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College Literature 32.2 (2005) 103-126 Access provided by Northwestern University Library

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Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation
Allan Johnston
As early as the 1940s, the writers of the Beat generation were starting to articulate views of postwar American society that would only reach full expression in the 1960s counterculture. While they were not so intent on defining a political or economic position as they were on escaping from one, the Beats regularly joined values of awareness with a "detachment from the existing society" (Snyder and McKenzie 1987, 11; Burroughs 1986, 15-18), while at the same time calling for an immediate release from a culture in which the most "freely" accessible itemsbodies and ideasseemed restricted. Thus they attempted to live the countercultural tendency to "tune in, turn on, drop out" and to accept the "free" (as in free love, free lunch, etc.) in a way that justifies Barbara [End Page 103] Ehrenreich's assertion that these authors presented "the first all-out critique of American consumer culture" (1983, 52). But as Gary Snyder points out, the Beats "had little confidence in transforming [society]," and so "never really articulated what [they] wanted" (Snyder and McKenzie 1987, 10-11). Paul Goodman observed that "Beat style . . . trie[d] to be an action, not a reflection or comment" (1960, 189). Consequently, Beat culture by its very nature lacked the theoretical and social underpinnings to develop the clarified economic or political oppositional stances that appeared in the 1960s counterculture. Only in retrospect, if at all, did the Beats see their lifestyle (including the alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, and petty thievery that it often involved) as a reaction against a seemingly aggressive and stifling social ethos. But the Beats shared ideas; any reader of Jack Kerouac knows the role that continuous, intense conversation played in Beat culture. The Beat "social ritual of reminiscence and retelling" (Goodman 1960, 184) guaranteed extensive interaction, even if some Beats only knew of each other through friends. These trends very possibly encouraged the development of a common pool of ideas, including ideas about economic realities, that cleared the ground for the more efficiently publicized ideas of the 1960s. The economic assumptions that evolved through this interaction, I would suggest, reflect the split in Beat thought that Gregory Stephenson isolates in Kerouac's writings. According to Stephenson, an originary "Beat condition . . . characterized by violence, desperation, confusion, and suffering" transforms into a "beatific stage . . . marked by the attainment of vision and by the communication of that vision to the human community" (1990, 3).

From this perspective, an east-coast-centered, need-focused, secular vision of economic realitiesa viewpoint most strongly brought out in the writings of William S. Burroughstransforms into a spiritualized attempt to escape from economic realities that reflects a more west-coast-centered, Buddhic-anarchic synthesis that perhaps receives its clearest philosophical expression in the writings of Kenneth Rexroth. These two perspectives create a dialectic that challenges popular economic and cultural assumptions, and the continuance of this dialectic into the 1960s and beyond forms a major part of the Beat link to the counterculture. Burroughs and especially Rexroth may not have directly inspired other Beat writers (though good evidence suggests that sometimes they did), but the dialectical interaction of their positions surfaces in the works of younger, early, east-coast Beats such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac, and starts to be transcended in the writings of Gary Snyder, who only became associated with the Beat movement after Ginsberg and Kerouac came to San Francisco in the mid 1950s. Several scholars have analyzed the social and economic forces in American life following World War Two. Martyn J. Lee describes this period [End Page 104] as involving a "foreclosure of economic contingency via a process of bureaucratic planning and calculation" (1993, 93) that developed "an economy of symbolic or cultural goods . . . aligned sympathetically with Capitalism's fundamental objective" (18). This alignment required "the agencies of capital [to] turn their attention towards . . . prevailing familial, kinship, gender" and other relations (67) to ensure the transformation of individuals into consumers. Behind much of this effort lay fear: as John Kenneth Galbraith has pointed out, "the success of the [American] economy in the years following World War II was accompanied by [a] deep uneasiness" that "industry's ideas and ideals" were engaged in an "unremitting battle against totalitarianism" and that "the people of the United States could 'be led over a bridge of socialism into a police state'" (1956, 2-3). Because this position ignored the fact that the economy was dominated by an oligopoly rather than by the competitive free-market system on which classical Capitalist theory was based, Galbraith argues, business operated under a series of misperceptions concerning the nature and vulnerability of Capitalism. Galbraith characterizes this misperception as "Depression psychosis" (63-83). Along withand perhaps also because ofthis trend, the Cold War worked to fuel the metanarratives of what Alan Nadel calls the "containment culture," encouraging an atmosphere of general tension and impelling social and consumerist conformity. The expectations resulting from this trend are epitomized by Stuart Ewen in his study of the role that advertising played in the evolution of American Capitalism. According to Ewen, in the postwar period, [c]onsumerist ideology became rampant, critical social thought became anathema. . . . The consumerized universe was . . . erected with unprecedented vigor, positing an economic nationalism which signified the inviolate sanctity of the world of goods. The definitions of "freedom" and "choice" were being unified and firmly implanted in the conception of loyal commitment to the political, religious and social arenas [of] brand names and consumer credit. . . . [T]he definition proffered by a "freedom-loving" political ideology was one in which to produce one's own world was subversive (except where it was legitimized by the "do-it-yourself" industry); to assert the idea that a community might control its own destiny was "communistic." . . . [T]o look different; to act different; to think different; these became the vague archetypes of subversion and godlessness. . . . The vision of freedom which was being offered to Americans was one which continually relegated people to consumption, passivity, and spectatorship. . . . While heralding a world of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, corporations (in concert with the state apparatus) were generating a mode of existence which was increasingly

regimented and authoritarian. (Ewen 1976, 206-15) [End Page 105] This construction of this ideological model "required an unquestioning attitude toward the uses of production . . . . [P]sychological methods attempted to turn the consumer's critical functions away from the product and toward himself" (Ewen 1976, 37). This increased self-consciousness occurred through the manipulation of what Ewen calls "social insecurity" (37), steering individuals from traditional American values of thrift and self-sufficiency toward passive excessiveness (25). Such efforts, coupled with the increasingly centralized oligopoly that gave rise to them, fostered a vision of ostensibly "happy" consumerist conformity, with definitive socio-sexual roles (male as provider, female as consumer), specific stereotypes of the "typical" family, and an aversion to social criticism or difference. While these specific postwar developments elucidate tendencies that were in operation in the immediate cultural background of the Beats, they also reflect a broader process of cultural totalization that has been underway since the Enlightenment. According to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the liberating power of reason first felt in the Enlightenment elevation of reason and science over restrictive religious dogma has turned on itself as reason, in dialectical ascendance, has itself become dogmatic and oppressive via its validation of technical efficiency over all other qualities. This domination has led to an increased commodification of existence at all levels. Viewed from this position, the Enlightenment advancement of science and rationality has created the possibility for social reorganization along lines that permit the calculation of "the most efficient means for attaining any end whatsoever" (Ingram 1990, xxii). This restructuring has led to the advancement of processes that are "essentially concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory . . . . If [reason] concerns itself at all with ends, it takes for granted that they too are reasonable in the subjective sense, i.e., that they serve the subject's interest in relation to self-preservationbe it that of the single individual, or of the community on whose maintenance that of the individual depends" (Horkheimer 1992, 35). This predominance of means-ends rationalism has promoted technological and scientific development to such an extent that life has become increasingly totalized as a series of exchange relations in which humans largely serve as means of production and consumption. As a product of mass production, culture itself becomes ensnared in "the repetitiveness, the self-sameness, and the ubiquity of modern mass culture," generating "automatized reactions [that] weaken the forces of individual resistance" (Adorno 1992, 71). This reduction of culture to "popular consumer commodity reinforces authoritarian and conformist patterns of behavior" by using "resignation, avoidance of conflict, anti-intellectualism, and stereotyping" as "familiar messages of mass culture that lend [End Page 106] themselves all too easily to political propaganda" (Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, xxiii). When these tendencies are coupled with the increased production and wealth of the postwar era, they help generate that figure of humanity that Herbert Marcuse presents in his analysis of onedimensional man, for whom "[i]ndependence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are . . . deprived of their basic critical function" by "a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying [his] needs . . . through the way in which it is organized" (1964, 1). One-dimensionality is supported by the "denatured permissiveness" that underlies "contemporary social control" and that in fact resulted from "the advent of affluence" (Roszak 1969, 111) in the postwar era. Distinctions of wealth get elided by the rising standard of living, and "domination itself [assumes] pleasurable forms" (Ingram 1990, 81-82) through processes such as "desublimation," or "[t]he integration of sex into work and consumption" in ways that "deny sexual fulfillment even while promising it" (82). The resulting "'soft' form of totalitarianism" (81) is especially noticeable in America, since American capitalism has consumed all

precapitalist sources of opposition, resulting in a closed society; "Assimilation is complete: the system 'swallows up or repulses all alternatives;' negation and criticism are reduced to cohesion and affirmation" (Martineau 1966, 78). The societal background to the Beat subculture thus supports Amiri Baraka's claim that the Beat movement involved a "distinct reaction . . . to reactionary politics, reactionary life style of American ruling class and sections of the middle class, reaction to conservatism and McCarthyism" (Baraka and Edwards 1987, 130), even while this reaction often lacked the cohesion of a direct political attack on the "soft" totalitarian system it opposed.1 Instead, it involved a desire to escape from socioeconomic conditions that the Beats felt subordinated the person to a world of consumer objects, while also suggesting a broader critique of sociocultural developments that were generating an increasingly totalitarian, commodity-driven world. In the eyes of the Beats, the society they faced was massifying and de-individualizing, while the state, the workplace, the media, and consumer culture appeared to be operating in tandem to require "conformity" at all times and in all places. The intensity of the Beat reaction to these conditions becomes clear if one examines the economic metaphor expressed as "the algebra of need" in the works of William S. Burroughs, an early mentor to Ginsberg and Kerouac. Eight years Kerouac's and twelve years Ginsberg's senior, Burroughs impressed both with his erudition when the three met in 1940s New York and formed the "basic triangular friendship [that] would be at the heart of [the Beat] movement" (Morgan 1988, 91). Burroughs's book collection had "an enormous impact on both Allen and Jack. Allen went so far as to note down a list of titles on a yellow pad" (Miles 1989, 48), while Kerouac accepted [End Page 107] Spengler's Decline of the West as a gift from Burroughs. Years later, Kerouac would write of Ginsberg that "Burroughs is his father" (1987, 101). Ginsberg himself testified at the Naked Lunch trial that Burroughs's writing "had a great deal of effect and influence" on him (Burroughs 1959, xxxii). Publicity over the trial made Burroughs an "uneasy leader" (Morgan 1988, 288) of the Beats in the mid 1960s. Describing the "algebra of need" in the "Introduction" to Naked Lunch, Burroughs establishes an interpretation of economic relations that resounds in Beat writing. Here the structure of the "many junk pyramids feeding peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly" models all economic interaction, since "[o]pium is profane and quantitative like money" (1959, xxxix). Burroughs's basic principles of monopoly are simple and straightforward: "1) Never give anything away for nothing; 2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait); 3) Always take everything back if you possibly can" (1959, xxxviii). The algebra of need, which replaces the "economic theories of capitalism's apologists [and] Marxist critics" (Skerl 1985, 38), is always degrading, and junk, the "ideal product," points to the inevitable decadence resulting from systems of supply and demand. Junk is "the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl though a sewer and beg to buy . . ." (Burroughs 1959, xxxix). It represents the fullest achievement of the "created need" that Burroughs saw as dominating society. It therefore suggests the degradation faced by individuals caught in this sort of needcentered web: "The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk" (xxxix). The algebra of need supports itself by creating dependencies, not only in its intended "victims," but also in its perpetrators. As Lupita puts it in Naked Lunch, "Selling is more of a habit than using" (Burroughs 1959, 15). Thus while Burroughs describes "a world of

manipulated needs" that "serve mainly to keep those who satisfy them in power . . . this power elite's control is far from absolute, for its members are driven by their own need to control and dominate" (Dolan 1991, 535). The needs Burroughs exposes also supersede the traditional level of commodity relations to operate in all walks of life, becoming ubiquitous in political, social, and sexual control systems as well as in biological relations and drug dependencies. This quasi-economic, quasi-biological concept thus sarcastically mirrors the "essential logic of capitalism," which Martyn J. Lee describes as entailing "a compulsion for the constant accumulation of capital, and . . . an insatiable appetite for accelerating the rate at which this accumulation occurs" (1993, 59). This effect is achieved, Lee asserts, by extending "the commodity form into previously [End Page 108] uncommodified areas of social life" through "the creation and commodification of a greater diversity of social needs" (87). For Burroughs, however, the algebra of need, which anticipates the "viral" control systems that appear in works after Naked Lunch, is "a basic formula of 'evil' virus": "The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need" (Burroughs 1959, xxxix). "Need" is evil because it generates dependency, and is viral because "[i]t can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of anotherthe renunciation of life itself" (134). Thus in moral/medical terms the contemporary state and all "major social institutions built on this cannibalistic structure are . . . viruses or cancers" (Skerl 1985, 39), as is the "word virus" Burroughs describes in the Nova trilogy as the vehicle for recreation in consciousness of dominant cultural and social ideological constructs.2 Burroughs's notorious Dr. Benway points out the cancerous nature of social institutions in his discussion of bureaucratic structures in democratic states: The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. . . . Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus. (Burroughs 1959, 134) If Benway speaks in part for Burroughs, the state is shown as "inventing needs to justify its existence" (Burroughs 1959, 134) after any initial establishment of infrastructure. This understanding recalls the "bureaucratic planning and calculation" Martyn J. Lee describes as "effectively mapped onto the physical living spaces of the everyday environment" (1993, 93). Yet though Burroughs senses the trap of these encroaching social and economic forces, he rarely suggests that there is any way to get free of controlling, systematized need. His description of it in terms of disease in fact shows the unwilled, uncontrolled nature of this 'growth,' much in the way that Frankfurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno describe the "unwilled" ascendance of rationality in their depiction of the dialectic of enlightenment. Burroughs does begin Naked Lunch with a satiric, Communist Manifesto-inspired call to revolution against dependencies: "Paregoric Babies of the World Unite. We have nothing to lose but Our Pushers. And THEY are NOT NECESSARY" (1959, xlviii). He also hints that one can somehow opt out of the "evil" of need"Cure is always: Let go! Jump!" (222), and suggests that "independent [cooperative] units" may "meet needs of the people who [End Page 109] participate in [them]" (134), hinting at those primitive forms of communal organization that in his later writings appear as alternative cultures.3 Inevitably, however, Burroughs returns to "a cycle of diminishing returns, a degenerate capitalist economy headed for bankruptcy" (Lydenberg 1987, 146).

In later interviews Burroughs seemed to postulate that the "next step" in human evolution would involve leaving the body altogether (Whitmer 1987, 106)and so, presumably, leaving economics, insofar as it is grounded in physical survivalvia a "mystic" "escape into space and silence" that for David Ayers shows "affinities with Gnosticism" (1993, 225). His works from the 1960s on also turn the existentialist junk virus into a "word virus" that generates self and society as "linguistic-social constructs linked to particular economic and political structures" (Skerl 1985, 63), propounding an escape from entrapping modes of consciousness through the destruction of word traps by means of the cutup, the fold-in, and other strategies that are too intricate to be discussed adequately here. Robin Lydenberg has documented these manipulations and theories of language in their relation to structuralism and post-structuralism, showing Burroughs's significance as a precursor of contemporary literary theory. Burroughs influenced such countercultural movements as the Punks and Generation X with his cutups, word viruses, and radical views, as is shown by his popularity as a Halloween costume among San Francisco Punks during the eighties (Whitmer 1987, 103) and his appearance in films such as Drugstore Cowboy. In relation to the Beats, however, Burroughs's significance appears mainly in Naked Lunch, with its comparison of advanced capitalist economics to addictive behavior. The analogy between capitalism and addiction becomes a leitmotif in Beat writing; it surfaces in Ginsberg's famous image of the "narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism" (1959, 11) and in Gary Snyder's description of humanity as "a locust like blight on the planet . . . living in a kind of addict's dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress" (Snyder 1995, 39 ["Four Changes"]). Burroughs's comparison of economic order to addiction in many ways resembles Kenneth Rexroth's interpretation of society as a vast "Conspiracy to quantify / The individual and / Convince him that all other / Seeming persons are actually / Already successfully / And happily quantified" (1968, 209 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]). But in Rexroth's writings, commodity relations in the modern collectivity can be negated through a vision of the universe "As a concourse of persons, all / Reflecting and selfreflecting" (108). If Burroughs "sets the trap" of advanced capitalism, that is, Rexroth attempts to escape from it through an alternative, spiritualized lifestyle of increased consciousness. While spiritual or person-to-person relations seldom surface in Burroughs's writing, Rexroth's writings, which he describes as "one long poem" in which "philosophies come and go" (vii), [End Page 110] always return to a culminating sense of vision within community that for him eclipses both economics and philosophy. Though Rexroth ultimately distanced himself from the Beats, he and the "San Francisco scene" of which he was a part had a crucial impact upon them at a critical stage in their development, particularly with regard to Ginsberg's poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters have written that "Rexroth was a father figure for the Beats (even though he did not have reciprocal feelings). Many of his attitudes and interests were theirs, especially 'disengagement' from materialist-militarist society, together with a turning to the Far East's literature and 'Buddha consciousness'" (Ferlinghetti and Peters 1980, 175-76). Rexroth's Friday night gatherings provided a meeting place for San Francisco writers (Hamalian 1991, 241). Allen Ginsberg, armed with a letter from William Carlos Williams, first attended in 1954 (Miles 1989, 171). Rexroth's commentaries on Ginsberg's poems may have helped Ginsberg move away from formalistic qualities in his verse, pointing the way to his longer, looser line (186-87). Ginsberg himself has said that "Howl" "was within Rexroth's genre" (qtd. in Gifford and Lee 1978, 222), and the poem itself bears a striking resemblance to Rexroth's elegy to Dylan Thomas "Thou Shalt Not Kill." In fact, Ginsberg acknowledges that his writings of the fifties reflected "the Grand Conspiracy of governments, that the state is a lie as Kenneth Rexroth said" (2000, 212) and that the "idiomatic verse" he and others evolved

in San Francisco in the mid 1950s "was an accumulation of the San Francisco West Coast Bohemian-Anarchist-Modernist tradition, as well as the New York impulse or energy that we brought, and Kerouac's obvious genius which [San Francisco poet Robert] Duncan appreciated and so did Rexroth" (Ball 1995, 167-77). Rexroth presided over the famous Gallery Six "coming out" reading of the Beats; Kerouac portrays him in this role as Rheinhold Cacoethes in The Dharma Bums (1958, 13-15). Moreover, Rexroth's "Letter from San Francisco" in The Evergreen Review provided the Beats with important early exposure. Tensions between Kerouac and Rexroth, attributable to a now-famous incident in which Rexroth threw Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others out of his house for being too loud, are variously linked to Kerouac's drunken behavior, Rexroth's insecurity, egotism, and territoriality, or both, and seem to have contributed to Rexroth's turn against the Beats. And while Kerouac had developed an interest in Buddhism before meeting Rexroth (see Kerouac 1997), it was not until he attended one of Rexroth's soires that he felt himself in an atmosphere in which he could discuss this topic with ease: When a discussion of Buddhism began, Jack mentioned the Pure Land Sutra he'd been reading, and was startled to hear intelligent comments on it. "Why there are other people here who have read these texts!" he [End Page 111] exclaimed. Rexroth, in the first of his many snide put-downs of Jack, retorted, "Everybody in San Francisco is a Buddhist, Kerouac! Didn't you know that?" (Nicosia 1983, 491) The fight with Rexroth led Kerouac to fume against the elder poet in his letters, particularly with regard to Rexroth's jealous nature, bent for criticism, and involvement in leftist politics. Still, in December 1959, Kerouac wrote to Gary Snyder that Rexroth was "a fine poet, a great poet in fact, I love Rexroth type poetry," and that he hoped "he [Rexroth] straightens out and realizes that the beat literature is the literature he worked for so hard for years" (1999, 233-35). For his part, Gary Snyder points out how central Rexroth was in both providing an atmosphere that allowed for free literary interaction and as offering a model of left-leaning political integrity in a time when such possibilities seemed limited: Kenneth [was] . . . a catalytic figure for all of us; . . . his house, literally, was the place that we met, and Kenneth provided for some of us a very valuable bridge between floundering in Stalinism/anti-Stalinism at a time when the Partisan Review was talking about the failure of intellectual America. . . . [A]narchism as a credible and viable position was one of Rexroth's greatest contributions for us, intellectually. . . . [I]t was beautifully reinforcing to meet Kenneth and get the sense that here was an American poet of an older generation who saw value in that. . . . [I]t gave me, it gave others a lot of reinforcement to begin to realize that we weren't, you know, entirely crazy. . . . (Snyder and McKenzie 1987, 4-6) Though Rexroth cannot be said to have specifically informed a Beat economic perspective, it is clear that the intellectual milieu that developed around his soires and which he articulated in his writings represents a position similar to the one that became increasingly central to Beat culture as it moved into its "beatific" stage. Rexroth's approach to economics reflects his years of studying Buddhism, Hassidism, alchemy, the English Hegelians, "philosophia perennia," and other religious and intellectual fields. For Rexroth, "economics" as such exists only as a sub-branch of epistemology. It represents a degraded epistemological condition, since the "cash nexus" denies the basic reflexivity that exists in the truest relation of self to other, even when this "other" is a thing. This understanding of relation is perhaps made most clear through Rexroth's comments on "The Hassidism of Martin Buber" (1959, 106-42). Buber identifies person-

to-object relations as "I-it" relations and person-to-person relations as "I-Thou" relations. "I-Thou" relations exist between beings, while "I-It" relations exist in the individual who "travels on the surface of things" and "extracts knowledge [or] wins an experience" (1958, 5). "I-It" relations reduce the significance of objects, since "it is 'in [the individual]' and not between him and the world that the experience [End Page 112] arises" (5). What is important in "I-it" interaction is not the object itself, but its experiencing, as the subject's continued distance from the object shows. In "I-Thou" relations, which Rexroth calls "vision," "experiencing" as such does not occur. Such relations involve linkage or merging and represent the truest state of relation of the individual and the other. Rexroth calls this type of relation "vision" because for him it stems from "a kind of transcendental empiricism" (1968, ix) through which true seeing occurs in an "unselfing" of self into the relation, or a "supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of creative process" (ix). When one relates to things in this way, without surpassing their being, one "responds" to them rather than reacting to or "experiencing" them in Buber's sense. According to Rexroth, the seat of epistemological beingthe egois entirely created by this type of relation. In fact he describes the ego as "the capacity to respond" (1959, 130). For Rexroth, however, this condition of merging in relation or response can only occur between "persons," a term that in this context can be defined as referring to whole, integrated beings. "A person is that which / By definition can never / Be added to anything else" (1968, 207 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]). The "person" is anything that has fully realized itself in its own being. According to Rexroth, "real objects are their own transcendental meaning. . . . Beyond the object lies a personobjects are only perspectives on persons" (ix). In this sense, any object we respond to is a person, since "we respond to a person, we react to things." Treating the object as a "person" requires that one recognize spirit in matter, the "transcendental" in the actual. This is why "The holy is in the heap of dustit is the heap of dust" (Rexroth 1968, [ix]). By claiming that "A person is that which / By definition can never / Be added to anything else," Rexroth means to indicate two features inherent in the claim that "objects are . . . perspectives on persons." First, a "person" can never be seen as anything other than itself. Second, a "person" can never be "added to," since it is always already added to everything by its existence in relation to, and in reflection of, all being. In the first sense, "personhood" recalls Buddhist tathata or "thusness," which links to Tathagata, the "thusness-already" (Kerouac 1997, 142) of Buddha's manifestation as each being that was central to Kerouac's exploration of Buddhism. In the second sense, beings join in the reflection of being that is symbolically depicted in the image of the jewel net of Indra as it appears in the Flower Wreath Sutra. The image of Indra's net of reflecting and selfreflecting jewels recurs in Rexroth's writings, as in his description of "Each universe reflecting / Every other, [End Page 113] reflecting / Itself from every other" (Rexroth 1979, 45 ["On Flower Wreath Hill"]), or in "The Dragon and the Unicorn": Each moment of the universe And all the universes Are reflected in each other And in all their parts and Thence again in themselves. *** Every item of this cosmos Of possibilities is the Mode by which I apprehend A person. Each person chooses His own time and space as he

Continually adjusts Himself to other persons. . . . They of course may appear Not only as persons. (Rexroth 1968, 108-09) Because being is relational and epistemology is how we know the interrelation of all beings as "persons," Rexroth claims that "epistemology is moral" (1968, ix; 295 ["The Heart's Garden, the Garden's Heart"]). Its morality lies in the recognition of the reflection of all being in being through vision. But from this point of view, economic relation must always be secondary. In pragmatic terms, economics must involve viewing people and things as objects or commodities rather than as free objects or "persons." Their importance lies in their value to the person using them, not in their intrinsic being. Pragmatic concentration on the "world of purpose" may be how we commonly know being, yet by relating to being in this way we treat beings as things rather than as persons. Economically oriented relations thus represent immoral or amoral epistemological positions. Such positions are involved in cause and effect, and "As long as we are lost / In the world of purpose / We are not free" (277 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]). In the "unselfing" that Rexroth characterizes as vision, being appears as itself, rather than as its utility. But most of our knowing of objects is dominated by use value or by the "causal efficacy" which, according to Dorothe Van Ghent, Rexroth tried to remove from his art in the 1920s via the "presentational immediacy" of literary Cubism (Van Ghent 1935, 31-37). Pragmatic or "use value" measures of objects appropriate causal efficacy by fixing objects according to human utility. Objects thus move in their epistemological [End Page 114] existence from being "persons" or "perspectives on persons" to commodity status. For Rexroth, the epitome of this sort of organization occurs in contemporary capitalism, which tends to view "all existence in the form / Of commodities" (1968, 207 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]). Scientific orientations towards objects as "fact" rather than as persons make objects "value neuter" (1970, 215 ["Smoky the Bear Bodhisattva"]), causing a "waste of value in a world of fact" (1961, 58 ["American Indian Songs"]). Yet scientific and pragmatic knowing accounts for what we commonly call reality. What such knowing really shows us is the extent to which our everyday knowing of being has been impoverished by the development of dominant epistemological orientations founded on science, the state, and capitalism. This is why, for Rexroth, every important artist of the last two hundred years has been an enemy of the state (1970, 129 ["Who Is Alienated from What?"]). By its very existence as a "collectivity" of separate, self-interested entities rather than as a community of beings, the state denies the totality of the person and intrudes upon the individual's capacity to know being. Collectivity creates person as integers, functions, or commodities. Capitalism and the state rule in proportion to their ability to direct personhood into thingness: As Capitalism and the State have become identical, All existence assumes the Character of a vast Conspiracy to quantify The individual and Convince him that all other Seeming persons are actually Already successfully And happily quantified, And that all human relations

Are quantitative, commodity Relationships. (Rexroth 1968, 209 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"])4 The state is "the organization / Of the evil instincts of mankind," "the systematization of / Appetitive choice to obtain / Desire by accumulation," "precisely the / Mechanism by which persons / Are reduced to integers" (Rexroth 1968, 74 ["The Phoenix and the Tortoise"]; 207 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]). By blocking the person's ability to perceive things in themselves and by reducing the capacity for "I-Thou" relation through emphasizing [End Page 115] commodity relations, capitalism creates a world in which "Highly perishable and / Expensive objects of non / Utility" (167 ["The Dragon and the Unicorn"]) become the measure of value. "Use value," a debased valuation, but one that retains a germ of worth since it emphasizes use, gets replaced with "useless value" (167), which is based on the creating and filling of artificial needs. Under such conditions, even the minimal communication involved in the use of objects gets lost. What is left, Rexroth claims, is insanity, which he calls "the crippling / Of the organ of reciprocity" (214) through a reduction of the "person," in all senses of the word, to thing. Through their interpretations of economic relations, Burroughs and Rexroth present intellectual and artistic responses to a socioeconomic matrix they needed to understand in order to survive. Their depictions of economic order thus stand more as defenses against an overwhelming totality than as concise theoretical systematizations. The writings of other Beats show a similar need to understand a system that they felt made oppressive demands for conformity. These works often vacillate between a cynicism and disgust similar to that shown by Burroughs and an alternative, albeit perhaps escapist, spirituality such as Rexroth presents. Allen Ginsberg's poems, for instance, range from early reactions against agonizing attempts to conform (Ginsberg 1963, 7-8 ["My Alba"], where he describes how he's "wasted / five years in Manhattan / . . . / deceived multitudes / in vast conspiracies / deodorant battleships" with "not a dime in the bank / to show for it") to assertions of defiant resistance (1959, 31-34 ["America"], where he explains, "I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry" and asks "When will you [America] be worthy of your million Trotskyites?"). Predominant among the latter type of poem are the visionary assaults on capitalist society that appeared after his liberating discussion with his therapist (described in Breslin 1984, 94-95). These works tend to pit a visionary realization of holy being against a degraded, industrialized capitalistic backdrop. In "Sunflower Sutra" (Ginsberg 1959, 28-30), for example, Ginsberg and Kerouac, "hung over like old bums," share "the same thoughts of the soul, / bleak and blue and sad-eyed, / surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery." The sunflower, which exists outside of and in spite of the economic conditions responsible for its surroundings, becomes a vehicle of escape from those surroundings, allowing Ginsberg a visionary moment of "unashamed wonder for the commonplace splendors of the world" (Roszak 1969, 137). He experiences the sunflower, himself, Kerouac, and even a locomotive as unique beings, "persons" in Rexroth's sense, distinct from the industrial wasteland surrounding them. The sunflower becomes the vehicle to a Rexrothian "community of persons" via memory, and so allows Ginsberg to experience the tathata of the sunflower, and even of a locomotive: 'You were never no [End Page 116] locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! / And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!" (1959, 30). Ginsberg and Kerouac exteriorize from themselves into "bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers . . . spied on by our eyes." They transcend both the environment damaged by "progress" and their own damaged, hung-over "internal environments," reaching a point at which they seem to see themselves from the outside. Interestingly, the sunflower that initiates this condition is "valueless" since it exists outside the economic sphere. Recognition of its exteriority permits tathata to infuse the locomotive, the "box

house hills," and "the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery." Ginsberg's poems often betray an obsession with the economic. He writes of cashing "a great check in my skull bank / to found a miraculous college of the body / up on the bus terminal roof" (1963, 13 ["The Green Automobile"]) and offers a lengthy description of American coins and bills (1963, 67-70 ["American Change"]). Such works point to the extent to which his consciousness teeters between a desire for spiritual realization and a sense of entrapment in a world dominated by a seductive consumerist ethos. In "A Supermarket in California" (1959, 23-24), he tries to get beyond his "headache" and "self-conscious looking at the full moon" by viewing objects in the supermarket esthetically rather than as commodities: "What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!" Here, though, he recognizes his manipulation of his surroundingsincluding his "personalizing" of the goods in the supermarket by connecting them to peopleas an effort to achieve vision through commodities, becoming the "poet as consumer filling his shopping cart for the ingredients of his art" (Merrill 1988, 66). In "Howl," the vision of a world mad with "the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism" (Ginsberg 1959, 11) carries with it a recognition that "to converse about America and Eternity [is] hopeless" (11; my emphasis). The spiritual revelation that drives the poem is diverted by the suggestion that one can only affirm the holiness of the commonplace from Rockland, an insane asylum. This contradiction derives from the hegemony of commodity and consumer relationships over all other forms of interaction, a hegemony that is personified in the poem as Moloch: "Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! . . . / Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!" (17). The concern with "unobtainable dollars" points to the confusion this rebellion against consumerism and its machinations stimulates. Moloch obliterates the visionary sense that the holy "exists . . . everywhere about us": They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! [End Page 117] Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! (Ginsberg 1959, 18) Though Gregory Corso was not as directly involved with Burroughs and with Rexroth as was Ginsberg, his poetry similarly often teeters on the brink of an imprisoning, consumption-centered world that destroys creativity and denies spiritual significance. Many of Corso's early works contrast need, either as an existential state or in its commodified expression, with an ideal world of heavenly or childhood innocence that existed before need gained ascendance. "A Dreamed Realization," for instance, claims that "The carrion-eater's nobility calls back from God; / Never was a carrion-eater first a carrion-eater / Back there in God creatures sat like stone. . . . / It was Life jabbed a spoon in their mouths" (Allen 1960, 208). Heavenly stasis is here contrasted with an image of need that recalls Burroughs' "naked lunch," at which "everyone sees what is on the end of every fork" (Burroughs 1959, xxxvii). Corso's "Dialogue2 Dollmakers" offers a surrealistic description of the conversion of a child's toya representation of the bodyinto commodities: "Let's not use eyes anymore. . . . / Let's use cans instead. / . . . / for the toenails, why not mattresses? . . . / Ah, Alberto, and the stockings, what about the stockings? / What about them? There's always abandoned farms to use" (Allen 1960, 206-07). One of Corso's best-known poems, "Marriage" (20912), pits any drive to creative life that married life might stimulate against long-term, soul-sapping financial obligations: "The landlord wants his rent / Grocery Store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus / Impossible to lie back and dream

Telephone snow." Even an ideal marriage with a penthouse and a "beautiful / sophisticated woman" seems a "pleasant prison dream" to Corso, calling to mind Barbara Ehrenreich's contention that the Beats were part of a widespread postwar male reaction against the social role of provider which received its clearest expression in the popularization of Playboy and the associated lifestyle (1983, 42-51). Though Corso is not directly involved in social criticism, his poetry contains elements of reaction against a world centered in consumerism and conformity. In fact he prided himself on upsetting the "applecart" of "old cornball America . . . where people are all regimented" (1987, 156). Jack Kerouac's novels often center on attempts to escape the mundane world of necessity through some form of transcendence. In On the Road, for instance, Sal Paradise journeys with Dean Moriarty in search of "IT," which for Sal seems to involve a "point of ecstasy" involving a "complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows" (1957, 173) that slightly resembles Rexroth's "'unselfing' of self." A latent world of strictly defined "appropriate" [End Page 118] behaviors provides a backdrop to the marginal actions of these characters. Dean Moriarty seems to represent a possibility of dropping out through what he describes as a "life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich . . . you cut along and make it your own way" (251). Ironically, however, a form of entrapment in a preprogrammed consumerism symbolically reenacts itself through Moriarty's behavior. Warren French describes Neal Cassady's characterization in On the Road and elsewhere as offering "the embodiment of [Kerouac's] reaction to his country and culture," and hence as becoming the "symbol of an entire culture" (1986, 87). Moriarty's behavior mimics the clockwork of industrial production, a fact he emphasizes through his continued insistence that he "know[s] time." Dean's characterization thus lends force to Paul Goodman's conviction that the Beats were ultimately fascinated with the rat race (1960, 165). Sal's development as a character involves his gradual recognition that Moriarty has to use peopleand use up peopleto keep going, since Moriarty's "full schedule" consistently reduces the direct, personal relations the characters think they pursue into "I-It" commodity relations. Throughout the book Sal undergoes subtle processes of interaction with the "fellaheen," an underclass of laborers, bums, marginals, and migrant workers which seems to offer an alternative to the dominant conformist ethos, perhaps precisely because it exists outside of the dream of wealth that enthralls America. When Sal meets Terry and starts living as a migrant farm worker, his labor and love remove him from his quest for the "it" that continuously eludes him: Every day I earned approximately a dollar and a half. It was just enough to buy groceries in the evening on the bicycle. The days rolled by. I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo and the bloody road. . . . I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be, in Paterson. (Kerouac 1957, 97) A "man of the earth," Sal enjoys a personal relation to work and family as an immediate experiencing of life. These moments with Terry contrast sharply with the scene that culminates Sal's and Dean's last trip togetherthe day of debauchery in the Mexican whorehouse. Sal has changed from producer to consumer, and because of the exchange rate finds himself wealthy beyond all expectation, able to participate fully in the American dream. He is so caught in his frenzy of spending that he doesn't know what to do with his money. "My girl charged thirty pesos, or about three dollars and a half . . . . I didn't know the value of Mexican money; for all I knew I had a million pesos. I threw money at her" (Kerouac 1957, 228). In the middle of the mayhem, one girl stands out, catching Sal's attention even while he finds her unapproachable. "Of all the girls in

[the whorehouse] she needed [End Page 119] the money most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little sisters and brothers. . . . [Her] unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse" (290). Her poverty and need cut her off from economic transaction, and so for Sal she gains a dignity that separates her from the world of filthy lucre. She is "free" in all senses, and made tragic by her freedom in the world of economic determinism that Sal, spending maniacally and compulsively, both feels victim to and perpetuates. After the scene in the whorehouse, Sal again finds everything collapsing, and is left sick in Mexico while Dean rushes off. The bond between the two seems broken, and the last time he sees Dean, Sal is free from Dean's spell. However, riding to the theater with Remi in a Cadillac, Sal now also appears to be "captive to the materialistic world of bad taste and conspicuous consumption" (French 1986, 42) he has tried to escape. But if On the Road seems to end with a return to middle-class conformity, The Dharma Bums suggests a possible alternative to consumer culture that directly anticipates developments in the sixties. The book's title significantly couples economic marginality, or even a direct rejection of the economic values that dominate society, with an acceptance of Buddhist spiritual teachings that (among other things) undermine consumerist values by calling into question the very nature of desire itself instead of encouraging its blind fulfillment. Japhy Ryder, Kerouac's portrayal of Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums, directly attacks a culture he sees as driven by forces urging incessant, unthinking production and consumption. He envisions a "rucksack revolution" that in context appears to have been genuinely prophetic of the counterculture: a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. . . . (Kerouac 1958, 77-78) Ryder introduces Ray Smith, Kerouac's self-characterization, to mountain climbing and backpacking, taking him away from consumer culture not through a frenetic pursuit of "IT" but rather by returning him to the basis of all economic order in nature. As he puts it while pointing out a glacier to Smith, "this is the beginning and the end of the world right here" (Kerouac 1958, 55). Gary Snyder's real-life environmentalism and Zen practice indeed go far towards raising a viable critique of capitalist culture, while simultaneously addressing some of the problems and contradictions that underlie the Beat reaction to it. These qualities are what made him, with Allen Ginsberg, the [End Page 120] Beat who remained most active in the sixties. Snyder tries to break the Beat (and generally western) distinction of visionary being from commodified existence through a Buddhist commitment to nonduality. Unlike Rexroth, that is, Snyder does not claim to find "value" in vision that is not present in non-vision or wish to view economic relations as degraded or degrading.5 This is made clear in his insistence on the importance of the "Real Work," a phrase he uses to describe religious practice, physical labor, political involvement, and the processes of nature: "the real work is eating each other" (1980, 82). This essential aspect of Snyder's world view elevates the "naked lunch" to an implicit and celebrated condition of existence while denying it the "evil" that Burroughs (and, through his reversal of it in vision, Rexroth) saw in it. For Snyder, the problems of contemporary economic systems reflect greater problems with desire, with the nature of existence, and with prevailing belief systems that have only begun to be approached, and that

increasingly seem to be sidestepped by a culture that seems ever more intent on the fulfillment of consumerist needs. The real work for Snyder involves "sensitiz[ing] the contemporary American psyche to more appreciative, less exploitative social and economic possibilities than are currently widely available within the strictures of Western worldviews and values" (Coyote 1991, 163). Snyder also approaches the Beat concern with addiction to material goods in ways that remove it from the context of economies into a wider ecological focus, joining the spiritual, natural, political, and economic into an interlocking web of forces (McClintock 1994, 111). Working from a "critique of industrial civilization as being self-destructive because of its lack of understanding of the nature of biological systems" (Snyder and McKenzie 1987, 10)a critique he started with Philip Whalen and others in the 1950s Snyder reappropriates significance to economic interpretations while acknowledging the destructive and addictive forces operating in advanced capitalism. Snyder's nondifferentiation of objects of commodification from other beings, the essential "equivalences of energy" Thomas Parkinson describes in discussing the poem "The Market" (Snyder 1965, 33-37; Parkinson 1981, 142), stems from the view that "in energy system terms" all things are "temporary energy traps in which energy is held briefly and can be deferred into other uses . . . on the path of energy from the sun to the energy-sink in the universe" (Snyder and Bartlett 1975, 48). All bodies, economic or otherwise, embody the same basic energy. In this view the essential aim becomes to preserve energy by conserving bodies. Snyder can then subtly link this radically environmentalist position to a Marxist critique of capitalistic society, while acknowledging that this critique remains incomplete because of its anthropocentric focus: "the most / Revolutionary consciousness [End Page 121] is to be found / Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: / Animals, trees, water, air, grasses" (Snyder 1970, 39 ["Revolution in the Revolution in the Revolution"]). Such views as this may explain why, in his review of Snyder's poetry, Rexroth commented that "ecology is the science of values" (Rexroth 1970, 215 ["Smoky the Bear Bodhisattva"]). According to Snyder, the Cuban revolution and the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s stimulated the Beat sense that social alternatives were possible. At the same time, increasing protest against the Vietnam War provided the resolve and the sense of urgency that would heat up the rhetoric of change that had first been espoused by the Beats (Snyder and McKenzie 1987, 10-11). The resultant spread of a sensibility that was largely inspired by the Beats through what soon became known as the counterculture led Jack Kerouac, who by 1967 was an extreme conservative and an alcoholic, to acknowledge on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" that the hippie movement was "a continuation of the Beats" and was even "better than the Beats" (Morgan 1988, 447). Thus in spite of the fact that in the 1950s the Beats muted their specific political positions, their writings helped establish the grounds for an implicit "critique of the organized system" that, as Paul Goodman wrote as early as 1960, "everybody in some sense agrees with" (1960, 170). The Beat rejection of consumerist aspirations and the existing economic order helped open the way for a critical perspective on modernity that still influences those who feel alienated from the dominant culture. The frankness and honesty of this critique goes a long way toward explaining why Beat writing continues to resonate with those who react against our era of globalized marketing and encroaching environmental holocaust. Allan Johnston teaches writing and literature at Columbia College, Chicago, and DePaul University. His scholarly articles have appeared in ISLE, AUMLA, McNeese Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Endnotes
1. In fact, according to Mel Van Elteren, "[t]he Beats evoked moral panics in the conformist climate of the 1950s just because they were not political in a conventional sense, as Barbara Ehrenreich rightly contends. Political leftists of whatever strain could be dismissed much more easily in 1950s America, 'but the Beats spoke from an underclass of unassimilated people to an unassimilated corner of the middle-class psyche . . .'" (Van Elteren 1999, 74; Van Elteren is quoting Ehrenreich). 2. This conceptualization of the "word virus" bears interesting comparison to Marcuse's description of the effects that the manipulation of language has in contemporary culture. David Ingram points out that for Marcuse, "[t]he telescoping and abridgment of syntax used in government propaganda and commercial advertising 'cuts off the development of meaning by creating fixed images which impose themselves with an overwhelming and petrified concreteness'" (Ingram 1990, 84; Ingram is quoting Marcuse). [End Page 122] 3. See, for instance, The Wild Boys (1971), in which violent homosexual gangs of boys model "Burroughs' Utopian vision of an alternative society" (Morgan 1988, 466). 4. The similarities between Rexroth's ideas and positions advanced by the Frankfurt School deserve to be noted. Analyses by Horkheimer and Adorno include critiques of the "value neutral" "objectivity" (Ingram 1990, xx) of modern society, the construction of the "subject" as a "mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy" (Horkheimer, qtd. in Tar 1985, 33), the fascistic nature of post-Enlightenment societies, the focus on efficiency above other values, and the identification of truth with facts of social existence rather than with possible alternative social structures. One might also note Adorno's late vision of an escape from the "implicitly totalitarian . . . domination" of nature and humanity through "aesthetic contemplation," in which subject and object form a "non-reductive" unity (Ingram 1990, 77), as similar to Rexroth's concept of "vision." Such resemblances reflect Rexroth's philosophical interests and political orientation at the time that the Frankfurt School was forming. 5. This distinction sheds interesting light upon Rexroth's leanings toward Shingon (Gibson 1987, 210), which can be described as esthetic in nature in that this school of Buddhism maintains that "the true meaning of . . . esoteric teachings" is conveyed only "through artistic representations" (Fischer-Schreiber, Ehrhard, and Diener, 1991, 198). Snyder, on the other hand, practices Zen Buddhism, which incorporates among other features a critique of rationality and its imprisoning aspects. The word "Zen" in fact derives from the Sanskrit "dhyana," signifying a "collectedness of mind or meditative absorption in which all dualistic distinctions like I/you, subject/object, and true/false are eliminated" (Fischer-Schreiber, Ehrhard, and Diener, 1991, 261). A full discussion of these distinctions is obviously beyond the scope of this paper.

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Power. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, Morgan. 1987. "Japanese Buddhism in the Letters of Kenneth Rexroth (190582)." Chukyo Diagaku Kyoyo Ronso 38.1: 207-16. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee, eds. 1978. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St Martin's. Ginsberg, Allen. 1959. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights. .1963. Reality Sandwiches. San Francisco: City Lights. . 1995. Journals Mid-Fifties: 1954-1958. Ed. Gordon Ball. New York: HarperCollins. . 2000. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins. Goodman, Paul. 1960. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. New York: Random House. Hamalian, Linda. 1991. A Life of Kenneth Rexroth. New York: Norton. Holmes, John Clellon. 1987. "Crazy Days, Numinous Nights: 1948-1950." In The Beat Vision, ed. Arthur Knight and Kit Knight. New York: Paragon House. Horkheimer, Max. 1992. "Means and Ends." In Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, ed. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram. New York: Paragon House. Ingram, David. 1990. Critical Theory and Philosophy. New York: Paragon House. [End Page 124] Ingram, David, and Julia Simon-Ingram. 1992. "Introduction." In Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, ed. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram. New York: Paragon House. Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On the Road. New York: Viking. . 1958. The Dharma Bums. New York: Signet. . 1987. "Letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 24, 1949." In The Beat Vision, ed. Arthur Knight and Kit Knight. New York: Paragon House. . 1997. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking. . 1999. Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking. Knight, Arthur, and Kit Knight, eds. 1987. The Beat Vision. New York: Paragon House. Lee, Martyn J. 1993. Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption.

London: Routledge. Lydenberg, Robin. 1987. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. Martineau, Alain. 1966. Herbert Marcuse's Utopia. Trans. Jane Brierley. Montreal: Harvest House. McClintock, James I. 1994. Nature's Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Merrill, Thomas F. 1988. Allen Ginsberg. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne. Miles, Barry. 1989. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial. Morgan, Ted. 1988. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt. Nadel, Alan. 1995. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke University Press. Nicosia, Gerald. 1983. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove. Parkinson, Thomas. 1981. "The Poetry of Gary Snyder." In The Beats: Essays in Criticism, ed. Lee Bartlett. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Rexroth, Kenneth. 1959. "The Hassidism of Martin Buber." In Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays. New York: New Directions. . 1961. Assays. New York: New Directions. . 1966. Collected Shorter Poems. New York: New Directions. . 1968. Collected Longer Poems. New York: New Directions. . 1970a. The Alternative Society. New York: Herder and Herder. . 1970b. "Smoky the Bear Bodhisattva." In With Eye and Ear. New York: Herder and Herder. . 1979. The Morning Star. New York: New Directions. . 1991. An Autobiographical Novel. Rev. ed. Ed. Linda Hamalian. New York: New Directions. Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the

Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. London: Faber and Faber. [End Page 125] Skerl, Jennie. 1985. William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne. Snyder, Gary. 1965. Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation. . 1970. Regarding Wave. New York: New Directions. . 1980. The Real Work: Interview & Talks 1964-1979, ed. Wm. Scott McLean. New York: New Directions. . 1995. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, Watersheds. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. Snyder, Gary, and Lee Bartlett. 1975. "Interview: Gary Snyder." California Quarterly 9 (Spring): 43-60. Snyder, Gary, and James McKenzie. 1987. "Moving the World a Millionth of an Inch." In The Beat Vision, ed. Arthur Knight and Kit Knight. New York: Paragon House. Stephenson, Gregory. 1990. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Tar, Zoltn. 1985. The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Schocken. Van Elteren, Mel. 1999. "The Subculture of the Beats: A Sociological Revisit." Journal of American Culture 22.3: 71-99. Van Ghent, Dorothe Bendon. 1935. "Some Problems of Communication." M.A. Thesis, Mills College. Whitmer, Peter O., and Bruce VanWyngarden. 1987. Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created The Sixties Counterculture that Changed America. New York: Macmillan.

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American Literature 76.2 (2004) 367-389 Access provided by Northwestern University Library

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"Howl" and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These New Beats?
Ben Lee
Oberlin College As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" The job would be beyond my means, for the present, however there is always hope for the Future. . . . I am the Trotsky with no dogma in your party. Allen Ginsberg, Journals Mid-Fifties, 19541958 It is difficult to resist the pull of the future. It is difficult, to turn immediately to the case I will discuss in this essay, not to place Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1950s within forward-moving, future-oriented cultural narratives. According to such narratives, Ginsberg's first published poems remain notable above all because of what they announced for the future, or to put it another way, because of the influence they had on what we now call the past. Literary historians often refer to Howl as the most important poem since The Waste Land, arguing that it helped free American poetry from New Critical hegemony by proclaiming loudly and abruptly that free verse, the personal, and the political belonged again in the poetic vernacular. Similarly, social histories of the 1960s often cite Howl (and the Beat movement more generally) as the most famous embodiment of a structure of feelingyouthful, dissatisfied, rebelliousthat would soon coalesce into the explicitly political cultures and practices of the New Left. In such accounts, Ginsberg's poems earn their place of [End Page 367] importance because of their undeniable connection to the emergent. These poems announce both a new American poetry and a number of overlapping new social movementsgay liberation and the antiwar movement, in particularthat gained momentum in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s.1 Without denying the force of such narratives, I want to gaze backward as I think forward in this essay, emphasizing Ginsberg's longing for an Old Left past that seems as insistent in his early poems as do his dreams of new freedoms, present or future. Focusing on Ginsberg's first published volume, "Howl" and Other Poems (1956), I argue for a newly historicized and melancholic reading of a poet whose important but complicated position in U.S. literary and cultural history we have only just begun to understand, and whose nostalgic affinities for the prewar Left have been mostly ignored by scholars of Ginsberg and of postwar U.S. culture and by critics of postwar U.S. poetry.2 From Wobblies to American Socialists, Young Socialists, Communists, Yiddish Communists, and Trotskyites, Ginsberg's work in the 1950s is shot through with references to political identities supposedly antiquated and actively discredited by intellectuals on both the Left and the Right during the Cold War moment.3 His hopes for the future, as my epigraphs suggest, are bound up in his capacity to call up past figures of freedom and resistance, who, like Trotsky, manage to signify revolutionary hope while refusing the (Stalinist) violence and discipline that had tainted revolution by the 1950s. To the extent that Ginsberg's great poems of the 1950s, Howl above all, are

prophecies of emergent movements and collectivities, they are also elegies for cherished pasts at risk of receding irretrievably, of being inconspicuously transformed and finally erased by narratives of progress that manageby dint of historical victories to limit the possibilities of the future. Like Benjamin's image of the flowers of the past striving constantly to reorient themselves in relation to that sun which is rising in the sky of history, the flowers we find scattered throughout Ginsberg's "Howl" and Other Poems retain their own undeniable agency and attraction. We can only understand them as fully as Benjamin suggests we might, however, if we manage to read against the unidirectional, categorically progressive heliotropisms that have too long oriented our approach to them. We need to reassert Ginsberg's tendency to commemorate the resources of the past, to infuse them with the poetic energies of the present, to reconfigure them in the face of shifting historical circumstance. [End Page 368] Narratives of postwar American verse frequently begin with economic prosperity, bureaucratization, and conformity, and with the "closed" poetic forms that seem both to echo and to help produce these more widespread social attributes. These closed forms are self-contained rhetorical structures, traditionally rhymed and metered, animated by tightly constructed tonal or metaphorical tensions. They come complete with their own bureaucratico-educational practice (close reading), their own managers (the New Critics), and their own white-collar workforce (instructors of literature in American high schools, colleges, and universities). Into this scene come the open poetic forms, infused with personal and social content, of poets like the Beats, the New York School, and the Black Mountain group. Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), rightly stands as synecdoche for this literary-historical watershed. It clarifies and consolidates for poets and critics alike the full strength and diversity of this movement toward free verse and apparent spontaneity of composition. It serves as a fulcrum that propels us forward in literary history, toward the dominant poetic statements (confessional, experimental, openly political) and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In Ginsberg's case, there is real cultural momentum behind narratives founded on some version of the following chronology: Ginsberg reads Howl for the first time at the Six Gallery in 1955, when the Beat movement begins to gain public acclaim; participates in early antiwar protests in 1963; serves on the planning committee for the quintessentially "hippie" Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967; chants mantras to calm Yippies and police outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; and gives his famous Gay Sunshine interview in 1972, in which he speaks about his homosexuality more openly, some have suggested, than any public or literary figure ever has before.4 It seems important, however, to wonder about the narrative possibilities that this neatly progressive cultural and literary chronology shuts down. For all such stories of forward movementfrom Beat poetry to social criticism, from rebellious aesthetics to organized mass demonstrations, from gay poetry to gay liberationlose something in the telling. In particular, the above chronology manages to elide Ginsberg's attachments to the Left-collective cultures that thrived in the years preceding World War II, cultures Ginsberg endows with a strange, anachronistic afterlife during the vehemently anticommunist years of the Cold War. [End Page 369] Focusing on the anachronisms, repetitions, and potentially fruitful revisions that Ginsberg's generational vision enfolds, one discovers an alternative to the progressivegenerational models most often called upon to define postwar culture. Such models tend to lose sight of melancholic attachments to past ideals or failed movements, lost objects of identification that are never fully mourned or forgotten and that continue to animate the texts of the present. They ignore those identifications alternately concealed and exposed, built into and constantly revised by social subjects in the face of unstable

local and historical contexts. They ignore those disjunctions we experience when social identities assumed to belong to previous generations resurface to disrupt our confident notions of the contemporary.5 From the perspective of Benjamin's historical materialist, progressive histories ignore the insight that progress is neither neat nor decisively future-oriented. Benjamin's angel of history, while he is driven "irresistibly . . . into the future," has "his face . . . turned toward the past." If not for the storm propelling him forward, "the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."6 Without making too much of the coincident imagery in Ginsberg's Howl and Benjamin's short meditation from "Theses on the Philosophy of History"two texts in which angels are defined by the wreckage and violence that surround themI want to found my readings of Ginsberg's political identifications on Benjamin's vision of melancholic progress, of history moving forward while gazing backward, longing to recuperate that which has been damaged. This vision helps illuminate the historical disjunctions of U.S. culture during the 1950s, a decade during which Ginsberg longed for the politics and poetics of a communist youth while embracing a postwar culture of unapologetic homosexuality and dreamlike nonconformity. Such disjunctions are reproduced and reconfigured in Howl, Ginsberg's great and indelible statement of postwar political upheaval, and in a whole series of images and thematic juxtapositions from his poems of the 1950s. "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel," he promises at the conclusion of "America," forging an image that typifies the divided nature of his politics and poetics during this period.7 The image is at once industrial and identitarian, anachronistic and prescient. It performs its melancholic attachment to the working-class collectives of the past even while it strives onward, toward the queer liberations and new collectivities of the future. It suggests that the pull of the futurethe [End Page 370] storm that propels Benjamin's angel forward, or "that sun which is rising in the sky of history"is no more insistent than the continued strivings of the past, and that the two can only be redeemed together. *** Without question, Ginsberg maintained throughout his life a deep attachment to the ideals and organizations of the prewar left. His mother, Naomi Ginsberg, was a dedicated communist who took her young sons to Party meetings in Paterson, New Jersey, and vacationed with them at a Yiddish-American summer camp where "the adults debated ideology" and "[p]ictures of the enemycapitalists and socialists with exaggerated features, blood dripping from their handslined the walls of the mess halls" (DL, 9).8 Allen's father, Louis Ginsberg, was a well-known poet and life-long socialist who named Allen's older brother after Eugene Debs, whom he had often heard speak as a child. Louis, at constant odds with Naomi over left political questions and frequently taken to task for what she considered his overly bourgeois perspective on both poetry and politics, would recite Dickinson, Poe, Shelley, Keats, and Milton as he moved around the house. Naomi, as Ginsberg recalled for a biographer, countered Louis's recitations by improvising fables for her children in which "the king or prince went out and saw the condition of the workers and helped them out and everyone lived happily ever after" (DL, 7). "Naomi reading patiently," Ginsberg remembers in Kaddish, "story out of a Communist fairy bookTale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator Forgiveness of WarlocksArmies Kissing/ . . . The King & the Workers" (CP, 214). Neither Ginsberg's passion for political debates and fairy tales nor his connections to left organizations ended with childhood. In 1943 he enrolled at Columbia University with the support of a partial scholarship from the New Jersey CIO and in 1950 he took an early postgraduate job with the Labor Herald, the newspaper of the New Jersey AFL.

Both during and after college, Ginsberg's devotion to literature overwhelmed his initial plan to study labor law or economics and to devote himself to the struggle against poverty and exploitation. Nevertheless, he retained throughout his life a stated affective and philosophical affinity with left organizations and political activities, an affinity that distinguished him from such Beat fellow travelers as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. While Kerouac and Burroughs may [End Page 371] have subscribed to many of Ginsberg's criticisms of American life, they would never have found themselves defending the foreign policy of the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, as Ginsberg did in letters to his father. Despite negative encounters with communist governments in Havana and Prague and a growing lack of faith in all Cold War governments, Ginsberg never gave up the hope that the spirit of the radical Left might be reanimated (DL, 23, 115, 120, 129, 27980). We can gain further insight into Ginsberg's political identifications around the time he composed Howl, and into the strangely haunted and interstitial historical position this poem articulates, by considering Ginsberg's relationship with Carl Solomon. While "Howl" and Other Poems is dedicated, as a volume, to Kerouac, Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, Howl itself is dedicated to Solomon, whom Ginsberg met in a psychiatric institute in 1949. Unlike Kerouac and Burroughs, Solomon shared Ginsberg's Jewish and New YorkNew Jersey childhood and his memories of preCold War idealism and collectivity. Solomon's "I Was a Communist Youth," published in 1961 in The Floating Bear, offers a fascinating portrait of the fate of New York student radicalism as World War II ended and the Cold War began: It was during the war. Red movements were flourishing everywhere. On the City College campus in 1944, when I began college, there were at least five hundred supporters of the American Communist Party out of a student body of a couple of thousand. Such was the educational environment of the war generation. We were raised under these slogans: Win the war, destroy fascism. After the war: full employment and the "century of the common man." Fascism was the most hated philosophy of all time. Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo were seen as the most significant tyrants of history. Moods have changed and time has brought about a difference in us all. After the war, America was to break with her wartime allies and they were to grapple on the battlefields of Korea. The great disillusionment was to come. . . . My travels brought me to Europe and to the West Indies and I had a glimpse of the world that the war against fascism had created. . . . What I saw in Cuba in 1945 was a preview of what was to come in the late fifties. What I saw in Yugoslavia in 1945 was the Partisans, wearing red stars on their arms. . . . [End Page 372] Only in America and from America came the slogan: Freedom. The slogan freedom meant white supremacy and the suppression of every movement for human hope on the face of the planet. So the cold war began. The men, like Franco of Spain, whom we had been taught to hate we were now told were our allies in a struggle against the "Eastern Bloc."

Men like Dimitrov of Bulgaria who had had the courage to defy fascism during the Thirties, we were now told were our enemies, a group of cowardly tyrants. Who knows what his opinions are amid such nonsense.9 Solomon's clipped narrative hints at a history more widespread than is typically acknowledged in accounts of the postwar avant-garde. In memoirs of the period, this history surfaces insistently as a previous kind of bohemian posture quickly forgotten once Beat, bebop, and postbop culture displaced the political investments, styles of dress, and proletarian folk songs that still echoed around Washington and Union squares in the 1950s. On one hand, the avant-garde tended to depict these proletarian styles and political investments as unquestionably obsolete and unworthy of serious consideration; on the other, the ideological force of these styles and investments still haunted the "new" American artists and erupted stubbornly in their poems, memoirs, and magazines.10 Solomon's narrative represents both these positions at onceOld Left obsolescence and haunted longingwithout adding to this dialectic Ginsberg's performances of faith in the eventual return of left collectivity. "I Was a Communist Youth" reads as much like a parable as it does an accurate log of Solomon's teenage travels, moving paratactically and in a deadpan, cynical tone through a list of concrete historical references arranged to tell a tale of state-sponsored hypocrisy and generational disillusionment. In what one might call a catalog as generational parable (a phrase one could also apply to Howl), Solomon begins with youthful idealism, proceeds by geopolitical observation, and culminates in existentialist cynicism. "Who knows what his opinions are amid such nonsense," Solomon concludes, occupying a final rhetorical position far removed from such optimistic slogans as "full employment and the century of the common man.'" The cynicism and points of critical emphasis that shape Solomon's brief political autobiography echo the postwar works of sociology and [End Page 373] social theory often named as the intellectual guidebooks of the New Left. Just before and into the Eisenhower era, left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills developed critical positions that began with dire assessments of social and political life in the United States and other advanced industrial nations. Diagnosing "the troubles that confront . . . all men and women living in the twentieth century" by way of the "white-collar people" who best represent the state of work, entertainment, and social relations under advanced industry, Mills in 1951 comes to a pessimistic conclusion. He portrays an international middle class increasingly dominant both in sheer numbers and in the prevalence of its social experiences, yet with no enabling or critically and politically empowering sense of its own social position.11 Similarly, in One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse takes as his point of departure the new modes of economic and ideological organization that have come to dominate advanced industrial society. Whether communist, fascist, or capitalist, advanced industrial societies with the sudden potential to meet the basic material needs of their citizens have begun to realize this potential using technological and organizational means that also increase "the scope of society's domination over the individual." As this domination of the individual morphs inevitably into collective control, "[c]ontemporary society," Marcuse writes, "seems to be capable of containing social change."12 Yet Solomon's melancholic longing for the Communist Party and the Popular Front against fascism creates a kind of tension between his generational parable and the arguments of Mills and Marcuse as I have summarized them. While these New Left intellectuals situate hope and resistance within critical analysis or in the space of properly dialectical thought, Solomon's hope appears precisely in his invocation of lost

hope, of an Old Left faith now untenable, of a belief in political agency that no longer seems viable. Even as this lost faith structures his cynicism, it designates a potential alternative to his current political affect. It creates a temporal disjunction, calling up a past social identity at once buried under cynicism and exposed to justify it but which cannot be exposed without simultaneously underscoring a position of resistance both to that cynicism and to the post-Fordist, Cold War forces that produce it. In Ginsberg's poems of the 1950s, such melancholic attachments to the Old Left generate even greater rhetorical energy. They come to symbolize the continued possibility of questioning prosperity and resisting the sophisticated social controls [End Page 374] of advanced industrial society. They act to disrupt dominant postwar logics of present political consensus and future compromise, invoking the old as the sign of the new, inviting past generations to haunt the present, troubling the notion that some contemporary dominance will necessarily structure the future. *** "Howl" and Other Poems is full of expressions of longing, layered one on top of the other, and certainly not all are melancholic gestures toward a former faith in left collectivity and political agency. There are longings here for love (often a trope for longing itself), for male-male sexual relations or camaraderie, for the means to express a self that feels infinite, and for the public acknowledgement of this capacious, God-like self and its capacity for poetry. "I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator," Ginsberg submits to the reader in "Transcription of Organ Music." "And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence to gratify my wish," he continues, "so as not to cheat me of my yearning for him" (CP, 141). Few poets manage to be so consumed by and yet so optimistic about want, wish, and yearning as Ginsberg in the 1950s. As infinite or transhistorical as these expressions of longing can seem, one soon notices them winding themselves around invocations of a lost past with a particular historical profile. Often this lost past emerges through images of automobiles and trains, connecting industrial production and working-class employment with Beat romanticizations of American machinery in endless motion along the roads and tracks of town and country. These machines are stationary or inaccessible as often as they move freely; they signal failure or anticipation as frequently as they signal successful movements and happy deliveries. "[S]o lonely growing up among / the imaginary automobiles / and dead souls of Tarrytown," Ginsberg writes in "Wild Orphan" (CP, 78). "I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry," he remembers in the opening sentence of "Sunflower Sutra," a poem that works to rehabilitate both the sunflower he discovers on that dock and "the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive" (CP, 13839). These imaginary automobiles and "once proud" locomotives help create the impression of a past that is mourned because it cannot be recaptured [End Page 375] but that is also celebrated because of what it continues to represent: solidarity and collectivity, shared purpose and freedom, the beauty of production, the promise that stationary machines and imaginations might be set in motion again. These are potential energies that Ginsberg repeatedly associates with the working classes. He attacks white-collar culture without hesitation and, not surprisingly for a poet who identified himself as bohemian, he seeds his Beat poems with heroic images of the lumpen proletariat: musicians, bums, junkies, and other "angels" of Skid Row. Yet just as frequently as Ginsberg's work of the 1950s attacks the middle class or sings the praises of the lumpen proletariat, it strives to imagine the proletariat. It fetishizes,

celebrates, and sanctifies the working classes, placing them at the imaginative center of poems like "In back of the real," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," and "Sunflower Sutra." In these and other poems from the 1950s, the proletariat is sometimes present, often absent, but longed for consistently. The poet searches for workers in "the old red Wobbly Hall" and on the docks in "Afternoon Seattle," and among the silk-strikers of his own memory in "America." He gestures toward the absent railroad switchman in "In back of the real" and dreams of grocery boys in "A Supermarket in California." In Denver in 1947, Ginsberg wrote "The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour," a poem unabashedly romantic about both laborers and manual labor and the first of his poems that friend and mentor William Carlos Williams considered truly promising. In 1951, Ginsberg began "A Poem on America" with the following observation: "America is like Russia. . . . We have the proletariat too" (CP, 64). Ginsberg in the 1950s continues to remember and hopes to reimagine an Old Left culture in which "work and art, labor and beauty" remain in constant dialogue, workers supporting artists who in turn celebrate the beauty of labor.13 His poems struggle to depict alliances between workers and his own coterie of avant-garde artists but must do so in the absence of a contemporary political or organizational space to support such alliances. Unions were not inviting Ginsberg to conduct poetry readings in their halls, and in the postwar moment, the work-art dialectic of the 1930s and 1940s lacked viable sites in which it might develop. Visiting Seattle's Wobbly Hall with Gary Snyder in 1956, Ginsberg finds "bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter," with little faith in either themselves or their visitors: "but these young fellers can't see ahead and we nothing to offer" [End Page 376] (CP, 150). Structured by their own elegiac insistence on failed communication and organizational absence, Ginsberg's proletarian images most often coalesce as expressions of longing, spiritual abstractions struggling to preserve a time when different forms of political culture seemed possible. They become invocations of a moment when art might somehow engage with and reconstitute its relationship to conditions of labor, when poems might still represent an expansive left collectivity. Ginsberg's "In back of the real" presents something like a parable of this hope for strategically anachronistic resistance. The poem expands the melancholy of Old Left identification articulated in Solomon's "I Was a Communist Youth" into a metaphysical poetics of industry that might sustain itself even without the organizational spaces and supports of the 1930s and 1940s: railroad yard in San Jose I wandered desolate in front of a tank factory and sat on a bench near the switchman's shack. A flower lay on the hay on the asphalt highway the dread hay flower I thoughtIt had a brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus' inchlong crown, and a soiled dry center cotton tuft like a used shaving brush that's been lying under

the garage for a year. Yellow, yellow flower, and flower of industry, tough spiky ugly flower, flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow Rose in your brain! This is the flower of the World (CP, 113) [End Page 377] Ginsberg moves in this poem from a series of physical juxtapositions rendered in prepositional phrases to a series of imaginative, idealized relationships represented through metaphor. This movement takes the reader from the initial desolation of the industrial space, emptied out and militarized, to a Blakean vision of the blessed and beautiful form within all creatures. The (absent) labor that defines this space as the poem beginsreferred to obliquely as the speaker situates himself "in back of the . . . railroad yard," "in front of a . . . factory," and "near the switchman's shack"is transfigured over the course of the poem and finally resituated within a poetico-spiritual realm in which industrial setting, flower, and workers can be at once symbolically merged and endowed with a sacred, eternal form. In back of the real, one might say, Marx and Engels's workers of the world are imaginatively transformed into the flowers of the world, each a little ugly and dusty but holding "the form of the great yellow / Rose in [its] brain." The difficulty and the potential of such an interpretation reside in two placesfirst, in the absence of the workers themselves, of even the switchman whose shack is nearby but who neither shows himself nor communicates with the poet. Second, such an interpretation must justify itself in relation to the tropes that take the place of absent workers in this poem: first the hay flower, then similes comparing the flower to Jesus and to a used shaving brush, and finally the great yellow rose. Like the "gray Sunflower" in "Sunflower Sutra," "crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye" (CP, 138), the hay flower in "In back of the real" might be said to represent the "perfect beauty" of all human souls in the often alienating and degrading struggles over labor, profit, and industrial production. Yet all the marks of left collectivity we find in Ginsberg's other poems from the 1950sfor instance, the "class consciousness" and the poignant claim in "A Poem on America" that "We have the proletariat too"have been evacuated from the desolate, first-person-singular wandering of "In back of the real." In place of collectivity are metaphors, a series of figures the poet offers up and yokes together as a way of continuing to imagine, to remember, or to believe in an ideal form he can no longer see, even in those spaces where he thinks he should find it. Jesus appears here as a figure of faith, of the Christian belief in redemption, a utopian future that could suddenly enter and transform the present. Likewise, the poet's hopes [End Page 378] for working-class collectivity and artist-worker connections reside in tropes and in the very act of troping, of generating figures of faith to counter the symbolic emptiness of postwar industrial space. Ginsberg's engagement in "In back of the real" with lost forms of left collectivity and culture are echoed by the poem's engagement with a long tradition of romantic imagery and political idealism. In both its specific metaphors and its activation of these tropes as symbols of some deeper, fuller life within modern, urban, industrial culture, Ginsberg's poem recalls Blake's "London" and "Ah Sun-flower," Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," and Yeats's "The Rose of the World," to name only a few. The "I wandered" of "In back of the real" echoes Blake's "London" and Wordsworth's tale of

"golden daffodils," though unlike the wandering "I" in these famous lyrics, which speaks to us from their first to their last stanzas, Ginsberg's "I" recedes over the course of the poem. Standing forth long enough to begin producing metaphors, Ginsberg's "I" blends into them once this production begins, thus compromising slightly the narrative control that Blake's and Wordsworth's speakers maintain. This integration of speaker and imagery suggests that agency functions somewhat differently in "In back of the real" than in this lyric's famous predecessors. Agency in Ginsberg's lyric is displaced slightly from the speaker and partially relocated in "the brain" of the poem's "flower of industry" (itself a trope, of course, for the speaker). As the poem ends, it is somewhere in the imaginative space between the speaker and the flower that we discover the power to hold on to and reactivate emotional attachments and images of self that seem to promise transformation. Without factory and railroad workers to wander through, transfiguring the "real railroad yard" with their collective presence, Ginsberg's speaker is left celebrating a flower, while the flower, in turn, is left remembering the ideal forms in its own brain, a seemingly endless loop of idealization that threatens to collapse under its own metaphorical weight. Stationary and solitary, Ginsberg's "flower of industry" lacks the collectivity and capacity for movement implicit in Benjamin's image of the flowers of the past, which, though they may at times stand in the grip of a simplistically progressive heliotropism, are nonetheless full of the very play between past and present that makes redemption possible. Ginsberg's flower stands alone, hinting at a sort of overly romantic melancholywhat Benjamin calls "left wing melancholy"that risks reproducing [End Page 379] itself endlessly, oblivious to other flowers or to the potential for a different sun to rise one day in the sky of history.14 It is no accident that during the 1950s Ginsberg's invocations of the ideal collectivity of the proletariat reside in metaphorical circuits and melancholic gestures toward a prewar past, rather than in gestures of support for the postwar initiatives of the labor movement. Although radical segments of the labor movement still existed in the 1950s, the CIO's 1949 purge of all unions who refused to embrace policies of anticommunism signaled what Stanley Aronowitz has called "an unprecedented era of conformity" within the trade union movement.15 A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, unions participated willingly in the Cold War consolidation of power in the hands of those that Mills names "the power elite," in the crusade against any and all "Un-American" expressions of political dissent, and in the increasing migration of the best industrial jobs and wages into whites-only suburbs or rural areas. Labor's complicity during the Cold War era with even the most egregious corporate and governmental initiatives was an undeniable sign for Ginsberg's contemporaries that U.S. political discourses in the 1950s would spend less time working through Depression-era class conflicts than interpreting the unequal distribution of mass-produced prosperity, consumer opportunity, and political influence. "Mass society," Aronowitz writes of the 1950s, "had replaced class society as the overarching spirit of the times," and the challenge for many on the Left was to fashion a critique of "deprivations . . . [that] were not material in the old sense" but "appeared postindustrial," the product of an economy that now had the capacity to provide all its workers with full-time employment and fulfilling social lives but refused to do so.16 While many postwar artists and intellectuals eagerly embraced this notion that an epochal shift had rendered prewar forms of art and politics obsolete, Ginsberg's poetic and political imaginary retains its investment in Popular Frontstyle assertions of working-class beauty and the cultural centrality of the work-art dialectic. Although poems like "In back of the real" and "Sunflower Sutra" suggest that the poet's connection with the proletariat became more and more a function of memory and metaphor, they nonetheless concern themselves with industrial rather than white-collar

work. These poems mark the increasing difficulty of imagining a resistant proletariat in consumer culture, and thus register the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial [End Page 380] economy by substituting commodities for workers as the figures of industrial production. It is through discarded commodities"a used shaving brush / . . . lying under / the garage" (CP, 113); "dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, . . . condoms & pots" (CP, 138)rather than exploited workers that Ginsberg manages to allegorize the productive and social relations he seeks to redeem. And while it is true, furthermore, that these relations finally assume an abstract, spiritual form in "Sunflower Sutra" and "In back of the real," I would argue that this form grows out of and contains within itself (within its "brain" or memory) a specifically melancholic vision of collectivity, based on factory economies and on the class consciousness structuring and structured by industrial social relations. Ginsberg's difficulty in the 1950s stems from his desire to continue to represent past forms of left collectivity and artistworker solidarity now that the historical bloc that once sustained these forms no longer exists. In reaction to this difficulty, he substitutes figures of faith for a political faith difficult to maintain in the railroad yards of the 1950s, an act of substitution that both holds open a space for left collective resistance and runs the risks of dwelling endlessly on the past. In Howl, we see how a potentially debilitating attachment to prewar configurations of political resistance begins to rearticulate itself as a new form of oppositional collectivitya new form, Howl suggests through its prophetic repetitions, that would be impossible to imagine without the cultural resources of the past. *** "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," proclaims the first line of Howl, prefiguring a generational rhetoric that would soon structure, among other notable statements, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address and an obscure but influential manifesto of student activism, the Port Huron Statement.17 Explicitly, the minds that America has driven to madness are those of the male, mostly homosexual, drug-using members of Ginsberg's own Beat-bohemian coterie. These are the angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz (CP, 126) [End Page 381] and who are often references to Ginsberg himself. Marjorie Perloff recounts that, as Frank O'Hara listened to Ginsberg begin a reading of Howl by invoking the most inspired intellects of his generation, O'Hara is said to have turned to his neighbor and quietly deadpanned: "I wonder who Allen has in mind?"18 As O'Hara's joke suggests and as Perloff argues at greater length, Howl unquestionably solicits our attention as an autobiographical work. In keeping with my approach, however, in this final section I want to place the biographical movements of Howl within a larger cultural frame, one that focuses on the complex temporality of the poem's claims to political identity. During a postwar moment when the left is caught, as Ginsberg later described it, "between the Scylla of Stalinism and the Charybdis of antiStalinism,"19 Howl speaks for a generation doomed, exhausted, institutionalized, yet nonetheless possessing a compelling vision of left collectivity, a vision both haunted by the past and predictive of political futures. As Howl imagines it, Ginsberg's "generation

destroyed by madness" is actually double: a postwar Beat illuminati inhabited (or energized) by a prewar generation dedicated to communist or socialist transformations. The rhetorical and poetic techniques Ginsberg employs to give shape to his (multi)generational parable reproduce the strange and contradictory historical condition that Howl sees itself occupyingat once repressive and liberating, paralyzed and animated, full of forward momentum and doubling back endlessly. Generating momentum in each of its three sections by returning insistently to the same root word and syntactical structure, the poem stacks one image or anecdote of Beat illumination onto another to create an impression of expansive yet publicly unacknowledged collectivity, a new "holy" collectivity through which the Old Left might bid for a return to social influence in a new form. Howl fuses the proletarian nostalgia of a poem like "In back of the real" with anticipation, reviving with a difference the literary references of the Popular Front and reimagining U.S. industrial landscapes from the perspective of neon supernatural hipness. In its very structure Howl signifies Ginsberg's desire to merge his own generation of angel-headed hipsters with his parents' generation of dedicated socialists and impassioned communists. Again and again in its famous first section, Howl returns to "who," the relative pronoun that inaugurates long line after long line and propels the poem forward [End Page 382] through catalogs of the poet's actions and those of his like-minded brethren, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, ....... who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets (CP, 126, 127) and so forth. From these short excerpts one gets a clear sense of the poetic structure without which Howl could not exist, the parallel syntactic structure and anaphoric return to "who" that leaves readers anticipating the next predicate: "wept at the romance of the streets," "scribbled all night rocking and rolling," "jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge," "sang out of their windows in despair," "barreled down the highways of the past" (CP, 129). As a poetic device, anaphora helps Ginsberg create rhythm and generate prophetic momentum from line to line. But the device also becomes a powerful trope in its own right, a figure of return that troubles linear progression and confuses origins by insisting on starting over, again and again, seemingly at the same place (the "who") but always with a difference (the predicate). Although Howl begins by announcing itself as a generational manifesto and proceeds to catalog the actions, attitudes, and suffering of a certain group at a certain historical moment, the form of the poem leads us to wonder

when exactlyand with whomthese actions and attitudes originate. Through force of repetition, one might say, the relative pronoun "who" becomes interrogative, and the form of Ginsberg's poem subtly undermines the notion that generations break away cleanly, defining themselves through their clear difference from the past. Howl reinforces its tendency to trouble origins and generational logic by collapsing its primary objects of identification: the poet's dedicatee and contemporary, Carl Solomon, and the poet's mother. Already [End Page 383] near the end of part 1, we find that the poet's addresses to Solomon merge perceptibly with descriptions of Naomi Ginsberg: Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, With mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply. . . . ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time (CP, 130) In 1955, just before Ginsberg composed Howl, he was shaken by news that Solomon, who had been faring well for a period outside mental hospitals, had again been institutionalized. He had been sent to Pilgrim State Hospital, where Ginsberg's mother was also a mental patient and where in 1947 she had been lobotomized with her son's written consent.20 Pilgrim State, Rockland, and Greystone all name New Yorkarea hospitals where Solomon or Naomi Ginsberg were institutionalized at one time or another. As Ginsberg evokes the "foetid halls" of these hospitals, where dreams turn to nightmares and bodies to stone, the biographies of mother and contemporary begin to merge, joining in solidarity "in the total animal soup of time." Just as Ginsberg's use of anaphora forces us to question the historical origins of both social afflictions and collective resistance in Howl, this blurring of the poet's central objects of identification implies that his lamentation for the madness of his own generation is also a lamentation for the blighted hopes and wasted intellects of their precursors. As in Benjamin's "Theses," one discovers in Howl the conviction that the spirit of both struggle and possibility in the present should be nourished by memories of past suffering, oppression, "courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude."21 Again in part 3, the poet's statements of solidarity with his contemporary become imbricated with expressions of sympathy for his communist mother: Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [End Page 384] I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother .................. I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the facist national Golgotha ......... I'm with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale (CP, 13233) Madness in Howl functions as an effective trope for acts of social resistance that are almost futile yet still somehow inspiring, or to put it another way, for the fate of the revolutionary imagination during a decidedly nonrevolutionary era. This figure is not, however, limited to a single generation. Is it Solomon or Naomi who plots "the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha"? Is it his generation or hers that, in its socially produced madness, hears "twentyfive thousand . . . comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale"? By the end of the poem, these two figures, and through them their generations, have become almost indistinguishable, Solomon imitating the shade of Naomi so that the poet can swear his simultaneous devotion to them both. Images of a mental patient dreaming of revolution, or of the institutionalized joining together to sing the Communist Party anthem, are composites. They are meant to suggest that the cultural resources of the prewar Left have not disappeared in the postwar moment, that the costs of a fervent belief in social transformation are high in either case, and that the past and present can only be redeemed together. Since the poem's composition, political interpretations have regarded Howl as an early sign of a new American counterculture invested in a wide range of social issues and, more specifically, as a harbinger of gay liberation. During the 1960s, New Left movementsagainst the Vietnam War, for instance, in support of civil rights, for the [End Page 385] reform of U.S. universitiesdeparted (as Howl does) from liberal optimism about the nation's institutions and from liberalism's Cold Warera foreign policy as it manifested itself both abroad and as a strategy for enforcing political consensus within the United States.22 These movements were also historically united because they had come unhinged (as Howl has) from the Old Left requirement that various issues and movements be subordinated to the larger effort to replace capitalism with an economic system of, for, and by the working class. One hears rumblings in Howl of organized movements that, in Nancy Fraser's terms, will demand "recognition" for identity groups culturally and discursively excluded from full democratic participation without claiming that such exclusions can be remedied only through complete economic transformation.23 Throughout this essay, however, I have tried to suggest that the articulations of collective action and political identity that energized the 1960s and 1970s, insofar as we can see them connected to, or predicted by, the models of resistant collectivity represented in Ginsberg's work of the 1950s, were not as new as they seemed. In memoirs and manifestos, postwar formations like the Beat generation and the New Left reveal their deep, though ambivalent, attachments to a set of supposedly antiquated cultural resources: a class consciousness that can activate critique and collective resistance, the integration of art into the collective struggle, the art of demanding social transformation even when it seems uncertain. Unquestionably reconstructed in the face of new historical conditions, these resources nonetheless helped galvanize the statements and stances of movements too often thought of as having created themselves spontaneouslyrising forth in rebellion against a dominant formation, such as the New Criticism or Cold War consensus, that has long rendered obsolete the left

formations of the past. My point is not to argue that the New Left is only the Old Left in new clothing but, rather, to remind us that the new can only be constructed by exaggerating the decline of the old. Ginsberg's poems of the 1950s mark the presence within the new American poetry of Old Left political identifications that continue to agitate even as they are defined as outmoded. As we think through the political and cultural movements and identifications of the postwar moment, his poems remind us that old forms can always be reconstituted in the face of new conditions. These forms are never as distant as they might seem, and the trick is to recognize them among us, to identify [End Page 386] them to one another, and to rearticulate them as figures of historical agency. "History," Benjamin writes, "is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now."24 If it is a postwar now that Ginsberg hopes to seize as he remembers the possibilities of the prewar past and has them rise "reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz," singing "the suffering of America's naked mind for love" (CP, 131), then it is a contemporary now that he urges us to seize as we read and remember his poems.

Endnotes
For their encouragement and helpful responses to this argument, both early and late in its development, I thank Eric Lott, Jahan Ramazani, Lisi Schoenbach, Chip Tucker, Bryan Wagner, and especially Jonathan Flatley. 1 For representative literary-historical accounts of Ginsberg's influence, see James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 19451965 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 53109; Marjorie Perloff, "A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties," in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990), 199230; and David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 33153, 52852. For representative descriptions of the Beat movement as precursor to the new social movements of the 1960s, see Stanley Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was New," in The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1143; and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 4554. 2 In refocusing attention on Ginsberg's attachments to the prewar Left, I hope to contribute to a larger effort, begun by critics like Cary Nelson and Michael Denning, to help us overcome the "deep cultural amnesia" that has worked to erase from our collective memory the names and details of a U.S. radical past; see Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 425; and Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 19101945 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001). 3 For one of many instructive readings of the "new rules of consent" written and maintained with the active participation of U.S. intellectuals during the postwar moment, see Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4264. "If the restorative [End Page 387] properties of the new liberal pluralism were to take hold," Ross writes, "terms like class' and mass,' so redolent of that vestigial marxist culture, would have to be quarantined, if not entirely lobotomized from the national mind" (43). It is precisely the influence of this "vestigial marxist culture" that I trace in Ginsberg's poems from the 1950s, which represent Marxist and socialist cultures as actively "quarantined" and even literally

"lobotomized"in the case of Naomi Ginsbergyet still a source of aesthetic and political agency. 4 For accounts of these and other events in relation to Ginsberg's life and art, see Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). Further references will be cited parenthetically as DL. 5 Three recent articles inspired me to begin thinking about generational rhetorics and the intersecting, synchronic, diachronic, and spatial complexity of social identity: Elizabeth Freeman, "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations," New Literary History 31 (autumn 2000): 72744; Marlon Ross, "Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective," Callaloo 23 (winter 2000): 290312; and Robyn Wiegman, "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," New Literary History 31 (autumn 2000): 80525. Although I depart slightly from Wendy Brown's interpretation of melancholy in general and Benjaminian melancholy in particular, my understanding of Benjamin's writings as an alternative and nonprogressive mode of historical narration is indebted to Brown's Politics out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). 6 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 25758. For a compelling theory of melancholy as both a mode of historical engagement and an affect that might ground social transformation, see Jonathan Flatley, "Moscow and Melancholia," Social Text 19 (spring 2001): 75 102. 7 Allen Ginsberg, "America," Collected Poems, 19471980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 148. Further references to Collected Poems are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as CP. 8 For more on the political backgrounds and commitments of Ginsberg's parents, see DL, 112. 9 Carl Solomon, "I Was a Communist Youth," in The Floating Bear: A Newsletter: Numbers 137, 19611969, ed. Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (La Jolla, Calif.: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), 129. 10 See, for instance, Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 2634. See also descriptions of Dolly Weinberg, LeRoi Jones's first girlfriend in the Village, in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 14144; and in Hettie Jones's How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 29. 11 C. Wright Mills, introduction to White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), xvxx. [End Page 388] 12 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1991), xlii, xliv. 13 Denning, The Cultural Front, 462. 14 See Walter Benjamin, "Left Wing Melancholy," trans. Ben Brewster, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 3046. See also Brown's Politics out of History, 16872, and her frequently cited "Resisting Left Melancholy," boundary 2 26 (fall 1999): 1927. 15 Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973; reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 336. 16 Ibid., 328, 330. 17 See Gitlin, The Sixties, 66. 18 Perloff, "A Lion in Our Living Room," 199. 19 Allen Ginsberg, interview by Allen Young, Gay Sunshine Interview (Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1974), 42. 20 Ginsberg and his brother Eugene were legally responsible for their mother once their parents divorced. On the institutionalizations of Carl Solomon and Naomi Ginsberg, see DL, 8790, 196, 202. 21 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255. 22 For a brilliant reading of the Cold War as a "consensus formation" still operative in the United States and global contexts, see Donald E. Pease, "Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War: Post-National Spectacles," in Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 55780. 23 See Nancy Fraser, "Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler," New Left Review 228 (MarchApril 1998): 14049, as well as her Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). For a recent account of the complicated relationships between Old Left, New Left, new social movements, and identity politics in Britain and the United States, see Grant Farred, "Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics," New Literary History 31 (autumn 2000): 62748. 24 Benjamin, Illuminations, 261.

Copyright 2002 The American Studies Association. All rights reserved.

American Quarterly 54.4 (2002) 581-622 Access provided by Northwestern University Library

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More is Better:
Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America Shelley Nickles
National Museum of American History

[Figures]
"around here, the working class is the middle class" suburban worker, 1960 1 At a series of conferences in the mid-1950s, the nation's leading designers of appliances, automobiles, and other mass-produced goods debated the social and cultural consequences of working-class prosperity in the decade following World War II. One invited panelist reportedly "shocked and intrigued" the mostly male group of Madison Avenue sophisticates. 2 The participant who caused such a stir was Miss Esther Foley, home service editor of True Story, a confessional-style magazine aimed at wage-earners' wives and published by Macfadden Publications since 1919. Foley abandoned the usual abstract or statistical profiles of the "average" mass-market consumer. Instead, she used slides to bring these designers directly into an unfamiliar worldthe kitchens and living rooms of her "ten million" working-class women readers. 3 What "shocked and intrigued" designers was the material evidence of working-class women's purchasing power. The debate centered on "rosebuds," the flowery flourishes that appeared everywhere. Why, the mystified designers demanded to know, did Foley's women readers insist on buying silverware decorated with rosebuds? Rosebuds represented a sentimental, ornamental aesthetic associated with working-class taste. In designers' scheme of economic mobility [End Page 581] leading to cultural uplift, postwar prosperity should have brought an end to rosebuds. As more and more of these women moved into the middle-income groups, they would trade rosebuds for silverware of a simpler aesthetic preferred by designers and other upper-middle class tastemakers. Instead, these wives of wage earners demanded their rosebuds. Foley told designers that she "did not want 'her' people to be ignored or slighted . . . [nor] their motives . . . misunderstood." She argued that "motivation research" could help designers understand that these women rejected "severe sterile purity" in silverware because it did not embody the "hopes, dreams . . . and despairs" of their increasingly comfortable but still distinctively working-class lives. 4 In other words, working-class women's preference for shiny ornamental rosebuds was not about bad taste, fashion, or status-seeking but about social identity. In fact, designers' dream of economic mobility leading to cultural uplift had been turned on its head. Not only was silverware with rosebuds evidence of a persisting working class in a supposedly classless middle-class society, but through the mechanism of mass production this ethos actually drove the standards for shiny appliances, automobiles, and other goods that permeated mainstream culture. This study offers a reconsideration of postwar class relations by exploring the significant influence of working-class women's distinctive values, as expressed in taste, on

American social life and culture. 5 By World War II, class had come to be synonymous with the "collar line," yet historians have shown that, along with income and occupation, patterns of education, sociability, and style of life also have played a role in class formation and identity. 6 The new postwar working class that was the subject of debate in this public discourse referred to white "blue-collar" wage earners and their families, a predominantly northern industrial workforce that included the children and grandchildren of European immigrants for whom ethnicity had become a class marker. 7 An increasing number of these blue-collar workers now had middle-class pocketbooks that allowed them to live in suburban "mass-produced domestic comfort" and participate in the white identity defined by that racially homogenous environment. 8 But, these blue-collar men and women nevertheless often retained their distinctive class values, lifestyles, and tastes. 9 Above all, an ethos I call "more is better" defined working-class taste. This ethos represented the preservation of working-class values now given new expression in big cars [End Page 582] and shiny refrigerators. That style, with its boldness and bulk, stood in contrast to a "less is more" aesthetic of simplicity favored by upper-middle class tastemakers. 10 By identifying the persistence of working-class taste, this study contributes to the work of labor historians who have argued that achieving a higher standard of living and common participation in the mass market could strengthen working-class identity and even foster political activism, as opposed to assimilation. 11 This study further argues, however, that a "more is better" aesthetic as an expression of working-class values not only persisted, but through the mechanism of mass production of goods such as kitchen appliances, actually pervaded material culture. Because mass production aimed at the largest possible market, working-class taste influenced design standards for goods purchased by working-class and middle-class women alike. Rather than assimilating, this study suggests, members of the working classparticularly working-class womenreformulated the mainstream material world of suburbia commonly understood as a middle-class creation. 12 The pervasiveness of this gendered blue-collar aesthetic did not come without a battle from some designers and other upper-middle class critics who fought to maintain their influence on standards for mass-produced goods. Designers of these domestic consumer goods perceived that working-class consumers moved up economically but not culturally. Promoters of a "less is more" ethos, many designers resisted this disjunction between economic and cultural mobility. 13 Although these battles took place outside the political arenas of voting booths and union halls, the triumph of tail fins and shiny refrigerators signaled the democratization of taste. This article will trace the impact of working-class values, as expressed in taste preferences for mass-produced goods, on mainstream culture by looking at the complex interactions among four key social groups: working-class women, who preserved their distinctive values and taste; designers of mass-produced goods, who had to satisfy the demands of this gendered working-class market; motivation researchers linked to social scientists, who articulated and promoted this persisting taste; and the publishers and editors of True Story magazine. Best known as a confessional magazine featuring stories with such sensational titles as "I Married Two Men but I Wasn't a Bigamist," the magazine's publishers sponsored numerous motivation research studies of real blue-collar women who read their largely fictional magazine. [End Page 583] True Story's publishers and editors then sold this image of a new gendered working-class culture back to their readers through the fictional stories and real home features in the magazine itself. 14

War of the Rosebuds

In the five years following World War II, household furnishings and appliance purchases climbed 240 percent. During the next decade, the median family income rose 30 percent in purchasing power and the suburban population increased at a faster rate than the general population. 15 Bolstered by increased real wages and purchasing power, a significant number of wage-earning families swelled the middle-income ranks and moved to the suburbs, and a majority purchased refrigerators, automatic washing machines, and other household appliances for the first time. 16 Did a higher standard of living and the ability to buy the same basic package of mass-produced goods as their white-collar neighbors make these blue-collar workers middle class? A consensus chorus of government policymakers, sociologists, public intellectuals, and businessmen answered affirmatively that prosperity was eroding the class identity of the American worker. 17 As one report argued, the suburban development was becoming the "new American melting pot . . . in which 'blue-collar' families are taking up the middle class life." 18 Designers, too, celebrated such reports of a "middle class classless society" by creating their own visual mythology in which workers traded blue-collars for tuxedos and their wives exchanged household drudgery for domestic "elegance." 19 In this view of cultural uplift, designers portrayed entertaining in the kitchen as a "new interest in simple routines," rather than acknowledging the social kitchen as a working-class tradition influencing middle-class servantless homes. Even the tools of work, the appliances themselves, were minimized in this image of upper-middle class uplift (fig. 1). Underlying this notion of social assimilation achieved through mass consumption and household modernization was a gender ideology defined by middle-class domesticity. 20 Foley's war of the rosebuds was an attempt to counter this view by offering indisputable visual evidence of real working-class women's homes. Designers' disdainful descriptions of the "shiny 'miracle' appliances in badly arranged kitchens, the inevitable chrome dinette set, the sentimental and unrelated living room furnishings . . . common [End Page 584] to this taste group" suggested that these designers were reluctant to admit that they now had to satisfy the demands of working-class women whose incomes allowed them to participate in postwar consumer culture but whose values and tastes differed from their own. The kitchens of Foley's working-class readers spoke of a middle-income standard of living achieved by up-to-date household appliances but not one defined by middle-class values of simplicity, managerial efficiency, and refinement that took their cue from professional tastemakers such as designers (fig. 2). 21 [End Page 585] Foley drew on True Story's own productive collaboration with a new group of market researchers linked to prominent social scientists who engaged in "motivation research" [hereafter MR] to expose the class and gender politics of an ongoing cultural debate. Drawing on numerous MR studies of actual blue-collar women in new suburbs and older neighborhoods, Foley's presentation clearly challenged the popular assumption that mass consumption and household modernization went hand-in-hand with social assimilation. She implied that these commentators confused middle income with middle class and suburb with middle-class community. The True Story editor's slides made the point that blue-collar consumers had risen on the "economic ladder," as evidenced by the proliferation of household appliances, but not on the "taste ladder" that designers had constructed. 22 Foley suggested that MR could help designers understand and predict the distinctive preference of these blue-collar female consumers. Although motivation [End Page 586] research was criticized as a device to manipulate consumers by some and dismissed as a pseudo-science fad by others, True Story saw motivation research as a method to uncover the persistence of working-class values,

lifestyles, and taste within this middle-income mass market. 23 By linking the symbolism in design to social science, motivation researchers made blue-collar aesthetics evidence not only of a distinct market segment but of a new social class of suburban workers within a changing American social structure. The retention of working-class taste presented manufacturers with a challenge. Manufacturers of silverware, tableware, textiles, and furnishings could offer diverse choices from rosebuds to plain design. But, the huge tooling and advertising costs involved in the mass production and mass marketing of goods such as household appliances was a disincentive to variety. This meant that manufacturers had to aim at a national mass-market majority comprised of both newly prosperous working-class and middle-class consumers. 24 Designers would have to make a choice between shiny chrome and plain design as the basis for determining increasing value on a ladder of consumption. Foley warned that designers who ignored this working-class taste in favor of their own upper-middle class preference for simplicity would fail. Designers realized that the triumph of a "more is better" aesthetic in mass-produced goods meant they were losing a battle not only to shape a new working-class market but also the middleclass market. The application of ornament through chrome and color even to standardized refrigerators suggested the pervasiveness of working-class taste.

Working-Class Sparkle or Upper-Middle Class Simplicity: Who Defines Value?

During the postwar era, the mechanism of mass production became the means by which a gendered working-class culture permeated the mainstream "middle," although this process was hotly contested by upper-middle-class tastemakers. The logic of mass production as it developed by the 1920s in the Ford Model T demanded standardization and thus the creation of design standards for the mass market. 25 How these design standards, the visual expression of a product's value, should be defined became a matter of increasing debate during World War II, when it became apparent that the composition of the market for expensive consumer durables like household appliances would rapidly [End Page 587] move away from an upper-middle class market to a mass market after the war ended. In the postwar period, for example, the ownership of mechanical refrigerators increased from 44 percent to about 90 percent of American households. 26 Corporate executives and designers in essence admitted that they had been catering to "an essentially conservative group'middle class' and 'better'"a group not so different from themselvesin designing and marketing their goods. 27 Standard practice had been to design household appliances based on the majority opinion of these largely upper-middle class women as expressed in surveys, resulting in designs that favored professional middle-class values of hygiene, efficiency, and simplicity. Manufacturers understood this new postwar "mass market" as "the low and low middle income classes of our national market." 28 Manufacturers wondered whether they could "connect" with this new mass market without losing their former clientele. 29 Designers perceived that consumers had diverse tastes, and social class became the most useful way to categorize these tastes for national markets. As opposed to designers' own upper-middle class preference for elegant simplicity, consumer research revealed that the working-class masses generally believed worth was expressed through three design features. One was "bulk and size": if "it looks bigger, it must be worth more." Bulk signified solidity. Another was "embellishment and visual flash." The third was color. 30 Although surveys indicated that men generally held the purse strings, manufacturers conceptualized the consumer as female and more specifically attributed

the desire for styling to the influence of women. As one study argued, "whether she has a job outside the home or not, the wage earner wife decides most family purchases or investments." This reflected a dichotomy that gendered function and production as masculine and ornamentation and consumption as feminine. 31 In the postwar period, the question was whether design standards would have to be "lowered" to accommodate blue-collar women's "more is better" idea about value or whether the working class would be uplifted by their new prosperity to accept the uppermiddle class "good design" available to them. These options were represented by two competing models available to determine design standards in a diverse and changing market. Industrial designers generally championed functionalist principles, which argued that design standards should reflect universal and everlasting aesthetic ideals defined by [End Page 588] simplicity and efficiency. In this view, changes in the composition of the market would have no impact on design standards. Working-class consumers would be uplifted by their new prosperity and would simultaneously be compelled by qualities of simplicity to accept designers' upper-middle class standards. In contrast to this static model, "Sloanism," the marketing strategies developed at General Motors under Alfred Sloan, opened the door for a dynamic conception of design that responded to changes in the social structure of the market. 32 Sloanism used design and flexible mass-production technology to create mass-market cars in which increasing value was represented visually as one "stepped up" to more expensive cars. This created a "ladder of consumption" in which cars at different price points corresponding to income groupsfrom Chevrolet to Cadillacwere defined through a visual vocabulary of increasing value defined by the "average" consumer. 33 Not surprisingly, the automobile industry took the lead in recognizing working-class purchasing power to create new postwar design standards. Contemporary social commentator Eric Larrabee derisively noted how this dynamic worked. According to Larrabee, the automobile industry was, democratic in its refusal to assert style leadership by setting genuinely aristocratic tastes that then filter slowly down; quite to the contrary, through market research it makes style filter up from below. 34 In other words, the automobile industry created a ladder of consumption based on the idea that "when the American workingman gets a little money. . . he wants a bigger car." For these consumers, increasing value was expressed through bigger, and more ornamented, cars. 35 The impact of this mass market aesthetic in automobiles, and how it spread to household appliances, was most vividly illustrated in the Cadillac. After World War II, General Motors relied upon mass production to lower prices of this highend car. The Cadillac was no longer aimed at the elite, but to "the man on his way up." This linked it clearly to the top of the ladder in a mass market. 36 In addition to large size and chrome, the Cadillac created distinctive design elements that reflected the "more is better" taste of a new average consumer. Because the Cadillac was the premier status symbol of the 1950s, these design elements then became linked to notions of status. Harley Earl, the influential GM designer who created the tail fin, argued that the tail fin [End Page 589] gave the consumer a "visible premium" for the money spent. The tail fin and the "V" emblem were two of the potent design elements that signaled "class" to a majority of Americans. 37 Immediately after the war, there were signs that this new mass-market aesthetic might spread to household appliances and other goods. Household appliance designers recognized that automobile designers were successful at articulating this "more is better" visual language of value. 38 The design motifs on refrigerators began to follow

suit. Observers increasingly noted the resemblance between the embellishments on refrigerators, such as flashy chrome nameplates, and the gadgets on automobiles. 39 Critics singled out Frigidaire as the worst offender, noting that Frigidaire's rounded form appeared bulky and was "least attractive [with] a very flashy trademark in gold and chrome, and gold colored plexiglass trim about the handle." 40 The fact that Raymond Loewy, a leader of the profession, had a hand in this design suggested the challenge designers faced. Loewy shared the view of his critics that the designer should be the "Knight of Good Taste," educating the masses to appreciate the modernist ideals based on simplicity. But, he defended "more is better" styling by arguing that "it is a proven fact" that "only a limited segment of sophisticated buyers" accepted "products whose design has been reduced to their simplest expression" while the masses "love chrome . . . indiscriminately." 41 Whether designers liked it or not, if they wanted to sell the goods they would have to recognize that social changes inevitably were altering mass-production design standards. Commentators understood that this trend in household appliance design signaled the infiltration of working-class values into mainstream culture. The shrill debate over taste and suburbia reflected a concern over the growing impact of this new class and gender dynamic in the marketplace. William Whyte captured these class and gender politics in his influential 1956 book The Organization Man. Whyte wrote disparagingly that the unhappy result of the "social revolution" that gave rise to the "emancipation of the worker" was the "pink lampshade in the picture window." 42 Like shiny chrome refrigerators, the pink lamp shade represented a new majority of American women who drove design standards in the marketplace and created new suburban domestic lifestyles without regard for the values of cultural arbiters. Tastemakers who hoped that working-class prosperity would result in uplifted tastes feared this spread of ornamentation influenced by [End Page 590] working-class purchasing power. The fact that even refrigerators could be styled showed the pervasiveness of this new "more is better" culture. Designers realized that it meant that they were losing the battle to shape a new "middle-majority" market consisting of both working-class and lower-middle class consumers. 43 A step removed from market pressures, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acted as the guardian of these values. Beginning in 1950, MoMA launched the "Good Design" program in conjunction with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Through this program, MoMA effectively sanctioned certain goods available in the marketplace that met its aesthetic criteria of simplicity and restraint. When the "Good Design" programs ended in 1955, however, the impact on the mass market appeared minimal. 44 The Museum of Modern Art resorted to evaluating these trends by holding sessions with such titles as "What's Happening to America's Taste?" 45 While some designers desperately tried to stem the tide against this "lowering" of standards in reaction to working-class women's influence, others promoted the "more is better" aesthetic as a successful sales strategy. Although there had been a tension within the design profession between modernist ideals and market realities, now more was at stake as the social structure of the market changed. The battle lines were clearly drawn in a design competition that the Servel refrigerator company held in 1950. Servel was a high-end refrigerator company with only 6.5 percent of the market. Company executives faced great confusion over the degree to which working-class purchasing power would affect their product, the most expensive mass-produced refrigerator. As a result of this uncertainty, the company's president invited Walter Dorwin Teague, a prominent designer, to compete with the proposals of Lurelle Guild, Servel's consultant designer since the early 1930s, to design the 1950 refrigerator line. 46 The two designersTeague and Guildoffered clearly divergent design strategies based on

different conceptions of what the design standard should be: Teague offered uppermiddle class "good design" uplift, while Guild argued for a new mass aesthetic. Although he subscribed to modernist principles, Guild prided himself on his savvy understanding of consumer taste. Displaying the biases if not the concerns of his fellow designers, Guild once stated that he often designed "deliberately for people without taste." 47 Now the purchasing power of these people made them a force in the market for refrigerators and other expensive consumer goods. Guild correctly [End Page 591] argued that "plain," "good design" was "utterly obsolete in style for this market" of the postwar years. The designer observed that this new market of working-class women wanted large and bulky refrigerators with more features and more "luster." 48 As Guild argued to Servel executives: "The Cadillac car looks expensive and is, the Servel refrigerator is expensive and looks plain." In other words, consumers would not "pay such a high price for a plain refrigerator." 49 Rejecting "simple and austere" design, Guild recommended a healthy dose of "sparkling chrome" to keep pace with competition such as Frigidaire. 50 In direct contrast to Guild, designer Walter Dorwin Teague prescribed an approach of upper-middle class uplift. Teague expressed confidence that women instinctively wanted "good design," if it were available to them. Teague came to the conclusion that Servel should define itself against "flashy" Frigidaires through a visual vocabulary of austerity and refinement. He achieved this plain aesthetic with a door design that minimized curves to reduce bulk and restricted ornament to the slim chrome door handle and small lettering and "flame insignia" for the requisite nameplate. Teague expressed confidence that "the great majority of purchasers respond to the care, restraint, and intelligent consideration this design expresses" (fig. 3). 51 Accustomed to a "tasteful" high-end niche, Servel, a company dominated by engineers, ignored Guild's advice that it adopt more ornamentation in order to expand sales into lower-middle class and working-class markets. Although they agreed with Guild that these consumers defined worth in terms of ornamentation rather than restraint, they selected Teague with the hope they could manipulate consumer demand. 52 By the early 1950s, however, Servel's refrigerators became an illustration of the way that the taste of newly prosperous working-class women increasingly influenced design standards for entire product lines through increased ornamentation of household appliances. Even as Teague's plain model debuted in 1950, the sales department began arguing that Servel refrigerators must have "either less cost or greater glitter" as the key to mass-market success over competitors. As Servel floundered, company officials turned for a few years to their own in-house designers with assistance from other consultants to design refrigerators that reflected a "more is better" aesthetic. These refrigerators featured two large multi-color door handles with a gold, modified "Cadillac V" surrounded by blue and white rectangles framed by chrome that enhanced the three-dimensional effect. By 1954, the [End Page 592] nameplate was rendered in large gold lettering, and the line featured two-tone models (fig. 4). Servel executives ultimately brought back Teague but pressured him to abandon the "classic restraint" approach and lower his notion of average taste to reflect the mass market's idea of value. By 1955, even Teague had to concede, begrudgingly, to the "request for sparkle" for a new line of Servel refrigerators. 53 Throughout the industry, household appliance forms became bulkier and more ornamented to increasingly reflect this "more is better" aesthetic. When working-class women expressed their preference for "white metal kitchens with Cadillac handles" on appliances and [End Page 593] cabinets, designers realized they were losing the battle not only to shape a working-class taste, but also the middle-class market, since these

standards shaped mass-produced goods aimed at the widest possible market. 54 The extent to which the new mass aesthetic had become the basis for an entire ladder of consumption was best illustrated in the design strategy of "good, better, best" developed by Sears, Roebuck and Company, in which best was always signaled by more ornamentation and gold color. 55 Design critic Thomas Hine has coined the term "populuxe" to suggest that an ideology of popularized luxury pervaded these goods. 56 But, this "populuxe" styling associated with new suburban developments was not popularized in the sense of [End Page 594] taste trickling down to the newly prosperous masses. As mass-produced shiny appliances blurred the collar line in the kitchen, working-class values pervaded mainstream middle-class culture. Working-class women's desire for styling did not mean that they were unconcerned about function or that styling reflected either glamour or status seeking, though designers such as Guild and critics tried to make such links. 57 These machines were primary tools for work, and this concern primarily shaped women's purchasing decisions. Women rewarded major advances in performance, which were few, with their pocketbooks, and spurned manufacturers' attempts to get them to trade in appliances that worked for newly styled models that represented no advance. Their interest in color for major purchases was bounded by practical considerations. 58 But, given two refrigerators of comparable price and performance, women demanded one that represented their "more is better" taste as an expression of value. Upper-middle class modernist designers tried to argue that there was a relationship between simple styling and function. In fact, aesthetics often had little relationship to performance. As a study in Consumer Reports showed, some chrome-laden machines rated low in aesthetic terms by designers were rated higher in terms of function than plain ones. 59 Workingclass women's point remained valid: why should they pay more for a plain refrigerator? Even as household appliance designers created this visual language, they continued to deride the trend toward bulk and adornment. Ultimately, designers who could not bear these design standards had to get out of the household appliance business and limit themselves to designing for the home furnishings industries, which supplied market niches. 60 Those who stayed in the business were reduced to private symbolic acts of protest. Designer John Vassos, whose own designs for RCA appliances catered to mass-market taste, had the tail fins removed from his own Cadillac, an act that garnered accolades from fellow uplifter Philip Johnson of MoMA. 61 Critic Vance Packard blamed designers and marketers for fostering status anxiety by designing status symbols, but designers clearly saw this as a development that was driven from the bottom up specifically by women. In response to charges that designers' professional stance was "undemocratic," designers suggested that the masses' preference for ornamentation was a sign of feminine weakness. By the mid-1950s, these design critics were blaming this "more is better" aesthetic on a [End Page 595] new group of motivation researchers who promoted it. Industrial Design magazine editorialized that the mass-market consumer should trade "motivational styling" for "psychiatry": "he may as well take his Freud straight." 62 But, motivation researchers simply analyzed, advocated, and gave a namemotivational stylingto changing design standards. It was designers who, despite protestations, gave material expression to persisting working-class values that were then studied by motivation researchers, in the service of groups such as True Story magazine.

"Blue-Collar Aesthetic"
Both critics of mass-market taste and the marketers who promoted it understood that,

despite the prosperity of blue-collar consumers, there remained a distinction between economic and cultural mobility. Different taste and opinion makers, including True Story magazine, tried to harness these distinctions for their own ends. In this battle, MR was an important tool for promoting a working-class ethos. Traditional market research had been primarily quantitative and asked direct questions about likes and dislikes. In contrast, the new proponents of MR in the postwar era used in-depth interviews, "role playing" and other techniques, and featured extended quotes from interviewees in their reports.MR emphasized that consumers' answers to direct questions were unreliable because consumer motivations were complex. MR was based on the assumption that the "symbolic meanings" of an object, in part expressed through the external design, were important to the average housewife. 63 Motivation researchers argued that the "huge economic gains of the American worker classes" and their resulting purchasing power presented an enormous potential for businessmen who studied the symbolic meanings of design, such as unraveling "the underlying significance and linkages between such surface phenomena as the flair for color in cars and . . . shirts and refrigerators." 64 Through motivation researchers' relationship with prominent social scientists such as Lloyd Warner, corporate efforts to understand the "taste" of the bluecollar consumer became a way to reinforce distinctions within American society through material culture. A pioneering and influential MR firm that used the tools of MR to discover a distinctive working class after World War II was Social Research, Inc. (SRI), founded in Chicago by academic Burleigh [End Page 596] Gardner in 1946. SRI's work often focused on social class differences expressed through behaviors, values, and consumption choices. 65 Gardner's firm sought, in part, to uncover the ways that design in massproduced goods conveyed social assumptions that were widely understood. For example, the firm conducted an influential MR study of automobiles that probed the "nonrational symbols" that made Cadillac such a symbol of success. The study found that cars had functioned as an "indicator of social status," because cars were designed at different price points that correlated to social classes that were understood by the designers in terms of income groups. 66 These studies also concluded, however, that during the 1950s, mass-produced goods like automobiles and appliances were becoming less useful as markers of social distinctions because a wide variety of people now occupied the middle-income group and could purchase the same goods. 67 Gardner and others argued that "social-class membership," as determined by an individual's consumption patterns, offered a richer understanding of buying behavior than relying on income alone, which blurred white-collar and blue-collar. They stressed the importance of cultural criteria such as domestic lifestyle and "taste." 68 This conception owed its greatest debt to the work of influential University of Chicago social scientist Lloyd Warner, a co-founder of SRI. 69 Warner rejected the rigid dual-class schemes of working versus business class based on the relation of power at the production site as represented in the work of Robert Lynd. 70 Instead, Warner rankordered people into six primary groups: upper-upper, old families; lower-upper, newly arrived wealthy; upper-middle, professionals and successful businessmen; lowermiddle, white-collar salaried; upper-lower, skilled, blue-collar wage earners; lowerlower, unskilled labor. The lower-middle and upper-lower classes were the "middle majority," the target of mass-market appeals. What was useful to marketing men was the fact that Warner's divisions were not by amount of income but by type of income, occupation, and consumption patterns, thus revealing the class distinctions within the middle-majority group. According to these studies, the upper-lower wage-earner group represented about 53 percent of all families in postwar America. 71 Rather than "deny the existence of social class" in America, motivation researchers

found that "knowledge of the social structure" allowed them to sell the U.S. "by class." 72 By using Warner's stratification schemes to probe the underlying significance of the whole constellation [End Page 597] of domestic artifacts, these motivation researchers challenged the prevailing perception that the collar line had disappeared. To demonstrate the persistence of the collar line, they shifted the attention from the massproduced environment of the kitchen to a variety of choices in the living room and therein found a distinctive working-class culture created not by men but by women and united not in politics but in taste. They had an important ally, and client, in the publishers of True Story magazine. True Story had been commissioning traditional market research surveys since the 1920s under the umbrella of its publisher Macfadden Publications, which had its own internal market research department. 73 The primary thrust of the magazine's interwar surveys was to convince advertisers that its working-class readers were becoming part of the mainstream consuming public. In these "sociological sermons to the trade," the magazine painted a picture of a working class that was an important market for massproduced goods. 74 At the same time, True Story promoted the emergence of what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called a "class-differentiated mass market" by arguing for the distinctive tastes of the working class as opposed to the "white collars." 75 Despite the fact that True Story vied with Ladies' Home Journal as the leader among women's magazines, these publicity campaigns met with limited success. Although True Story was able to increase advertising by nationally-branded products such as food and soap through such appeals, it still received little advertising from makers of expensive consumer durables such as automobiles and appliances during the interwar period. 76 In the postwar period, True Story had the opposite problem: not to draw attention to the working class as consumers but to maintain the working-class consumer as a distinct class. After World War II, few could dispute the economic influence of True Story's wage-earning readers. No one could achieve a mass market without this group. As one study argued, the "shift from 35 percent to 65 percent penetration of a new appliance" depended primarily on "the working class housewives." 77 The magazine's challenge, therefore, was proving that the working class was still a class and had remained true to True Story despite its prosperity. Macfadden Publications feared that advertisers would think they now could reach these blue-collar consumers by advertising in middle-class women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal. Macfadden had to find a way to tout workers as prosperous, [End Page 598] and therefore the same economically as the middle-class, but distinct culturally and therefore worthy of being targeted separately. To explicate the distinct interests of True Story readers further, however, required a departure from the traditional division in market research by income groups.
78

Beginning in the late 1940s, True Story commissioned SRI to conduct several motivation research studies to understand "the working class woman." 79 Although these studies, written by professional men, occasionally revealed the same gender and class biases as industrial designers' rhetoric, they were nevertheless significant for trying to reclaim a voice that was lost in much public discourse. Interviews with actual True Story readers in their homes provided the bulk of evidence for these studies. The studies interviewed working-class women in a variety of cities and suburbs and used middleclass women as points of comparison. The most famous report, a 1959 study called Workingman's Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style, was authored by SRI employees Lee Rainwater, Richard Coleman, and Gerald Handel based on twelve years' research commissioned, not coincidentally, by Macfadden Publications. This was followed by another influential report, Status of the Working Class in Changing American Society. A few years later, they completed a study entitled The Working

Class World: Identity, World View, Social Relations and Family Behavior Magazines. 80 Taken together, these various studies concluded that business magazines such as Fortune and government-issued reports had exaggerated the extent of middle-class values and homogeneity in society by confusing "middle-income" with "middle class" and "suburb" with "middle-class community." 81 They argued that marketing strategies were based on the erroneous assumption that, "given the same income, the poor man would behave exactly like the rich man." In other words, they did not account for the difference between economic and cultural mobility. The major point of these Macfadden-sponsored studies was that "although a factory worker might now be in the same income group as a white-collar worker," that worker was unlikely to embrace middle-class values. 82 Instead, these blue-collar families had different attitudes towards their work, different ways of raising their children, different ways of socializing, and different taste. These class distinctions reflected not only status hierarchies identified by sociologists, but also the persisting working-class self-identification of a majority of [End Page 599] blue-collar suburbanites surveyed. 83 Women played a key role in articulating these distinctions within the domestic culture of suburbia. SRI's studies for True Story probed various aspects of working-class women's domestic lifestyles including "patterns of taste and aesthetics in connection with furnishings, appliances, and clothing" to uncover these differences. These studies suggested that looking solely at the appliances these women purchased obscured differences in patterns of sociability and taste because "a prosperous lower class and an upper middle class kitchen" might seem similar "when both are well furnished with modern appliances, often of the same brands." As the previous section has shown, massproduced appliances themselves did not express differences, only a greater influence of working-class purchasing power through an overall adoption of the "more is better" aesthetic. But, as SRI's Sidney Levy pointed out, "even these 'same kitchens' may have important differences in them, and have been arrived at through rather different marketing processes based on different values, thought processes, and purchasing actions." Lengthy conversational interviews conducted in these women's own homes revealed that the meaning of these appliances differed dramatically. 84 It was the distinctive importance of new household appliances and the kitchen to the working-class woman in this postwar period that suggested why her taste prevailed in these mass-produced goods. Working-class women's preference for up-to-date, substantial, shiny appliances was an expression of their distinctive domestic lifestyles. Their daily routines were dominated by work, including housework and childcare. As one woman responded when asked to describe her day, "I just run from one day to the next." Middle-class women did much the same work, but they were more likely to have some help, and to have a varied routine that offered social opportunities outside of the home. The studies concluded that working-class women saw their primary role as houseworkers, whereas middle-class women defined themselves more as wives. 85 The centrality of work to the daily lives of blue-collar women led to their emphasis on appliance purchasing. Although studies of household appliance purchasing by income made in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that the majority of purchases were in the middle-income range, analysis by social-class group revealed that blue-collar consumers bought the largest percentage of appliances. Blue-collar consumers also bought a large percentage of top-of-the-line appliances. 86 Large-capacity, bulky appliances represented [End Page 600] solidity and potential laborsaving qualities. These women realized that modern conveniences had not freed them from drudgery, but they made their work easier and contributed to a more cheerful kitchen environment. 87

Furthermore, the importance of the kitchen to the working-class woman led to a desire for "more is better" appliances that reflected that importance. Even by 1960, the kitchen continued to be the room where blue-collar women spent the most time working and socializing. The blue-collar family was more likely to eat in the kitchen, even when entertaining. 88 When asked what the most important room was, one working-class resident of Gary, Indiana noted that her kitchen was most important because "that's where all your expensive household equipment is . . . and that's where I do the biggest part of my work. 89 Another woman living in a new suburban house in Louisville indicated that the kitchen was the most important room to her because "that's where we stay most of the time. We eat in the kitchen. If neighbors come in, we sit in the kitchen." Many women expressed the importance of a "bright" and "cheerful" kitchen as the "heart of the home." 90 Therefore, these studies concluded, it was "not surprising that they should want the kitchen fixed to order, since the kitchen is the focal point of the working class wife's existence." 91 Finally, a "modernized up-to-the-minute kitchen" with modern styled appliances signified these blue-collar families' "arrival into a 1950's middle-American level of . . . respectability." These studies concluded that "solid heavy appliances" were "symbols of security" for working-class folks. 92 Motivation researchers emphasized that this quest for "respectability" meant pride in achieving a hard-earned standard of living, not necessarily middle-class identity. The studies implicitly suggested that designers, even those who promoted a mass aesthetic, misunderstood women's reasons for embracing styling. Designers thought women wanted "glamour" and advertised them in this way, but MR studies suggested that women viewed shiny appliances as a reflection of "modernity," an acknowledgment that they had achieved a higher standard of living defined by new household technology. 93 Researchers identified middle-class women by their distinctive use of their domestic spaces. 94 Middle-class women also wanted similar kitchens, but their motivations were different; they wanted the latest appliances to facilitate their escape from the kitchen, since traditionally the kitchen was associated exclusively with work, and socializing took [End Page 601] place elsewhere. The living room was most important to the middle class housewife. 95 Whereas working-class women expressed pride in their large refrigerator and ranges, middle-class women were interested in minimizing the appearance of these machines in their kitchens. 96 Furthermore, these women often achieved these up-to-date kitchens differently. Working-class families were more likely to update their kitchen using their own extensive manual skills and labor. 97 Whereas working-class women most often named an appliance as their most valued possession, middle-class women named possessions that appealed to "aesthetic sensitivities," such as living room furnishings. 98 These studies comparing blue-collar True Story readers to wives of white-collar workers argued that it was in these living room furnishings that social class differences were most evident. SRI identified three major taste cultures by social class as manifested in furniture (fig. 5).The working class rejected the "severely plain, functional styling of furniture." They preferred "an overelaboration of detail" in large, substantial-looking furniture and sought dependability and comfort. By looking in the living rooms of these women in suburbia, one could see that there was a distinct "blue collar aesthetic." In contrast, the "anxious" middle class was concerned about "good taste" and most apt to be influenced by professional tastemakers such as designers. The upper class had a "hodgepodge" of styles because they were secure in their status. 99 These studies tended to define "middle-class" by a concern for taste and by the "status-anxiety" that resulted from this concern. 100 With mass-produced goods such as appliances, workingclass taste influenced design standards for the largest possible market. In contrast,

"taste in furniture" was "much more elusive and subtle." Brand names were unknown; the variety was seemingly endless. 101 Therefore, women's selection of furniture was an expression of class identity, as well as an impediment to social mobility. 102 The intentions of True Story's editors and publishers were limited to defining a market segment of working-class consumers in order to influence manufacturers and advertisers and sell magazines, not to promote collective class-consciousness. 103 In probing blue-collar taste, however, these studies also reinforced the work of those sociologists who discovered the persistence of a distinct working-class identity. 104 For example, Bennett Berger's influential sociological study of blue-collar suburbanites also made "taste" central to defining social identity. He argued: [End Page 602] [I]mpressions garnered from a survey of furnishing style of the [wage earner] living rooms leads one to doubt the success of the [middle-class] "women's and home" magazines in providing a viable model. The living room tends to be crowded with . . . overstuffed furniture. . . . The mantle tends to become a glass or plaster menagerie. 105 While a national ideology promised middle-class status to those who participated in mass consumption, through their discoveries about taste these motivation researchers and sociologists secured a place for a persisting working-class identity in the new postwar social order. As an expression of social values and identity, taste was an impediment to social mobility from the working to middle class and within the middle [End Page 603] class. As Bennett Berger noted, the upper-middle class was "tightening their entrance requirements" by emphasizing those things that money couldn't buy, such as "good taste." 106 As one woman who married a lawyer and moved to the suburbs later remembered: You were trying to live out this ideal of life in the suburbs, in a way, that you saw in Life magazines. But you always considered yourself just a little above it. You know, you had the Eames chair. 107 These researchers differed amongst themselves about the relative significance of the boundaries between the lower-middle class and the working class, acknowledging the commonalities women were forging in new suburban communities while distinctions in taste, outlook, and values remained. What was being created, Berger argued, was a new working-class culture, one that differed both from the middle class and from the urban working class of the past. The sociologist ultimately concluded that the suburban working-class and portions of the lower-middle class formed a "middle-class working class" with "finer gradations of status" existing between them. Perhaps Berger's phrase best expressed the complex ways in which this newly prosperous working class influenced a segment of mainstream culture defined as middle class through mass consumption while it maintained its distinctive identity through taste, expressed most notably in the living room. 108 For example, the increasing emphasis on the kitchen as a space for sociability within the suburban middle class reflected the increasing prevalence of working-class lifestyles. 109 Motivation researchers and sociologists had uncovered an important division between the economic and cultural mobility of the working class and articulated the influence of this powerful, working-class market on the material world of suburbia as a whole. After discovering this persisting identity, True Story magazine sold back the image of the suburban working-class woman to its readers. Just as True Story's patronage influenced the work of motivation researchers, so too the perspective of the actual women readers interviewed for this research was reflected in the magazine itself. 110 As

a study by Eung-Sook Kim has noted, the editorial formula of True Story was tailored to a "feminine psychology in a working-class setting, with fears, anxieties (and pocketbooks) raised to the middle-class level." 111 Whereas the MR reports of actual working-class women and Esther Foley's conference appearances were aimed at business, the magazine promoted working-class [End Page 604] distinctiveness to its own women readers. The magazine offered its readers advice to navigate this new suburban lifestyle on their own terms. 112 The result was a dialectic between the actual readers surveyed and quoted in the reports, the composite portrait of the "workingman's wife" constructed by motivation researchers from the individual responses, and the readersimagined and actualportrayed in the magazine. Throughout the postwar period, True Story magazine's monthly features offered strategies for working-class wives to achieve their new standard of living, often within a suburban milieu, without conforming to middle-class values. In articles such as "Washing Work Clothes is a Tough Job," home service editor Esther Foley and her associates unabashedly promoted automatic washing machines and other up-to-date modern styled household appliances, but in a way that spoke to working-class domestic routines and family circumstances. 113 Homemaker stories focusing on actual True Story readersa regular featuredepicted this "more is better" aesthetic as one aspect of a distinctive blue-collar lifestyle. For example, Alexandra Angelov, Yugoslavian-born wife of a machinist in Indiana, and Genevieve Sherpa, wife of an Italian-American worker in Syracuse, used their new appliances to make the traditional ethnic recipes they brought with them into these kitchens. 114 "Shining" and "sparkling" were the phrases used most often by readers interviewed in the magazine to describe modern equipment and the new kitchens where they most often ate family meals and socialized. In 1948, Rae Berling of Detroit told True Story's editors that she "would love to have a brand-new shiny" refrigerator. True Story reader Patsy Brennan achieved that goal in 1963. She told the magazine that "a kitchen is the heart of the home, worth spending money on to make as perfect as possible," a phrasing which perfectly mimicked those of readers surveyed in an earlier MR report. 115 Letters in the "Village Pump" column, purportedly sent from actual readers, confirmed the persistence of working-class identity in suburbia by reporting tensions with new white-collar neighbors. One woman complained that despite her "reasonably attractive home" she had to "take a back seat socially" because her father was a manual worker. She suggested that "the white collar attitude towards us of the working class" made her "wonder how we can honestly claim our country is a real democracy." 116 Even the "true stories," first-person dramas written [End Page 605] by professionals drawing on reader submissions, occasionally focused on the class tensions embedded in new suburban domestic lifestyles. 117 Traditionally, the typical "true story" featured a heroine and a sensationalistic, but highly moralistic, story with themes that often combined seemingly conflicting ideas. 118 The new suburban domestic dramas occasionally featured in the postwar era were tamer, but they were still moralistic dramas that sent ambivalent messages about consumption. In "The Yellow Refrigerator," when a man proposed marriage to his fiance, he promised her a yellow refrigerator, the color signifying up-to-date styling and a better life. After marriage, some expense always prevented them from getting a new refrigerator. After learning she was pregnant with yet another child, the author lamented: "There goes my yellow refrigerator." The story concluded with the author deciding that her family was more important to her than the elusive yellow refrigerator. The magazine acknowledged women's desires for colorful appliances and cheerful up-to-date kitchens as legitimate expressions of their social identity, but it also suggested limitations. 119 Stories featured the kitchen as a place where neighbors of different "collars" united and

where working-class women wielded influence in their neighborhoods. In "Duchess in My Kitchen," the wife of a mechanic felt inferior to a more sophisticated woman who moved into the town and invited herself into her home. Ultimately, however, the middleclass woman found respite from her own troubles in the working-class "author's" kitchen. Significantly, it was the kitchen that served to unite the two women (fig. 6). In "Frozen Friendship," a woman received new-found popularity in her neighborhood when she purchased a large freezer, but the freezer also became a source of tension when neighbors took advantage of her. The tension ultimately was resolved after the freezerowning woman asserted herself. 120 Finally, "Split Level Blues" epitomized the complex portrait of the working-class suburban woman. This fictional author represented a virtual composite of the real True Story women readers quoted in the MR surveys. The working-class woman featured in this "true story" was proud of her up-to-date suburban kitchen with "shiny machines" that were equal to those of her neighbors. Yet the tension in the story arose from her feeling that she did not fit in with her white-collar neighbors. Not only was her husband a manual worker who didn't play golf like the others, but she cleaned her house everyday, whereas the white-collar housewiveslike the middleclass women interviewed in [End Page 606] the MR reportshad a daily schedule for cleaning particular rooms. As the author told her husband, "they don't . . . think like we do." Differences manifested themselves in areas as diverse as parenting and livingroom decorating styles. The author felt like an outcast at a neighbor's party because of the "ultra modern furniture, I guess you'd call it. Everything looked flat and bare and cold, with almost no decorations except some crazy abstract paintings." The turning point came when neighbors joined her in singing songs from her working-class youth. She concluded her story with the realization that her neighbors would accept her despite her differences in taste and values if she accepted herself. 121 Like the MR reports suggested, and as the actual readers featured in the magazine confirmed, this fictional story suggested that shiny appliances and living room furnishings added up to a new suburban culture where women were reformulating class relations as they shopped, worked, and raised families, forging new commonalities and distinctions. [End Page 607]

Conclusion
The prosperity of the "workingman's wife" after World War II spurred a debate on taste precisely because mass-production design began catering to her. Rather than try to reform taste, ultimately business found it useful to reify, embrace, and even amplify this stratification and diversification to sell more and to sell to a new mass market. Together, mass-produced industrial design and motivation researchers' study of its social meanings provided material expression to changes in the economy and social structure. Because working-class prosperity fostered changes in material culture, the goods themselves helped to shape a new understanding of class relations that was framed in terms of taste and domestic lifestyle. The dynamic interactions between designers, motivation researchers, and sociologists ensured that debates about taste moved beyond the realm of the market to society and culture. 122 T.J. Jackson Lears has argued that this focus on taste deradicalized debates over class and indicated that a new professional class, including tastemakers such as industrial designers, had "come into its own." 123 But, as this article has suggested, the emphasis on a "more is better" aesthetic was in some ways destabilizing to traditional class and gender hierarchies. What lay behind this "more is better" ethos was the new power of working-class women in mainstream culture. 124 The older upper-middle-class group failed to maintain their own cultural authority. The battle over design reflected a "status anxiety" of a social class that no longer controlled a mass consumption economy that they had helped shape. 125

If critics understood suburbia through its purchased symbolsthe place where the "chrome shines brighter"so did its residents. Oral histories of women who moved to the suburbs, combined with these sociological studies of suburban blue-collar wives, and the stories that True Story subscribers read, suggested that these women were pioneers. No one knew how to be suburban in these new communities formed in postwar America. In part, this new mainstream culture of "mass-produced domestic comfort"along with its inner divisionswas worked out in the process of designing these goods. 126 The combination of mass-produced household appliances and production of domestic furnishings aimed at distinctive markets gave women in suburbia the tools to reformulate social relations. Women's outlook and work in the home were influenced by their husbands' jobs [End Page 608] and their prospects limited by them, but on a dayto-day basis these women were largely on their own to develop a new domestic culture. Vance Packard described this domestic consumption as "status-seeking" and blamed manufacturers, designers, and marketers for intensifying this urge by designing status symbols. 127 Viewed from the perspective of women in suburbia, this was not so much about seeking status as it was creating society. Because they reflected changes in the economy and social structure, goods helped women create new social bonds and distinctions. As Bennett Berger argued, contemporaries mistakenly took these goods to be "'middle-class' symbols" that suggested the disappearance of the working class rather than understanding these higher standards of living as "conditions capable of generating a consciousness of collective achievement which is worth fighting to preserve." 128 By questioning the popular assumption of suburbia as a reflection of narrowly-defined middle-class values, this study takes seriously struggles over taste and suggests why shiny appliances were worth fighting over in postwar America. Viewed through this lens, style can be understood as a tool that women used to preserve class identity and reformulate social relations. More broadly, we need to reconsider the purported classless nature of postwar society and the popular assumption that assimilation necessarily went hand-in-hand with household modernization and mass consumption. In particular, we need to appreciate the ways that working-class women wielded influence in the battle to define standards for a new mainstream material world commonly understood as middle class. 129 Shelley Nickles is a project curator in the Division of Social History at the National Museum of American History. She is completing a book on gender, taste, household goods, and the remaking of class in the twentieth century.

Notes
An earlier version of this paper was first presented at the 1997 American Studies Association meeting. I wish to thank Eileen Boris, Robert Friedel, Daniel Horowitz, Charles McGovern, Jeffrey Meikle, John Nickles, Joy Parr, Susan Strasser, and Olivier Zunz for their helpful comments on various drafts of this essay. Special thanks go to Meg Jacobs for offering invaluable suggestions that strengthened this article in numerous ways. The research for this article was made possible by financial support provided by a Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and a University of Virginia Academic Enhancement Fellowship, by the assistance of library staff at the National Museum of American History and Syracuse University Library Special Collections, and by the helpful communication of former SRI staff Richard Coleman, Gerald Handel, Sidney Levy, and Lee Rainwater. [End Page 609]

1. Quoted in Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1960), 84. 2. "Eleventh Annual ASID Conference," Industrial Design 2 (Dec. 1955): 122-23. See also Foley's attendance at another ASID conference described by Eric Larrabee, "Rosebuds on the Silverware," Industrial Design 2 (Feb. 1955): 62-63. The following discussion of Foley's attendance at conferences held in 1954 and 1955 is based on these two articles. 3. On Foley, see her obituary in The New York Times, Dec. 13, 1974, p. 48. These slides have not been located in Macfadden company files, according to inquiries made to Janet Tanke, Lisa Rabidoux-Finn, and Tina Paptalardo, of True Story magazine. Foley may have used slides taken by the motivation research firm SRI, but these materials have not been saved. Personal communication from Sidney J. Levy to author, Oct. 18, 2001. The readership figure is from Larrabee, "Rosebuds," 63. The circulation of all Macfadden publications' "True Story Women's Group" magazines, which included not only True Story but also True Romance, Photoplay, and others, was 6.5 million in 1957, but market research placed the total number of homes reached by the magazine including second-hand readership at about 12 million. "Come on In. . . The Market's Fine," advertisement, Electrical Merchandising 89 (July 1957): 58-59. According to True Story magazine figures, 81 percent of the magazine's readers were "working class housewives," whom they defined as wives of blue-collar workers, including craftsmen, factory operatives, and service workers such as truck drivers. Lee Rainwater, Richard Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman's Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style (New York: Oceana Publications, 1959), 219. 4. Larrabee, "Rosebuds," 62-63. 5. An argument for putting class relations back into the study of consumption has been effectively made by Victoria de Grazia and Lizabeth Cohen, "Introduction: Class and Consumption," International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (spring 1999): 1-5. Historians have provided useful discussions of debates over postwar class relations in Olivier Zunz, Why The American Century? (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998); James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 320-26; Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994), 110-12, 118; Lizabeth Cohen, "A Middle-Class Utopia? The Suburban Home in the 1950s" in Janice Tauer Wass, ed., Making Choices: A New Perspective on the History of Domestic Life in Illinois (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Museum, 1995), 58-67; Meg Jacobs, "Inflation: The Permanent Dilemma of the American Middle Classes" in Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds., Postwar Social Contracts Under Stress (New York: Russell Sage, 2002), 130-53. See also the introduction by Olivier Zunz, ibid., 117. 6. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), particularly his discussion of Giddens's theory of structuration, has been useful in articulating this approach to defining class (5-12); see also Olivier Zunz, "Class" in The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley I. Kutler (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1996). 7. For two perspectives on the process by which ethnicity became a more distinctively working-class attribute by the mid-twentieth century, see Olivier Zunz, The Changing

Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 7. As debated in this public discourse, the "working [End Page 610] class" excluded non-white workers as well as the poorest members of society. Although True Story magazine occasionally included African American stories and letters, the two major MR studies completed for the magazine made explicit the belief that "Negroes and Puerto Ricans" were a different category and therefore excluded from their studies of working-class women. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 17; Lee Rainwater and Gerald Handel, Status of the Working Class in Changing American Society (Chicago: Social Research Inc. for Macfadden Publications, 1961), 176. This racial distinction is clearly articulated in S.M. Miller, "The 'New' Working Class" in Arthur B. Shostak and William Gomberg, eds. Blue-Collar World: Studies of the American Worker (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1964), 2-9. In the pre-World War II period, when the working class was not seen as a significant market for expensive mass-produced durables, industrial designers often lumped the ethnic working class together with non-whites as consumers outside the middle-class norm. See Shelley K. Nickles, "Object Lessons: Household Appliance Design and the American Middle Class" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1999), ch. 3. On the African American consumer market, see Robert F. Weems, Jr. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998). 8. The phrase is from Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 101. The blue-collar workers were the higher income group contemporary sociologists labeled the "stable working class" or "upper lower class." Lizabeth Cohen makes the point that racial exclusion meant that the "recruitment" into postwar suburbanization was also a recruitment into "whiteness" in Cohen, "A Middle-Class Utopia," 65-66. See also George Lipsitz," The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White Problem' in American Studies," American Quarterly 47 (Sept. 1995): 373-74. On racial segregation in suburbia, see David Halle, America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 26-31. Historical studies that address postwar suburbanization include Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993). On the working-class composition of postwar suburban development, see Daniel Seligman, "The New Masses," Fortune, May 1959, p. 108. 9. Contemporary sociological studies that address the ways that blue-collar workers maintained their distinctive class identity through domestic consumption in suburbia during the 1950s and 1960s include: Berger, Working-Class Suburb; William M. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963); Arthur Shostak and William Gomberg, eds., Blue-Collar World: Studies of the American Worker (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964); Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967). Those specifically focusing on working-class women include, Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife; Helena Znaniecki Lopata, Occupation: Housewife (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); and Mirra Komarovsky, Blue-Collar Marriage (New York: Random House, 1962), although the latter does not focus on consumption per se. 10. On a distinctive working-class aesthetic in earlier periods, see Lizabeth A. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915" in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth

(Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local [End Page 611] History, 1982); Jenna Weissman Joselit and Susan L. Braunstein, Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990); Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 3; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 139-41; Nan Enstadt, "Fashioning Political Identities: Cultural Studies and the Historical Construction of Political Subjects," American Quarterly 50 (Dec. 1998): 745-82; and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986). 11. These historians have provided a useful corrective to the dominant view of postwar society as infused by middle-class culture in historical studies such as David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), and in contemporary sociological studies that connected mass consumption to alienation, such as Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1955).Studies that have been influential in revising this view, although focusing on an earlier period, include: Cohen, Making a New Deal; and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). For the postwar period, see George Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight (New York: Praeger, 1981); Lizabeth Cohen, "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America" in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun (Charlottesville, Va.: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998); On mass culture's potentially politicizing role for women, see Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1961" in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1994), 22962; Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media (New York: Random House, 1994). For a study of postwar working-class culture in the South, see Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000). On African American consumer politics, see Weems, Desegregating the Dollar. 12. I thank Meg Jacobs for her help in articulating this formulation. For an excellent study that explores the influence of working-class prosperity on the postwar landscape, see Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001). While numerous studies have focused on women's roles in articulating class identity through domestic consumption in the Victorian era, few historians have done so for the postwar period. Exceptions focusing on middle-class identity include May, Homeward Bound; and Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Historical scholarship usually treats workingclass women's domestic consumption as assimilation. On postwar material culture as part of a new broad middle-class taste, see Thomas Hine Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), 129-62, 243-83. For a more complicated, albeit brief treatment, see Cohen, "A Middle-Class Utopia." On working-class women's domestic culture in postwar Canada, see Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999). 13. Not all designers espoused uplift. The pragmatic approach is represented in J. Gordon Lippincott, Design for Business (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947). For accounts of the design profession in the postwar period, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, "From Celebrity to

Anonymity: The Professionalization of American Industrial Design" in Raymond [End Page 612] Loewy: Pioneer of American Industrial Design, ed. Angela Schnberger (Munich: Presetel-Verlag, 1990); Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 1940-1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). On the notion of taste as an expression of class interests and a struggle over cultural capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984). See also Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974), and "Design and the Consumer: A View of the Sociology and Culture of Good Design" in Design Since 1945, ed. Kathryn B. Hiesinger (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983). For broad discussions of competing value systems in defining consumer culture, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal; Meg Jacobs, "'Democracy's Third Estate': New Deal Politics and the Construction of a Consuming Public," International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (spring 1999); Charles McGovern, "Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940," in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1998), 37-58. 14. On the gendered, working-class culture promoted in True Story, see Ann Fabian, "Making a Commodity of Truth: Speculations on the Career of Bernarr Macfadden," American Literary History 5 (spring 1993): 51-76; Eung-Sook Kim, "Confession, Control, and Consumption: The Working-Class Market World of True Story Magazine" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Iowa, 1992). 15. Statistics may be found in: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 24-5; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 312; Cohen, "From Town Center to Shopping Center," 190. See also, "Labor: A New Social Revolution" Fortune, Apr. 1958, p. 218. Daniel Seligman, "The New Masses," 108. 16. Labor leaders focused on gaining higher wages and shorter hours for unionized workers. See Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era" in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989). 17. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, How American Buying Habits Change (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, 1959). "Worker Loses His Class Identity," Business Week, July 11, 1959, p. 90-91, specifically responded to the Labor Department report; William H. Whyte, Jr. "The Consumer in the New Suburbia" in Lincoln Clark, ed., Consumer Behavior: The Dynamics of Consumer Reaction (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1955), 1-14. See also numerous Fortune magazine articles from 1954 through 1960, including "The Rich Middle Income Class," Fortune, May 1954, p. 98, which refers to workers as the "new bourgeoisie," and Gilbert Burke, "How American Taste is Changing," Fortune, July 1959, p. 114-16. Major contemporary accounts linking mass consumption and changes in the class structure include: Daniel Bell, "Labor's Coming of Middle Age," Fortune, Oct. 1951, p. 114; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1960); David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954); David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1955). For a

popular contemporary critique, see Vance Packard, The [End Page 613] Status Seekers (New York: David McKay, 1959). Horowitz, Vance Packard, makes the point that even critics of the consensus view such as Packard tended to exaggerate the extent of affluence in American society by ignoring persisting poverty and racial exclusion (110-12, 118). On the tendency for commentators to exaggerate the homogeneity in American society, see Roland Marchand, "Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945-1960" in Robert H. Brenner and Gary W. Reichard, eds., Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1960 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press), 163-82; T.J. Jackson Lears, "A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass Consumer Society" in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 38-57; Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver. 18. Seligman, "The New Masses," 106. 19. The phrase is from "A New Kind of Elegance Emerges," Industrial Design 2 (Dec. 1955): 39. This seemed to be a visual interpretation of a report appearing a year earlier, Stan Wellisz, "The Designer's Stake in The Changing American Market," Industrial Design 1 (Apr. 1954): 97-101, which had discussed the implications of "The Changing American Market" series in Fortune. 20. This conflation of mass consumption and middle-class gender ideology reached its apex at the Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debate" in Moscow in 1959. See May, Homeward Bound, 16-19, 162-65; Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). The classic contemporary critique of this ideology is found in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), which focused largely on the plight of upper-middle class women. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), discusses how the shift from servants to household appliances made middle-class women's work more like their working-class counterparts. Other studies of household modernization include Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1919-1963 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993);Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1996). On changes in middle-class use of space for dining, see Richard N. Jones, "Changing Concepts of Home Building" in Marketing's Role in Scientific Management, ed. Robert L. Clewett (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1957), 527-39. 21. "Eleventh Annual ASID Conference," 62-63. 22. These are phrases used by Larrabee, reporting on Foley's presentation in "Rosebuds on the Silverware." This official viewpoint of Macfadden publications was argued most forcefully in Rainwater and Handel, "Status of the Working Class," 3. 23. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957; New York: Pocket Books, 1958), was a popular contemporary criticism of MR. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique condemned the work of motivation researcher Ernest Dichter. On the pioneering role of Dichter, see Daniel Horowitz, "The migr as Celebrant of American Consumer Culture" in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (New

York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 157-66. The differences between Dichter's psychoanalytical approach and the sociological approach used by SRI in the service of Macfadden and other clients are effectively described in Michael A. Karesh, "The Social Scientific Origins of Symbolic Consumer Research: Social Research, Inc.," 7 th Marketing History Conference Proceedings 7 (1995): 101-2. For differing conclusions [End Page 614] about the impact of MR, see the following interpretations: David Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design (London: Routledge, 1994), 173, 179; Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 258-60; T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 251-54; Russell W. Belk, "Studies in the New Consumer Behavior" in Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), 59. For a contemporary discussion of MR and design, see Avrom Fleishman, "M/R.: A Survey of Problems, Techniques, Schools of Thought in Market Research: Part I," Industrial Design 5 (Jan. 1958): 26-29, and "Postscript to M/R," Industrial Design 5 (June 1958): 70. 24. On diversity in the home furnishings industries, see Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers; Philip Scranton, "Manufacturing Diversity: Production Systems, Markets, and an American Consumer Society, 1870-1930," Technology and Culture 35 (July 1994): 476-505. On mass production, see David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1880-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984); Ben Nash, Developing Marketable Products and Their Packagings (New York: McGraw Hill, 1945). On the construction of national markets for branded, standardized goods, see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989).On the dynamic between mass consumption and market segmentation in postwar America, see Lizabeth Cohen, "The Class Experience of Mass Consumption: Workers as Consumers in Interwar America," in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 158-60; Nickles, "Object Lessons," 279-390; Zunz, Why the American Century, 93-112. 25. On Fordism, see Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production. For its impact on industrial design, see also Heskett, Industrial Design. 26. For the earlier figure, see Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 115; for the later figure, see Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness, 113. 27. B.L. Aldridge to George Throckmorton (July 23, 1942), Box 292, folder: Memo from Mr. Throckmorton, Radio Corporation of America collection (Acc. 2069), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware [hereafter RCA/Hagley]. 28. R.J. Candiff, "Comments on Servel's 1950 Refrigerator Designs from an Advertising and Sales Promotion Concept" [1949], reel 16.28, Walter Dorwin Teague papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Teague/Syracuse]. 29. Aldridge to Throckmorton (July 23, 1942), RCA/Hagley. 30. Ben Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 19-25, 139. See also Stan Wellisz, "The Designer's Stake in the Changing American Market,: 97; Harold Van Doren, Industrial Design, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940), 46. On a class-differentiated market in the ceramics and glass industries, see Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers, 139-41. In

the prewar period, the "masses" were largely associated with poverty, and manufacturers catered to a "class" market of upper-middle class consumers. Massmarket ornamentation had been used to sell cheap novelty goods but could be largely ignored by industrial designers of expensive consumer durables, since the average consumer was solidly middle class. Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 2, 3. 31. Quote from This is Your Market: America Today, 1954 (New York: Macfadden Pub., 1954), 9. On the gendering of styling, see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1985); Gartman, Auto Opium, 166-67. On these hierarchies more generally within modernism, see Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression [End Page 615] of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), intro. 32. On the development of these two models in the interwar period, see Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 1 and 2. For a useful summary, see Nigel Whitely, Design for Society (London: Reaktion Books, 1993). On the aesthetic ideals and commercial pragmatism of the industrial design profession in the 1930s, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1979); Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). 33. On Sloanism, see Alfred P. Sloan, My Years With General Motors, ed. John McDonald and Catherine Steven (1963; New York: Doubleday and Co., 1990), 58-70, 149-68, 179-81, 238-47, 264-78; "A New Kind of Car Market," Fortune, Sept. 1953, p. 224; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263-301; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973); James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 22950; Whiteley, Design for Society, 13. On creating these visual symbols of value, see Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 19-25, 139-42. 34. Eric Larrabee, "Autos and Americans: The Great Love Affair," Industrial Design 2 (Oct. 1955): 98. 35. George Walker quoted in Gartman, Auto Opium, 153. 36. Gartman, Auto Opium, ch. 6; William H. Whyte, Jr., "The Cadillac Phenomenon," Fortune, Feb. 1955, p. 106-9, 174-84; Pierre Martineau, "It's Time to Research the Consumer," Harvard Business Review 33 (July-Aug. 1955): 47. 37. Earl quoted in Phil Patton, Made in U.S.A.: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America (New York: Penguin, 1992), 245. Cadillac began using the "V" emblem in their postwar cars; the first tailfin appeared in 1948. Consumer Guide, Cadillac: Standard of Excellence (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1980). On the reasons Cadillac became a successful status symbol, see Whyte, "The Cadillac Phenomenon," 106-9, 174-84. 38. Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 139. On this assumption, see Egmont Arens to H.S. Spencer (April 20, 1943) box 26, folder: refrigerators, Egmont Arens papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Arens/Syracuse]. 39. Eliot F. Noyes, "The Shape of Things: Refrigerators," Consumer Reports 12 (May

1947): 176. 40. Catherine Moran, "Report on Market Survey made on Home Refrigerators" (Feb. 15, 1949), Reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. 41. Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), 221-23, 371. Frigidaire advertised this refrigerator in True Story during this period. For Loewy's role as consultant to Frigidaire at this time, see also Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1979); and contracts between Loewy's firm and Frigidaire, box 40, folder: contracts, Ga-Ge, Raymond Loewy Papers, Library of Congress. 42. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), 341. See also Lears, "A Matter of Taste," 44. 43. On the idea of a "middle majority market," see the Social Research, Inc. pamphlet, "Women and Advertising: A Motivation Study of the Attitudes of Women Toward Eight Magazines" (New York: Hearst Corp. 1954); and "The Rich Middle Income Class," 98. 44. Pulos, American Design Adventure, 110-121. The sociologist Herbert J. Gans exposed the cultural politics of "good design" in "Design and the Consumer: A View [End Page 616] of the Sociology and Culture of Good Design" in Kathryn B. Hiesinger, ed., Design Since 1945 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983). 45. See "Persuading Image: A Symposium," Design 138 (June 1960): 54-57. MoMA, "What's Happening to America's Taste? A Panel Forum" (Apr 22, 1955), reel 16.32, Teague/Syracuse. 46. On Teague, see Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 43-48. Despite the technical differences between gas and electric refrigerators, industrial design was consistent. For an elaborated discussion of this case study, see Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 5. For stats on market share: Market Research Department, "Mechanical Refrigerator Units Confidential" (Mar. 9, 1949), folder #79-10.4-35a, Frigidaire Collection, Kettering/GMI Alumni Foundation Collection of Industrial History, Flint, Mich. [hereafter Frigidaire/GMI]. For the refrigerator industry in this period, see Robert C. Haring, Marketing of Mechanical Household Refrigerators (Missoula, Mont.: Montana State Univ., 1963). 47. "Both Fish and Fowl," Fortune, Feb. 1934, p. 90. 48. Lurelle Guild to Louis Ruthenberg (Mar. 30, 1949), box 17, folder: Servel 1940-51, Lurelle Guild papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Guild/Syracuse]. These assumptions were confirmed in numerous market research reports. For example, see Estep & Associates, Inc., "Consumer Reaction to Large Refrigerator Freezers: A Research Report Prepared for Raymond Loewy Associates (Oct. 24, 1960), 15, box 138, folder: Market Planning Research Division 1960 Admiral Corp, Raymond Loewy papers, Library of Congress. 49. William Hainsworth to Louis Ruthenberg, "Refrigerator Appearance, Dr. Frank Steining's visit" (Sept. 13, 1948), box 17, folder: Servel 1948, Guild/Syracuse. 50. This is based on written descriptions. No images of this suggested design, rejected

by Servel, have been located. Lurelle Guild to Louis Ruthenberg (Mar. 30, 1949); and Guild to Ruthenberg, letter draft [1950], box 17, folder: Servel 1950-51, Guild/Syracuse. 51. Catherine Moran, "Report on Market Survey made on Home Refrigerators" (Feb. 15, 1949); W.D. Teague, "Presentation of Model in Evansville" (Mar. 17, 1949); W.D Teague, "Servel 860 for 1950" (Sept. 15, 1949), all reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. Although ornamentation was clearly part of a general marketing strategy to increase price paid by consumers for "deluxe" models based on a "more is better" idea of value, correspondence in the Teague papers makes it clear that plain design was not necessarily cost saving. In fact, Teague's initial design proposed reducing the exterior corner radius much more dramatically to eliminate the bulky, rounded appearance, but he was rebuffed by Servel because of the new tooling costs that would have been incurred. Walter Dorwin Teague to R.S. Taylor (Feb. 18, 1949); Taylor to Teague (Feb. 21, 1949), both reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. 52. R.J. Caniff, "Comment on Servel's 1950 Refrigerator Designs" [1949], reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. Servel clearly viewed working-class consumers as an important market, as evidenced by its frequent advertising in True Story magazine in this period. 53. For the "less cost or greater glitter" quote, see Dailey to Teague (Sept. 18, 1950). During 1950, Servel was already at work on the 1952 model. Servel hired staff designer Donald Dailey in 1950. Dailey to Teague (Sept. 18, 1950); Dailey to Teague (Apr. 5, 1951), all reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. Teague to Mr. Menzies (June 22, 1955); Dan Cardozo memo "re: Telephone conference with Fred Eilers (July 25, 1955), both reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. R.H. Ensign, conference report (May 26, 1956), reel 16.28, WDT/Syracuse. This discussion is based on numerous correspondence and other materials in Guild/Syracuse and Teague/Syracuse. For a fuller discussion of these developments, see Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 5. [End Page 617] 54. On the Cadillac V on RCA televisions and radios, see John Vassos to Tucker Madawick (May 2, 1964), box 3, folder: RCA II correspondence, John Vassos Papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Vassos/Syracuse]; Henry Dreyfuss archive, box 12, folders: RCA #6-8, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York [hereafter Dreyfuss/CHM]; box 15, notebook 1: 1947-57, the Tucker Madawick papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Madawick/Syracuse]. For refrigerators with the "V" emblem, see Larrabee, "Automobiles: The Great Love Affair," 97. On working-class women's preference for "Cadillac handles" on kitchen cabinets see Larrabee, "Rosebuds on the Silverware." 55. "Department 817," Industrial Design 1 (Oct. 1954): 85. Elizabeth S. Weirick, "What Sears Roebuck and Co. are Doing to Give Their Customers The Best of Materials Obtainable" (Nov. 30. 1932); and T.V. Houser, "The Whys and Wherefores of Sears Merchandise" (Mar. 30, 1939): 11-13, Sears Roebuck, & Co. Archives. Richard S. Latham, "The Artifact as Cultural Cipher" in Laurence B. Holland, ed., Who Designs America? (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), 266-67, criticizes this system. Van Doren, Industrial Design, 114-15, explicitly describes the design strategy behind the line and the step-up. 56. Hine, Populuxe. 57. For the complex values influencing women's consumption choices, see Parr, Domestic Goods; and Clarke, Tupperware.

58. Parr, Domestic Goods. Pierre Martineau to John Manning (May 21, 1962), folder: 79-10.7-59, Frigidaire/GMI. On household appliance manufacturers' attempts to promote style obsolescence, see Nickles, "Object Lessons," ch. 6. 59. Consumer Reports 12 (May 1947). Compare "Reports on Products: Mechanical Refrigerators": 135, with Eliot Noyes, "The Shape of Things: Refrigerators," 176. For a study of the social milieu that guided the establishment of Consumer Reports, see Charles F. McGovern, "Sold American: Inventing the Consumer, 1890-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1993). Ralph Nader pointed out the larger detrimental consequences of corporations' focus on styling at the expense of engineering in Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Bantam, 1973). 60. See "Persuading Image: A Symposium," Design 138 (June 1960): 54-57; MoMA, "What's Happening to America's Taste?" 61. See Hollis Baker to John Vassos (Mar. 6, 1959); and Vassos to Baker (Mar. 16, 1959), box 7, folder: B, John Vassos Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [hereafter Vassos/AAA]. 62. "Are Designers Undemocratic?" Industrial Design 5 (Nov. 1958): 31. 63. Pierre Martineau, the Research Director of the Chicago Tribune, became an influential promoter and sponsor of MR using Lloyd Warner's social categories. Martineau hired SRI to conduct several studies for the newspaper. See Pierre D. Martineau, "The Pattern of Social Classes" in Marketing's Role in Scientific Management, ed. Robert L. Clewett (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1957), 233-49. The quote is from The Chicago Tribune's Advertising Dept. in a printed but unpublished report, The Consumer Speaks About Appliances: A Presentation Based on a Motivation Study . . . of Major Appliances (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1959). For these assumptions, see also the Industrial Designers' Institute press release [Oct. 1959], box 99, folder: National Conference Chicago 1959 (Oct.), Industrial Designers Society of America papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter IDSA/Syracuse]. 64. Pierre Martineau, Motivation in Advertising (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957), 163; Pierre Martineau, "New Look at Old Symbols," Printer's Ink 247 (June 4, 1954): 32. See also Horowitz "The migr and American Consumer Culture," 159-66. [End Page 618] 65. SRI's assumptions about social class and consumer psychology and its research methodology is outlined in Burleigh J. Gardner, Women and Advertising: A Motivation Study of the Attitudes of Women Toward Eight Magazines (Chicago: Social Research, Inc. for Hearst Corp., 1954) and Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, iv-xiv, 219-36. On SRI, see Karesh, "The Social Scientific Origins of Symbolic Consumer Research." 66. Chicago Tribune Research Division, Automobiles: What They Mean to Americans (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1954), 21-23. The study was directed by Sidney Levy who joined SRI in 1948. See Karesh, "The Social Scientific Origins of Consumer Research," 104. This quote is from Martineau, "It's Time to Research the Consumer," 46. 67. On the blurring of the status meanings of automobiles in the 1950s, see Lee Rainwater and Gerald Handel, Status of the Working Class in Changing American Society, prepared for Macfadden (Chicago: Social Research, Inc., 1961), 2-3; Robert P.

Weeks, "Detroit Discovers the Consumer," The Nation (Oct. 19, 1959): 151-52. 68. Pierre Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," Journal of Marketing 36 (Oct. 1958): 121. 69. Warner's official role at SRI was as a consultant. Gardner had trained as a social anthropologist, had studied under Warner at Harvard, and had done field work for Warner in Newburyport, Mass., the subject of Warner's "Yankee City" study. Anon., "Burleigh Gardner: Selling the U.S. By Class," Printer's Ink 270 (Mar. 25, 1960): 77. Burck, "How American Taste is Changing," 188, credited Gardner with "pioneering the status symbol concept of advertising" by using Warner's social categories. 70. On Warner and his critics, see Olivier Zunz, Why The American Century, 100-2. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956). William Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1941). 71. Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," 122; statistics in "This is Your Market: America Today . . . 1954" (Chicago: Macfadden Pub., 1954). 72. "Selling the U.S. By Class," 79. 73. For an example of the earlier market research reports, see Magazine Homes and Branded Merchandise (New York: Macfadden Pub., 1937). 74. Quoted in Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 71, 54. True Story magazine, The American Economic Evolution 1 (New York: Macfadden Pub., 1930), cited in Cohen, Making a New Deal, 101-2. 75. Lizabeth Cohen, "The Class Experience of Mass Consumption" in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 158. 76. On True Story, see Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964), 298-301. I make this point regarding advertising based on my comparison of sample issues of True Story and McCall's, published between 1920 and 1940. 77. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 18. 78. See "Come on in . . . the Market's Fine," 58-59. Macfadden continued to sponsor and produce statistical market research reports in this period, including True Story Women's Group, This is Your Market: America Today. . . 1954 (New York: Macfadden, 1954); W.R. Simmons and Associates, Inc., The Women Behind the Market (New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1962). See also Kim, "Confession," 163. 79. Burleigh R. Gardner introduction in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, xiii. [End Page 619] 80. About half of the sample of both working-class and middle-class women interviewed for the 1959 study lived in newly-built houses in postwar suburbs. Rainwater, Coleman,

and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 221. Status of the Working Class was published in 1961. The last Social Research, Inc. study for Macfadden that I have located is A Study of Working-Class Women in a Changing World (May 1973). 81. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 3-5. They were responding to the popular notion that "people in the same income groups today tend to resemble each other" in lifestyle, outlook, and consumption. This view was promoted in articles such as "Selling to an Age of Plenty" Business Week, May 5, 1956, p. 132. 82. Martineau, quoted in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, xi. Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," 124. 83. For example, Berger, Blue-Collar Suburb, table A.21. 84. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 23, 154. Sidney J. Levy, "Social Class and Consumer Behavior" in On Knowing the Consumer, ed. Joseph Newman (New York: John Wiley, and Sons, 1966), 147. I am grateful to Sidney Levy for providing this reference. 85. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, ch. 2, quote at 30. 86. This argument of appliance purchase percentages by social class within income group is made by Martineau, "The Pattern of Social Classes," 240. On top-of-the-line appliances, see "Look National Appliance Survey, 1963" (New York: Cowles Magazine and Broadcasting, 1963). 87. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman' Wife, ch. 2. 88. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 21-2, 111. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 176-77 89. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 109. 90. Ibid., 108-11. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 177. 91. Ibid., 176. 92. Ibid., 171; Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," 126. 93. Ibid,, 175. Martineau, "The Consumer Speaks About Appliances." 94. Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," 125. 95. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 21-2, 111. 96. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 179. Chicago Tribune's Advertising Dept. derived this conclusion about upper-middle class women in The Consumer Speaks About Appliances. 97. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class. Many home service articles in True Story documented the changes readers made to their homes. See, for example,

"How Happy Can a Woman Be," True Story (Nov. 1957): 88-89. 98. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 181. 99. "Blue-collar aesthetics," a chapter title in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, pointed out the differences between working-class women's own stated preferences for the "simple" and "modern" and the meanings the middle class gave to these terms, as well as the differences observed in their furnishings. Gardner spelled out these categories for designers in the Industrial Designers' Institute Press release, [1959]. See also "Burleigh Gardner: Selling the U.S. by Class," 77; Burleigh B. Gardner, S.J. Levy, R.F. Camp, N.B. Zisook, and S. Greene, The Homemaker and Home Furnishings (Chicago: Social Research Inc., 1967); Martineau, Motivation in Advertising, 168. 100. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 184. On the concept of status anxiety, see Vance Packard, The Status Seekers. 101. Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," 122. [End Page 620] 102. "The New Customer: Skilled, Choosy, Culture-Hungry," Business Week, May 4, 1957, p. 69-70. 103. See Kim, "Confession," 118-19; and, more generally, Zunz, Why the American Century, 109. 104. Although some sociologists criticized Workingman's Wife as a commercial product, they also cited it as an important resource for information. See Shostak and Gomberg, eds., Blue-Collar World. 105. Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 76-78. See also Shostak and Gomberg, Blue Collar World. The importance of the living room as an indicator of class had been noted in the 1930s by the sociologist Stuart Chapin, who concocted a "Living Room Scale" as a measurement of social class. On Chapin, see Alan Roy Berolzheimer, "A Nation of Consumers: Mass Consumption, Middle-Class Standards of Living, and American National Identity, 1910-1950" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1996), 323-36. See also Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Summit Books, 1983), on Chapin and other efforts to use furnishing choices as an index of class. 106. Berger, Working Class Suburb, 93-97. On the politics of taste cultures and social class distinctions, see Gans, "Design and the Consumer," 31-36, and Popular Culture and High Culture; and Bourdieu, Distinction. 107. Quoted in Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women's Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 127. 108. Berger, Working Class Suburb, 93-97. On the distinctions between SRI's view, which accepted the usefulness of a "middle majority" market despite class differences, and Martineau's contrary view, see Martineau "The Pattern of Social Classes," 244, and Motivation in Advertising, 163-172. For an analysis of the "middle majority" market, see also Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 12-19.

109. On the working-class association of the social kitchen, see Kelly, Expanding the American Dream, 135. 110. One study specifically analyzed actual readers' views of the magazine itself through motivational style interviews. Lee Rainwater and Marc J. Swartz, The Working Class World: Identity, World View, Social Relations and Family Behavior Magazines (Chicago: Social Research, Inc. for Macfadden-Bartell, 1965). 111. Kim, "Confession," 191. 112. This section is based on my analysis of every issue of True Story magazine from 1945 through 1965. I am grateful to Rachel Fincken and Kirsten Brinker for their assistance in collecting and analyzing these materials. 113. On appliance purchases, see in True Story: Adeline Garner, "Washing WorkClothes is a Tough Job," TS (Apr. 1963): 94-95; Hyla O'Connor, "New Refrigerators Do Wonders," TS (Aug. 1948): 54-55; Esther Foley, "How Happy Can a Woman Be," TS (Nov. 1957): 88-89, "A Modern Range is a Clean Range," TS (Feb. 1960): 68-69, "The Endless Diaper . . . and Your Machine," TS (Dec. 1955): 76-77, "For Our New Baby . . . I Got This New Kitchen," TS (Nov. 1954): 72-73, and "New Ways to Kitchen Happiness," TS (Nov. 1952): 66. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 302-3. The home section, although proportionately small in relation to the stories, was deemed to be of great interest to True Story readers, according to Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman's Wife, 128. Esther Foley, the home service editor from 1949 to 1962, was preceded by Esther Kimmel. Various people served as food and equipment editor. Adeline Garner replaced Foley as home service editor in 1962. 114. Anon., "A New Treat From an Ancient Land," TS (Mar. 1963): 82-83; Esther Foley, "I Make Tomato Sauce from an Old Recipe," TS (July 1953): 68. [End Page 621] 115. Hyla O'Connor, "New Refrigerators Do Wonders," TS (Aug. 1948): 55, and "Remodeling Magic Made This Perfect Family Kitchen," TS (Jan. 1963): 57. 116. Letter in the "Village Pump," TS (Nov. 1948). For a similar letter, see TS (Sept. 1949). In an extended essay in the Feb. 1960 issue, "We Wait and We Worry," the wife of a steel worker living in a new development with modern appliances recounted the anxieties brought on by a strike. 117. For the derivation of the "true stories," see Fabian, "Making a Commodity of Truth," 64-65. 118. See Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 53-55; Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century. For True Story, see also: Fabian, "Making a Commodity of Truth," 51-76; Kim, "Confession"; Rainwater and Swartz, "Working Class World," 179. 119. "The Yellow Refrigerator," TS (Oct. 1961): 48-51. A similar message may be found in "I Wanted a House," TS (Dec. 1954). 120. "Duchess in My Kitchen," TS (Mar. 1958): 48-51, 109. For other example of TS stories that feature the kitchen, see "I Wanted A House"; "Frozen Friendship: I Became the Most Popular Woman on Our Block. . . After My Husband Gave Me a Deep Freeze," TS (May 1953): 28; "The Woman Next Door," TS (Jan. 1953): 14.

121. "Split Level Blues," TS (Mar. 1962): 46, 112-18. 122. One of the first commentators to suggest that a new social structure had emerged in which class divisions were replaced by distinctions of tastes and lifestyle after World War II was Russell Lynes in his essay on highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture published in the pages of Harper's and Life magazines in 1949 as well as in a book called The Tastemakers. Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1949), 310-33. For an analysis of the impact of brow categories on industrial designers, see Ibid., 300-5. On Lynes see, Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 97. 123. Lears, "A Matter of Taste." For a nuanced discussion of these debates over class, see Zunz, Why The American Century, ch. 5. 124. See Berger, Working-Class Suburb, although he does not put this point in gendered terms. On the influence of women in the postwar market, see Clarke, Tupperware; Sparke, The Sexual Politics of Taste. For a Canadian study that offers an illuminating comparison, see Parr, Domestic Goods. 125. My appreciation to Jeffrey Meikle for helping to develop this point. 126. Quotes from Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 99, 101. For oral histories, see Harvey, The Fifties. See also Lopata, Occupation: Housewife. 127. Packard, The Status Seekers. For a thoughtful analysis of Packard, see Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism. 128. Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 103. 129. De Grazia and Cohen use the term "middle-mass" in "Class and Consumption," 2. See also Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1996), 280; Zunz, Why the American Century, 74-75.