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 (Top of Page)

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.

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 (Top of Page)

"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.

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.

In many ways, Father Ryan thought like the wage earners he would come to guide and defend in his writings. For example, he did not expect workers to accept the impoverished conditions to which many employers relegated them by paying them abysmal wages. As the documents on this website show, Father Ryan believed that workers should possess goods that they think are necessary according to community standards, such as respectable clothing, in addition to those goods that are "objectively necessary," such as the food and clothing essential to mere survival. At the same time, he thought that "the indefinite pursuit of material satisfaction" made people unhealthy and turned them away from spiritual matters crucial to one's development as a Christian, and as a member of a broader community.

Thorny questions of individual, family, and community needs and standards of living were made more difficult by the difficulties in estimating the number of poor living in the United States at the turn of the century. In their attempts to arrive at an answer to the question of "how much is enough," workers, politicians, social reformers, social scientists, and labor union leaders focused their attention on the means by which one acquired what was necessary to live, one's wages.

A Living Wage (Top of Page)

The living wage question grew out of the issue of "wage slavery." Before the Civil War, wage labor, defined as payment to an employee based on hours or days worked, seemed to be at odds with ideas about citizenship in a democratic republic. The idea of the independent, self-employed individual working his own farm or running his cobbler shop was tied to the idea of an independent citizen. Citizens in a republic, the thinking went, could not be free if they worked for someone other than themselves. As a result, individuals of the pre-Civil War years likened wage work to the situation of enslaved African Americans of the nation.

With the end of institutionalized slavery and the expansion of industrialization, however, more and more independent tradesmen and farmers found themselves pushed out of their trades by the new industries, which could produce the goods once made by independent merchants far more cheaply. Many were forced to take jobs in factories. As more Americans found themselves working in the nation's industries, the term wage slavery gave way to a preoccupation with settling on a living wage, a precise amount of money that would enable workers to exercise their rights as citizens of the republic. While most agreed that a living wage should enable the chief male breadwinner to feed and clothe his family properly, to have access to restful recreation, to educate himself through a variety of publications for the duties of political citizenship, exactly what constituted a living wage was a highly controversial issue.

Moreover, much of the public discussion of the living wage focused on the male as the family's chief breadwinner, far less on the position of the woman wage worker, of whom there were many at the time. Reflecting the gender discrimination of the period, many individuals of the turn of the century tended to see women as working only prior to marriage, or to supplement the family income, rather than as workers in need of a wage on par with men's. The head of the influential American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, offered one definition of the living wage that should be seen in this context. In 1898 Gompers said that a living wage should be "sufficient to maintain an average-sized family in a manner consistent with whatever the contemporary local civilization recognizes as indispensable to physical and mental health, or as required by the rational self-respect of human beings."

As this comment suggests and as historian Lawrence Glickman has shown, the American worker of the turn of the century came to understand a living wage in terms of his and his family's full participation in a consumer society. Workers wanted to function within the industrial democratic society, to benefit from its material fruits and to be able to express themselves as informed citizens. How much did the worker need to live this kind of life?

The answer to that question is that there was no single answer. As society became increasingly consumer-oriented, offering access to material goods like telephones and bicycles, among other things, the definition of what constituted a living wage became more and more slippery. (Top of Page)

As Ryan's writings show, however, settling upon a living wage that would enable members of a Christian family to live healthy religious lives in their communities was no easy task. In 1905, for example, he calculated that anything less than $600 a year did not constitute a living wage for an average workingman's family. By 1918, in response to cost of living changes and the transformation of consumer tastes, he revised his estimate for that same family up to $1,386.

Ryan defended the hardworking wage earner, arguing that the worker had a right to a wage that would enable him to support his family in a Christian manner and in modest enjoyment of the material goods the society had to offer. When it came to pinning that wage down, however, he realized that such a task was extremely difficult in an increasingly consumer-driven society.

In making his arguments for a living wage, for limited consumerism, and against the limiting of family size, Father Ryan drew from Catholic doctrine and especially Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which laid out the Catholic position on the rights of labor. At the same time, like other social critics of his time, he was uncertain as to exactly when moderation shaded into excess.

The documents on this website reveal Father Ryan as an articulate critic of the kind of consumption that blocked the spiritual and religious development of the family. He abhorred the acquisition of objects like large homes and expensive furniture, usually purchased to elevate oneself above others. He criticized gluttony, the eating of delicate and rich foods that were consumed for enjoyment rather than nourishment. Finally, he was an outspoken critic of a trend that was just emerging at the time and which is still with us today, the practice of limiting family size.

The final exercise of this website, "A Budget Exercise for the Consumer," asks students to pull together the series of documents presented on this website, to answer for themselves, the question of &How Much is Enough?& The documents and exercises reveal the historical aspects of the question, the difficulty in arriving at a clear answer, and perhaps allow us to become more aware of our own materialist and consumerist tendencies.

"The New Consumerism": An Introductory Document (Top of Page)

While nearly all of the documents for &How Much is Enough?& are from Father Ryan's time, the Introductory Document is offered here to provide students with a starting point from which to understand consumerism in our own era. In this way, we come to understand that the question of &How Much is Enough?& is one that has a rich past, a contested present, and most probably an interesting future. The Introductory Document is a 1999 article from the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor titled "The Costs of the New Consumerism." Ponder the following as you examine the document:

• What is the photograph saying about the American consumer?
• What is "the new consumerism"? How has it affected credit card debt?
• How do Jude Dougherty's and Father John Kavanaugh's views on the new consumerism differ?
• How does Pope John Paul II see modern consumerism?
• According to the article, how does consumerism affect spiritual life?

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