Customer to Consumer: The New Consumption in the Progressive EraAuthor(s): Susan StrasserSource: Magazine of History, Vol. 13, No. 3, The Progressive Era (Spring, 1999), pp. 10-14Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163286Accessed: 17/04/2010 14:45

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Susan Strasser

Customer to Consumer:

The New Consumption

in the Progressive Era

Sometime before 1911, an H. J. Heinz sales representative spent

a week in a Wisconsin town promoting the company's vinegar.

As Frederick W. Nash ofthe sales and advertising department told the story, no grocer in this community of about ten thousand

stocked the product. Most bought vinegar from farmers and believed

that their customers would not pay extra for vinegar with the Heinz

label. The sales representative went from door to door in the best

neighborhoods, collecting introductions from one woman to the

next. He sold nothing, but offered taste tests and compared Heinz

manufacturing techniques "with the crude and imperfect methods of

farmers." If asked, he regretfully informed his hostess that Heinz

vinegar was not for sale in her town. About fifty influential women

telephoned their grocers to complain, and the sales representative left

town with orders in hand (1). This story?possibly apocryphal?comes from a company too

successful to be typical, but it demonstrates how advertised, branded consumer goods triumphed among the middle and upper classes

during what political historians call the Progressive Era. The sales

representative was not working alone, nor was the Heinz brand new

to women wealthy enough to have telephone service. Innovative

marketing and public relations efforts had distinguished the company since before the 1893 Columbian Exposition, where it gave out a

million pickle charms. The five-hundred-person Heinz sales force

could install window and interior displays simultaneously in 25,000

stores, coordinating pyramids of mincemeat, for example, with

Thanksgiving advertising in women's magazines. Thousands of light

bulbs flashed images of gargantuan pickles over New York City and

many other towns. The Heinz factory tour attracted twenty thousand

visitors annually, and about fifteen thousand a day used the rest

rooms, toured the demonstration kitchen, and took in the stereop

ticon slide show ofthe main factory at Adantic City's Heinz Ocean

Pier during the summer (2). In going direcdy to consumers to create demand, the Wisconsin

sales representative followed the oudines ofthe strategy that underlay

all this promotional effort: creating markets for branded products. This strategy established direct relationships between manufacturers

and the end users of their products, and transformed the chain from

manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to customer. No longer might a

grocer's customers rely on his opinion about the best soap; no longer

could wholesalers look for good deals among various soap manufactur

ers. People asked for Ivory, which could only be obtained from Procter

and Gamble. Indeed, by 1909, some argued that a million dollars' worth

of advertising could not conquer the Ivory name?in essence, that Procter

and Gamble was invulnerable to competition.

Manufacturers' branding was used not only on packaged,

labeled versions of traditional goods like vinegar and soap, but as an

essential piece of the marketing strategy for new products like

chewing gum, corn flakes, safety razors, and phonographs, which had

never been made at home or in small crafts shops. Since colonial

times, wealthy urbanites had eaten from ceramics made in English

factories, and more typical Americans had bought a few manufac

tured products. But in 1880 they still grew some of their food or

bought it from the grower, and most people wore some homemade

clothing. During the next thirty years, Americans everywhere and of

all classes began to eat, drink, clean with, wear, and sit on products

made in factories. Standardized, uniform goods that cost money

supplanted the makeshift, the homemade, and the handmade,

altering fundamental ways of life.

Without land for gardens or time for handcrafts, even poor urban

workers joined an expanding market for manufactured goods. Inexpen

sive products like gum, soap, and tobacco offered premiums as part of

their marketing; working people who saved wrappers and tokens could

aspire to Kodak cameras, Gillette razors, Thermos bottles, and the lowest

priced Victrolas. Even people who lived far from stores could shop; the

Sears and Montgomery Ward catalog pictured nearly every kind of

manufactured product America had to offer.

Formerly customers, purchasing the objects of daily life in face

to-face relationships with community-based craftspeople and store

10 OAH Magazine of History Spring 1999

Strasser/New Consumption

keepers, Americans became consumers during the Progressive Era.

They bought factory-produced goods as participants in a complex

network of distribution?a national market that promoted individu

als' relationships with big, centrally organized, national-level compa

nies. They got their information about products, not from the people

who made or sold them, but from advertisements created by

specialists in persuasion. These accelerating processes, though by no

means universal, had taken firm hold of the American way of life. The emerging consumer identity was especially well established

among the middle- and upper-class people, many of them women,

who regarded what we now understand as consumer issues as

naturally allied to other progressive social and political campaigns.

Struggles over pure food and drugs, weights and measures, and retail

price maintenance were political manifestations of debates over

manufacturing interests' power as surely as discussions of trustbusting or child labor. Shop-at-home campaigns against mail order houses

used rhetoric that pitted "the people" against "big business." Yet

reformers regarded the fruits of mass production as indications of

progress no less than did their contemporaries.

Promoting New Products The transformation in American consumption habits was

planned and coordinated by an advertising industry that was itself

changing. Advertising agencies had once simply brokered advertis

ing space in magazines and newspapers. Now they took on new

roles, hiring artists and copywriters to create the advertising itself.

The most advanced agencies handled product sampling and other non

print promotions as part o{ carefully planned campaigns that used

market research to target markets segmented by ethnicity and income.

New media highlighted the new advertising. Newspapers and

magazines had long published paid commercial messages in separate

sections full of small, closely-packed ads, like classified advertising today. Now, following the lead of Cyrus Curtis's Ladies' Home

Journal and the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers, mass-circulation

publications became advertising media, supported by advertising revenues and designed to highlight the ads. Billboards, the oldest of

advertising media, were transformed by poster lithography, electric

ity, and outdoor advertising firms ensuring that posters would

actually be kept up for the amount of time paid for. Even immigrants

who did not read American newspapers and magazines saw bill

boards; they were also courted in ethnic newspapers and with cards

placed simultaneously in thousands of trolleys, in cities all over the

country, by streetcar advertising firms.

The new advertising was a response to profound changes in the

production of goods. "Continuous" or "flow" production tech

niques?conveyor systems, rollers, and gravity slides?were common

in some industries decades before Henry Ford created the assembly line for the Model T in 1913. They enabled big corporations to

expand industrial output by moving materials faster through the

factory. Many smaller firms did "batch work," making large

quantities of consumer products like fashion apparel, jewelry, and

furniture, which came in many styles and were not amenable to the

strictures of mass production. Together, batch-produced and mass

// it isn't an Eastman, it isn't a Kodak

!*? ? lot I ?*(m*? KotUk <*a. I, AkMtJO Kttn'Mdl

on the tree; then Kodak pictures of the tree; pictures of the baby, of grandmother, of the Christmas house party? alt help to keep green the Christmas memories.

Kodaks, $5.00 to $ 108.00. Brownies, $ i.OO to $9.00*

EASTMAN KODAK CO.

*??%%**_Rochester, N. Y. T*Ko?*a<r

Kodak'sadvertisinggaveinstructionsforrecognizingthephotoopportunityand

incorporatingcamerasintoholidaysandvacations. Thisadwaspublishedin1905.

(Courtesy ofthe Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 89-354.)

produced goods made in factories and available in unprecedented

numbers around the turn oi the twentieth century constituted the

material for mass consumption (3).

Many of these goods were sold at new kinds of stores. Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, modern mass retailers?first department

stores, then mail order houses and chain stores?challenged the

wholesalers and commodity dealers who had dominated distribution since mid-century. "Turnover" was the mass distributors' central

tenet, a parallel to the principles of mass production. This idea

moving goods into and out of the store quickly?was brought to its

apotheosis by the big Chicago mail order houses, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck. In 1906, Sears moved to a forty-acre tract, where

two thousand people opened and processed more than nine hundred

sacks of mail every day. Using trains and telegraphs, conveyor belts,

pneumatic tubes, and scheduling systems, the mass retailers could

coordinate the flow of goods from many producers to many consum

OAH Magazine of History Spring 1999 11

Strasser/New Consumption

ers. By 1915, the largest mail order firms kept files on four to six

million customers, tracking their purchases.

The new retailing also challenged the wholesalers' customers:

the general stores at country crossroads and the grocery, drug, and

hardware stores along small-town Main Streets and in urban

shopping districts. Credit from such stores saw farmers through

droughts and workers through strikes; their proprietors played

central roles in community life. Big manufacturers depended on

these small shopkeepers to distribute the new goods, and they

courted storekeepers as vigorously as they did consumers.

New Products, New Needs, New Habits

Turn-of-the-century products may be understood as artifacts of a

culture in the making, founded on new technologies and structured

by new personal habits and new economic forms. People who had

never bought cornflakes were taught to need them; those once

content with oats scooped from the grocer's bin were told why they

should prefer Quaker Oats in a box. Advertising, when it was

successful, created demand, but many products failed. Old-fash

ioned ways persisted; grocers who ordered packaged products also

sold in bulk. Early twentieth-century ads attempted to build consumer trust in manufacturers, but trust in local merchants still

motivated many purchases. Advertising celebrated the new, but

many people were content with the old. The most effective marketing

campaigns encouraged new needs and desires, not by creating them

out of whole cloth, but by linking the rapid appearance of new

products with the rapid changes that were occurring in all areas of

social and cultural life.

As the Heinz representative suggested, the new goods were

modern products produced by modern methods;

they provided the physical expression of a break

from earlier times and the wherewithal for modern "

habits. Packaged breakfast cereals suited urban

people seeking convenience, punching a time

clock, and not needing the calories of a country

breakfast. Fountain pens permitted people to write

anywhere. Safety razors replaced personal service

in a public place with private, individual use of a

disposable product. Cameras offered a completely

new way of viewing the world. Phonographs

brought the concert hall into the home.

In promoting such products, manufacturing

companies and their advertising agents converted

the population to the modern ways of mass produc

tion and factory-made goods, using images and

approaches that ranged from fanciful to factual.

They explicitly fostered new habits by selling

product categories along with the products. Adver

tising its patented "In-Eleanor Roosevelt-Seal" pack

aging, National Biscuit promoted the whole concept

of packaged crackers. Campbell's sold "the Soup Idea" as a company representative described its

initial advertising. Colgate taught people to brush

their teeth and (along with Gillette and other razor manufacturers)

gave away pamphlets that explained self-shaving to men who

patronized barbers. Kodak transformed an expensive and highly

technical hobby by introducing cameras that were relatively cheap

and easy to operate, and by teaching people to recognize family

photo opportunities.

Expenditures on leisure goods and activities were central to new

lifestyles. Even those without cameras patronized photo studios for

formal portraits and had their pictures taken by roving photographers

on outings to the amusement park or the beach. Amusement parks

themselves offered people of all classes an opportunity to fill their

leisure time with purchased experiences. So did movies, where for

a nickel immigrant workers could watch actors living out American

dreams, using American products. And the department store and

the mail order catalog transformed shopping into a fantasy excursion.

Progressivism and the New Consumption Belief that progress could be equated with abundant consumer

goods pervaded American culture as the diversity and quality of

manufactured goods improved, their prices dropped, and daily

physical needs were met with less drudgery. Even critics of corporate

capitalism appreciated the benefits of mass production and mass

distribution. McClures, Collier s, and other inexpensive popular

magazines?the media ofthe new advertising?were also the media of

reform: in their pages the work of muckrakers was juxtaposed with

advertisements for factory-made standardized products. Ladies'

Home Journal spearheaded the campaign for pure food and drugs, and featured columns by Ida Tarbell and Jane Addams. Both the

advertised products and the reform campaigns were manifestations

"Boy With Wheelbarrow," a 1901 National Biscuit billboard, lithographed in four colors and measuring

nine-by-fourteenfeet. In promoting the box, the company was advertising the product category,

packaged crackers, as much as its individual products. (Courtesy of the Warshaw Col lection of Business

Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 89-336.)

12 OAH Magazine of History Spring 1999

Strasser/New Consumption

of progress as turn-of-the-century Americans understood it. At the

same time, citizens?attuned to corporate greed and misdeeds by

progressive journalists and politicians?demanded protection from

the big businesses on which they were becoming dependent for

supplying daily needs.

Complaints about adulterated food were longstanding. Local

merchants could not be held accountable for food from distant

sources, and new kinds of adulteration joined such traditional

fraudulent practices as extending flour with chalk and other cheap

substances. Concerned with shelf life, manufacturers seeking

national markets promoted the development of preservatives, color

ings, and flavorings, which chemical companies tested for efficacy but not

for safety. Reformers called for legislation to establish the principle that

manufacturers could not legally sell poison and call it food or medicine. State legislatures began to regulate food and drugs during the 1880s, but the federal government had no jurisdiction over domestic food supplies until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The campaign to pass that law was championed by Ladies' Home

Journal and Collier's, by home economists who publicized pure food concerns in their classes, and by state agencies that mounted displays at food expositions. H. J. Heinz, Frederick Pabst, and other big food

manufacturers supported the legislation; plagued by proliferating state regulations, they wanted a uniform federal law. These manu

facturers argued that branded, packaged goods inherently offered

consumer protection by identifying the manufacturer and guarantee

ing consistent quality. Trade organizations representing wholesale

liquor dealers, food manufacturers, and the patent medicine inter

ests, however, opposed the bill. So did the National Association of

Manufacturers, although regulation received overwhelming support

on the floor of its 1906 convention; the leadership opposed the bill, and the organization's lobbyists worked to weaken it.

Agitation for pure foods inspired and merged with the move ment for accurate weights and measures, which achieved federal

legislation in 1913. At pure food expositions and state fairs, weights and measures proponents displayed measuring devices with false

bottoms, compared correct and incorrect sizes of milk bottles and

bushel baskets, and occasionally invited fair goers to inform on

retailers. Urban weights and measures officers raided grocery stores

and stalls in public markets. Other city officials construed their

charge as protecting both consumers and small retailers from

violations by packaged goods manufacturers who sold big boxes full of air. Speaking at a 1910 conference sponsored by the United States Bureau of Standards, a Chicago official recounted his battle to require

packaged food to carry net weights. "I lost that bill," he told the audience. "Capital was too big."

For all the might of manufacturers, the big companies involved

in distribution?wholesaling firms and mass retailers?wielded their

own power. Manufacturers attempted to establish brand loyalties

strong enough to overcome price sensitivity?belief in the qualities of

Kellogg's or Ivory that would convince customers to pay whatever

they cost. But the mass retailers countered by offering better prices

than independent merchants on branded, nationally advertised

products. Manufacturers struggled to maintain control over their

Heinz workers packing baked beans, in acompany publicity photograph. The

signs were captions for the factory tour as well as for the photo. (Library

ofCongress, USZ-62-45943#2521.)

products with "retail price maintenance" or "fair trade," a policy of

setting prices not only to wholesalers, but also to retailers and

consumers, often by printing a price on the package. This policy

disregarded the tradition that producers who sold to middlemen gave

up both title to the goods and any right to govern sales to third parties.

Opponents called it "price fixing," and it met with continual

challenge in the courts.

The new retailing also met active opposition from local business

interests. Local newspapers regularly attacked mail order houses;

small-town businessmen organized "trade-at-home" organizations.

Sears and Montgomery Ward fought back in catalog prose. "The

amount of money that we can save you over the prices you pay at

home varies from 15 to 50 per cent," Sears claimed in 1908, "to say

nothing ofthe fact that our goods are, as a rule, of a higher grade than

those carried by the average storekeeper" (4). The two sides squared

off in political battles like that surrounding the establishment of

parcel post, which passed in 1912. Yet, the local merchants should not be characterized as activists for a dying past. Organized in their

chambers oi commerce and boards of trade, they championed local

economic growth through road-building, sewer systems, train depots,

and irrigation projects. But whether or not they saw or acknowledged

it, the good roads they .promoted and the mass-merchandising

techniques they attacked were of a piece, two aspects of a transforma

tion that reverberated throughout the culture.

That transformation provides an understanding of progressiv

ism that complicates the conventional picture. Calls for reform ofthe

industrial order took place within a clear and general comprehension

of its benefits. In individual lives, new ways coexisted with old ones:

people bought some new things and not others, and they set their

new purchases next to their customary goods and their keepsakes.

Farmers both ordered from Sears and bartered eggs with country

storekeepers; urban workers bought goods from pushcarts as well as

department stores; immigrant cooks served both traditional foods

OAH Magazine of History Spring 1999 13

Strasser/New Consumption

and Uneeda biscuits. Still, the future was clear: young people

insisted on new levels of convenience, leisure, and material

comfort. Living through unprecedented change in the fundamen

tals of daily life for all but the poorest ofthe poor, the progressives had reason to believe in progress.

Endnotes 1. Nash's article, first published in the advertising trade journal

Printers' Ink, is reproduced in Paul Terry Cherington, Adver

tising as a Business Force: A Compilation of Experience Records

(New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company for The Associated

Advertising Clubs of America, 1913), 309-10.

2. Ibid., 308; Robert C. Alberts, The Good Provider: H. J. Heinz

and His 57 Varieties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 128-33.

3. On batch work, see Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 18654925

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On mass produc

tion, see David A. Hounshell, From the American System to

Mass Production, 18004932: The Development of Manufac

turing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1984). 4. Sears, Roebuck, and Company, 1908 Catalogue, No. 11 7: The Great

Price Maker (Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1969), 9.

Further treatment of the points in this article, and citations for

specifics not noted below, may be found in Susan Strasser, Satisfac

tion Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

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Susan Strasser is the author of Never Done: A History of American

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American Mass Market (1989), and the forthcoming Waste and

Want: Household Trash and American Consumer Culture (1999). She has taught at The Evergreen State College, Princeton University,

George Washington University, and the Bard Graduate Center for

Studies in the Decorative Arts.

This was oneof"McGuire's Anti-Mail-Order Cartoons," a series of magic-lantern slides copyrighted in 1914 for use in trade-at-home presentations. (Library of

Congress).

14 OAH Magazine of History Spring 1999