Catholics and a Living Wage

• How Much Do You Need?  
• Customer Born Every Minute
• Progressive Era Reform
• A Living Wage
• "The New Consumerism"

How Much Do You Need?

"My favorite car is the Mini Cooper. After seeing The Italian Job, I've become obsessed. With its quick bursts of speed, the Cooper's perfect for stunts and chases. I'd take my mom for a ride because I know that, once I started driving, she would freak! And watching moms freak is hilarious."

Susan Brinch, 18, as quoted in Parade, 2/22/04
View The Italian Job Website / Trailer

Would Susan Brinch have become obsessed with the Mini Cooper if she had not watched the 2003 film The Italian Job? It's hard to know for sure. We do know, however, that corporations pay huge sums of money in order to have their products carefully placed in films, a practice that often generates substantial increases in sales of the product. For example, red, white, and blue Minis starred in The Italian Job, along with American actors Mark Wahlberg, Mos Def, Charlize Theron, and Seth Green, who drove the cars in elaborate sequences of stunts and chases to perform an ingenious robbery. The film in effect wrapped the Mini, a European-made car only recently released for sale in the United States, in patriotic colors, celebrity cool, and youth appeal. Not only is Susan Brinch "obsessed" with the car, suggesting the success of the Mini-marketers, she even pictures herself driving it the way it was driven in the film, although she seems to take more pleasure in "freaking" her mom than in using the Mini to perform a genuine heist. If car sales are any indicator of desire, Brinch is not alone: sales of the Mini-Cooper jumped 20% in the month after the release of the film.

Film is but one avenue through which advertisers create desire for their goods. The Internet has given birth to yet another ad universe, as anyone that has spent a few minutes surfing the web knows. Corporations are also entering previously forbidden spaces in their efforts to generate sales, as consumption experts like Alissa Quart show. Rising costs and budget cuts have caused many schools to allow corporate sponsorship within their walls. Districts across the country now have Pepsi and Coke contracts that allow sales of brand-name drinks in their schools. Advertisers are seeking to create desire for goods among younger and younger Americans. Disney, for example recently marketed popular princess-themed merchandise to girls as young as two years old. Their strategies have been incredibly profitable: Walt Disney's princess products totaled $1.3 billion in sales in 2003, up from $100 million in 2000.

In short, ours is a world in which advertising and marketing are creating new desires where none previously existed, and where traditional goods are marketed through more and more media. American workers, young and old, take home bigger paychecks and spend them on items considered luxuries decades ago. In generating such desires, advertising directly shapes our view of how much is or isn't enough to live.

A Customer Born Every Minute: Advertising in Historical Perspective

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How much is enough to live? This question was as relevant 100 years ago as it is today. Today many of us might think in terms of saving for the latest digital music player or a new DVD we've had our eye on, but a century ago the desires were for things many of us take for granted today. Electric lights, telephones, ready-made clothing, bicycles; these were just becoming widely available through technological advances in production. Just as the development of the computer chip and wireless technologies transformed life at twentieth century's end, the rise of mass produced foods, clothing, and furniture altered the way people lived in the early 1900s. Professional advertising and marketing were just emerging in the nineteenth century to trumpet the qualities of these goods.

The person many consider the first advertising genius, the showman P.T. Barnum, made his mark selling amusements to Americans accustomed to spending out of necessity rather than for pleasure. Barnum believed a customer was born every minute, and getting people to buy was just a matter of getting attention using catchy phrases and delivering a product that made people feel good. Rather than publicizing the viewing of an elephant at one of his shows, for example, by simply asking people to pay to see an elephant, he advertised "Jumbo the Elephant," which turned the animal into a kind of friendly and unique monstrosity.

Sound like familiar strategies? Indeed, advertisers continue to use Barnum's methods to sell everything from soda-pop to sneakers. Think about one of the most successful ad slogans of all time: "Just Do It." The success of the ad campaign is suggested by the fact that most of us know exactly what the phrase is selling. How does "Just Do It" turn a pair of sneakers into a dream-achieving machine? P.T. Barnum died in 1890, but he probably would have appreciated the power of the slogan that made Nike sneakers among the most popular in the world a century later.

When new manufacturing methods led to increases in production and decreases in the cost of a whole range of consumer goods by the late 1800s, the field of advertising emerged full-force. Especially important were advances in packaging technology, which enabled manufacturers to wrap up their goods at the factory rather than ship them to stores in large quantities. The manufacturer might label the individually wrapped products at the plant, or a store owner might label the products at his or her local establishment. In either case, this grew into a hugely competitive and consequential process we would today call "branding." Goods that could be branded could be advertised as something unique and worth buying. This branding process accelerated toward the end of the nineteenth century, as previously unlabeled ketchup and soup, for example, became Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Campbell's Soup, products with their own special properties--at least according to their advertising.

Campbell's Soup History

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By the early 1900s, the number of ad agencies working to create unique qualities for a growing range of products exploded. In their sales pitches, advertisers borrowed Barnum's methods, but toned them down in order to increase product respectability. Respectability, advertisers believed, encouraged repeat purchases. The earliest advertising had emphasized description of available products, while the emergence of brands and new kinds of goods caused advertisers to aim more at persuading consumers to purchase.

Let's look at the early advertising used to sell Ivory Soap as an example of one of these new trends. The soap, which was distinctive in that it floated in water while most other soaps sank, was developed some time in the late 1870s by the Proctor and Gamble Company. Harley Proctor, one of the company's owners, thought his soap needed a name catchier than its original, P & G White Soap.

Eventually Proctor settled on the name Ivory Soap, "the floating soap." After the soap was on the market, a test by scientists found the soap to contain "only .56% impurities" and ads began referring to Ivory as "the pure soap" and using images of angels, priests, and babies to sell it. Hence Ivory went from the more descriptive "P & G White Soap" to the 99% pure "Ivory Soap" associated with babies and angels. Which version would you be more likely to buy?

The new products, however, were not available to everyone. Members of the growing middle class could satisfy the desire created by the new ads for some of the merchandise. Certain entrepreneurs grew enormously wealthy producing the new goods, and could purchase as they pleased. As the numbers of middle class and wealthy grew, however, so too did the number of poor people -- many of these people living in poverty worked in factories creating goods they didn't have the money to buy. Some observers of the growing gap between the rich and the poor were disturbed by what they saw. How, these reform-minded people wondered, could the fruits of the developing economy be more evenly distributed across the population? To address the issue of fair distribution of wealth, many of these reformers realized that a more basic question needed to be addressed first: How much, exactly, does one need to live a good life? (Top of Page)

Numbers, Needs, and Progressive Era Reform

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Americans of the Progressive Era, which loosely spanned the period from 1889 to 1920, asked themselves this question again and again as they sought to understand and evaluate the social and economic changes unfolding around them. A proper answer, reformers like Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt believed, would enable them to focus on the positive developments in the economy while working to correct the problems. The reformers went about trying to understand the economic problems they saw using a favored tool of the times: the scientific method. In particular, they held that through numbers and the study of statistics they could determine precisely how much money families needed live decently. One could, they believed, arrive at a precise numerical "living wage" by which a family could survive. Having arrived at such a number, one could then measure how many families fell short of that standard and consider the kinds of reforms -- minimum wage laws, stronger unions, profit-sharing companies -- necessary to achieve a living wage for all families.

"Numbers," as one nineteenth-century educator summarized the feeling of many Progressives, "are the only perfect instruments we can handle and the only means of ascertaining the true effect of any given cause." The reformer's faith in statistics reflected this idea of the number as the perfect instrument for pinpointing true effects.

Factory workers, for their part, looked at numbers slightly differently, but with just as much faith in their ability to convey truths. Late nineteenth century industrialization pushed wages, prices, and the cost of living to the forefront of the factory worker's thinking. Many had once been farmers, and were accustomed to making their own clothing, to growing and eating their own food. Now they found themselves paying for necessities out of the cash wages they earned through hourly labor. They would join together in unions and bargain with employees for higher pay. They would beseech the government to take an active role in keeping wages high and prices low.

They, like the Progressive reformers, grappled with the same questions:

What is a fair wage?

What is a just price?

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Only statistics, data, numbers, could provide answers to such questions, they too believed, and only a government bureau could be trusted to collect that information impartially. Beginning in the eastern part of the country where industrialization emerged first, and spreading to the mid and far west, labor unions began to agitate for state bureaus of labor statistics. Workers in Massachusetts were the first to press for a labor bureau. In 1865 unions there had pushed the state to create a commission to study wage rates, but the commission complained that it lacked the proper statistics to determine what workers were being paid. The unions then pressured the state legislature to create a state Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 1883, there were twelve such bureaus in states across the country, and by 1884 a United States Bureau of Labor Statistics was formed. As the Commissioner of this new national Bureau, Carroll Wright, claimed in 1904: "the spirit of the age undertakes to ascertain what social classes owe to each other and statistical science helps the world to answer."

Both workers in labor unions and reformers, then, were interested in answering the question "how much is enough live?" For specific ways of pinning down answers they consulted with a new breed of intellectuals, dubbed "social scientists," who were working on specific ways of understanding the wage issue. Systematic graduate training, modeled on European, particularly German, universities, emerged for the first time after the Civil War and helped establish the prominence of the professionally-trained scholar over the amateur dabbler in a wide range of disciplines. Several schools still prominent today, among them Clark University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Chicago, were founded as graduate schools for just this purpose in the late nineteenth century. Members of the newly emerging professional disciplines of sociology and economics, reflecting the dramatic changes in higher education, were especially interested in the power of numbers to explain facets of social and economic phenomena. Economists, sociologists and others in social-science fields founded their own professional organizations during this period. The American Economic Association, for example, was founded in 1885, the American Anthropological Association in 1902, and the American Sociological Association was established in 1905. These associations sought to set standards of education and training that would set them apart as uniquely qualified professionals and experts in these disciplines. For the new sociologists and economists, the ability to manipulate statistics was critically important to their claims of special expertise, for it suggested that their professions were both scientific and objective, and that their people had unique skills.

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Many of these social scientists found themselves in the Progressive movement. By the turn of the century the social science disciplines enjoyed broad and deep public confidence. As the historian Steven Diner has noted, there was widespread belief at this time that natural and social sciences could generate both understandings of and solutions to social problems. The new emphasis on solving problems and the field of social science came together in the minds of public commentators, politicians, writers, and union organizers to generate a preoccupation with living wage issues. The wealth of the new industrialists was scrutinized and attacked as excessive and self-indulgent. Critics lampooned the practices of the very rich, who built "summer cottages" modeled on European palaces in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as mansions on Park avenue in New York, and State Street in Chicago that were even more opulent.

Men like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt imported whole rooms from medieval castles for their mansions, bought up loads of antique furniture once owned by seventeenth century French kings, acquired expensive art from the Dutch and Italian masters, and porcelains from the ancient emperors and empresses of China. The social philosopher Thorstein Veblen called this amassing of wealth "conspicuous consumption," a term that came to describe the extravagant and misguided consumerism of the upper classes.

Veblen and others argued that business entrepreneurs were predators that hurt rather than helped the industrial system. They warped industrial and social progress, according to Veblen, by restricting output to keep prices artificially high, thinking only of their own profits and hampering the supply of goods and services to the general public, who deserved a share of the wealth as much as the rich.

Other social scientists focused on the people at the other end of the social and economic spectrum, the very poor. How much, they asked, did the poor need to live? Robert Hunter, in his 1904 study Poverty, cited Jacob Riis when he noted that 10 percent of the people who died in New York City between 1885 and 1890 had been given a pauper's burial. He claimed that 20% of the population of Boston lived in constant economic distress and estimated that 10 million people in the nation as a whole, or about 12% of the population, were poor at the turn of the century. This estimate is now seen as too low. Recent analysis puts the number of impoverished Americans at closer to 40% of the national population in 1900. (Top of Page)

Men like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt imported whole rooms from medieval castles for their mansions, bought up loads of antique furniture once owned by seventeenth century French kings, acquired expensive art from the Dutch and Italian masters, and porcelains from the ancient emperors and empresses of China. The social philosopher Thorstein Veblen called this amassing of wealth "conspicuous consumption," a term that came to describe the extravagant and misguided consumerism of the upper classes.

Few were more sensitive to the shifting definition of a living wage than Father John A. Ryan (1865-1945), a priest and social reformer who taught at Catholic University's School of Sacred Theology from 1915 until 1940. Ryan, the eldest of eleven children born to Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine in the 1850s, grew up in modest circumstances in rural Minnesota. Ryan's sense of life's necessities were conditioned by his upbringing in an Irish-American culture, which emphasized that the needs of the community mattered as much as the needs of the family and the individual.