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Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 by Jeffrey L. Meikle Review by: Warren Belasco Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 120-121 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1180838 . Accessed: 10/12/2014 07:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Winterthur Portfolio. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 10 Dec 2014 07:30:03 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939by Jeffrey L. Meikle

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Page 1: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939by Jeffrey L. Meikle

Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 by Jeffrey L. MeikleReview by: Warren BelascoWinterthur Portfolio, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 120-121Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont WinterthurMuseum, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1180838 .

Accessed: 10/12/2014 07:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Winterthur Portfolio.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 10 Dec 2014 07:30:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939by Jeffrey L. Meikle

120 Winterthur Portfolio

better understand our own culture, and we can thereby speculate more intelligently about what American art and architecture might be in the fu- ture. Such is the noblest purpose of history, admi- rably served by American Renaissance, in spite of its intellectual limitations. This is a good book on an important subject, and it should be widely read.

RICHARD J. BETTS

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jeffrey L. Meikle. Twentieth Century Limited: Indus- trial Design in America, 1925-1939. American Civili- zation series, edited by Allen F. Davis. Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 1979. xiv+ 249 PP.; 149 illustrations, bibliography, index. $17.50.

In the most idealistic period between the two world wars, modernist architecture and design vowed to restore coherence to a disordered urban-industrial landscape. By eliminating nostal- gic, revivalist styles, modernists hoped to har- monize the everyday enviroment with "machine- age" ideals of speed, efficiency, and reliability that supposedly governed the economic world. This unity would heal social and psychological ills caused by our schizophrenic tendency to approach modern problems with old-fashioned values. The reform impulse was clear. Cultural lag had to go and designers of material culture could take the lead. Until people lived in machine-age homes and neighborhoods, they would be unable to under- stand the machine-age realities of factory and office.

In the nostalgia-ridden 1970s, however, we came to see modernism not as a transformation but as a basically conservative attempt to reconcile us to the hegemony of insensitive corporations, de- humanizing work conditions, and costly, wasteful technologies. Jeffrey Meikle's Twentieth Century Limited is a major contribution to this recent re- evaluation. While most critics have concentrated on the purist, high-art architects whose works af- fect us only occasionally, Meikle looks at the in- dustrial designers, particularly Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy, whose automobiles, furni- ture, interior decoration, refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, and other appliances have been more relevant to everyday living.

Meikle shows that the designers who professed reformist-utilitarian ideals functioned primarily as promoters of planned obsolescence. Concerned

about slumping sales of consumers goods, manu- facturers turned first to high-power advertising in the mid-192os, and then to product redesign in the early 1930s. Refusing to see maldistribution of in- come as the main cause of underconsumption, businessmen believed that consumer dollars could be coaxed out of mattresses and cigar boxes by cleverly manipulative marketing strategies. Prod- uct redesign was the conservative alternative to more direct income redistribution proposals of the left. The right-wing plan was clothed in the garb of pseudoprogressive design, particularly streamlin- ing, which offered an appearance of smooth effi- ciency, scientific planning, and confident futurism.

To be sure, designers claimed that streamlining followed the purist principles of function-before- form, but Meikle shows that the main functional aim was to increase sales by "lubricating" points of "friction" in the production-distribution machine, that is, to overcome consumer unwillingness (or inability) to buy new products by making the older ones seem inferior or inadequate. Occasionally re- design did improve a product's efficiency, but even then, the manufacturer pushed for further re- design in order to render the supposedly perfect product obsolete. As for the loftier aim of banish- ing cultural lag, industrial redesign was no more honest to machine-age realities than were the ear- lier revival styles. Indeed, by hiding the com- plexities and inequities of modern industrialism beneath a deceptively smooth veneer, streamlining was as much a mystifying fig leaf as was the re- vivalist ornament that had masked the brutality of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution.

By dealing extensively with the business aspects of industrial design, Meikle adds an important sense of historical and economic context to Donald Bush's Streamlined Decade, where the approach is primarily aesthetic. Meikle also adds to our under- standing of American advertising. In particular, he refines and supplements Stuart Ewen's Captains of Consciousness, which examines magazine advertis- ing of the 1920os through a rigorously Marxist framework.1 Meikle shows that material culture can be as blatantly propagandistic as printed cul- ture. But, unlike Ewen, Meikle finds no monolithic business conspiracy to promote planned obsoles- cence in the 192os. Rather, the business commu- nity was divided over the wisdom and effectiveness of advertising. While department-store executives

'Donald J. Bush, Streamlined Decade (New York: George Braziller, 1975); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Adver- tising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

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Page 3: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939by Jeffrey L. Meikle

Book Reviews 121

and advertising men-Ewen's main sources- advocated an aggressive program of consumer manipulation, manufacturers and engineers were reluctant to modify their more utilitarian ap- proach. It was costly to retool annually, and con- sumer habits seemed too quixotic to be judged ac- curately and controlled. Thus, most manufacturers continued to design products on the basis of pro- duction cost and ease of repair rather than on the basis of appearance, until the early 1930s, when they became desperate and turned to pseudo- utilitarian streamlining as a way to stimulate sales.

Even then, many businessmen went into planned obsolescence not because they believed it worked but because their competitors were doing it. For the majority of manufacturers, the annual model change was as much a defensive tactic as it was an aggressive strategy to remake consumer consciousness. As it turned out, streamling was no real solution either. Many redesigned products-- like Chrysler's Airflow-failed, and overall sales continued to lag until the 1940s. While a few admen like Earnest Elmo Calkins projected images of all-powerful consumer engineers, the average manufacturer was less a "captain of consciousness" than an embattled corporal trying to keep his small unit intact.

Although Meikle convincingly describes the designer-businessman's motives, his treatment of public response is inadequate. While many cultural historians see the Great Depression as a period when intellectuals looked to the past for signs of order, hope, and continuity, Meikle claims that "the common men and women" looked to the fu- ture, hence the popularity of streamlining. Yet Meikle offers very little evidence that modernistic styling was indeed popular. Redesigned products sold after 1934, but this may have been a function of the slight economic upturn rather than a reflec- tion of popular acceptance of new designs. And the buyers of streamlined refrigerators and radios were by no means representative of the majority. At one point Meikle implies that some manufac- turers saw redesign as a way to step up to a more affluent class of customer, but overall, he does not differentiate among markets. Indeed, even among consumers who could afford new products, there was a good deal of resistance. The Airflow was a major flop, yet Meikle does not really come up with an explanation. Perhaps motorists in the 1930s were more concerned about safety and economy than about speed and styling. It may also be that nostalgia was a good deal stronger among the common people than Meikle allows. Certainly, in

roadside architecture, popular films, and radio programs, old-fashioned folksiness still won a lot of customers. The decline of streamlining after the war, coupled with the persistence of nostalgic re- vival styles, especially in domestic architecture and furniture, shows that many American still refused to be reconciled to the machine age. And it now ap- pears that such allegiance to the values of the pre- industrial past may, in fact, be our best hope for a more humane future.

WARREN BELASCO

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour. White Towers. Photographic essay. Cambridge, Mass., and Lon- don: MIT Press, 1979. vii+ 190 pp.; illustrations, index. $17.50.

Architects, scholars, and historic preserva- tionists have suddenly discovered the material culture of roadside America. Within the past year or two, monographs and articles have been pub- lished on diners, gas stations, and fast-food fran- chises.' The movement now even has its own pro- fessional organization-the Society for Commer- cial Archaeology-which sponsors yearly meetings and hopes to publish its annual proceedings.

Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour, two Philadelphia architects, have been major con- tributors to this populist movement in architectural history. This trend seeks to explore commercial ar- chitectural design and its conscious use of both signs and symbols, its incorporation of contempo- rary styles, and the criteria by which it measures its success. Both authors teach at the University of Pennsylvania and both have been involved in the Renwick Gallery's 1976 exhibition, "The Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City," and similar projects. Izenour, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, contributed to Learning from Las Vegas, a work that most commercial archaeologists already consider a classic in the field.2

I Richard Gutman and Elliot Kaufman, American Diner (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); David I. Vieyra, Fill 'Er Up: An Architectual History of America's Gasoline Stations (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1979); Marshall Fishwick, ed., The World of Ronald McDonald (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1978).

2 Robert Venturi et al., Learningfrom Las Vegas: The Forgot- ten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972; rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).

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