Face Value

The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America

Cary Carson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813939384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The Industrial Revolution was previously understood as having awakened an enormous, unquenchable thirst for material consumption. People up and down the social order had discovered and were indulging in the most extraordinary passion for consumer merchandise in quantities and varieties that had been unimaginable to their parents and grandparents. It was indeed a revolution, but a consumer revolution at the start.

In Face Value, Cary Carson expands and updates his groundbreaking earlier work to address the intriguing question of how Americans became the world's consummate consumers. Prior to the rise of gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America, there was still a decided sameness to people's material lives. About mid-century, though, a lust for fancy goods, coupled with social aspiration, began to transform American society.

Carson here addresses the intriguing question of how Americans developed the reputation for avid consumption. Both elegantly written and engagingly argued, the book reveals how the rise of the gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America gave rise to a consumer economy.

1

WHY DEMAND?

Hear tell the familiar story of the Industrial Revolution in England and America. Textbook after textbook intones the standard recitation. Once upon a time in the reign of George III a “string of important inventions in a few industries began a profound alteration of the British economy.”¹ Steam engines, flying shuttles, water frames, and power looms, operated by men, women, and children summoned to work by a factory bell, produced prodigious quantities of inexpensive personal and household goods. Machine-made textiles, pottery, ironmongery, and a multitude of other “necessities,” “decencies,” and affordable “luxuries” were transported over improved roads and along newly built canals to markets in every corner of the realm. There they were snapped up by a rapidly growing population of eager consumers. These were people who waxed healthier, wealthier, and happier than ever before on rising wages, falling death rates, and a diet of roast beef and white bread supplied by model farmers and progressive stockbreeders. Echoing the modern corporate slogan “Better Things for Better Living,” orthodox histories long ago endorsed a supply-side explanation for the events that led to industrial and commercial expansion. They presented consumer demand as a universal given, as immutable as mankind’s quest for a dry cave and a square meal. Mechanization, the factory system, faster cheaper transportation, and new banking and credit facilities were simply those English-made miracles that finally in the eighteenth century drove down the cost and increased the supply of goods and services that everyone had always wanted and that ordinary people could now afford.

Industrial progress, traditional schoolbooks implied, thrived on freedom and waited on genius. Histories of the United States provided the classic example. Because Old World mercantilists had frowned on colonial manufacturers, Americans first had to win independence, then steal British industrial secrets, to bring the factory system to these shores. Soon thereafter the wheels began to turn and the spindles spin. The rest was textbook history: “A great change in American ways of making things soon reshaped American ways of living.” Colonists “had made the things they needed in their own homes and for their own use. Now goods were produced in factories and by machines for sale to anybody willing to pay for them.” Projected into the future, these events eventually created “an American Standard of Living.” This version of history was even more supply driven than the one in which the Industrial Revolution sated a universal natural appetite for consumer goods. Mass production in the United States not only met existing demand, aggressive merchandisers deliberately created a market of “new consumers needed to buy the masses of goods now produced in the factories.”²

Either way, the main lines of the cause-and-effect, supply-and-demand argument remained largely uncontested either by historians or economists until recently. Conveniently, their unanimity seemed to be confirmed by the observations of numerous eyewitnesses from the eighteenth century. Listen, for example, to one of many contemporary voices, this one Henry Fielding’s, heard not in his fiction, but in the pages of a pamphlet on public policy.³ “Nothing,” he observed, “hath wrought such an Alternation in this Order of People, as the Introduction of Trade.” He described the extraordinary consequences: “This hath indeed given a new Face to the whole Nation, hath in a great measure subverted the former State of Affairs, and hath almost totally changed the Manners, Customs, and Habits of the People, more especially of the lower Sort. The Narrowness of their Fortune is changed into Wealth; the Simplicity of their Manners into Craft; their Frugality into Luxury; their Humility into Pride, and their Subjugation into Equality.” Prosperity, equality, luxury, and pride—the virtues and vices of modern life, the blessings and blights of mass production and mass marketing.

Two hundred years did little to alter history’s verdict. Few doubted that the Industrial Revolution awakened an enormous unquenchable thirst for material goods. It sired the race of getters and spenders that we all have become, we Americans nonpareil. The essential truth of supply-side economics stood unchallenged as the incontrovertible central thesis that explained the genesis of our consumer societies in the industrialized nations of the West.

Incontrovertible except, it turned out, for one little problem, one awkward fact: Demand came first.

Henry Fielding was writing in 1751. Already what he called “the former state of affairs” was a memory. Already the manners, customs, habits, and possessions of very ordinary people had “almost totally changed.” Nor was his polemic the earliest one of its kind. The downward and outward spread of luxury had been a favorite target of preachers and pamphleteers for going on fifty years. Before Arkwright, before Watt, before Hargreaves, Wedgwood, Boulton, and Kay, almost before even Abraham Darby, people up and down the social order had discovered and were indulging the most extraordinary passion for consumer goods in quantities and varieties that had been unknown, even unimaginable, to their fathers and grandfathers. It was indeed a revolution, but a consumer revolution in the beginning. The better-known Industrial Revolution followed in response.

Only recently have historians begun to understand and present this story the right way round. It makes a difference. Putting the consumer revolution first opens the door to a broad retelling of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century British and American history. At a stroke it places a vast body of historical evidence—much of it visual and three-dimensional—in the service of history-writing that too often has ignored art, artifacts, and architecture altogether. Either that, or quarantined them in separate histories of their own. This book draws heavily on these neglected sources and goes on to explore the implications of the new perspectives they open to the past.

The problem of chronology—which came first, supply or demand?—is not significant in its own right. Chicken-or-egg propositions are seldom useful starting points for historical research, and certainly not for students of industrialization. Revisionists who set out along that path will trip up over ample evidence to support the conventional and entirely accurate view that eighteenth-century manufacturers and retailers deliberately created markets for products and services where none had existed previously. I would have little success trying to deny that, once people began thinking and behaving like consumers, they became fair game to swarms of entrepreneurs who quickly spotted markets to exploit and expand.

There is a more important purpose to be served by paying careful attention to the timing of these events. It acknowledges that a dramatic rise in consumer demand after 1690 or so was sustained for decades by workbench artisans using old-fashioned technologies improved in only a few minor ways at best. Putting a demand-driven consumer revolution before power-driven industrialization begs questions that historians have been slow to ask. It shifts their perspective from the means of production to the consumption of the goods produced. It challenges them to reexamine the notion that demand is a constant that has remained strangely impervious to the forces of historical change that alter other aspects of culture.

At first, asking why demand requires seeking answers to even more basic questions. What goods did people really acquire? How did they use them? How were people’s everyday lives changed by their possession of newfangled artifacts and the things they could do with them? Who shared in the wealth of material possessions? How evenly or unevenly were they distributed, and how did those differences recalibrate the social order? Descriptions of material life eventually send historians in search of explanations. What caused ordinary people at certain times in the past to spend their sometimes meager earnings on expendable goods and services in preference to longer-lasting investments? Why was there demand for some things at one time and different things at others? Why did the pace of consumption quicken so dramatically in the eighteenth century?

Ultimately historians who pursue this line of inquiry end up exploring a set of fundamental relationships in modern society. These are social relationships, to be sure, but with this difference: they require the intercession of inanimate agents—namely, the household goods and personal possessions whose ownership and use first became widespread among northern Europeans and North Americans in the eighteenth century. Artifacts and the activities to which they were instrumental defined group identities and mediated relations between individuals and the social worlds they inhabited. We ourselves take the facilitating role of material things for granted. Competence in understanding and using the “language” of artifacts is learned along with the ability to speak, read, and write. Actually it is a far more general form of literacy than the latter two. Ours has become a very complex material culture; two hundred years ago it was simpler; three hundred years ago very much simpler almost everywhere the world around. Only small groups of affluent courtiers, prelates, merchant princes, and other elites had always led well-furnished lives of luxury.

The consumer revolution changed all that. That is the term historians now give to that great transformation when whole nations learned to use a rich and complicated medium of communications to conduct social relations that were no longer adequately served by parochial repertories of words, gestures, and folk customs alone. Artifacts expanded the vocabulary of an international language that was learned and understood wherever fashion and gentility spread.

For a time the old handcraft industries supplied the needs of the first new consumers. But they could not keep pace, and, as venture capitalists came to see the tremendous potential for growth in home markets in England and in overseas markets in the colonies, the search began for new technologies to increase production and new sales strategies to enlarge those markets. Consumer revolution and Industrial Revolution were mutually necessary and complementary sides to events that textbooks must put back together again—the right way round—before we can appreciate the full significance of one of the great divides in the chronicle of human experience. When one looks back on the whole history of material life, it exaggerates nothing to say that the mass of humanity were only rudimentary tool users before the eighteenth century. A bare hundred years later, by 1800, everyday life for many people in England, northern Europe, and North America was scarcely livable without a cupboard or a chest of drawers full of things they used to deal with virtually everyone they encountered every day—family, friends, neighbors, fellow workers, business associates, servants, slaves, and perfect strangers.

Why? Historians want reasons that explain why material things became so essential to the conduct of social relations starting only two or three centuries ago. They see it as a historical problem, of course, but the issue draws its intellectual vitality from something that concerns a larger body of thoughtful citizens, as good scholarship in history should. Recent trends in our national life have reopened a debate about the celebrated American standard of living and our persistent belief in a beneficent materialism. For a generation now the poor in this country have been getting poorer, absolutely poorer in terms of real disposable per capita income. There have been other periods when the value of wages declined, but the prolonged slump now coincides with an unparalleled glut in new consumer goods and services available to those higher up the economic ladder whose buying power remains constant. The growing disparity between rich and poor, or more accurately and significantly, between rich and middle, puts at risk a basic element in the American Dream, the promise of almost universal access to a shared material culture.⁴

For generations that aspiration helped unite a nation of immigrants into a democracy of fellow consumers.⁵ Compared to a world deeply divided between haves and have-nots, Americans are fortunate always to have been a nation of haves and not-yets. That appears to be changing. We therefore need to consider what consequences might follow were the wages of hardworking men and women to deteriorate so far that they and their children gave up all hope of eventually participating in the consumer culture that has served as one of the great equalizing influences in American life. Meaningful solutions are the province of politicians and policy-makers. We look to historians for the hindsight that helps sort out the real issues from the specious ones and, in this case, to learn how it happened that we Americans, more than any people on earth, came to require such an orgy of goods and gadgets just to keep us steady on our daily course.

That history—the rise and spread of a consumer society—is no longer the neglected topic it once was.⁶ Yet, given the newness of historians’ interest in the subject, it is hardly surprising that studies launched from different academic disciplines are only now arriving at a common destination after traveling along separate intellectual paths. There are, first of all, economic historians who study the wealth of nations and have discovered a notable increase in people’s consumption of durable goods around 1700.⁷ There are political economists who believe that this shift was reflected in the importance that economic theorists began giving to home markets from the 1690s onward.⁸ Literary scholars and intellectual historians note an extraordinary outpouring of eighteenth-century books, pamphlets, and sermons on the subject of luxury and decadence.⁹ Art historians see the middle and upper middle classes portrayed in countless paintings and prints that are both product and record of a new affluence and leisured lifestyle.¹⁰ Cultural historians chart the spread of gentility and etiquette-book manners.¹¹ Pattern books also interest architectural historians, who see more than coincidence in the appearance of numerous inexpensive handbooks popularizing a standardized classical architecture at just the time when vernacular building traditions were losing their hold on the folk imagination.¹²

So it goes among other historical disciplines as well. The history of technology,¹³ business history,¹⁴ and even political history¹⁵ have responded to the sense historians have that people’s basic attitudes toward themselves as individuals and their place in the social order underwent a fundamental change in th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Why Demand?
• 2. Folk Consumers
• 3. New Consumers
• 4. Fashion Performed
• 5. Living En Suite
• 6. American à la Mode
• 7. Toward a History of Material Life
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Index