An Essay from 19th Century U.S. Newspapers Database Consumerism and Consumption

Nancy F. Koehn, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University

A national consumer culture first emerged in the United During a nine-month period at the beginning of the nine- States late in the nineteenth century. But the origins of a teenth century sixty-six different customers were noted consumer society stretch back for at least a century before in the ledger of one general store in Louisville, Kentucky. that. In the 1780s Thomas Jefferson had dreamed of a vir- Most patrons were white men, but several women and tuous republic composed of self- sufficient yeoman farmers, African American slaves shopped there as well. In almost untainted by the squalor associated with manufacturing. twelve hundred transactions, an average of about eighteen Consumption, in Jefferson’s utopia, would revolve around per customer or two visits each a month, these people the basic requirements of subsistence, all of which could bought thread, shoes, hats, chamber pots, spectacles, and be found in the land’s bounty. His was a powerful vision, other goods and paid for their purchases with cash, store and its ideological influence was long-lasting. But it was credit, skins, and wood. not an accurate description of how most people lived in the The inhabitants of early-nineteenth-century cities had more new United States. Jefferson himself was one of the nation’s choice in goods and outlets than those who lived in rural most conspicuous consumers, going deep into debt to fill areas. Hundreds of stores filled urban streets, offering an his home, Monticello, with expensive goods from around assortment of groceries, dry goods, glassware, medicines, the world. and even paint. Buoyed by rapid population growth and On small farms in Massachusetts, in elegant Philadelphia increased commerce, specialty shops also appeared in U.S. row houses, and on sprawling Virginia plantations, cities beginning in the 1820s. These outlets initially focused Americans at the end of the eighteenth century bought, on broad categories of merchandise, such as groceries and bartered, and used a range of goods that they did not or hardware, but by 1850 urban consumers could find stores could not produce themselves, including tea, china table- dedicated to narrow lines of goods, such as books, carpet- ware, spices, calico, satins, clocks, Dutch ovens, and sugar. ing, tea and coffee, china, cutlery, and hats. Even on the edges of the Appalachian frontier, peddlers and Nearly all stores were small, measuring a few hundred general storekeepers kept households supplied with whis- square feet in size. Many were operated informally from key, needles, hoes, and a myriad of other items. the owners’ homes without elaborate displays or extensive Many of these goods came from or through Great Britain. advertising. Specie was frequently in short supply during All told, Britain’s exports to North America and the West the first half of the nineteenth century, and like their coun- Indies expanded by more than 2,300 percent over the terparts in the country large numbers of city dwellers paid course of the eighteenth century. By the early 1800s North for their purchases with other goods or on credit. America and the West Indies bought more than half of This localized consumer economy did not necessarily trans- Britain’s exports, the overwhelming majority of which were late into widespread material affluence or comfort. In the manufactures, especially textiles and metalwares. 1830s, for example, most farm families lived in three- or Antebellum Consumption four-room houses without basements or flooring, save for the bare earth. On average these households probably spent In the first decades of the nineteenth century most commer- less than 200 dollars (about 3,100 dollars in late-twentieth- cial connections within the United States were local. New century dollars) a year for all expenses except housing. England peddlers, for example, hawked Bibles, almanacs, Rural families in the 1830s spent about 40 percent of their and hymnals to individual farmhouses in rural Vermont as nonhousing budgets on food. More than half of this went well as to regional merchants. Plantation owners in eastern for cereals, flour, and cured meat and fish. Most of the re- Georgia traveled to Savannah to buy buckwheat, crackers, mainder was spent on salt, spices, sugars, and beverages. lard, and tea, using credit on their future cotton sales. Gale Digital Collections In the city as well as in the country most Americans had

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bland and monotonous diets. Root vegetables (especially fuel mass production. In 1869 more than half of the goods potatoes), meat, bread, and dried pulses (beans, peas, and produced in the United States were agricultural and about lentils) made up the bulk of calories consumed. Men ate a third were manufactures. Thirty years later the ratio had about fifteen pounds of food a week, and women ate about flip-flopped: 33 percent of all commodities produced were twelve or thirteen pounds. They washed it down not with agricultural and 53 percent were manufactures. The re- water, which was often unsafe, but wi h large quantities of maining 14 percent came from mining and construction. tea, coffee, hot chocolate, beer, wine, and spirits. To find work in these growing sectors, people poured into Before 1850 the majority of Americans could count the cities, where they adopted new patterns of consumption. number of durable manufactured items they owned on Most fresh vegetables came from a street cart or a grocery the fingers of two hands. Some of these items, such as a shop rather than the family plot. New shoes, which rural Wedgwood vase, a grandfather clock, or silver spoons, households often purchased only when a peddler with ap- occupied a special place in household inventories, prized propriate sizes appeared, were available to urban families symbols of gentility or, for those on the frontier, of people in an assortment of sizes and styles all year round. and places once close by and now distant. Recounting her Industrialization brought economic growth and rising in- family’s move to Lowell, Massachusetts, in the antebellum comes. From 1869 through 1900 real per capita income period, one middle- class woman remembered rose by 2.1 percent a year. Although the late nineteenth familiar articles [that] journeyed with us: the brass- headed century was punctuated by several significant depressions shovel and tongs, that it had been my especial task to keep beginning in 1873, 1884, and 1893, the long-term trend bright ... the two china mugs, with their eighteenth-century was strongly upward. This was the most significant and lady and gentleman figures, curiosities brought from over sustained expansion that the U.S. economy had thus far the sea. ... Inanimate objects do gather into themselves experienced, and its effects stretched far. One of the most something of the character of those who live among them, visible results of the new prosperity was the mass produc- through association ... They are family treasures, because tion of countless new consumer goods, including canned they are part of the family life, full of memories and inspi- soups, ready-made shirts, packaged meat, soft drinks, and rations (Larcom, A New England Girlhood, pp. 149-150). watches. Some of the same improvements that created new things helped make established products, such as revolvers, The Emergence of a Consumer Society clocks, corsets, gloves, and locks, better, cheaper, and more During the middle and late nineteenth century the United easily obtainable. States gradually developed a national market. Borne along Late-nineteenth-century households encountered many of by the dramatic expansion of the telegraph and railroad these goods in new forms and outlets. For most of the cen- after the Civil War, people, livestock, and goods criss- tury, rural and urban customers purchased staples such as crossed the continent faster, cheaper, and more reliably vinegar, soap, and soda crackers from local stores, where than had been possible previously. In 1830 it took three clerks poured, weighed, and scooped these bulk items into weeks to move calico or imported earthenware from New desired quantities, often advising customers on quality. York to Chicago. In 1860 it took only three days, and by After about 1880, however, fast-growing companies such 1880 people and goods could make the journey in less than as Heinz, Procter and Gamble, and the National Biscuit twenty-four hours. Company (Nabisco) began to brand and package a wide This “transportation revolution,” as historians have called range of products for national distribution. Along with it, knit together an economy of unprecedented scale. the American Tobacco Company, Singer Sewing Machine Previously scattered and localized transactions gave way Company, Kellogg’s, Eastman Kodak, and Pillsbury, these to frequent commercial connections that spanned regions, manufacturers used their brands and the marketing initia- industries, and the nation. By the 1880s even settlers in the tives that supported them to build direct relationships with remote Dakota Territory no longer produced most of their end users and create large markets for their offerings. major food crops. Instead growing numbers of farmers As the scale and scope of national distribution expanded, concentrated on wheat or cattle for sale to eastern markets. households relied less on the local retailer’s assessment of a For the rest of their foodstuffs, such as flour, bottled pick- particular product. Instead consumers came to know and les, salt, spices, fruit, and some vegetables, these men and trust goods by the way new brands were advertised. Heinz’s women increasingly relied on distant canners and other baked beans were “pure food for the table,” and Coca- manufacturers. Cola, invented in 1886, was promoted as a “Delightful,

Gale Digital Collections The development of an integrated national market helped Palatable, Healthful Beverage.” Ads claimed that Singer

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sewing machines had helped bring the “women of the at least one of these “palaces of desire.” New York had A. world into one universal kinship and sisterhood.” Many of T. Stewart’s, R. H. Macy, and Lord & Taylor; Philadelphia these branded products were sold through established dis- had John Wanamaker; Boston was home to Jordan Marsh tribution channels, such as urban specialty shops, country and Filene’s; and Chicago was home to Marshall Field, the merchants, and “drummers,” or traveling salesmen. Fair, and Carson-Pirie. Department stores were very busy By the end of the century several important new outlets places that were far grander in scale than urban specialty had emerged, including chain stores, department stores, shops or rural general stores. At the end of the century and mail-order houses. A. Montgomery Ward published Marshall Field employed more than seven thousand people his first mail-order catalog in 1872. His venture was a huge to staff its State Street store in Chicago, which included success, and by the 1890s his catalog totaled more than one more than half a million square feet of selling space on thousand pages, had a circulation of 730,000, and elicited twelve stories, each opening onto a great atrium with an an average of two and a half orders per catalog. The arrival enormous skylight. A vast assortment of merchandise, from of the Montgomery Ward catalog, one customer remem- women’s furs to children’s tricycles to South African dia- bered, “was like having Christmas come three or four times monds, was displayed. As many as fifty thousand people a a year.” Spurred on by Ward’s accomplishment and the day crowded into Field’s great store. By 1900 d ily transac- advent of rural free delivery in 1896, other retailers such tions numbered in the tens of thousands, and annual sales as Sears, Roebuck also began offering goods by mail. By topped 17 million dollars. With their dazzling window dis- the end of the century almost twelve hundred mail-order plays, elaborate lighting, and numerous rooms filled with concerns were competing for more than 6 million custom- goods, Marshall Field and other emporiums were magnets ers. For households, especially those in remote locations, for residents and tourists alike. Most of the merchandis- mail-order catalogs were a vital link to an expanding world ing and advertising was aimed at women, who made up of goods. the majority of customers. Shoppers at department stores found themselves in a “fairyland,” noted one contempo- One of the first and most important chain stores was the rary observer, a scene of “splendor and of beauty.” Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which began in 1859 as a small store selling hides and feathers In department stores, specialty shops, and open- air markets, in New York City. Within a few years the founder, George urban women bought the food, clothing, and furnishings Francis Gilman, decided to specialize in tea. He and his that were no longer produced at home. Consumption had partner, George Huntington Hartford, opened new stores become a vital component of the work of the household, and gradually broadened their lines to include grocer- and women assumed major responsibility for it, crafting ies. By the end of the century the chain had nearly two new and significant public roles for themselves. This social hundred stores in twenty-eight states. Others quickly fol- shift happened more slowly in remote areas, where men lowed in A&P’s wake. The Jones Brothers Tea Company, continued to make up the majority of customers at general which later became Grand Union, began operations in stores well into the twentieth century. By 1920 retailers, 1872; F. W. Woolworth opened his first “five and ten cent advertising executives, sociologists, and family members store” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1879; and in 1882 accepted women’s position as households’ chief purchasers the Great Western Tea Company of Cincinnati (later the of consumer goods. Kroger Company) opened its doors. These chains gradually As the twentieth century began most Americans had ac- homogenized the U.S. grocery market, exposing millions cess to a substantially higher standard of living than that of of Americans to a growing and roughly similar array of their ancestors in 1800. Families still spent the bulk of their goods. incomes, an average of about 70 percent, on food, shelter, Mail-order houses and chain stores relied on centralized and clothing, but they had more and often better choices in buying and management, high inventory turnover, and these expenditures than earlier generations had enjoyed. In modern accounting systems. These practices made possible 1890, for example, each urban American ate an average of lower unit costs than those faced by most local merchants. a pound of fresh beef a week and drank more than a quart Chain stores passed on some savings to customers by offer- of milk. ing national brands and private label goods at fixed prices The things that most Americans once considered luxuries, below those of independent retailers. such as a bed frame and springs or a clock, had become The mid-century emergence of department stores also indispensable to all but the very poor. Pianos and mirrors, shaped urban consumers’ wants and needs. By the end of the scarcely dreamed of on the early- nineteenth-century fron- tier, found their way into the parlors of urban and rural Gale Digital Collections century most major cities and many smaller ones boasted

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middle-class homes. Working-class families in 1900, those Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and with annual incomes below 600 dollars, often had carpets Local History, 1982. and curtains. Although vacations remained the province of Gallman, Robert E. “Commodity Output, 1839-1899.” wealthy households, working- and middle-class families Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth spent small sums on an occasional trip to an amusement Century. Report of the National Bureau of Economic park or five-cent movie theater. Research. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, The consumer society ushered in during the late nineteenth 1960. century was a far cry from that of the late- twentieth-cen- Hendrickson, Robert. The Grand Emporiums: The tury United States. In 1900 only one in four families had Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores. running water, less than one in five had an icebox, and only New York: Stein and Day, 1979. one in six had a flush toilet. No televisions, day care cen- ters, health clubs, birth control pills, video stores, or fast- Horowitz, Daniel. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes food outlets were available. The majority of households toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940. did not rely heavily on installment credit to fund their pur- Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. chases. Despite these differences, U.S. consumerism at the Jaffee, David. “Peddlers of Progress and the end of the nineteenth century looked forward rather than Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860.” Journal backward. The industrialization, urbanization, economic of American History 78 (1991): 511-535. growth, mass production, and distribution that accelerated Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood Outlined from after 1870 greatly expanded Americans’ sense of material Memory. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889. possibility. These forces created consumers operating in a mass market, where once only customers interacted in Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, local economies through personal connections. As a mod- and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: ern consumer society took firm hold at the beginning of Pantheon, 1993. the twentieth century, the values o an older, preindustrial Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History culture that emphasized spiritual as well as material im- of Advertising in America. New York: Basic, 1994. provement began to weaken. In their stead arose a culture organized around the production and acquisition of goods Perkins, Elizabeth A. “The Consumer Frontier: Household and services, focused on self- fulfillment through economic Consumption in Early Kentucky.” Journal of American prosperity. History 78 (1991): 486-510. Potter, David Morris. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: Further Readings University of Chicago Press, 1954. Atherton, Lewis E. The Frontier Merchant in Mid- Shammas, Carole. “Consumer Behavior in Colonial America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. America.” Social Science History 6 (1982): 67-86. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Democratic Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of Experience. New York: Random House, 1973. the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon, 1989. ———. “A. Montgomery Ward’s Mail-Order Business.” Tedlow, Richard S. New and Improved: The Story of Mass Chicago History 2 (1973): 142-152. Marketing in America. New York: Basic, 1990. Brady, Dorothy S. “Consumption and the Style of Life.” Twyman, Robert W. History of Marshall Field and In American Economic Growth: An Economist’s History Company, 1852-1906. New York: Arno, 1954. of the United States. Edited by Lance E. Davis et al. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Source: Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century. 3 vols. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Breen, T. H. “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776.” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467-499. Cohen, Lizabeth A. “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working- class Homes, 1885-1915.” In Material Culture

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