This article once appeared in Social Text, 1984, 8 (Winter): 84-103. That version of the essay was butchered by an editor who edited the piece sans consultation with me. I have taken the liberty of reediting it here.
The first third of the twentieth century saw a reduction in hours of work from 60.1 to 47 hours per week, primarily as a result of technological advancements, the activities of organized labor, new managerial approaches, and changes in the "philosophy of production" within the economic elite.1 However, although fewer hours were worked, output in the production of goods continued to increase.2 These trends created two problems: first, what to do with increased leisure time ("Until lately, most people have had no leisure to use and, of course, they do nut know how to use it");3 and second, how to absorb the economy's expanded productive capacity. Coupled with rising "technological unemployment" and declining opportunities for capital investment in traditional goods-producing sectors, these trends pointed towards a dilemma in continued capitalist development.
The inability of existing markets to absorb the increasing surplus of goods revealed the limitations of the self-regulating "free market"4 and suggested that deeply rooted cultural principles of deferred gratification were becoming a fetter to continued economic development. New opportunities for leisure posed a problem of social control over the industrial labor force made necessary by the labor-market system of modern capitalism. To maintain capitalist expansion, it was imperative that new markets be created to provide outlets for both the investment of surplus capital and the increasing abundance of goods. It was also necessary to provide a focus for workers' leisure compatible with the dictates of the workplace. A major response to both the dilemma of social control over leisure time of workers and the need for greater absorption of goods was "consumerism."
The social significance of consumerism was not lost on the leaders of corporate industrial thought: "Prosperity lies in spending, not in saving." The importance of leisure in this new scheme of things was sketched out by a leading architect of corporate capitalism:
that was in the days when it was socially necessary to divert wealth from consumption to the uses of capital. That is no longer necessary. With our present rate of productivity, in fact, it has become foolish and is no longer good business. Continuing in that course would destroy capitalism; for there can be no adequate saving unless there is adequate spending, and spending on a scale which only the masses, with mass leisure can achieve.5
This era saw the emergence of "captains of Non-Industry, of Consumption and Leisure," and a shift from "heroes of production" to "heroes of consumption."6 Contemporary commentators expressed astonishment at the change in American attitudes toward leisure and play. The ascetic ideology that had granted preeminence to hard work and deferred gratification was being dissolved by the very economic growth it had helped make possible. The Protestant Ethic lingered on in distinctions between "true" leisure and wasted time (as opposed to the older notion of leisure as idleness) but an evolving hedonistic conception of pleasure guided by an ideology of consumerism now occupyed a central place in people's lives.7
Leading liberal businessman encouraged the rise of consumerism because they saw the future of American capitalism as dependent on the development of mass consumption. This business elite used consumerism as "an aggressive device of corporate survival." The modern advertising industry arose as a direct response to this perceived need to create and expand markets, and distribute goods within them. Soon the aim of advertising went "beyond the strictly pecuniary one of creating the desire to consume," and became a thoroughly rationalized attempt to redirect, and even reshape, middle class cultural assumptions. Directed at manufacturing and shaping desires, wants and habits, roles and self-concepts, advertising contributed to the "social production of consumers."8
With the decline of occupational community, families and neighborhoods lost much of their recreational self sufficiency.9 No longer did a strong occupational community ensure that leisure experiences would be mediated by working-class experiences. Instead a vacuum was created which commercial recreation was quick to fill.10
The market, based on the structuring premise of egostic self-interests, tended to orient people toward individualistic approaches to leisure and in this respect their leisure resembled their work. Workers confronted the market as solitary beings, exchanging labor for a wage, and in turn exchanging the wage so that they might try to fulfill their gendered needs. "Wage labor, rather than the social community of old became the organizing structural and cultural principle of daily existence."11 Under Taylorism this egoistic framework was taken to extremes. Scientific management techniques tried to isolate the worker in the workplace.12 Greater isolation in one's work in combination with the general erosion of craft skills pushed the worker's interest in the product of labor toward the pecuniary. The isolation encountered by the worker in his work was reflected in leisure activities as the sociability and cohesive force of occupational cultures (in which work and leisure acquaintances and activities "intermingled inextricably") disappeared, replaced by the commodity relation.
Modern spectatorship as a dominant leisure form had its roots in these same developments. The spectacle provided an escape from the routine of alienated work and an alternative to the demise of occupational communities. Structured by market forces, the spectacle offered structured passivity, a passivity that resonated with changes taking place in the sphere of production. Indeed, Georg Lukács observed that capitalist rationalization and specialization of the work process made workers passive spectators of the production process and even of the "workings of [their] own objectified and reified faculties."13
The trajectory of capitalist developments and the assembling of the meanings of leisure have been inextricably interwoven. The extension of the central organizing principles of rationalization and exchange relations into leisure as a consequence of the capitalist organization of social life was analogous to the construction of a reified "grammar" of leisure.
Commercial recreation developed rapidly during the period from 1909 to 1929, with recreational expenditures rising from 3.2% to 4.7% of total national income.14 This growth of commercial recreational expenditures shows a remarkable correspondence to what Martin Sklar terms the first major period of "disaccumulation" in the American economy. The percentage of national income invested in net capital formation declined from 13.6% during the 1899-1908 decade to 10.2% for the period 1919-1928.15 Sklar argues that during the epoch of capital accumulation surplus was absorbed primarily through investment in producer goods or constant capital. But the investment function of the surplus declined in importance with the onset of the disaccumulation phase of capitalist development, and the burden of surplus absorption became redirected toward processes of personal consumption. Thus one consequence of the decline in net capital formation in the traditional goods-producing sectors was that surplus capital was increasingly diverted into service industries which, among other things, created and serviced leisure.
Though estimates of aggregate non-governmental expenditures on leisure and sport vary somewhat for this period, there is general consensus of a trend towards the "dominant and relatively increasing importance of the commercial or professional kinds of recreation."16 Most observers wrote that spending on passive recreational forms grew more rapidly than on active recreations. However, while the distinction between active and commercial leisure was useful for assessing where the most rapid market expansion was occurring, active leisure had become no less commodified, only consumed with less frequency and visibility.17
The visibility of commodified leisure was most apparent in the sports spectacle. The growth in spectator sports in the first third of this century was itself nothing short of spectacular.18 One commentator after another pointed to the vast expansion in stadium-building, attendance, and space devoted to sports in the newspaper. But sport spectatorship extended well beyond the confines of simple attendance at games and matches; people also followed teams, athletic celebrities, championships, and records through the sports page.
The role of athletic sports in providing passive amusement for the nation cannot be fully determined by counting the spectators at games and contests. An important leisure-time activity of unnumbered thousands is reading the sport pages of newspapers and listening to the radio broadcast of games...The growth of popular interest in athletic sports as an amusement enterprise is reflected in the remarkable increase in the amount of space given by newspapers to sports news.19
Because newspaper coverage of sport during this period became standardized with the spread of syndicated columns and news, more and more of the sports-reading public was exposed to the same presentations and interpretations of sport. Through the printed page spectatorship extended into the home, the school, the workplace, the tavern, and the barber shop where fans could discourse and debate about athletic heroes, teams, games, and even the relative merits of various sports. "Youngsters memorized the statistical accomplishments of their heroes and debated the comparative prowess of their idols."20
The appeal of sports to newspapermen was, as a leading figure in the advertising industry observed, that the public was "sold" sporting events as "millions have been sold commodities by newspaper advertising."21 Sports sold newspapers and newspapers sold sports. Critics of passive spectatorship frequently blamed the newspapers insistent focus on the more spectacular side of sports rather than the day-to-day athletic and recreation activities pursued in neighborhood gymnasiums and playgrounds.
One index of the growing appeal of spectator sports was the emergence of a literature critical of the dangers of "spectatoritis." The existence of this literature suggests how widespread spectatorship had become. Fictional accounts, advertisements, and the public exchange of written opinions about spectator activities grew pervasive, revealing not only that some wished to contest the morality of this trend, but also that a growing number of people regarded spectatorship as a perfectly natural phenomena free of staining moral connotations.22
By the third decade of the 20th century sport had "blossomed" into a "big business" with millions of dollars invested in plant and equipment along with millions of customers.23 Sport as big business was not confined to professional sports, but included the collegiate organization of sports as well. It was commonly acknowledged that a major justification for collegiate football was public relations and its generation of funds for other purposes. As the growth in stadium-building, spectators and gate receipts attests, organized sport was a lucrative business. According to a team owner in 1912, "As a business investment, baseball has U.S. Steel and all the stocks quoted on the Stock Exchange beaten to a frazzle."24
While many viewed the capitalist development of organized sport a natural, and perhaps the only, route for the development of sports to take, as early as the 1890s a few critics had begun to point to the "spread of the fallacy" that if one was not on a team and did not have a coach it was no worthwhile doing anything but watching.25 It was doubtlessly true that organized sport produced technically superior sports performances -- measured in stop-watch time -- to that which took place on sandlots and in cow pastures. In a society beguiled by notions of technique and efficiency such technically superior sports was interpreted as better sport. Spontaneous, unorganized play was reduced, ideologically to a pale imitation of the product of organized sport. This was justified by comments which attributed the tendency towards spectatorship to the machinations of instinctual laws. Typically the argument went something like this -- due to the "mastery impulse," most people who are "unable to become champions and heroes, prefer the vicarious triumph of a chosen idol to the dull level of mediocrity."26
Achieving high standards of technical "excellence" aside, securing its "distribution" to masses of people required the machinery and capital of sport organized as a big business. Owners emphasized that the maintenance of quality in sport required taking financial risks and gambles on a grand scale. Among the axioms for organized sport were: "It takes money to get a winning team," and "A winning team gets the money."27 The sports reading publics routinely encountered the assumption that large sums of money and extensive business experience were required to run sports in order to meet the high standards imposed by the public. Substantial financial capital was presented as necessary to the extensive scientific and specialized training of players, the provision of equipment and physical plants suitable for displaying sport, and the ability to systematically search for and identify future talent. By the 1920s some even claimed that professional baseball had its own research departments just as did industry to continually refine and improve their product.
The treatment of professional athletes as wage-labor had been brought to public attention as early as the 1880s when baseball players sought to institute a form of workers' control over the organization of professional baseball. With the rise of large-scale business machinery in sports, the sports press occasionally made explicit reference to the fact that the player --or worker -- had come to be viewed as a commodity to be exploited for dollars and cents. "Players have been bought, sold, and exchanged as though they were sheep."28 The sports page regularly described the status of players as commodities in the language of the market. Beginning with the obvious, yet crucial, distinction between players and owners, the sports pages were filled, as they are today, with the news that players had been "purchased," "sold," or "placed on the market." Players represented "investments" which could "yield returns" or, perhaps, "depreciate." Minor league players were bought "largely on speculation." But the players who made it were "worth" it because they helped win games, which drew crowds. The established star was a "valuable piece of property." The worth or the value of an athlete was determined by how much he could bring in the marketplace.29 Moreover, athletic stars were frequently described in terms of values associated with the capitalist organization of society. Drawing this out, Ring Lardner sought to capture Christy Matthewson's character in the metaphors of money and saving, while describing Ty Cobb in metaphors of figuring and planning ahead.30
The training, selection, and playing patterns of professional athletes became dictated, in large part, by a pattern of rationalization similar to that occurring wills-in industry, which focused attention on the necessity of technical training, specialization, and quantification. The same universal quantification that typified Taylorism in the work sphere penetrated the sphere of sport.31 In fact, it was claimed that American athletes rose to a position of world superiority when the "efficiency engineer began to reconstruct the whole system of American athletics."32 There occurred an elaborate codification of rules; sporting activities were broken down into mechanical, repetitive, standardized, and easily defined component parts; and complex formalized strategies governing play were introduced.33 Coaches because experts who taught technique, and players, expert technicians who strove for maximum efficiency and output.
The more instrumentalized the games became and the more athletic play was treated as commodity labor-power, the more it became necessary to assess players' output and efficiency. Since labor time did not appear to be an accurate measure of value within professional athletics, other measures were required to gage the commodity value of players. Hence the development of more sophisticated performance and productivity "statistics."34 This concern for measurement was emulated in the play of youth, Recounting his play as a boy, James Farrell wrote, "Having a penchant for averages, I proposed that the scores of all our games be kept and that we figure out our batting and fielding averages."35
Many other leisure activities appeared to be the products of Capital intensive investments in such things as artificial ice rinks, indoor tennis courts, and massive amusement complexes. The Florida vacation industry promised "bigger sport than ever this year, because new capital has expanded the attractions, the entertainment..."36 Even the relatively spontaneous neighborhood play of youth was increasingly understood as requiring institutional training and supply through schools and Little Leagues.37
The idea that capital investment in leisure was necessary in order that it be productive was applied not only at the organizational level but also at the individual level. As free time became more abundant and mass production industries generated a need for mass consumption, this understanding of leisure as a valuable resource became deeply entrenched. Advertisements for sporting equipment employed this theme, suggesting that it was through the purchase of their product that this resource could be utilized most productively. In this scenario the value of leisure resources was said to be supplemented through the purchase of proper goods and services. Reformers likewise endorsed the notion that the value of the individual's leisure resources could be enhanced -- but only by following their programs of morally supervised recreation. From all corners, people were admonished to "invest" in their leisure to enhance their "rate of return" and make it "profitable": "Rightly used our leisure may be converted into an asset which will yield large dividends in culture and happiness, but if given over to mere idleness...will become a dangerous liability."38 Competing claims were made as to which activities provided optimum opportunities for the "profitable investment" of leisure time such that waste was minimized and the "dividends" maximized.39
The Hoover Conference on economic changes in the United States reported in the 1920s that "closely related to the increasing rate of production-consumption of products is consumption of leisure." Moreover the conception of leisure as consumable' began to be relied upon in business in a practical way and on a broad scale. It began to be recognized not only that leisure is consumable but that people cannot 'consume' leisure without consuming goods and services, and that leisure which results from an increasing man-hour productivity helps to create new needs and broader markets."40 By 1930 Robert Lynd remarked upon the growth of a "culture marked by a growing externalization of values in things bought in stores, observing that "Good times, especially those involved in spending money to go places and do things, have become an expected part of the routine week of family members, rather than a matter of special occasions." 41
Consumption time became virtually equated with leisure tune. For example, by 1915 organized labor's demand for a shorter working day had drifted toward the contention that more leisure would enable workers to consume more and do so in a more skilled fashion. "With leisure time people develop greater and more discriminating needs and therefore a greater desire to buy the goods that industry is producing."42 Linking the rhetoric of leisure consumption to what they considered to be the demands and imperatives of organized capital, leaders in business, labor, and government contended that the absorption of productive capacity required that "workers have money to buy and leisure to consume." Henry Ford himself asserted that "an extra day of leisure is going to bring large results, for the people will learn more about living, will have more time to expand their sense of need, and therefore will increase their consumption."43
Under Taylorism and various other forms of scientific management, workers were encouraged to work as rapidly as possible ill order to make more money so that they could "buy pleasure in their leisure time." The justification for this system of work no longer tied itself to considerations of occupational satisfaction but to monetary considerations and the fruits of consumption which they implied.
Advertising for leisure and recreation was built around the premise that leisure and recreation needs could be fulfilled by matching them up with the appropriate purchasable goods and services. Recounting the contribution of the advertiser during this period, Printer's Ink commented that "he had provided uses for the new leisure." Advertising's "message implored people to Consume."44 A publicity campaign by Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co. promoted bowling as a remedy "for what ails you" available to all at moderate expense in the evenings (the primary time for recreation among rank-and-file workers).45 Coca-Cola promised to give the "pause that refreshes," presenting an image of leisure as a consumption pause. Later this was expanded to: "Good workers know it's good to pause a minute now and then to relax and refresh yourself. With an ice-cold Coca-Cola a little minute is long enough for a big rest."46
Insofar as spectator sports were presented as a sphere apart from, and in contrast to, the tedium of daily life, a principal justification for spectatorship was that it provided a "'release' from the necessary routines of daily life and labor."47 In the sport spectacle excitement and release could be purchased. Escape and release from the pressures of the work world were identified as legitimate items of consumption available through sports spectatorship or the oddly enchanted atmosphere of amusement parks. The "real charm" of football or baseball to the spectator was said to be that it "takes a man out of himself," allowing him to forget the worries of the daily grind simply by watching others play. The vicarious satisfaction of watching others play a game simultaneously stimulated the transfer of the "energy liberating qualities" of the game to the individual spectator. Ideologically, spectatorship offered a highly visible means of temporarily forgetting the degradation suffered as commodity labor-power. The purchase of entry into the sport spectacle promised to restore and energize the individual's labor-power. The safety-valve metaphor accurately described the role of spectator sport in reproducing the conditions necessary to the continuity of existing social relations of production.
In contrast to most wage labor, which demanded discipline, self-denial and repression of expressivity, spectatorship was characterized as an outlet for surplus energies and repressed "instincts," allowing the individual to "revel in long restricted impulses." As a spectator the individual could yell, scream, gesticulate, and even curse the symbols of authority (the umpires) without suffering sanctions.48 Though a nice outlet, in order to purchase relief from the drudgery of work, individuals had to perform again and again the same alienated work, so that they could purchase the means of relief that would enable them to tolerate still more hours of work.
Paradoxically, spectatorship offered an opportunity to escape the increasing rationalization of work by evaluating the rationalized technique and efficiency of athletic workers. The issue of efficiency and calculation and strategy in athletics had become a virtual fetish. Increasingly it was argued that the proper way to play games was scientifically and efficiently. Baseball was lauded as that distinctly American institution" wherein the "science of efficiency has been carried to a fine point of precise and definite perfection of detail" such that "practically the whole American people are trained and competent judges" of the product.49
Leisure not only came to be conceived as a refuge from dehumanization and a retreat from authority and domination in work, but also as a bastion of freedom of choice." Leisure "for most people represents the opportunity to do what they want to do rather than what they must do." As an editorial in the Nation put it, nobody wants authority waved over his or her head, especially in playtime -- there is enough of that at work. "'Leisure' means free time -- when our activities are determined not by economic compulsion, but by native impulse. 'Recreation' means free play -- what we do from desire, not necessity."50 Leisure came to refer to a person's "own time," just as "free time" meant time free from compulsion. Leisure supposedly demarcated the realm of choice. An opposition between work as necessity and leisure as freedom of choice became a cultural cliché. However, "these alleged freedoms and choices meant merely a transformed version of capitalism's incessant need to mold a work force in its own image." 51 Actually, the free time from which leisure was constructed became time committed anew to the demands of the emerging mass production system.
Set against work, leisure was seen as a means of satisfying legitimate inner demands for self-expression.52 On this point, advocates of commercialization and leaders of the playground movement agreed. What they disagreed about was how development should properly take place. Advocates of commercialization argued that people were increasingly defined and delimited by commodities, and that the development of human potentialities required a flow of outside satisfactions (maximization of utilities) and not an exercise of their own capacities, as the self-improvement ethos of the progressives in the Playground Movement proposed. Some observers early in the 20th century pointed out that people did not know how to amuse themselves in play but were reliant upon special gadgets. By 1930, "it [was] practically impossible to participate in any of the active sports or games that [were] highly popular...without the outlay of a considerable amount of money for the necessary equipment as well as of time to acquire the technique of the prevailing fashion of playing."53 While obviously a manifestation of Conspicuous Consumption, the trend from simple to costly leisure-time pursuits also provided evidence of the increasingly prevalent notion that the satisfaction of a leisure experience was in direct proportion to the complexity and expense of the equipment (e.g., motorboats as opposed to sailboats).54
Advertising for all types of consumption played heavily on the idea that personal development was dependent upon the consumption of things -- whether it be beauty, soap, a corset, a "revolutionary" new catcher's mitt, or a bike. Indeed, the advertising copy for the Columbia bicycle assured that it "will not only open up a new source of enjoyment to you, but will increase your capacity to enjoy."55
The only significant exceptions to this pattern were limited largely to notions of adolescent leisure and recreation. Under the early sponsorship of professional recreation leaders and physical educators, sports was advocated as the single activity capable of providing the conditions required for successful development. In the athletic team there was considerable emphasis upon development as taking the form of team playing (e.g., a sign of achieving one stage of development was the willingness to perform the "sacrifice hit") and the establishment of social solidarity. In the mid to late 1920s the leaders of the Playground Movement chose to discontinue sponsorship of competitive athletics for children, arguing that such emphasis produced excessive emotional strain on youth. However, the departure from this sphere of activity allowed the "Little League" movement to become progressively penetrated by the values and logic of professional and commercialized athletics.56
A related but distinct meaning was given to leisure at this time: the idea that the extrinsic value of play is as important as its intrinsic value. In other words, athletics could be made to "pay off" in money, status, championships, and heightened productivity. The idea that one should play purely for the pleasure it affords was relegated to second place, and prevailing themes of "utility" and "marketing orientation" came to dominate mass leisure.57 The Nation commented that "the pernicious habits of translating human values into money values has invaded the realm of sports." Instead of viewing play as its own sufficient reason due to its spontaneous and universal qualities, "we breathe the air of utility...football is justified in numberless bank-presidents and successful mining engineers."58
With the emergence of competitive athletics in U.S., the motive for engaging in sport to derive intrinsic pleasure from the activity was subordinated to the goal of winning -- in fact, to "winning at any Cost." Sport became a means to other ends, rather than being an end in itself. In other words, the exchange-value of participating was placed above its use-value. The craze for winning in sports "exhibited the spirit and method of trade."59 Hence, the prevailing ethos of sport demanded the elimination of uninhibited self-expression and non-instrumental orientations -- play, in other words, had no place in the world of sport.
The "winning is everything" attitude in American sports drew on the ascendancy of the free market ideology and the Protestant Ethic. The combination of the accumulation ethos and a now secularized need for assurance of salvation provided a powerful impetus towards the win at any cost attitude. This was, of course, more than reinforced by the perversion of Darwinism in the idea that only the fittest survive. Perhaps the paradigmatic case of endorsing sport as a training instrument for the struggles to be encountered in the cutthroat competition of the business world was that of Yale football under Walter Camp. Camp -- perhaps the most successful coach of his era -- spoke the language of social Darwinism, demanding complete dedication to the goal of winning. To the dominant portion of the business elite, Camp's version of sport "reflected the same acquisitive values that permeated the rest of their lives. Money making, fierce competitiveness, and an intense desire to win at any cost became major themes of play as well as work." Whether in work or sport, if the individual wants to be a prize winner in the great race of success" he must work at it.60
The athletic field taught both workers and future workers to be concerned primarily with external rewards (wages rather than satisfactions in the work that is per formed). The same crude economistic perspective that informed scientific management's approach in the factory was extended to the playing field. Indeed, a leading proponent of "Boy's Work" defined it as "social engineering in the field of boyhood motivation."61 In many factories it was common know ledge that the possession of outstanding athletic skills would bring a job (oftentimes a "softer" job) More subtle however, even in industrial athletics was the giving of sweaters emblazoned with the factory letter to workers who made the first team.62 Status symbols, these letter sweaters were standardized rewards with the development of organized sports in the twentieth Century there occurred an increasing demand for standardization of both rewards and the rules and regulations governing the awards -- for outstanding services rendered to the school/team/firm.
The notion of scarcity of external rewards was closely tied to the notion of leisure as earned by work.63 Children were routinely instructed that they could play when they had finished their work or chores. Moreover the pleasure of leisure earned by bird work was said to be the greatest that one could experience As the all American boy in an advertisement for the magazine The American Boy puts it Surely ought to enjoy that canoe trip, the way we re sweating to raise cash To which his mother adds, the "sweetest rewards are the hardest won."64
The individual's character or personality was a marketable commodity insofar as Individual attainment of rewards in the economy was said to be dependent upon the exhibition of the proper character or "personality package."
Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness are transformed in commodities, into assets of the "personality package," conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment in himself he feels that he is a failure, if he succeeds, he is a success. Clearly his sense of his own value always depends on factors extraneous to himself, on the fickle judgments of the market, which decides about his value as it decides about the value of commodities.65
In a society dominated by a market ideology, persons must sell their "social personality." A frequent justification of sport and leisure was that they provided a means of acquiring this personality package. Both reformers and staunch defenders depicted sport as an important medium through which the individual could acquire traits and qualities which would in adult life make the individual more salable -- that is, proper sports socialization was a key to economic success in the work world.66
Intercollegiate athletics were said to yield valuable results in developing the manly character "so essential to the serious work" of the business world by stimulating and fostering habits of self-control, self-reliance, courage, perseverance, self-denial, temperance, patience, and intelligent subordination.67 These were the traits and values embodied in Theodore Roosevelt's articulation of the "strenuous life." Though it was still "recognized that . . Competitive sports trained the players in certain traits of character which are the basic winning traits in the struggle of life," as the bureaucratic and corporate nature of the economy became more pronounced, the mixture of valuable traits was altered. A greater emphasis began to be placed upon obedience, submergence of self, and a premium on the avoidance of human error.68
In the bureaucratically organized workplace of the 1920's, "recording the worker's personality" grew into a preoccupation of personnel managers. This heightened concern with workers' personalities was, in part, a response to the "requirements of harmonious integration into the bureaucratic order of the enterprise." Those personality traits congruent with these requirements were rewarded.69 Some years earlier, Frederick Taylor had commented on the congruence between athletic training and industrial discipline and methods: "They are there given [through athletic training], not the elective idea of doing what they want to do, but cooperation, and Cooperation of the same general character which they will be called upon to practice in after life.70 The society of physical education directors set forth in 1920 a list of qualities to be "acquired" through group athletics. This list -- habits of obedience, subordination, self-sacrifice, cooperation, friendliness, loyalty, adherence to the rules, and capacity for leadership -- reads like a set of requirements for workers in large bureaucratic organizations.71
Recognizing the athletic hero as a valuable public commodity, a variety of industries, ranging from sporting goods to real-estate developers, sought to create the impression that the achievements of famed athletes were closely linked with the use of their products.72 Sporting-goods manufacturers endeavored to spread the idea that their products were largely responsible for the success of champions, and that purchase of their products could very probably result in enhanced or improved play. Typical of this theme is the following:
The language of sports had woven its way into the fabric of national consciousness as a means of selling all manner of goods. Sporting metaphors and the rhetoric of athletic ideology found their way into advertising copy urging the purchase of cars, tires, cameras, soap, clothing, and tobacco.
By the 1920s the assertion that the acquisition and consumption of salable articles enabled individuals to incorporate abilities and qualities they lacked or desired had become commonplace in most magazines: for example, "Sportocasins" improve your game and are essential to a good game of golf, or "Dunlop balls help with direction and distance."74 Still other items claimed to transfer qualities and traits from the commodity to the user. A Spalding home gymnasium was said to make a man out of you. In an increasingly important leisure activity for many women -- the cultivation of beauty -- beauty could be added or enhanced by a trip to a "beauty parlor" or to the market for tubes and jars. The Willys-Knight automobile was featured as the "Fountain of Perpetual Youth." "The very youth and zest of the Willys-Knight help to keep owners young and light-hearted."75 Magically, the car that had been assembled through an extreme division of labor acquired human characteristics which were then passed along to its Owner.
Attributes and qualities such as virility, beauty, youth, musical ability, and success in sports were now considered separate or independent of the self, attached to the self only through the acquisition and consumption of goods and services. Paraphrasing Marx's discussion of reification, it might be said that the experience of leisure satisfactions was increasingly understood as dependent upon the product in the person.
Leisure as shaped by a flow of commodities became valued not simply for its ability to satisfy leisure needs (for its use), but also for its appearance, such that the collection of images and appearances advanced in leisure activities became an end in itself:
To the extent, therefore, that pursuits of our leisure time tend to become organized under conventional patterns determined by competitive consumption they lose their unique and primary value as recreation and so become merely another department of activity devoted to the achievement of prestige and status.76
In fact, there was a tendency for a leisure product's use-value to become reduced to its appearance (or the ability to manipulate its appearance). This may have been the diffusion of the tendency towards "conspicuous leisure" identified by Thorsten Veblen. Veblen observed that one aspect of commodity fetishism was that commodities assume the form of symbols and signs which may be manipulated to secure status, prestige, etc. In Middletown, the Lynds point to the decline of craft hierarchy and occupational community and a corresponding breakdown of status mechanisms within the working-class community. As these status mechanisms disappeared, the "life plans of workers...had to be reoriented around the pursuit of status through money and the commodity display."77 In Middletown of the 1920s that commodity display centered around leisure activities.
The ideas that equipment is the primary ingredient in the leisure experience and that status comparisons can be made on the basis of the equipment employed were closely tied up with the notion that leisure experiences could be validated through processes of knowledgeable consumption. The consumption of leisure commodities extended into leisure activities a pattern similar to that which characterized the social relations of production. This pattern consisted of a greater emphasis on interaction with things than with people.
The extension of the commodity into more and more areas of leisure life, in conjunction with the standardization of products and activities of the modern advertising industry, altered the manner in which leisure experiences were socially validated as "real" or "worthy." For example, the merchandising of the concept of "regulation" baseballs had the effect of making less valid the experience of playing the game with a homemade baseball. Farrell comments in his Baseball Diary that "another event in the life of an American boy entranced with baseball is the acquisition of his first regulation baseball. . .it was a feather in my cap to have this ball." Similarly, once people had been made aware of the existence of "uniforms," the prospect of playing without uniforms appeared as a less fulfilling experience. The ownership of a regulation baseball or a Louisville Slugger bat not only affirmed the worth of one's leisure experience, it also provided a potential source of status and acceptance.78
PRIVATIZATION AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY
People's leisure lives became increasingly solitary with the development of the radio, the movie industry, and the mass-produced automobile.79 Steelworkers' accounts of changes in their use of leisure after the change from continuous operation shifts to the eight-hour day provide an indication of this privatized notion of leisure: "I like putterin' around the house. I'm growin' a garden. . they [my kids] want me to get a car. I'm thinkin' about it. That's what lots of the other men are doin', ridin' around and seein' places."80 A survey of the leisure activities and desires of 5,000 persons in several major urban areas in the early 1930s showed that the most popular activities were going to movies, reading newspapers and magazines, and listening to the radio. One of the chief reasons given for pursuing these activities was the fact that they could be done alone.
The popularization of fenced-in backyards provides a fascinating indicator of the privatization process, although the culture of backyards varied by region and city; so too porch sitting had been culturally varied by region. Porch sitting had comprised an important leisure time activity keyed around the existence of a "community" and one's part in it. The backyard, in contrast, made it possible to sever one's leisure from community participation in favor of interaction with family members and selected individuals. The backyard emerged as a private sanctuary or haven equipped according to standards set by the mass market. 81
Private life and leisure satisfactions were made to appear as if they were one and the same. Advertisements for Victrola phonographs suggested that with their products, "You are at the opera in your home...the artist will sing it or play it a thousand times, if you wish, for your personal enjoyment... Don't deny yourself this endless pleasure."82 Another conspicuous development was the declining proportion of leisure time devoted to conversation.83 The advent of the mass-circulation magazine and the radio seriously undermined the notion of leisure as a time for conversation." This privatization of leisure represented a coalescence of several structural and ideological phenomena. The emptiness of work, the emergence of mass production, and a deeply rooted ideology of individualism made readily acceptable the identification of a private life of consumption as the avenue for liberation and fulfillment, given the absence of cultural alternatives.84 The privatization ethos that was beginning to be widespread in the 1920s marks a profound cultural transformation in American society.
The contrast between leisure activities in the 1920s and the preceding decades received lucid presentation in the comments of an early student of leisure:
Think of the old folk dances, and folk music, compared with modern dances and jazz! Then, not infrequently, members of a family performed on different musical instruments. not a brilliant performance its highly polished instruments, but they produced a satisfying and creditable music from home-made instruments.85
Considerable attention was devoted to the democracy-in-action theme in leisure and sport which suggested that these activities fostered an objective tangible equality between classes and provided diverse occupational groupings with commonalties of interest. Accounts were not limited to the imagery of shoulder rubbing between worker and banker at the ball park. "Capital and labor " it was asserted "may have their own private differences, but they unite in rooting for the same ball club." This ability to harmonize the contradictory Interests of the public was accomplished and approved with every man's pocketbook."86
Local followers and fans frequently took great pride in the hometown team, the emphasis on team nicknames and sports lingo serving as a means of inducing identification with the community.87 The apparent commonality of interests generated under the banner of spectator sports fostered a sense of Gemeinschaft.88 In a society increasingly characterized by Gesellschaft relations the spectatorship of organized sports offered a return to a feeling of community, available now as a commodity which could be acquired instantly through spectatorship. The social and historical dimensions of "community" vanished in this understanding as community came to be understood as something "out there" to be bought as an immediate possession. But this sense of community was circumscribed spatially and temporally; it did not carry over into other institutional spheres and dissipated over time if not replenished. Nonetheless, it did seem to provide a partial bridge across existing class divisions. Communist organizers in the 1930s and 1940s counseled followers that identification with professional sports teams had the effect of fragmenting class cohesion.
The process of capitalist industrialization gradually removed leisure front the social context of occupational communities and reduced it to a correlate of wage-labor. Although the pseudo-Gemeinschaft and privatization themes appear to have been mutually contradictory, each was a response to the disintegration of traditional institutions which had guided and structured the activities of daily life. The pseudo-Gemeinschaft theme represented an attempt to resurrect a sense of community by manufacturing an artificial commonality of interests around commercialized spectacles. Privatization building on the "cultural infrastructure" provided by mass consumerism, emerged as an antidote to the fragmentation of occupational community by scientific management.
The traditional institutions of the industrial occupational community -- the occupational peer group, the extended home, the lodge, the tavern -- lost their raison d'etre with the spreading of cultural Taylorism. For instance, people would still attend taverns (now called bars or lounges), but normally as strangers or couples seeking privacy, entertainment, or transient relationships and not as occupational peers reproducing their relationship to the world of work.89
Each of these structurally evolved modes of experiencing and interpreting leisure prescribed the naturalness of the capital-labor connection. Both the spectacle and the privatization of leisure ideologically reified leisure as separation via commodity consumption, as well as posing structural barriers to the effective vitality of any autonomous working-class leisure grounded in sociability.
The degradation of labor, shortened work days, the advent of the mass-production/ mass-consumption economy, the progressive privatization of social life, and the tendency for capital to expand into areas outside the traditional goods-producing sphere, all pushed the meaning of leisure radically towards a conception of "free time." As such, leisure became a means of more fully integrating individuals into increasingly packaged and managed processes of consumerism. With the emergence of the corporate economy, it was increasingly taken for granted that leisure was something to be bought, that "free time" was a space that needed to be filled with things and images of things. In this way, leisure offered escape and compensation for unfulfilling work, as well as promising an alternative source -- privatized -- of fulfillment, freedom, status, and individuality.