Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell Read Free Book Online Page A

and consumers were considered one and the same. If cheap goods are made by cheap men, then the goods these men and their families were buying—everything from violins to cars—were anything but cheap. In this fleeting homage to capitalism, workers earned fair wages and paid fair prices for high-quality goods. What went un-mentioned was that these very same Chevrolet workers had earlier that year waged a successful sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, to protest unfair and unsafe working conditions, and low wages. The strike helped prompt the creation of the United Auto Workers, arming employees with unprecedented control of their working lives and unprecedented political and economic power. As the car unions won successively larger concessions for their membership in the mid-1930s, Detroit ranked first in the nation in private home ownership.
     
     
     
    WORLD WAR II blotted out this happy picture with the double whammy of scarcity and inflation. There was little on offer, and what was available was priced out of reach for many Americans. Car manufacture came to a halt in 1942, to make way for the war effort, and the price of textiles shot up nearly 30 percent, the cost of farm products more than 40 percent. While before the war the government had set legislation to keep prices from falling too low, now it struggled to stave off price gouging. In 1942 the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply issued the General Maximum Price Regulation, requiring merchants to set ceilings on the price of what eventually grew to be 90 percent of all goods. There was rationing of rubber, sugar, gasoline, heating oil, milk, coffee, soap, nylon stockings, and even used cars. The merrily dancing worker/spender bees were gone; thrift, not the “spreading of money,” became the desired norm. The “Consumer’s Pledge,” sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” urged Americans to eschew canned goods in favor of “fresh fruits and vegetables [to] save tons of tin” and to “take the best care of your wearables, and mend them when they tear.” Waste was reviled, and recycling elevated to a patriotic duty. Interestingly, despite this enforced frugality, most Americans managed to live well, far better than they had in the roaring twenties when there was enormous income disparity. In 1944 the average factory worker’s pay had grown by 80 percent in five years, while, thanks in part to government-imposed price controls, living costs had climbed only 24 percent. And in 1945 personal savings reached an astonishing 21 percent of disposable income, compared to a mere 3 percent two decades earlier.
    In the boom years following World War II, soldiers returned flush with optimism and eager to set up new homes and new lives. Consumers saved to buy their chunk of the American dream, typically a detached single-family home, preferably in the suburbs. No one argued that wages should be kept low to keep prices low. Indeed, social thinkers of the time reasoned that high wages were critical to the nation’s growing prosperity. As one wrote, “There can be no high levels of production unless the products of industry are bought by workers” with their generous slice of the American pie.
    As America moved into the Eisenhower era, wartime frugality lifted as the rank and file shared in the postwar prosperity. Fortune magazine gushed that “the union has made the worker to an amazing degree a middle-class member of a middle-class society.” Workers were encouraged to derive increasing satisfaction and status from their lives outside of the office or factory. Thanks to high wages and solid benefits, they had both the time and the means to invest in outside interests such as sports, gardening, and travel. They could move uptown for better schools or to a larger home in a leafier suburb for more space. Equality meant not access to the means of production (well out of reach for most workers) but to a growing range of consumer goods.