100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture by Timothy B. Spears

Abstract

374 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture, By Timothy B. Spears. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp· xx+300; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. How did the products of the Industrial Revolution find their ways into the American heartland? Who carried news of the products and argued on their behalf before national brand advertising took over much of that task after 1890? Timothy B. Spears answers these ques­ tions in 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Cul­ ture, a fascinating book that also does a superb job of explicating the traveling salesmen’s roles as cultural, as well as commercial, mid­ dlemen. Spears skillfully weaves together business, cultural, social, and lit­ erary dynamics to explain this central figure in the United States’s transition to a consumer culture. In the process he reminds us that wholesalers, not manufacturers, sponsored most of the men who brought industrial goods into the 19th-century hinterlands, and that through most of the century, drummers—that is, traveling sales­ men—operated as agents of merchant, not corporate, capitalism. Foremost, he restores to memory the hundreds of thousands ofsales­ people who once roamed the nation, reminding us repeatedly, and necessarily, that “the salesman gave the mechanics of consumption a human or natural countenance” (p. 193). Commercial travelers provided the main, and very human, conduit for manufacturers’ and wholesalers’ product, as well as the colorfully printed advertising ephemera that both reinforced face-to-face sales pitches to retailers and carried other messages to consumers. Commercial travelers experienced a freedom of movement and lifestyle rare among the nonwealthy in the 19th century—and often considered dangerous. This freedom lured farmers’ sons who watched the trains pass and who admired the style and dash of the “brilliant bird[s] of passage” who connected small towns with “the great outside world” (p. 12) and regaled local shopkeepers with “smutty” jokes and stories of adventure. How could the young ad­ mirers know that the oft-toldjokes came from other tired and lonely drummers and cheap publications, and that the adventures often were misadventures on the way to towns very much like the admirers’ own? Many commercial travelers found the costs ofthese freedoms trou­ blesome, and Spears has dug deeply into their own writings and into the voluminous contemporary literature about them to explore the trade-offs. He interprets the perceived costs of the itinerant lifestyles and their perceived threats to society in the context of that era’s domestic values. These men experienced great tensions as they oper­ ated in a masculine subculture away from the homes that were then considered necessary to nurture and protect bodies and souls. The commercial travelers’ similarities to other laborers became TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 375 more apparent by the turn of the century, when corporations and managerial business practices began to dominate the economy. Spears demonstrates the rhetoric and means by which salesmen came under the influence of “system” as offered by Frederick W. Taylor and others. As “scientific salesmanship” developed and pro­ fessionalization progressed, drummers and their freedoms became relics of premodernity. Salesmen now trained their own personali­ ties to new standardized ideals while learning how to read potential customers’ personalities, the better to be all things to all men. At the same time, their managers could better insist on efficiency, coor­ dination, and discipline. Salesmen could no longer invent sales pitches or travel routes as they pleased; they were now merely one component of formalized marketing programs. Literary explorations of the vicissitudes and meanings of the sales­ men’s lives—and deaths—first attracted Spears to this topic. His evi­ dence comes from a broad spectrum of resources, which he uses carefully to unravel historical persons and their activities from the “mythic figure cut loose from the bonds of history” (p. 5). A gener­ ous selection of evocative illustrations likewise evinces the commer­ cial travelers’ widespread cultural presence. Historians of technology will wish for more discussion about how developments in transportation and communication affected the commercial travelers’ activities and conditions. And conversely, these heavy users and their needs must have influenced decisions made in...