the price. Ordinary laborers refused to invest in worthwhile things, he said, and instead put their money “into mere show, into clothes, diamonds, and the like.” Many commentators after the war, including Attorney General Palmer, argued that instilling frugality into the minds of working people would stop the strikes and social unrest that threatened the nation’s security.

  THE CUSTOMER IS QUEEN

  Most historians of the “consumer revolution” argue that it came from above, directed from the offices of advertising agencies. The standard story
is that advertisers created desires and invented false needs in the minds of consumers. They seized consumers’ minds, established “cultural hegemony,” and were nothing less than the “captains of consciousness,” according to the title of one of the leading histories of the advertising industry.

  However, in the eighteenth century, the first mass marketers of consumer goods understood that to be successful meant to treat the “consumer as king”—or, more precisely, as queen. Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley, the first manufacturers of pottery and among the first capitalists to seek broader markets for consumer products, acknowledged to each other that they could not allow their own tastes to determine what they produced. When Wedgwood found that a particular vase which he thought unattractive was widely popular, he did not hesitate to mass produce it. “I do not see any beauty in it but will make something of it,” he told Bentley. To guide their production, Wedgwood and Bentley spent as much time as possible in their London shop, observing what customers purchased and asking them their opinions. According to business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk, the partners “acknowledged consumer sovereignty and crafted a strategy aimed at meeting demand, rather than shaping it.” They “perfected techniques that registered the nuances of consumer taste and channeled this information into the factory’s design shops.” At first responding only to the preferences of the London elite, Wedgwood and Bentley found that the principle of consumer sovereignty applied to the lower classes as well. Rather than seeking to dictate taste to “the Middling Class of People,” the pair acknowledged that “Their character is established” and would only “buy quantitys” of products that they already knew they liked. By the end of the eighteenth century, this strategy made Wedgwood the best-selling pottery line on both sides of the Atlantic. Similarly, Frederick Hurten Rhead, one of the leading Anglo-American potters of the early twentieth century, learned that only consumers, and not style experts, could “tell the manufacturer what to make.”

  In the 1920s, what Nation’s Business called the “economic necessity” of “fact finding” compelled the creation of the audience survey. Procter & Gamble pioneered the method by sending questioners door-to-door in neighborhoods across the country, keeping track of the number of items returned, and interviewing shoppers about their likes and dislikes. The company would not launch a product that had not gone through rigorous vetting with consumers. Paul T. Cherington, research director of the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm, said in 1931, “the consuming public imposes its will on the business enterprise.” The company promised to get “the facts from the real consumer.” The central problem for any business, according to Cherington, was to understand the “fussy and troublesome ideas” that consumers had about particular products. The most successful enterprise would attempt not to manipulate but “to please and satisfy the public.” To Cherington, the consumer held “the balance of power” in the marketplace, and “the measure of the manufacturer’s or merchant’s skill” was the extent to which it knew and satisfied the consumer’s desires.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, every major business that catered to consumers was conducting market research surveys to find out what they wanted, then producing it as soon as they could. Ordinary Americans with new, extraordinary desires were voting with their feet and their hard-earned money every day, electing new lives for themselves and a new way of life for everyone.

  Anyone who believes that advertisers control consumers need only be told a few names: Tucker, Henry J., Ford, Edsel, Mercury Park Lane, Studebaker, Wagonaire, Lincoln Blackwood, AMC Marlin, Buick Reatta, and Eagle Premier. These were among many automobiles that were marketed strenuously by their manufacturers but quickly discontinued due to weak sales. Moreover, of the 30,000 new products introduced in grocery stores after 1960, more than 80 percent were pulled from the shelves by 1980. In the 1980s, consumers rejected even more products. Of the 84,933 grocery store products introduced after 1980, fully 86 percent did not survive to 1990. And ask any Hollywood executive how easy it is to please the customer. There have been thousands of big-budget, highly advertised films that lost millions for studios. Indeed, it has been estimated that at least 80 percent of Hollywood productions have lost money, while many have lost fortunes.

  No less an authority than Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, spoke to the inability of Hollywood to control its audience. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1916 on the moral content of his films, Laemmle reported that he had sent a survey to twenty-two thousand theater owners titled “What Do You Want?” The studio chief said that he expected 95 percent of the respondents to ask for clean and wholesome films, but “instead of finding 95 percent favoring clean pictures, I discovered that at least one-half, or possibly 60 percent, want pictures to be risqué, the French for smutty… . They found their patrons were more willing to pay money to see an off-color than a decent one.” Because “one after another [theater owner] said that it would be wise to listen to the public demand for vampire pictures,” Laemmle argued that film producers could not be the “guardian of public morals.”

  From early in the history of American marketing, producers understood that, in the words of the advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink in 1929, “The proper study of mankind is man, but the proper study of markets is woman.” This was especially true in the burgeoning markets for fun. Several historians have shown that the early motion picture industry was driven largely by female consumption. According to historian Nan Enstad, “during the same years that working women went on strike in unprecedented numbers, they were creating a motion picture ‘craze’” when “neighborhood theaters, called nickelodeons, boomed after 1905.” Though women possessed far less money and had far fewer opportunities for leisure than men, they comprised nearly half of movie audiences in the early years of the motion picture industry. Consequently, producers increasingly geared their films to female audiences, including “a long line of motion picture serials featuring female heroines” such as the long-running and enormously popular series What Happened to Mary and Hazards of Helen.

  Working-class women flocked to amusement parks as well and helped make them the living symbols of the end of the Victorian age. “Coney Island in effect declared a moral holiday for all who entered its gates,” the historian John Kasson has written. “Against the values of thrift, sobriety, industry, and ambition, it encouraged extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry.” At first catering to a “sporting” male subculture in the 1870s—with venues for horse racing, prizefighting, and prostitution—by the end of the nineteenth century, newly liberated working-class women made Coney Island their own. To cater to what was becoming the resort’s most ardent patrons, proprietors built dancing pavilions up and down the boardwalk. These open-air dance halls became the scene of “thousands of girls who are seized with such madness for dancing that they spend every night in the dance halls and the picnic parks,” as one observer put it.

  The mostly female crowds that flocked to the dancing pavilions drove the rapid growth of Coney Island at the turn of the century, spurring the construction of amusement parks to lure in the throngs. Three parks—Dreamland Park, Luna Park, and Steeplechase Park—catered to the new sexual culture of New York’s working girls. Rides at the amusement parks “encouraged closeness and romance” by deliberately jostling patrons so as to cause patrons to bump into one another. The Barrel of Love, a revolving drum at Steeplechase Park, went even further by tumbling riders on top of one another. Other rides, such as the Canals of Venice and the Tunnel of Love, simply sent patrons into dark passageways. Without a population of women wishing for such encounters and willing to experience them in public, Coney Island and American amusement parks as we know them would not have existed. As Kathy Peiss puts it, “the desires of such working women as Agnes M., who loved to dance, see the men, and have a good time, shaped the emergent mass culture.”

  The generation of working-class women who drove the American revolution of leisure and ple
asure overcame the opposition of protective parents who didn’t want them to work outside the home or have their own money. They broke through the common belief that women seeking pleasure in public spaces were immoral and degenerate. And they simply ignored the Puritan and Victorian proscriptions against “indolence,” “extravagance,” and “dissipating luxury.” They created the weekend, and for this alone, they should be considered national heroes. But they accomplished something even more phenomenal. Against all odds, they created American fun.

  10

  HOW GANGSTERS MADE AMERICA A BETTER PLACE

  Imagine an America without jazz. Imagine an America in which alcohol is still illegal. Imagine an America without Broadway, Las Vegas, or Hollywood. Imagine an America in which all gays and lesbians are in the closet. All you have to do is imagine American history without organized crime.

  WORST PLACES, BEST MUSIC

  As we have seen, the first members of the Sicilian mafia to emigrate to the United States arrived in New Orleans in the 1860s. By the 1880s, some three hundred mafiosi controlled substantial portions of the city’s economy, most significantly the many brothels, saloons, and nightclubs that defined New Orleans as the pleasure capital of the South. Several historians have argued that it was precisely the gangsters’ disregard for social norms that made them the most likely to enter illicit economies. Indeed, by the turn of the century, when respectable Americans shunned jazz as black and criminal jungle music but many at the lowest orders of society—mostly black and Italian dockworkers along the Mississippi waterfront—nonetheless demonstrated a willingness to pay to hear and dance to it, New Orleans gangsters happily made it their business. We have seen that Italian Americans were among the first to play the music, and also that the first buildings in which jazz was played professionally—brothels in the Storyville district near the French Quarter—were owned by Sicilian mobsters. In 1917 a teenaged Louis Armstrong received his first wages for playing the trumpet at a tavern owned by Henry Matranga, leader of the Matranga family and arguably the most powerful criminal in the early-twentieth-century United States. According to Armstrong, Matranga disregarded the color line as blithely as he ignored other social mores. “He treated everybody fair, and black patrons loved him very much.” Armstrong and the other black inventors of jazz such as Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, and King Oliver also received their early pay from George Delsa, manager of Anderson’s Rampart Street cabaret, one of the first clubs to feature jazz, who used his Mafia connections to protect the club and the prostitutes who worked there from the police.