Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [53]
Everywhere there were what the Lynds described as “new urgent occasions for spending money.” No one owned a radio in 1920; a decade later, 40 percent of all households had one. President Harding installed the first radio in the White House in February 1922. Over four million sets, at a cost of about $100 each, were sold between 1922 and 1925.
Installment-buying and new methods of providing credit removed the stigma from debt and allowed people to spend well beyond their incomes. By the second half of the 1920s, an estimated 15 percent of all retail sales were on credit. Half of household appliances and three-quarters of cars were sold on hire purchase in 1929. Accessible mortgages fueled a housing boom.
As well as more money, Americans had more leisure time. It was becoming more common to have Saturday afternoon as well as Sunday off, and many workers began to enjoy an annual two-week paid vacation. More and more people were working in offices in towns, rather than in factories or on farms, and their hours were determined by electricity rather than daylight. Between 1902 and 1929 the electric light and power industry expanded nineteen times.
The gap between people’s basic physical needs—food, shelter, clothing—and what they did to make a living grew ever wider. After a packaged breakfast cereal a typical American drove into town from his suburban home to begin work at a desk at eight-thirty rather than outside at sunrise. Families or groups of friends could now spend their electric-lit evenings playing mah-jongg (the craze of 1922), dancing to music on the radio or the gramophone, or going to the movies—all of which created a sense of belonging to a single American culture.
Following fads like mah-jongg, using new slang words or knowing the latest dance song “are absolutely necessary if one wishes to be like everyone else,” explained a college newspaper. Changes in fashion were making it harder to tell the social classes apart. Increasingly, the rich liked to look casual and approachable while the aspiring poor were spending as much as they could afford on clothing to demonstrate their social mobility.
This was a culture of extravagant consumerism as well as conformity: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture. A French professor, visiting the United States in Alexis de Tocqueville’s footsteps in 1927, observed that, “In its pursuit of wealth and power, America has abandoned the ideal of liberty to follow that of prosperity.”
In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the sociologist Thorstein Veblen had explored human acquisitive and emulative instincts, arguing that expenditure and leisure are the ways men gain and display status. Conspicuous consumption (a phrase Veblen coined) was the wasteful use of resources or money to impress others; conspicuous leisure (another Veblen phrase) the wasteful use of time to demonstrate wealth. According to Veblen’s ideas, aspiration and acquisition were unavoidable elements of the human make-up, and they were actively encouraged by the structure and ethos of 1920s society. “Everyone lives on a slope from any point of which desirable things belonging to people all the way to the top are in view,” observed the Lynds of Middletown.
Advertisers, studying the work of academics like Veblen, began educating the poorer classes to imitate the buying patterns of the richer, appealing to Americans’ newly discovered desires to be glamorous and envied. One Middletown girl stopped going to school altogether because her parents couldn’t afford what she thought were the right clothes—without which she claimed she would have been neglected by the boys and scorned by the other girls. It was typical of the period that her parents apparently accepted her argument and allowed her to drop out.