The Cabinet and the American Housewife

NANCY HILLER

n the distaste—ranging from mild ennui to marriage-wrecking exaspera- Ition—that late nineteenth-century women shared for household work, a few entrepreneurial men in Albany, , saw a golden opportunity. The farm equipment factory these businessmen had founded was surviving but far from thriving when they happened on a product that would catapult their firm to national fame. The Hoosier cabinet, a freestanding cupboard equipped with ingenious mechanical devices, consolidated storage and maximized the efficiency of kitchen labor, thereby alleviating some of the most exasperating aspects of the middle-class housewife’s daily responsibil- ities. This article examines how a modest item of Indiana-made furniture came to alter the course of kitchen history. Women’s lives during the late 1800s were quite different from our own. For working-class and rural women, general housekeeping involved real physical labor. Most tasks had to be done by hand—churning butter, stoking stoves with wood or coal carried from the porch or cellar, chopping and mixing and washing. Kitchens were sparsely furnished, usually with a worktable and sink, a storage cupboard, and a few open shelves; dry goods purchased from the grocer were kept in a pantry, along with rows of the canned goods that most women made from homegrown produce. Kitchens were also typically large; a basic work area of 14 by 18 feet was not unusual,

______Nancy Hiller is a cabinetmaker and writer in Bloomington, Indiana. The bulk of the following essay is excerpted from The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and is reproduced here with their permission. The author’s five-page intro- duction, summarizing earlier portions of the book, was written specifically for the IMH.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (March 2009) 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. 2 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

with many tasks performed in ancillary rooms such as a cellar or pantry, in addition to an outdoor yard. An average housewife walked thousands of steps each day in the course of food preparation and cleanup alone. Even middle-class women who could afford paid help found everyday life to be far from easy. Servants often brought trouble into their mistresses’ homes—communication problems, personality conflicts, and differences in domestic habits—and domestic help, good or bad, was becoming increas- ingly hard to find. The factories of the rapidly growing manufacturing sector were hungry for labor, and, despite poor pay and significant hardships, employment in book binderies, mills, and button shops often proved more appealing than domestic service, with its preponderance of fickle and unreasonably demanding employers.1 The problem, from the workers’ per- spective, was summed up nicely by a woman who contrasted her servant friends’ existence with her own experience in industry: “[T]hey’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the [mistresses’] house. . . . Our day [in the factory],” she continued, “is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings.”2 As domestic servants exchanged their harried positions for the struc- ture and independence of industrial work, their former mistresses were forced back into their own kitchens, where they found themselves at a loss. After years—sometimes generations—of depending on hired labor to deal with the innumerable basic tasks of everyday life, many lacked the expertise required to provide for their families.3 What was a young housewife to make of a recipe that told her to take “a pinch of this, and a little of that, and considerable of the other, and cook them till they are done about right”? The literature of the period suggests that overcooked dinners, sagging cakes, and other minor disasters led frequently to household strife, but there was little formal instruction available in how to remedy such problems. Moreover, despite the considerable skill, creativity, and effort involved in kitchen-related enterprises, many middle-class Americans held such work in low regard, a fact that did nothing to fuel the housewife’s motivation.4

______1Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 21-22; Ellen M. Plante, The American Kitchen 1700 to the Present: From Hearth to Highrise (New York, 1995), 58-65, 110-26. 2Nancy Cott et al., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (Boston, 1996), 359. 3On the rise of domestic advice literature for middle-class women, see Plante, The American Kitchen, 110-39. Popular magazines offered similar advice. See, for example, “Economy in Cooking Well,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1871. 4Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (2nd ed., Berkeley, Calif., 2009), chap. 2; Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought,” Signs, 16 (Spring 1991), 463-84. THE HOOSIER CABINET 3

Kitchen Scientists, from Hoosier Manufacturing Company’s You and Your Kitchen catalog, 1918. The company drew on the domestic science movement of the early twentieth century to market its cabinets, portraying them as key to the scientific approach to meal preparation. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana 4 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Catharine Beecher, one of the century’s most influential writers and activists, sought to address this disparity at both its individual and its broad- er social levels. With her equally well-known sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, she published and lectured on the need for formal instruction in the house- keeping arts, arguing that proficient, wholesome housekeeping would have wide-reaching effects on American society as a whole. Beyond providing practical guidance that ranged from recipes for calf’s foot blancmange and egg frizzle to her impressively detailed design for a kitchen work cupboard that she called a “cooking form,” Beecher published an astonishing variety of insights into the all-too-often stifling effects of domestic life on the American woman’s spirit.5 As Barbara Welter and others have convincingly argued, women’s attempts to live up to nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood bred resent- ment. Day after day spent alone at home in housework that was not just exhausting, but accorded little—if any—respect, left wives with what we would call low self-esteem, not to mention a lack of energy and enthusiasm for family activities by the end of the day.6 Understanding that women need- ed to feel as though their contributions were valued both by their husbands and family at home and in the wider socio-political sphere, Beecher argued that housekeeping, no less than other forms of business, should be formally taught, and that it warranted the cachet of domestic science. While she sup- ported home beautification and other pursuits on the grounds that these would promote the happy temperament so encouraging to godly living, she cautioned against overspending on such relative frivolities, as doing so could kindle domestic strife. Strife, above all, must be avoided; a husband who was “wearied with endless complaints” might well be drawn to clubs plying family-wrecking temptations.7 Even in her most impassioned calls for improvements to women’s welfare, Beecher steadfastly upheld the impor- tance of maintaining household harmony, and with it, the institution of marriage. While Beecher and other advocates of women’s welfare were working for a better society, economic and technological changes were paving the way for industrial manufacturing on an unprecedented scale. The Hoosier cabinet itself could only be produced because of radical improvements in

______5Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book: Designed as a Supplement to Her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1st ed., New York, 1846); Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York, 1869); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York, 1973). 6Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-74. 7Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, 466. THE HOOSIER CABINET 5

the procurement, processing, and transportation of raw materials. These improvements were augmented by changes in energy production and supply that gave rise to the mechanized factory, and by changes in transportation that allowed for the shipment of finished products to increasingly far-flung places. From the territory’s early history, Indiana’s dense hardwood forests had appealed to craftsmen in wood. As early as 1818, The Emigrant’s Guide, or Pocket Geography of the Western States and Territories advertised the Indiana high country as a rich source of premium timber.8 The prospect drew established artisans from such centers of craftsmanship as Boston and New York, and many brought with them their skills, equipment, and knowl- edge of the furniture business. Joseph Meeks moved to Brookville, Indiana, in 1818, and the following February, he placed an advertisement in the Enquirer and Indiana Telegraph:

JOSEPH MEEKS CABINET-MAKER, Late from the City of N. York, where he has conducted a small business for the last eight years, takes this method of informing the inhabitants of Brookville, and the vicinity, that he intends following the above Business at this place. He has brought with him a quantity of Superior Mahogany, which he will manufacture in the newest fashion and workman like manner; likewise other woods nat- ural to the growth of this country. His residence at present is at the House of Mrs. Cooper, in the rear of Mr. Ray’s tavern. N.B. An Apprentice wanted immediately.9

Furniture- and cabinetmaking enterprises flourished in Indiana, though setbacks due to bankruptcy or fire were common. When business was good, craftsmen had opportunities to display considerable artistry; cat- alogs and advertisements from the early nineteenth century list such items as Fancy beds, circular bureaus, scroll-top Windsor chairs, and tables with elaborately reeded legs. At other times, many shops kept going by manufac- turing farm equipment, caskets, or basic household objects such as salt and quilting frames.10

______8The Emigrant’s Guide, or Pocket Geography of the Western States and Territories (Cincinnati, 1818), 108, 248, quoted in Betty Lawson Walters, Furniture Makers of Indiana, 1793 to 1850 (, 1972), 11, 12. 9Walters, Furniture Makers of Indiana, 12, 13. 10Ibid., 242 ff. 6 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

During the first few decades of the nineteenth century, most shops advanced beyond dependence on hand tools to equipment powered by hors- es, dogs, water, and steam. The state’s 1820 industrial census recorded 28 cabinetmakers and 7 chairmakers, but by 1840, furniture making had become the state’s third-most-common industry, its practitioners outnum- bered only by those in home construction and the manufacture of leather products.11 By the mid-nineteenth century many shops had several employ- ees, and mechanization had enabled some establishments’ production to outpace demand, resulting in inventory available for sale through merchants and dealers.12 Hoosier manufacturers produced a wide range of nationally sought-after furniture, from rustic Old Hickory chairs and settees used in vacation lodges to perhaps the most renowned product of the state’s indus- try—the Wooton Desk, patented in 1874, which became an international status symbol among businessmen, politicians, and other men of wealth and power.13 Mechanization was accompanied by a scientific attitude toward busi- ness efficiency, one result of which was the time and motion study. Coinciding with this trend, selling was increasingly regarded as a profession in its own right; every aspect of the field was analyzed and refined, from advertising copy and promotional events to the most effective ways for salesmen in retail stores to stand, move, and smile while demonstrating their products. All of these developments would play a role in the design, manufacture, and sales of the Hoosier cabinet.

One night, while millions of anonymous women bent over ironing boards or dropped their sewing to answer the cries of screaming children, a small gathering of businessmen leaned back in the creaking chairs of their office club in Albany, Indiana. The group, which consisted of James McQuinn, his son Emmett, and two partners, J. Maring and T. Hart, con- vened on a regular basis to talk about commerce and to dream. The elder McQuinn had worked for the Buckeye Window Company of Findlay, Ohio, where he had been involved in every aspect of that business from the shop floor up, eventually moving into management

______11Ibid., 15. Walters also provides a “Check List of Indiana Furniture Makers Working in 1850 and Before,” which lists 2,176 individuals and establishments, pp. 35-229. 12Ibid., 19. For an example of an Indiana town growing through furniture manufacture, see Will Maurer, “A Historical Sketch of Tell City, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, 14 (June 1918), 108-133. 13Ralph Kylloe, A History of the Old Hickory Chair Company and the Indiana Hickory Furniture Movement (rev. ed., Lake George, N.Y., 2002); Betty Lawson Walters, The King of Desks: Wooton’s Patent Secretary (Washington, D.C., 1969). THE HOOSIER CABINET 7

and regional sales. Shortly after the business relocated to Albany, following the depletion of the natural gas on which the glass works in Ohio had depended, McQuinn undertook some side work for the Albany State Bank, keeping books and helping the management while still devoted to his pri- mary job with Buckeye Glass. This part-time work introduced him to some of Albany’s most influential business people. In 1899 the glass firm was sold, and McQuinn’s non-compete agreement obligated him to go into another line of work. He wanted to remain in manufacturing but had no particular plan in mind. In the easy company of the office club with Maring and Hart, the sen- ior McQuinn tossed around ideas for a possible venture. A local furniture factory had fallen on hard times. The owners had laid off their employees and were willing to sell the enterprise at a bargain price. Whatever the actu- al thoughts exchanged on the night of this meeting, we can gain some insight into the entrepreneurial motives of the participants from an account published in the New Castle Times in April 1910.

Some ten years or more ago a little group of men bethought them that mankind is making his work easy and light by the employment of all manner of machines and convenient appliances to such an extent that the ancient curse about man eating bread in the sweat of his brow seems to be revoked, and that all the while womankind in the performance of her household work and her manifold ministrations to the comforts of the home is laboring under many disadvantages, is without machines and labor-saving appliances such as men employ, so that the original cur[s]e hangs heavily upon her.14

However anachronistic the Times account may be, attributing to the club members an awareness of their future product that they almost certainly must have lacked, it shows, if nothing else, the success that women had achieved—individually in their homes, as well as through the advocacy of authors such as the Beecher sisters—in publicizing their message about the need for better kitchens. The elder McQuinn acquired the old furniture factory and began oper- ations. The factory’s first known product was not, in fact, the women’s labor saver referred to in the Times account above, but a piece of agricultural equipment known as a seed separator. It seems, however, that even as the company manufactured these farm implements, which they sold

______14New Castle Times, April 1910, quoted by Herbert L. Heller in “Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet Factory Opens,” The New Castle Courier-Times, 1980 (exact publication date unavailable). 8 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

house-to-house from gaily decorated horse-drawn carts, someone in the shop had started to make kitchen cabinets. We have no account of exactly how these first few cabinets came to be produced. Perhaps one of the own- ers’ wives had requested a prototype that she could try out in her kitchen. We do know that the company thought the cabinets had potential as a sec- ondary product to ensure regular income during winter months, when equipment sales to farmers would likely be slow. Whatever the , the company had a few kitchen cabinets on hand when the principals realized that the seed separators were going to be a hard sell. The morning after the meeting in which they had discussed the disap- pointing farm equipment sales, they sent out each of their four wagons with a cabinet on board, in addition to the regular complement of seed separa- tors. The results were stunning, as the senior McQuinn would later describe:

[T]he drivers all came in and reported that they had sold the kitchen cab- inet to practically the first prospect, but they brought nearly all of the seed separators back unsold. The second day each took two cabinets and one seed separator and that night all cabinets were reported easily sold. The third day each driver took three kitchen cabinets and long before night they all returned entirely sold out. That settled the question defi- nitely as to what line of furniture we should make.15

The company was on its way. Within the first two years of operation, the Hoosier factory, like count- less others of the time that were housed in wooden buildings, had suffered a devastating fire. But the company soon acquired new premises. The city of New Castle, approximately twenty-five miles south of Albany, was willing to chip in $2,500 toward the purchase of manufacturing space, in exchange for a contract promising to employ twenty-five men for a minimum of eight months a year.16 The company moved into the former Speeder Cycle Factory, which offered 18,000 square feet of space. The Hoosier cabinet’s basic design is most often attributed to its well- known immediate predecessor, the baker’s table. With its rounded storage bins for flour (which led to its nickname, the possum belly table), its work- ing surface for kneading or rolling out dough, and the shallow, two-door upper section that was added to many models, the baker’s cabinet undoubt-

______15J. S. McQuinn, quoted in “The Hoosier Manufacturing Company, 1899-1942,” Henry County Historical Log, Spring 1988. 16Philip D. Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets (Indianapolis, 1989), 17. THE HOOSIER CABINET 9

edly helped shape the Hoosier genre. However, there were additional influ- ences as well. In basic form, the Hoosier cabinet is not radically distinct from sever- al other types of cupboard that preceded its invention. As long ago as the sixteenth century, English kitchens included a piece of furniture known as a dresser, on which meat would be prepared, or dressed. In addition to its work surface, the dresser (which has since come to be most widely known as a Welsh dresser) had a shallow upper section with open shelves for stor- ing linens and dishes. British colonists imported this type of cabinet to America, where the form became refined over time to suit peculiarly American needs.17 Step-back cupboards, which featured a deeper base cabi- net with two doors below a shallow upper section usually enclosed by two glazed doors, were also widely used in kitchens of the mid- to late nine- teenth century. In 1887, more than ten years before the Hoosier Manufacturing Company was founded, a certain John Roth patented a design for a cabinet with compartments for dishes, pies, small pots, and other kitchen wares, in addition to a dedicated space for flour, drawers for coffee, tea, and spices, and a kneading board for bread. The following statement by Roth, about whose creation little more is known, is especially compelling in view of the claims that would be made several years later by the various manufacturers of Hoosier cabinets:

My kitchen dresser is particularly adapted to the use of small families and will promote comfort and convenience of such by furnishing storage for the most essential articles of food and for the utensils for preparing and enjoying the same and at the same time the utmost economy of space is secured.18

Another nineteenth-century development that contributed to the Hoosier cabinet’s distinctive design was the invention of wall-hung bins, which provided sanitary storage of flour while allowing for easy and eco- nomical dispensing. The bins could be purchased in different sizes and sup- plied with their own sifters.19

______17In this section I have benefited from Jacquelyn Star, “Free-Standing Kitchen Cabinets in the , 1899-1930: ‘Hoosier’ Kitchen Cabinets, Development in a Cultural Context,” MA thesis (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981). 18Ibid., 36. 19Ibid., 37. 10 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Early versions of the Hoosier cabinet had the lower section fitted with racks to store dishes and a pull-out shelf for storing pots, pans, and other larger items. The lower section also had a bread bin and drawers for utensils and linens. On this base was mounted a counter that could be extended for a user seated at a stool; the counter was built of wood with a zinc or enam- eled top for ease of cleaning. The upper section was shallower and housed a flour dispenser, usually with its own built-in sifter; hooks for hanging small utensils; racks for storing spices and of extracts; a holder for the house- wife’s rolling pin; space for jars of coffee, tea, and sugar; and shelves for smaller dishes, glassware, and cups. Later versions became increasingly sophisticated in their accoutrements and styling, eventually including meal- planning computers, daily reminders for grocery trips, and helpful house- hold hints. What differentiated the Hoosier cabinet most markedly from its pred- ecessors—aside from the intriguing cabinet described by Roth, above—was its meticulously organized interior storage, a testament to the late nine- teenth-century preoccupation with functional design. The Beecher sisters had advocated such attention to planning and detail for kitchen work in the middle of the century, and efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor had perfected its applications to the work of office and factory. The Wooton desk had exemplified this fascination with system and efficiency in brilliant style, and some scholars have seen precedents for the Hoosier cabinet’s interior organization in the furniture of the late nineteenth-century office.20 Just as the Wooton businessman’s desk had come to symbolize its user’s status, the Hoosier cabinet would transcend the scope of mundane kitchen furniture, providing a material signifier of a woman’s culinary and other domestic skills. The most famous company to produce the cabinets was the Hoosier Manufacturing Company. The other best-known makers were Sellers, Nappanee, McDougall, Boone, and Wilson. Not all the manufacturers were in Indiana. The 1907 “Directory of Leading and Representative Furniture Manufacturers of the United States” listed three firms besides the Hoosier Manufacturing Company: the Buchanon Cabinet Company of Buchanon, Michigan; the Elwell Kitchen Cabinet Company of ; and the Hastings Table Company of Hastings, Michigan.21 In fact, once the type

______20The Universal Millwork Catalog of 1927 (1927; rep., New York, 2003) introduces its section on the kitchen with the statement, “Modern efficiency is asserting itself in the home today, just as in the office and workshop,” p. 251. See also Mary Anne Beecher, “Promoting the ‘Unit Idea’: Manufactured Kitchen Cabinets (1900-1950),” APT Bulletin, 32 (2/3, 2001), 27-37. 21Star, “Free-Standing Kitchen Cabinets,” 29. THE HOOSIER CABINET 11

This Hoosier Manufacturing Company advertisement appeared in several publications during 1910. Ads often stressed the practical necessity of the new cabinet—a Hoosier to a housewife would be like a plow to a farmer. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana 12 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

became known as a generic “kitchen cabinet,” many manufacturers, large and small, began producing them.22 The systematic and ergonomic design of the Hoosier cabinet genuine- ly expedited meal preparation and consolidated kitchen storage. But mere features alone, however helpful, cannot account for the millions of cabinets that would find their way into American homes. To understand why the cabinets became such a runaway success we have to appreciate the part played in this story by the increasingly sophisticated profession of sales, which not only promoted the cabinets by making them accessible to buyers, but extolled their many benefits as well. The history of the Hoosier cabinet illustrates how early twentieth-cen- tury manufacturers enthusiastically put these principles of salesmanship and marketing into practice. The Hoosier Manufacturing Company, whose promotional budget and visionary sales strategies vastly surpassed those of any other firm, advertised in newspapers and magazines almost from its inception. By the 1920s, Hoosier was spending almost a quarter-million dol- lars annually on advertising. In an effort to capitalize on the interest gener- ated by these advertisements, the company established dealer relationships with furniture stores. However, most businesses were less than enthusiastic at the prospect of devoting precious floor space to mere kitchen cabinets. In 1904 the firm publicized a plan to sell to customers directly, cutting out the middlemen, but they later found it most expedient to establish their own network of “Hoosier-authorized” dealers, and they artfully coordinated their advertising in print media with promotional events at these localized ven- ues.23 By 1916 there were over 5,000 dealers, and the company had sold more than a million cabinets. As countless advertisements for Hoosier cabinets show, the purveyors of these “step savers” profited richly from the Beecher sisters’ insights and creativity. The promotion of “equable and cheerful temper and tone in the housekeeper” proved a spectacular means to increase sales. Although only a few advertisements explicitly cited the Beechers (and it is Catharine whose wisdom was most often invoked), the sisters’ influence is unmistakable. Not only had they literally provided a blueprint for the cabinet’s essential design, with their drawing of the cooking form; their writings had enumerated exactly those areas of the middle-class housewife’s daily existence that war- ranted remediation—a list that, for these businesses, translated to unmined veins of gold.

______22The Showers Brothers Furniture Company of Bloomington, Indiana, is one of the many firms that manufactured Hoosier-type kitchen cabinets among their products. The offices of the Indiana University Press have for decades been located in one of the former Showers Brothers’ showrooms; their adjacent factory building now houses Bloomington’s city hall. 23Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 20, 21. THE HOOSIER CABINET 13

Worn out? The new kitchen cabinet promised to reduce the overall amount of labor the housewife had to perform, as well as make each step of that labor less physically taxing. Feeling unappreciated? The investment of $50 required to purchase a Hoosier cabinet would provide a concrete sym- bol of the esteem in which a housewife’s work was held by her spouse. Wondering what your education was for, when you spend so much of your daily life in menial labor? The cabinet’s diverse, ingenious appurtenances would indicate to the woman of the house and to others that the challenges of kitchen work were many and real; why else would “efficiency experts” have devoted so much attention to inventing such equipment? Beyond all of these remedies to domestic woes there also lay a positive reason to buy this cabinet: the simple beauty of the object as a piece of furniture would make the housewife’s time in her kitchen a rewarding pleasure. Finally, the pres- ence of a Hoosier cabinet in a woman’s home would demonstrate to family and friends her embrace of modern ideals. The various manufacturers of Hoosier cabinets employed a variety of print media for advertising, from local newspapers to national magazines. Some of these publications were directed at a female readership—The Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Woman’s Home Companion, among them. Others, which included Liberty Magazine, Everybody’s Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post, were intended for general readers. Others still were directed specifically at husbands. In its earlier years, the Hoosier Manufacturing Company advertised in farm publications such as National Stockman and Farmer Magazine and Breeder’s Gazette. The male head of the household would, after all, be paying for the cabinet’s purchase. But the most telling bit of advertising directed at men must surely be a 1913 example published in Country Gentleman. Entitled “The Moving Picture Story of a Hoosier Cabinet,” it shows three drawings of a housewife. In the first, she “sits while working,” rather than having to stand. The second shows how she can keep all her tools and materials at arm’s reach, which saves her from having to walk around the kitchen. The third plate tri- umphantly proclaims, “Through Early–Not Tired,” perhaps hinting that the wife might be expected to have energy left for other activities she might engage in with her husband at the end of the day. Most of the ads, however, were directed at wives themselves, who could presumably be counted on to suggest to their spouses the positive improvement in every aspect of family life that this modern invention would facilitate. If matter-of-fact suggestion proved unsuccessful, she might badger her husband; how could anyone not afford a Hoosier, when the com- pany offered payment on credit with only a dollar down and forty-nine pay- ments of a dollar a week? While fifty dollars represented a great deal more money in 1900 than it does today, the payment plan brought these cabinets 14 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

within the reach of countless buyers whose income would otherwise have precluded such a purchase. The cabinet would be paid for in a year and pro- vide decades of stalwart service! If the cabinet’s combination of practical fea- tures and affordability did not sway a stubborn husband, his wife could point out, as had the piece in Country Gentleman, that this purchase might well garner him more wifely attention. Men’s work, being visible in the public sphere, brought financial prof- it, opportunities, and recognition. The Beecher sisters had understood the importance of such recognition to an individual’s motivation and sense of self-worth. But women, who labored in the home, worked largely by them- selves. Their work was also taken for granted, which led to a vicious cycle: feeling underappreciated contributed to low self-esteem, which in turn often led to grumpiness and impatience with family. This syndrome of neg- ativity at least made many women’s housekeeping labors more of a chore than they needed to be, and at worst caused significant household strife. The frequency with which the advertisements promised relief from drudg- ery and exhaustion certainly suggests that in spite of the nineteenth centu- ry’s vaunted ideals, women’s household work had taken a heavy toll on marriage and family life. In response to such realities, some Hoosier cabinet advertisements were designed to make women feel that their domestic labors were valued for their contributions beyond the domestic sphere. The authors of these ads undoubtedly understood that this constituted a subtle yet welcome form of flattery—a way of helping women appreciate their part in the larger com- munity. The beef and mutton pie they prepared for dinner, or the calf’s foot blancmange they served for dessert (both are included in Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book) might have national or even international repercus- sions. Mrs. X’s husband might be the tradesman responsible for maintaining equipment at the university’s chemistry department. Mrs. Y’s husband might work for the mayor. Perhaps Mrs. W was married to the state governor, or even an ambassador. Who knew what wide-reaching developments might be aided by a husband’s ability to perform well, instead of feebly, on any given day? The Sellers company did its own part to persuade women that their labors were valued, enumerating “Added Features That Cost Us Over $100,000 Annually.”24 This level of investment by a manufacturer certainly implies the importance of those for whom the investment is made. Nowhere did this ad acknowledge that the cost of these added features, which includ- ed an automatic lowering flour bin and ant-proof canisters, was passed on to

______24Ibid., 76. THE HOOSIER CABINET 15

Hoosier Manufacturing Company catalogs, including this one from 1912, regularly included drawings comparing the steps required to make a meal using a traditional pantry versus a Hoosier cabinet. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana the buyers; instead, readers were allowed to imagine that these improve- ments had been added for their benefit alone, and at the manufacturer’s expense. A variation on this ad, appearing in another publication, claimed that providing the “Automatic Lowering Flour Bin” cost the company $52,000 more per year than what the cabinet would otherwise have cost to make. A third Sellers ad referred to their kitchen cabinet as “The Best Servant In Your House.”25 As with the previous examples, this one flattered would-be buyers, implicitly crediting them with a kind of prestige they like- ly lacked: only those who are powerful and important are actually in a posi- tion to employ servants. Labeling their cabinet “The Indorsement [sic] of Success,” Coppes Brothers’ ad published by Pictorial Review in 1920 calls to mind Max Weber’s take on the Protestant work ethic.26 Just as Weber posited that the work ethic had arisen from the Protestant belief that earthly success could

______25Ibid., 80, 81. 26Ibid., 102. 16 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

indicate an individual’s status as one of God’s elect, and thereby provided motivation for the Christian to prosper in earthly terms as a means of assur- ing himself that he was among the chosen few, if a woman owned a “Dutch Kitchenet,” she must be successful. The cabinet’s presence in her kitchen would be a badge of her housekeeping prowess, as enviable as a modern-day Eagle Scout’s award. Imagine how the presence of this cabinet would impress family and neighbors, with its suggestion that it could only have been bought by a husband who greatly valued his wife and looked upon her household responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. The many ads for Hoosier cabinets that cited numbers of kitchen footsteps saved also under- scored, by implication, the housewife’s value. Who would take the time to count her footsteps and work to minimize them if those steps did not belong to someone important? Counting footsteps proved big business for the makers of Hoosier cab- inets. The idea of saving steps has been figurative for so long that most of us have forgotten the origin of this expression in the literal movement of feet. “How many steps in the kitchen preparing three simple meals?” asked Coppes Brothers and Zook.27 Accompanied by a statement from Mr. Harrington Emerson, the “Father of Efficiency Engineers,” and appearing next to a photograph showing H. H. Tice of Emerson Engineers recording the time and motion involved in preparing a meal, the ad proclaimed, “2,113 steps every day–1,592 can be saved!” Further copy termed these dis- coveries “amazing” and “supremely important”—again in line with Beecher’s urging that the value of women’s work in the home receive due appreciation. With its promise to save footsteps by consolidating items in one “cen- tralized storehouse that has places for 400 articles, all within arm’s reach,” the Hoosier cabinet fulfilled the day’s requirement to help the newly ser- vant-less wife (and the wife who had never been able to afford servants) run her household more efficiently.28 But there were other ads that personified the cabinet as a servant. A 1916 ad for McDougall contains a veritable ser- vant’s vow.

I will make each kitchen hour a joy—each meal a source of keenest pleas- ure—each day an example of economy and efficiency….

I will banish blue Monday and black Friday—take the drudgery out of your kitchen—and fill the days with the song of willing service.

______27Ibid., 103. 28Advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post, October 28, 1916; Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 36. THE HOOSIER CABINET 17

I will keep your kitchen as neat as wax—your food supplies in perfect order. I will save you all I cost in a score of ways—to live without me is an extravagance.

I will always be on time . . . always keep my temper—never aggravate— never disappoint you—for I am the McDougall Kitchen Cabinet. Your faithful servant, Patience McDougall29

Like this one from “Patience McDougall,” an ad for the Boone cabinet made by Campbell-Smith-Ritchie portrayed the Hoosier as a woman, “Helen Boone.” “Boone Cabinets as represented by ‘Helen,’ below, are beautiful. But they are also unique in work-saving service. They are capable because they incorporate the proved [sic], ultra-modern advantages 369 Women, readers of The Ladies’ Home Journal, designed.”30 Miss Boone’s countenance peers out from various corners of the cabinet as she points to its many helpful fea- tures, among them a disappearing ironing board and “a mirror for that hasty glance!” The suggestion seems to be that you, too, could become capable and beautiful by using this cabinet. At the very least, Helen Boone could replace your former servant who abandoned you, seeking factory work. (Other competent and attractive members of the Boone family were known as Mary, Betty, and Bertha.) Other advertisements did even better. Sex sells, and while its use may have been somewhat veiled in much early twentieth-century advertising (at least, the advertising directed at the kind of women whose families would have the means to buy such household improvements), it was handily employed all the same. Why portray a cabinet as a chaste, submissive girl or a sensible home efficiency expert when you could personify it as a stunning, strapping man? The McDougall Company seized this opportunity. “Handsome, tall and competent,” reads one ad from 1920, “your McDougall waits cheerily in the kitchen every morning.” Having helped get your fami- ly ready for the day, McDougall then “hurries you out, smiling and fresh, for a bit of relaxation.” Rare among Hoosier cabinet ads, this one just happens to picture a cabinet without its user; her stool sits empty with her apron, discarded, lying suggestively on top. It is hard to view this ad without imag- ining some additional kind of pleasure, unmentioned, that took place after the work was done. Her husband and children having been ushered off to their respective days, she has untied her apron strings and left the kitchen. What occurred between this moment and the time when she hurried out of

______29Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 114. 30Ibid., 127. 18 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

that house so refreshed? The portrayal of the “servant” continues in digni- fied terms: “Ancestral leadership, steadfastly upheld, exhibits itself in fine character of construction and complete convenience. . . . Lustrous beauty, sound oak sturdiness, and rare utility combined.”31 Taken as a piece, this ad calls to mind images of the young Sean Connery, or perhaps those muscle- bound men on the covers of the bodice-ripper romances that would find their way into the kitchens of these same women several decades later. There’s nothing like the anticipation of romance to sweeten even the dullest labors that must, by necessity, precede it. The unspoken promises that can reasonably be inferred to relate to sex went on. These were, after all, the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when all manner of supposedly outdated social notions were being abandoned. The promise of sex, while less overt than it would become dur- ing the 1960s, was everywhere. Just as today, there was strong pressure to be slender, youthful, and energetic. Expectations of women, too, were chang- ing; women’s demand for voting rights set in motion a train of social effects, one of which was a new emphasis on how they appeared as individuals— not just in terms of beauty, and not just as keepers of the house and mothers of children, but in their capacity as partners within a marriage partnership. It was no longer enough to be a responsible housekeeper, a good cook, and a caring mother; now women began to be judged as conversation partners and objects of desire. There were new standards to be met, and along with them, new reasons to feel anxious and insecure. Just as today, self-doubt was insidiously nurtured by advertisers so that it could then be profitably mined as a potentially inexhaustible means to increase sales. Advertisements in Liberty Magazine, which billed itself as “A Weekly for Everybody,” featured ads for Pepsodent toothpaste (“Cloudy Teeth—dull teeth. How to make them whiter—quickly!”), Lemon Facialax skin-whitening cream, and “Dr. Lawton’s Automatic Waistline Reducer.” Editorials revealed “The TRUTH About BEAUTY SURGERY” and quizzed women, “Do You Use Your Husband’s Name? Or Are You of Those Who Would Abolish ‘Mrs.’ from the Glossary of Married Life?” Fiction included such offerings as “The Happy Hunting Ground: A Short Story of a Girl Who Crossed the Sea to Look for a Rich Husband, and Found Love Instead” and “White Pants Willie, The Story of a Young Man Who Found Love and Adventure in Dazzling, Money- Drunk Palm Beach.”32 Read with this larger social context in mind, the cabinet ads may be seen as offering yet one more attractive benefit: by helping their users stay

______31Ibid., 120. 32Liberty Magazine, January 17, 1925. THE HOOSIER CABINET 19

beautiful, youthful, and energetic, the cabinets could help save marriages. “Why be all fagged out and suffer from backache and headache? Why be a kitchen drudge, waste your strength and wear yourself out? A ‘Dutch Kitchenet’ will systematize your kitchen work—make it easy and give you leisure time for rest and recreation.”33 The Sellers cabinet promised to “con- serve your strength to a remarkable degree.”34 Hoosier agreed that “the greatest economies [women] can effect are those of Time and Strength,” allowing “more time for rest and recreation,” and for “porch breezes” in summer.35 “The Hoosier will help me to stay young,” declares a bride to her mother, presumably on her wedding day.36 “Save nerves, Save health,” cries another Hoosier ad; yet another, “Think what this spare time would mean to you day after day, if you worked sitting down so you could feel rested enough to enjoy it.”37 It is hard to read page after page of advertising focused on the prevention of backaches, headaches, “drudgery,” and exhaustion in the context of a married household where the husband would be paying for the purchase of any home improvement without being put in mind of the kind of husband-generated complaints the cabinets might be expected to help reduce. Other ads employ peer pressure of various kinds in an effort to have housewives cajole their husbands into a purchase. “Are you fitting your daughter by example and experience to be a successful home-maker?” asks a McDougall advertisement from 1917. “Are you educating her for the prac- tical work of life? Are you teaching her true economy and efficiency?” After pointing out that the cabinet can be had for only a dollar a week, the ad con- tinues, “You cannot spend this small amount in any way that will be of greater daily benefit to your daughter, your family and yourself.”38 Using the same type of rationalization, the Hoosier Manufacturing Company asserted in various advertisements that “[a] Hoosier Cabinet is not an expense—it’s an investment.” The pressure to be modern, to keep up with the times and avoid being left behind by one’s peers, is also employed. “You would not knowingly per- mit, in your modern home, the doing of important work by methods that belong to a drudging past,” proclaims a Sellers ad from 1925. “Then remem-

______33Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 101. 34Ibid., 68. 35Ibid., 38, 41. 36Advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal, 1919; Plante, The American Kitchen, 209. 37Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 32. 38Ibid., 116. 20 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

ber that a modern cabinet is the indispensable working center, scientifically developed for culinary purposes. . . . You will free your new house from the crudities of built-in shelves and cupboards.”39 By far the greatest peer pressure was employed by the Hoosier Manufacturing Company. A 1910 advertisement urged readers of Good Housekeeping to join no fewer than 300,000 other women who had already, according to this claim, cut out “all the disagreeable part” of their kitchen work.40 Another, in 1914, put a quasi-patriotic slant on the peer pressure theme, claiming to have more than 700,000 users—now more than double the number in 1910—and promoting the cabinet as a “national step saver for American women.” “Women all over the United States praise the Hoosier,” the ad continued. “You need it, too.”41 The political undertones of this campaign were echoed in 1920, when an ad in The Saturday Evening Post characterized the cabinet as a “woman-emancipator.”42 Another, in 1920, claimed to be not just improving daily life for American housewives, but revolutionizing the fate of “Womankind,” as evidenced by the fact that kitchens were now being designed around the cabinet: “To-day kitchens are actually being planned to fit the Hoosier.”43 By 1920 the Hoosier Manufacturing Company could point a metaphorical finger at the housewife and urge, “you need the HOOSIER–Now. It can do for you what it is doing for two million other women.”44 Later ads shifted the focus from the reduction of drudgery to high- lighting the ways in which a Hoosier cabinet would transform the kitchen into a source of delight, perfect for aiding the woman of the house to express lingering ideals of supposed true womanhood. The McDougall cabinet promised to “make each kitchen hour a joy” and claimed to “radiate good cheer.”45 The Sellers cabinet would “bring beauty and color into the kitchen.”46 By 1920 the Hoosier Manufacturing Company had decided to call one of its models the “Hoosier Beauty,” a name that would endure for years; in 1925 one of the firm’s advertisements declared the kitchen “the one room exclusively a woman’s . . . and so the kitchen should reflect cheer and

______39Ibid., 87. 40Ibid., 30. 41Ibid., 33; emphasis added. 42Ibid., 38. 43Ibid., 41; emphasis added. 44Ibid. 45Ibid., 114. 46Ibid., 88. THE HOOSIER CABINET 21

charm as well as provide comfort and convenience.”47 “It is the one room,” the ad continued, “where she may have her own way without consulting others. Perhaps this is the very reason the kitchen is so often last to get its due. . . . Yet every woman has her dreams of what this room should be! . . . [A]bove all, it would be a charming, restful place, with dainty, feminine touches to cheer her work day along.”48 In addition to the basic kitchen cab- inet, the company offered a breakfast set that would bring an “added touch of cosy [sic] cheer . . . in White or French Grey Enamel, golden oak, or painted to match your special color scheme. Whatever your choice, you have a tastefully appointed, charming room.” For the holiday season of the same year, 1927, the company ran an ad in The Saturday Evening Post that gives testament to the importance of color in its own right.

Sometime between now and Christmas a Hoosier dealer in nearly every community will feature the new Hoosier Beauty Cabinet—choice of five color combinations—and with it a beautiful 46-piece golden maize din- ner set, a 19-piece set of jade green glassware and a 10-piece crystal set of kitchen glassware . . . all for a small payment down.

. . . You have a choice of five smart finishes—Silver or Golden Oak, White, Wedgwood or Grey Enamel. Cupboard interiors are finished in scarlet, apple green, orange or robin’s egg blue. Doors are attractively dec- orated to match.49

As so many advertisements of the time pointed out, “The best part of a Hoosier kitchen is that you will never know you’ve spent the money! For buying Hoosier furniture is now reduced to the easiest, simplest terms.”50 Manufacturers rivaled each other to see who could devise the most irre- sistible offerings. By 1930 Sellers was advertising its kitchen ensembles “in the new Colored Oak,” claiming to be “the style leader in kitchen furniture— sponsor of the modern colorful kitchen and of beautiful wood finishes.”51 To maximize the value of its advertising investment, the Hoosier Manufacturing Company devised an ingenious way of gauging which ads generated the most interest. As Philip Kennedy has pointed out, just as many companies today include a department code on reader response cards,

______47Ibid., 48. 48Ibid.; emphasis in original. 49Ibid., 53. 50Ibid., 48. 51Ibid., 91; emphasis in original. 22 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

different advertisements listed different addresses for the company’s main office in New Castle. When readers sent in a form requesting information, the company could identify the source of their interest by the address. One ad listed the office at 1027 Broad Street, another at 1127 Sidney Street. Earlier ads gave various numbers on Maple Street, while 1410 Sidney Street and 135 Calhoun Street also made appearances. No doubt the post office in New Castle was aware of this ploy and delivered all the mail to the actual location of the main office, on South 14th Street.52 Another innovative marketing device employed by the Hoosier Manufacturing Company was its annual kitchen design competition that took place in the early 1920s. Advertising in professional publications, the company solicited entries from designers and architects around the country for kitchen layouts that would incorporate a Hoosier cabinet in the most attractive and efficient way. In one year, 343 entries were submitted, 50 of which made their way into the slender published volume entitled The Kitchen Plan Book. Reprinted in 1997 by American Bungalow Magazine, this book is a valuable resource for today’s restorers and designers of early twen- tieth-century-style kitchens. But when it was originally published, the book was much more. “The problem,” as presented by the company, involved “the design of a fully equipped kitchen for a family of four or five without a servant.”53 Accordingly, the competition rules specified that the kitchen could not exceed 144 square feet—these kitchens were to be exemplars for the small, “modern” house without a space-wasting pantry. Besides the Hoosier cabi- net, the kitchen was to include the “essential requirements” of a sink with drain board, range, and refrigerator. The actual purpose of the competition, however, becomes clear on reading the company’s “object.”

This competition is being conducted … to encourage the study by archi- tects and architectural draftsmen of labor-saving devices and economies in plan and equipment for the modern small-family kitchen. The acute- ness of the servant problem has resulted generally in increased kitchen activities on the part of individual members of the family. . . . That a kitchen should be . . . a really pleasant room to work in . . . is becoming recognized in larger measure in all communities. The Hoosier Manufacturing Company, believing that a real demand exists for standardi- zation, hopes through this competition to bring to the problem, the expe- rience . . . of the architect and, with the suggestions thus obtained,

______52Ibid., 20. 53Hoosier Manufacturing Company, The Kitchen Plan Book (New Castle, Ind., c. 1920), 7; reprinted by American Bungalow, 1997. THE HOOSIER CABINET 23

expects to be able to submit to the public and the architectural profession data and practical suggestions for an up-to-the-minute model kitchen.54

By publishing the “best” work of the nation’s architects and designers, who had been challenged to incorporate a Hoosier cabinet most effectively into a kitchen, the manufacturer was attempting no less than a revision of basic kitchen standards. The book was intended not just to show architects and builders how to plan a kitchen that would offer the most effective lay- out for using a Hoosier kitchen cabinet; more ingeniously, the book was intended to make the Hoosier cabinet as indispensable a part of the kitchen as a stove or sink. Remember, the title of this book is not “A Kitchen Plan Book,” but The Kitchen Plan Book. Ideally, Americans would be left unable to imagine a kitchen that did not include a Hoosier cabinet. What a quaint idea that would be! Of course a house must be built with dedicated space for the Hoosier. No one in her right mind would wish to go back to the time when a kitchen’s storage and preparation areas were limited to a “mere built-in contrivance, such as a series of shelves and cupboards.”55 By the time of this competition, “[t]wo million women [had], by their purchases, placed the stamp of approval on the Hoosier as America’s greatest household conven- ience.”56 The text concluded with the following coup de grace: “In planning a kitchen, it is logical to leave a space in which the Hoosier may be placed.” And who would not wish to be logical in an era when the values of “science” and “system” were so vaunted?57 Another significant factor in the Hoosier Manufacturing Company’s success was the company’s masterly coordination of its advertising and mar- keting schemes with a nationwide network of dealers. This collaboration made the cabinets readily available to buyers even in rural locations many decades before the development of general delivery services such as UPS. A 1915 publication for Hoosier retailers offers a brilliant example of the com- pany’s dealer support. Published in broadsheet form, the Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet Book, as this publication is called, is, at just over thirty pages, actu- ally less a book than a promotional guide for retail agents. The booklet promised cash prizes for the highest-performing sales agents, who could win up to $500 on top of their ordinary retail markup. (Considering that two years later the Aladdin Company was selling entire house kits for an

______54Ibid.; emphasis added. 55Ibid., 51. 56Ibid. 57Ibid.; emphasis added. 24 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

The Hoosier Manufacturing Company provided its dealers with a variety of press-ready advertising copy, including this from the Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet Book, 1915, for publication in local newspapers. Advertising campaigns often led up to a promotional sale. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana THE HOOSIER CABINET 25

average price of $1,145, this prize money would translate into tens of thou- sands of dollars’ worth of purchasing power by today’s standards and so must have provided dealers with a powerful incentive to sell the Hoosier Manufacturing Company’s wares.) The contest would coincide with a nationwide promotional event whereby customers could purchase a Hoosier cabinet for $2.50 less than the advertised price. This price reduction was especially significant given that the Hoosier Manufacturing Company strict- ly controlled the prices charged by its authorized dealers. To encourage participation in this promotional extravaganza, the text cites past successes: “These sales have increased Hoosier business every year for fifteen years in spite of wars, panics and periods of business depression. They made the fall months of 1914 the biggest in Hoosier history. The new plan, we believe, will increase your Hoosier business and your new cus- tomers beyond every expectation you now think reasonable.”58 The booklet included guidance and materials for agents’ in-store use. It previewed the advertisements that would appear in national publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Woman’s Home Companion. It instruct- ed sellers exactly how to set up their store windows to maximize profits and offered special tags to enhance their displays. Store Card No. 1, for instance, noted, “PAY ONLY $1. Balance $1 weekly.”59 It offered dealers a five-foot- long, green-and-white advertising poster and provided photographic illus- trations of how to display the cabinets to the dealer’s best advantage in the store. Furthermore, the booklet promised help with developing new cus- tomers by mail. In it were reproduced sample letters with the following text that the Hoosier Manufacturing Company would send to prospective cus- tomers in the retailer’s own locale.

You already know a lot of people who ought to be good prospects for Hoosier Cabinets. Some of these people trade with you now; others don’t.

Before you make the public announcement of your big Hoosier sale in the newspapers, why not send a carefully written personal invitation to each of these women, giving them the special privilege of coming in the week before the general public is invited, and making her selection with- out rush or hurry.

Almost every select shop in the big cities uses this plan. It always makes one feel especially favored to get an advance invitation of this sort.

______58Hoosier Manufacturing Company, Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet Book (1915), 8. 59Ibid., 14. 26 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

You send us the names of all the people who ought to own Hoosier Cabinets. We will write the above letter [as indicated in the text] on the attractive little folder shown here—sign your name to it, mail it—do all the work—pay for the —charge you nothing but the postage.

This letter, written by an expert advertising man, carefully criticized by business men of wide experience, has already been tested successfully. If we did not know it would produce a big increase in your Hoosier sales, we could not afford to make this liberal offer. Printing and handling of these letters alone, will cost us more than the postage. Take advantage of this opportunity. It will have a big influence on the success of your sale.

On top of all these other types of aid, the company provided a week’s worth of press-ready advertisements for retailers to run in their local news- paper. As may be expected, these ads became increasingly urgent in tone as the week wore on, moving from “Next week will be too late” through “DECIDE TONIGHT.” The company also supplied painted metal signs to “Bring Farmers to Your Store,” colorful cards for retailers to drive around with on their delivery trucks, attractive pamphlets that could be customized with a retailer’s store name and sent out by mail to prospects’ homes, and several pages with illustrations of various Hoosier models, from “the low priced Hoosier cabinet no. 1537 to no. 1549: “The Carrara All White Hoosier—cleans like a porcelain bath .”60 As the garnish to this veritable feast of sales assistance, the booklet concluded with three pages of step-by-step instructions on how the retailer ought personally to demonstrate the Hoosier cabinet to prospective buyers who came into the store. One of the most entertaining passages describes “Mrs. Christine Frederick’s Housekeeper’s Food Guide, showing an unlimit- ed number of balanced menus,” which was provided as a standard feature in the upper section of the higher-priced models. Retail salesmen were urged to praise the Guide, which “answers every day the perplexing question, ‘What shall I cook for dinner?’ You simply turn the dial until you see before you in the slot, the names of the meat you want. A choice of perfectly bal- anced menus is before you. A great many women regard this as the most important feature on the new Hoosier. It saves money, time and worry.” The text followed with the confidential advice, “Show how the food guide oper- ates, and ask the customer to operate it herself.”61 By 1920 the Hoosier Manufacturing Company alone had sold two mil- lion cabinets, which translated to getting its product into one in ten American homes. This figure does not take into account a single one of the

______60Ibid., 16. 61Ibid., 33. THE HOOSIER CABINET 27

The early twentieth century saw the increasingly sophisticated development of all forms of sales. The Hoosier Manufacturing Company encouraged its retail dealers to stay on the cutting edge and sell their wares aggressively. In their Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet Book, 1915, the company provided detailed instruction, including a word-by-word script, for the salesmen who would demonstrate their cabinets to prospective buyers. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana 28 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

competition’s “” that could be found in many thousands of other households. The cabinets’ penetration into the United States market repre- sented an unprecedented level of sales and reflected the success of new methods of marketing and distribution. It is no wonder that scholars use these companies’ advertisements to examine our nation’s transformation from a production-based economy to a culture increasingly identified and defined by consumption.62 The cabinet itself had been designed in response to a set of readily dis- cernible socio-economic needs, at a time that coincided fortuitously with the development of the ancillary industrial infrastructure that allowed the various cabinet companies to maximize sales. But while these manufactur- ers benefited by underscoring the values of systematic planning and effi- ciency, along with the desirability of the cabinet’s sleek, modern style, other developments in the realm of kitchen furnishings were taking place that epitomized these qualities even more relentlessly. By the 1930s, the Hoosier cabinet had begun to be cast as outdated and was being rapidly supplanted in American kitchens by built-in cabinets. Although built-ins were advertised as the truly modern kitchen furniture, they were by no means an innovation of the 1920s, but had been a common feature in many nineteenth-century houses, particularly those of the wealth- ier classes. Although the butler’s pantry is the best-known example, more modest homes often had linen presses recessed into their kitchen and din- ing room walls. Kitchens in some of the better endowed Shaker communi- ties, such as Hancock in Massachusetts, were also sometimes furnished with built-ins. These earlier cabinets were site-built into the fabric of a house by skilled carpenters, usually during the home’s construction. As such, they were absolutely fixed in place and could not be removed if a family relocat- ed to a new home. (One Hoosier cabinet company, Kitchen Maid, had por- trayed its product’s portability as an asset in a 1919 advertisement.)63 Early built-ins were also relatively expensive, as they required more refined car- pentry than the basic construction and trimming out of a house. As a result, they were uncommon among houses built for the working and lower-mid- dle classes. The manufacturers of freestanding kitchen cabinets had on more than one occasion waged public relations campaigns against built-ins, which they recognized as a potential threat in the market for middle-class kitchen

______62See, for example, Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890- 1945 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 2006); Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York, 2007). 63Kennedy, Hoosier Cabinets, 144. THE HOOSIER CABINET 29

furnishings. A 1925 Sellers advertisement contrasted the “modern cabinet,” which had been “scientifically developed for culinary purposes,” with the “crudities of built-in shelves and cupboards.”64 To be sure, the Hoosier did exemplify many attributes of the modern ethos, with its numerous mechan- ical parts, easy-to-clean surfaces, and efficient, step-saving design. Yet when millwork companies marketed their new modular built-ins, they found it easy to convince the housewife that their designs took the best of the free- standing cabinets’ “modern” qualities even further. Unlike the Hoosier, built-in cabinets extended down to the floor, eliminating the space under- neath where dust and dirt could collect. The new built-ins could also be fit- ted seamlessly from one wall to another and topped with a sanitary counter, further reducing opportunities for grime to accumulate. Moreover, because they were available in different widths and depths, the new built-ins could accurately be described as even more efficient than freestanding cabinets, as they enabled landlords and homeowners to maximize opportunities for storage in even the most irregular spaces. They were also modern in the sense of being widely available to nearly everyone, thanks to the very prin- ciples of efficiency and standardization that the Hoosier Manufacturing Company had helped to pioneer. On top of all this, the new built-ins had an indisputably more streamlined appearance than their freestanding counter- parts, which gave them the ultimate claim to being “modern.” Several manufacturers of freestanding cabinets responded to the new kitchen furnishing competition by differentiating their wares still further from what some called “mere built-in contrivances.” They cut back on claims highlighting functionality and focused instead on their products’ aes- thetic appeal and style. Colorfully painted Hoosier cabinets became popular, their doors’ panels sometimes enhanced with stenciled designs. A 1930 cat- alog published by the Hoosier Manufacturing Company, for example, included cabinets in ivory, spring green, grey, orchid pink, and citrus yellow, available with a decorative “pipe organ” design on the upper cupboard doors. Kitchen Maid offered its cabinets in “beautiful Golden Oak and Snowy White Enamel.”65 The Sellers company attempted to bolster sales by adopting designs traditionally associated with more formal types of furni- ture, offering its basic Hoosier in a vaguely Mediterranean version with “gay, artistic effects of the Spanish type.” Sellers also advertised a quasi-Early American model characterized as “colonial,” and a streamlined variation they called “Klear Front Modern American.”66 Still another way of attempt-

______64Ibid., 87. 65Ibid., 144. 66Ibid., 88. 30 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

ing to stimulate sales was to offer companion products—dishes, glassware, or other kitchen furniture such as stepstools, breakfast sets, and workta- bles—at special prices with the purchase of a cabinet. A Hoosier Manufacturing Company advertisement in 1931 offered a “complete Hoosier ensemble—8 pieces $59.50 plus freight from factory”; in addition to a Hoosier cabinet, the set included a stool, breakfast table with four chairs, and kitchen worktable.67 While each of these strategies may have boosted the manufacturers’ flagging sales, they proved futile as long-term responses to the introduction of modular built-ins. Several manufacturers, including Sellers, Hoosier, and McDougall, eventually began producing their own lines of modular kitchen cabinetry. As Jacquelyn Star points out, “By 1935 free-standing kitchen cab- inets were considered old-fashioned. A reader from Ottawa, Kansas wrote to The Grand Rapids Furniture Record requesting ‘the address of some firm who makes the old style kitchen cupboard with glass doors.’”68 The Hoosier’s heyday was over.

______67Ibid., 59. 68Star, “Free-Standing Kitchen Cabinets,” 54.