 Introduction: The Marketing of Leisure
The buying and selling of time is the central activity of the leisure industry in a capitalist economy. This is what differentiates modem popular culture from the foIk culture which preceded it, and from which it borrowed many of its forms.
Football, for instance, developed in the 19th century into its various modern forms out of local, traditional games, but by 1900 had become a professional sports. The players eamed their living by the game, and their spectators paid for the pleasure of watching.
Throughout the present century, adults have berated their children for preferring to buy the products of popular culture rather than "make their own entertainment". This offers a clear distinction between foIk culture and popular culture: foIk culture is something you make; popular culture is something you buy.
Among the many fundamental social changes brought by the Industrial Revolution was the way in which leisure was systematized. The factory system regulated time in a new way, making time-at-work different from time-not-working. In a sense that had not been true in preindustrial culture, time-not working became an empty period that needed to be occupied.
For much of the 19th century leisure, which can be defined as the non-productive use of time, remained the prerogative of the propertied classes. But by the early 20th century the notion of leisure spread down through the social system in Europe and North America and new activities came into existence to occupy leisure time.
The city amusements of the Iate 19th century were prototypes for ephemeral consumption: saloons, dance halis, pool rooms and roller-skating rihks; dime novels and illustrated papers, circuses, amusement parks, burlesque shows and professional sports; melodrama and cheap seats in the theaters and concert halis. Most spectacular of all were the great exhibitions of the second half of the 19th century, beginning at London's Crystal Palace in 1851 and culminating in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Paris Exhibition of 1900. These architectural extravagances, thrown up for a summer to display the new wonders of the worlds of industry and commerce, were available to anyone who could pay.
This was not enough. By the turn of the century industrial production had developed to the point where the economy required consumption, as well as production, to be managed. 19th-century industrialists had regarded their labor-force as a necessity for production, but in the early 20th century it was recognized that capitalism must encourage the workers to be purchasers as well.
Mass advertising developed out of a need to persuade people to buy. Manufacturers merely made products, but advertisers "manufactured consumers". Advertising involved a shift in cultural value s away from a Victorian Protestant ethic which demanded that production, property, and personal behavior be controlled. it encouraged an ethic which permitted pleasure and even sensuality.
Advertising came to concentrate not on deseribing the product it was selling, but on the emotional satisfactions that its consumption would afford its purchaser. I preached the new, "therapeutic" doctrine of 20th century capitalism, that its citizens should seek self-realization through the intense experiences brought about through buying products for their leisure time.
In 1899 the American economist Thorstein Veblen argued that "the conspicuous consumption of valuable goods" became the principal means by which members of the Leisure Class demonstrated their social standing to each other and to the rest of society. As he was deseribing the nature and implications of a consumer culture, American capitalism was spreading that culture, and the idea of leisure, to far larger sectors of the population.
Several years later, a writer on fashion noted that as wealth or social status were the basic selling points of most elothes, "the styles should go as far as possible in proving that the owner does not have to work for aliving". From the 1920s onward, the idea of stylistic obsolescence in which annual models introduce new season's fashions spread out from automobiles to other types of consumer goods as the way to maintam a constant demand, through what Charles Kettering of General Motors called "the organized creation of dissatisfaction".
In 1929 Christine Frederick wrote, "Consumptionism is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is adrnitted today to be the greatest idea that America has to give to the world; the idea that workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers.... Pay them more, sell them more, prosper more is the equation." This was the American Dream: an economic perpetualmotion machine which made everyone appear equally prosperous.
It drew immigrants with the fantastic visions seen, as novelist Michael Gold deseribed in 1930, "In the window of a store that sold Singer Sewing Machines in our (Romanian) village. One picture had in it the tallest building I had ever seen. It was called a skyscraper. At the bottom of it walked the proud Americans. The men wore derby hats and had fine mustaches and gold watch chains. The women wore silks and satins, and had proud faces like queens. Not a single poor man or woman was there; everyone was rich."
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Introduction
