Consumerism

TOO MUCH STUFF

I’ve been on a campaign to reduce the massive buildup of STUFF in our house, and my garage is filling up with decades of flotsam and jetsam.  A garage/yard sale is imminent.  So the plague of too much stuff has been very much on my mind here in 2010, but I was surprised to see that people in 1968 were beginning to have similar feelings.

Here’s an illustration from an article entitled “How Do You Lose a Swimming Pool?” from the April 1968 Readers’ Digest.  It was condensed (”digested”) from a somewhat longer piece in the Denver Post Sunday magazine called Contemporary.  The Digest (published in Westchester County, outside New York City)  cast a fairly wide net for its articles, gathering them in not just from readily recognizable cosmopolitan magazines, but also from the American heartland.   In this way, Digest editors were able to keep their finger on the pulsebeat of America, especially for “lifestyle” articles.

I’ve already written once about this issue of the Digest– way back in August 2009, when I remarked on the list of articles, which reads in retrospect almost as a catalogue of 1968 themes:  the Pill, civil rights, grim news from Vietnam, homefront protests, recreational drug use, the crisis in the nation’s inner cities, even a “pre-echo” of 1970s environmentalism (Charles Lindbergh’s “Wisdom of Wildness”).   Add to this catalogue this article.  At first glance satirical and “light-hearted’ (the Digest was well known for leavening each issue with wholesome humor), this piece actually sounds themes that were beginning to be heard in 1968, a violent and divisive year, yes, but also a year that was the high-water mark of the postwar “age of affluence.”   Consumer goods proliferated wildly after the war, and the pace of production and consumption only accelerated in the turbulent 1960s, especially in suburbia.

The prosperity brought with it new pressures and new anxieties about class and status, and the tidal waves of consumer goods produced a problem that probably felt pretty new in 1968, but 42 years later no longer does.  The problem is well stated here in the first paragraph by the writer, Will Stanton:

“I happen to be a member of the new affuent middle class.   My neighbors are in the same bracket and we all have the same problem– one unique to our country and time.  There’s no place to put anything.”  The article’s tagline restates it:  ”There’s no limit to what money can buy– and that’s the root of the problem.”    The author elaborates:  ”There used to be rich people and poor people.  The poor had no room to keep things in, but they didn’t have anything to keep anyhow.  The people that owned all the stuff had castles.  It worked out fine.  But the new middle class . . .”    Stanton says that when he and his wife, Ethel, bought the house “the thing that impressed us was the size. . . . We had always lived in an apartment.  Then suddenly we had all that space and all the beautiful catalogues and charge accounts everywhere.”   They also had two kids, then three (that’s when they bought a station wagon and then a second car); they develop hobbies, all of which consumed space and demanded more consuming (restoring furniture, photography, gardening); they buy a boat, “because the children would only be young once,” but they have to keep it in their now-shrinking yard.

They buy a large, portable pool, with a folding metal frame and a plastic liner, that somehow gets lost one year when it’s packed away amidst all the rest of the stuff.  Will doesn’t want to tell anybody, because he’s worried that people won’t understand:  ”The trouble is some people are 50 years beyond the times.  They just don’t understand the problems of the affluent middle class.”

Where does all this lead?  You guessed it:  the creation of the U.S. self-storage industry (”U-Store-It,” “Stor-More,” and so on), which begins in the mid-1960s and rapidly expands in the 1970s.  Today, rentable self-storage units in the United States account for more than 2.35 billion square feet of storage space.

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The Avengers travel back in time — and so can you.

The Avengers, Marvel Comics, September 1968

As of yesterday, August 31, 2009, the owners of Marvel Comics are $4 billion richer, thanks to the Disney Corporation, so it seemed timely to check in on Marvel in 1968– towards the end of the period that for many fans represents the imprint’s Golden Age, when it was selling upwards of 50,000,000 comics a year.  Specifically, we’re looking in on  ”The Avengers,” the ever-changing cast of superhero characters that had first appeared five years earlier.

“A first-hand look at the BIG ONE”

Banding together to fight foes too powerful for one superhero to conquer, the Avengers in Number 56 include Captain America, Hawkeye, Goliath (sometimes known as Giant-Man), Black Panther (a.k.a. “T’Challa,”  from the fictitious African country of Wakanda), and last (and decidedly least, in this issue, where she hardly makes a dent) is Wasp.  In this issue, the four male heroes go back in time — thanks to a time machine in the castle of defeated foe “Doc Doom”– back to the waning days of World War II.  ”I’ve always WANTED a first-hand look at the BIG ONE,” Hawkeye says as he climbs onto the “Chrono-Square.”  No doubt a lot of boys reading these comics agreed:  they, too, wanted to travel back to those exciting, Nazi-killing days of the war that their fathers had fought in but didn’t talk about too much.  Seems that Captain America had remained haunted by the death of his young sidekick, Bucky, in an explosion during the War (”He was a GREAT little guy… the best partner a man ever had”) and wanted to see for himself what had actually happened.   Suffice to say that the rest of the story involves an encounter with Baron Zemo (”foremost of all Nazi agents”), a pair “hulking humanoids” created by the Baron, some American G.I.’s coming to the rescue, and some problems with “parallel time continuums.”   The foursome gets back to the present, intact, but Bucky stays dead (but not for long; it’s complicated).

“You Can Have a He-Man Voice” and “Now You Can Be Taller Instantly”

Revisiting comics like this one is its own kind of time travel for boomers like me– less for the stories and the comic art (though I remain fond of the sound-effects words, like “PHTOOSH!” “SPKAK!” and “KWOM!”) than for the advertisements, which seem as changeless as Holy Writ:  Charles Atlas invites me to “Check the Kind of Body You Want.”  A geeky-looking kid selling “Grit,” America’s Greatest Family Newspaper, says it’s a swell way to make a lot of money and win prizes, too.   A page of tiny ads offers me Famous German Medals, live chameleons, X-ray glasses, a midget spy camera, Joke Gum, Smoke Bombs, and a device to eliminate my blackheads and pimples in seconds, suggesting that I can “Be Good Looking!”

I wonder:  (a) Did anyone ever send off for any of these “self-improvement” aids, and (b), did they work?

And whatever happened to that collection of comics you had?

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EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

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