Manufacturing Diversity: Production Systems, Markets, and an American Consumer Society, 1870–1930

Abstract

Manufacturing Diversity: Production Systems, Markets, and an American Consumer Society, 1870-1930 PHILIP SCRANTON In considerable measure, historians concerned with the dynamics of the American economy across the last century have placed a growing emphasis on patterns of consumption, strategies for shaping demand, and the meanings users attached to consumer goods, thus balancing an older focus on organizations and technologies of production and transportation. Historical research on American mass consumption has chiefly targeted mass-production sectors of the economy and the great firms that generated what Alfred Chandler has termed “throughput” efficiencies, economies of speed and standardization central to quantity output (autos, canned goods, cigarettes, and, hence, Ford, Campbell Soup, American Tobacco).1 Across the same era, however, extraordinary expansion was evident in other segments of production for consumer demand, sectors in which throughput practices were virtually nonexist­ ent, standardization a positive hazard to sales, and concentration of enterprises into oligopolies utterly absent. In fashion textiles and apparel, jewelry, furniture, carpets, lamps, and printing, dynamics of growth parallel to, but distinctive from, those documented for mass production emerged to frame a pattern of extensive development in batch and custom manufacturing.' The task undertaken in this article is Dr. Scranton is professor of history at Rutgers University—Camden and director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology', and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. This article is a revised version of a paper presented during his fellowship term at the Center for Historical Analysis (CHA), Rutgers University—New Brunswick. He wishes to thank his colleagues in the CHA “Consumer Societies’’ project and the Technology and Culture referees for their valuable comments and criticisms on earlier drafts. 'Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed (New York, 1989); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley, Calif., 1985); Richard Tedlow, Hew and Improved (NewYork, 1990); Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort (Rochester, N.Y., 1988). •’By “extensive,” I refer to the multiplication of firms, increase of workforces, and in certain places, creation of dense industrial districts that obtained in sectors where economies ofscale were few, yet demand and markets grew secularly. The institutional and© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3503-0001S01.00 476 Manufacturing Diversity 477 to recover these components of consumer-goods manufacturing from the historiographical silences that have long enveloped them and to link them with the meanings we have ascribed to “consumer society,” thereby laying a preliminary foundation for conceptual refinement and more nuanced research. This effort will be introduced by some remarks on theoretical and conceptual issues surrounding investigations of consumer societies and a response to a set of recent, relevant studies. A number of problems thus opened up will be sketched before turning toward clarifying the differing structures and processes of mass and batch production in consumer goods in late-19th- and early-20th-century America. Brief profiles of several batch sectors and one fuller case study will be offered for illustration, prefacing a cluster of concluding speculations that attempt to link this invocation of diversity with potentially fruitful ways to enrich our understanding of the production-consumption nexus. Theory and Concept To date, the notion of a consumer society has been elaborated inductively, rather than through formal modeling and theory building. It is fundamentally a historical and behavioral concept, at times used to indicate a shift from a presumably producer-oriented society character­ ized by tradition and scarcity to a world in which wants are mutable and the means for (and meanings of) their satisfaction changing. Capitalist development is deeply implicated in the constitution of a consumer society, but the process is not reducible to economic determinants, some observers preferring to underline this point by using the term “con­ sumer culture” instead? Taking Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb on 18thcentury Britain as the core text in this matter,1 the articulation of a consumer society is connected with six broad elements of a historical setting. First, in terms of general context, such a society will be unlikely to emerge where caste relations prevail or a small aristocracy governs multitudes of landless peasants and more plausible where the social...