American Taste at Mid-century

 

     My daughter has a taste for what is now broadly called Mid-century Modern style, the sort of thing I rejected in my youth, when its soulless spare designs struck me as the last gasp of boring Bauhaus aesthetics, with results like the dread “tossed rubber bands” Formica pattern in my parents’ kitchen of which they were so proud.  A plastic laminate with a cheerful facade that could be convincingly clean in a way that a wood surface could not seemed to me to sum up the moment.  Yet similar patterns remain available today due to the admiration of younger generations.  Taste, whether in kitchen counters or sonnets, is rarely absolute; it is dynamic and highly dependent on context as the meaning of choices varies with the timing of the swing of the pendulum of aesthetic norms.  The meaning of taste changes as it evolves and is largely determined by the moment, as the avantgarde becomes normative and then inevitably old-fashioned, and new symbolic associations grow like crystals or mushrooms, appearing on old images overnight.  

     Growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s, coming to fancy myself a young aesthete, I was quite naturally a Europhile.  Such impressions were, of course, largely literary at first.  Mark Twain could establish rare common ground with Henry James in portraying Americans as crass and cultureless.  James himself and Stephen Crane and Pound and Eliot and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein preferred to live abroad.  The intellectuals of my generation never doubted that the most artistic films were made by Fellini, Visconti, Godard, and maybe Tony Richardson.  Hollywood did not seem even to compete.  Europeans, we thought, knew how to live.  They sat in cafes, drinking wine and tossing off witticisms while Americans sat with beer watching (American) football, silent except for occasional eruptions of cheering.  Every time one heard an English accent or saw a Parisian lift his eyebrows from the middle the comparative sophistication of the Other seemed self-evident.

     In spite of my ironic tone, I do not believe that this opinion was entirely without basis.  Prosperous, indeed economically dominant as post-World War II America was, the two most characteristically American products during that era were cars and breakfast cereals.  These have in common that each is wasteful and overpriced, designed to extract the very maximum price for the least value, in obedience to the profit-oriented laws of capitalism. 

     For this reason, American cars during the ‘fifties were as inefficient as possible, oversize boats sprouting ostentatious spaceship fins, insouciant about gas mileage while the Europeans chugged about in tiny Renaults, Fiats, and Volkswagens while others, still rebuilding from the war, made do with bicycles and motorcycles.  In the U. S. manufacturers made substantial unnecessary model changes every year, not to improve the product, but to make it clear to the neighbors that one had purchased the newest model.  The bulk of the price of an American car went not to pay for the labor and materials that went into its construction, but into the dealer’s cut, the advertising budget, into style, image, and conspicuous consumption.

     A remarkably similar pattern could be applied to food.  While the British ate a hearty breakfast of eggs and sausage, beans and fried bread, Germans often consumed cold cuts and cheese, while the French were often satisfied with a croissant and a few inches of baguette with dabs of butter and confiture, American were persuaded to purchase the cheapest carbohydrates, puffed to seem like more and eventually coated with heaps of sugar and strange artificial colors and flavors, a variety of food one would assume was strictly for children had one not observed so many adults eating Froot Loops in chain motel breakfast bars. 

     And then there is American bread, in those dear gone days American bread was Wonder bread, a brand launched in 1921, a food of fabulous lightness and blandness.  Henry Miller made this sort of loaf the basis for his analysis.  “What do I find wrong with America?  Everything.  I begin at the beginning, with the staff of life: bread.  If the bread is bad the whole life is bad.” [1]  He goes on to say that the only way to get decent bread in America is to go to an ethnic neighborhood. 

     Another culinary oddity marking the U. S. A. was a fondness for chewing gum.  Semi-culinary, anyway.  Here is another example of convincing customers to pay for as close to nothing as possible.   This product, originally made from spruce resin like the Native Americans chewed, and then chicle, is these days based on a wholly artificial base of synthesized polymers, plasticisers and resins, primarily polyisobutylene a material used as well in the manufacture of inner tubes.  Chewing gum was popularized by energetic marketing efforts, making Wrigley’s one of the top five advertisers through the ‘twenties. [2]  The company sent free samples to everyone listed in any American telephone book in 1915 and again in 1919 (by which time the number of people with telephones had multiplied fivefold). For years the company sent gum to every child as a second birthday present.  These efforts were so successful and the habit of chewing became so popular that gum was included in military field rations and introduced like Spam and American cigarettes by service members abroad.

     What was dramatically true of bread was true of food in general.  The markets of my youth had no Asian, Caribbean, or Hispanic foods.  (One cannot count Chun King’s chop suey, those cardboard-like stiff taco shells, or little tins labeled curry or chili powder.)  Though this continent contributed raw materials of incalculable value to world cuisine – including hot peppers now relished around the world -- in the Eisenhower era blandness prevailed.  I don’t believe I touched a fresh clove of garlic until I was cooking on my own.  The contrasts of American taste with the rest of the world, once stark and clear, have softened or vanished.  The milestone marked when salsa picante sales surpassed ketchup indicates a broad new acceptance of spices, herbs, and flavor that had been lacking in the era of casseroles made with canned soup.  So-called artisanal breads are available in all supermarkets, and chewing gum usage, a key indicator of this sort of American exceptionalism, is waning in most sectors.

     That super-refinement of flour and sugar, the heightened artificiality of food in general, the impetus toward commodification intolerant of oddly-shaped carrots or soil on the winter squash in that earlier time, corresponded with distinctive hygiene practices focused on the impossible pursuit of the unnaturally immaculate body.  Just as Americans shrank from real food, they harbored puritanical suspicions of their own bodies.

     Advertising in the early twentieth century began to suggest that shaving the armpits was obligatory to wear the new fashions.  An advertisement for depilatory in the May 1915 Harper’s Bazaar declares its use mandatory for those in “summer dresses,” particularly if they may be doing “modern dancing.” 

     Women’s shaving their legs followed soon after, but did not become common practice until the ‘forties when the War Production Board sharply curtailed silk and nylon stockings manufacturing.  By the 1950s virtually all American women, but very few foreign ones, shaved their legs.  (Pubic shaving remained to be discovered until decades later.)

     Advertising encouraging women to shave or use depilatories emphasized the social opprobrium suffered by nonconformists.  The Ashes and Roses (of Paris) brand threatens the negative judgement of observers.  “The fastidious woman today must have immaculate underarms if she is to be unembarrassed.”  Likewise, the Zip company announces, “You need not be embarrassed!”  In an advertisement headlined “Unloved” a lady relates her loveless life which turned to happiness once she began using products of a certain Madame Lanzette.

     A similar fear of social censure fueled the market for mouthwash and deodorant.  Listerine had been produced primarily for use by medical workers in the late nineteenth century, but in 1921 the company mounted an advertising campaign introducing the neologism “halitosis,” and their sales multiplied by a factor of forty in six years.  Listerine popularized the catchphrase ‘Even your best friends won’t tell you” as well as the poignant “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”  Another of Listerine’s campaigns asked “You 5,000,000 women who want to get married: How’s Your Breath Today?”  “Don’t fool yourself. Since Halitosis never announces itself to the victim, you simply cannot know when you have it.”  One advertisement notes that hairdressers observe that one third of their clients, including women from “the wealthy classes,” were “halitoxic.”  

     People were convinced that they not only were likely to be offending others with bad breath, they had to worry as well about body odor, another embarrassing affliction indiscernible to the sufferer and likewise a threat to romantic attachments.  Antiperspirants were like Listerine originally produced for medical use, to counteract sweating on the hands during surgery, but in the early twentieth century, marketers of Odorono made their pitch to consumers in general, and to women in particular with lines like “the most humiliating moment of my life – when I overheard the cause of my unattractiveness to men.”  Odorono was also the source of a new euphemism: b. o. for body odor, a trait so horrifying one must avoid saying even its name.  This campaign was so successful that in my own elementary school days in the 1950s, my classmates would harass some unfortunate victim by meaningfully intoning those two letters that, they realized, signified total social rejection. 

     A great deal of America’s distinguishing characteristics seemed to many of my generation to be very much of a piece.  The puritan’s distaste with the body created markets for products that had never before existed while people were at the same time enticed into spending their wages on food and automobiles that were for the most part great puffs of illusion.  And this world of artifice was generated wholly by the conjuring tricks of advertising capable of extracting the cash from consumers with words and images in a grotesque parody of a work of art.   The most powerful nation in the world did not, many of its artists and writers thought, know how to live.

     Some rebelled.  And some of the revolution seemed to end up with a result very like the ancien régime.  In the sixties we made yogurt and granola at home, and now we find their super-sweetened degenerate cousins filling vast supermarket displays.  At least yucca and tofu are available there as well.   Deodorant and, to a lesser degree, mouthwash are simply taken for granted.  We can drive a hybrid or electric car though SUVs and trucks dominate the sales (and profit) chart.  American puritanism seems locked not so much in struggle as in symbiosis with American hedonism as the country sags in financial clout and corporations become globalized.  Good quality bread is now in demand by the affluent as is good beer while the rest of the world welcomes the hungry ghosts of fast and prepared food.  In Bangkok there is a long line at the Macdonald’s and in London the pubs offer a standard menu of options, all frozen in the kitchen while in even Paris real French bread is becoming elusive.   If America has gained greater sophistication, the rest of the world seems to have lost a significant part of what it once had.  So much has to do with money.  Now that everyone, it seems, is traveling the world, I am afraid that the tourist often finds life abroad has a good deal in common with life at home, as more and more people settle for the specious satisfactions of consumerism and find an imaginative life in the fanciful flights of advertising.

  

1.  “The Staff of Life,” Remember to Remember.

2.  Daniel Robinson, “Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890—1930,” Enterprise & Society, Vol. 5, No. 1.