The Roaring ‘20’s have long stood for prosperity in America’s consciousness, but that decade began in the depth of a steep Post-World War I recession, and in 1929, another recession was already well under way when the Wall Street Crash ushered in what we still call the Great Depression. In fact, judged by the standards of the 1950’s through the 1990’s, the ‘20’s weren’t all that prosperous, seeming so only in relation to how people lived earlier and during the Depression. What prosperity there was, however, and its limits, can be seen from a new perspective by looking through some mail-order catalogs issued then.
New technologies promised Americans great benefits. Autos had been around twenty years when this decade began, but for the first time they came within the reach of most Americans. Critics asserted that mores were crumbling because of the mobility - and freedom to misbehave - that cars offered, and that movies, radio, and free-thinking books, threatened public morality.
Nothing so characterized that decade in the eyes of its observers than the New Woman. She was already baring her arms on the cover of John Wanamaker’s 1920 Store and Home catalog/journal, and new freedoms and confidence that came with woman’s suffrage that year emboldened her to try sailing (Bradley Knitwear 1922-1923) and skiing (Philipsborn 1923), take an active role in planning her family’s new house (Sears Roebuck 1924), and enjoy nights on the town (Van Housen’s Favor Co. 1928). Even if she were a stay-at-home wife and mom, she could enjoy new labor-saving appliances like the stoves, furnaces, and water heaters found in Kalamazoo Stove’s regular, colorful catalogs. Radio and cheaper phonographs brought music, news, and the world at large into the homes of an increasingly urbanized society whose members knew and cared more about the celebrities they saw in movies or listened to over the radio than about their own neighbors down the street, or their cousins across town, or country kin. Hitherto communities had shared "eternal" truths and values. Individuals and families were suddenly caught up in a society based upon and sharing new values and inter-ests.
The transformative technology of this decade was radio. The first public radio-station transmission(s) took place in 1919-1920. The inventors of radio and the industrialists who controlled the technology gave little thought to its application for entertainment. They moved into commercial broadcasting and manufacturing sets for homes only after entrepeneurs, paralleling those who had recently gained control of the movie industry, began reaping rich rewards. It was the growth of radio broadcasting to consumers (and auto and appliance sales) that made the ‘20’s roar economically. Sales receipts for radios rose from negligible in 1920 to $60 million in 1922 and $426 million in 1929. RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, came to stand for Wall Street’s excesses after the Crash because its stock had more than quintupled in value between 1928 and 1929, rising above $500 a share without ever having paid a dividend.
We see how quickly the radio industry matured by comparing the thin, rudimentary catalog issued in New York in 1921 by RASCO, the Radio Specialty Company, with the 1929 catalog of the Walter Rowan Company of Chicago, its catalog number 67. RASCO offered no finished radio sets, only the parts and instructions needed to build sets. That was normal then. Amateurs had been able to purchase the parts needed to build sets since at least as early as 1906; that year the Etheric Electric Company issued a 64-page catalog of wireless telegraphy, a copy of which sold online recently for $265. By the mid-20’s radio sets of all sizes and costs were readily available through countless specialized and general-retailers’ catalogs. Rowan’s offerings in 1929 included the Blackstone Lo-Boy ($77.62), the Stevens Consolette ($84.67), the Salisbury Console Desk with Cathedral Grand ($180.52), the Tyrman Special Egyptian model ($237.55), and toward the lower end of the field the Excello R-46 and R-41s for between $29.40 and $41.16. Rowan continued to list and illustrate parts of all kinds. What makes this catalog so special, however - even quite remarkable - is that its cover advertises Television. Rowan offered the components needed to build a TV receiving unit. A few prophets were then predicting the imminent arrival of television broadcasting in the fall of 1929, but the Crash, followed by the Depression and then World War II, de-layed the birth of this medium for twenty years. Radio, of course, was not limited to city dwellers. The 1923 issue of "Armour’s Farmer’s Almanac" was subtitled "Visions of a Wireless World Run by Radio"; its features included 12 black-and-white cartoons sug-gesting how radio would transform rural life.
The ‘20’s were characterized by a wider income and wealth disparity among Americans than at any time since, at least until the pre-sent decade. Many catalogs served the growing carriage (meaning by then auto) trade while others aimed for consumers who had to pinch every penny and were on the lookout for ways to supplement their incomes. Elizabeth Arden’s Salon d’Oro, which already had locations stretching from Paris to San Francisco, offered in 1923 expensive beauty kits to assist women in "The Quest of the Beauti-ful." Leavens finished-to-order furniture wasn’t quite in the same financial bracket but offered a wide assortment of luxuriantly finished revival-style pieces at prices far beyond the means of all but the most affluent. The fabulous Silver Ace plan models offered in 1929 by the Aero Model Company’s stunning catalog cost much more than do comparable models today. A Spirit of St. Louis cost $12.50 and models of Commander Byrd’s Antarctic plane cost either $20 or $30, sums representing a week or more of wages for most Americans.
That not everyone had become rich by 1929 is beautifully illustrated by the curious "Home Shopping Guide" issued that year by Woolworth. Each page in this brochure/catalog bears a line drawing of a room, or shows a common activity, and prints a long list of items that each needed that Woolworth sold for either 5 or 10 cents. Surprisingly, the display captioned "For Your Table" shows a maid in full uniform attending to a table set for a dinner party. How many Woolworth shoppers employed servants? Was this encour-aging unrealistic wishful thinking or did it simply illustrate the spirit of the age just before the Crash?
Premium catalogs offering free gifts to supplement purchases, or in exchange for selling the company’s merchandise, grew both more plentiful and more ambitious throughout the decade. The United Profit Sharing Corp.’s 1922 catalog now interests me less for its special offers than its full-color illustrations of the packaged goods that contained the coupons that consumers could trade for sil-verware, jewelry, glassware, sporting goods, etc. For some reason that I can’t identify, dozens of companies encouraged consumers to sell boxes of chocolates to earn cash or gifts. Normandy Chocolates’ catalog of circa 1925 is one of my favorites of this crop. Cata-logs from the granddaddy of premium companies, the Larkin Company of Buffalo, kept getting bigger and more beautiful. The cover of the 238-page 1926 catalog, with its semi-impressionist rendering of a perfect American family gazing skyward at a biplane, was one of the hits of my recent catalog exhibition. (Copies of this catalog on CD regularly appear for sale online, priced just slightly below what I paid for my original.)
Although America had become a predominantly urban nation by the Twenties, it continued to include a still-significant farm popu-lation. Most farm families benefited little from the relative prosperity. Farm prices collapsed in 1919 and remained depressed through-out the Twenties. Rural America’s depression was already a decade old when Wall Street crashed. Most American farmers, especially in the South, were subsistence growers and had little involvement with the greater economy. There were, of course, regular catalogs from International Harvester and the other great farm equipment makers, but I have little interest in industrial equipment so I recommend the catalogs of Dr. Hess & Clark and Armour’s Farmers Alamanacs to readers interested in agriculture then. Copies of Dr. Hess’s 1928 catalog appear almost weekly now online so someone must have found a stock of them. Nevertheless, I commend it for its panoramic photographic cover. Armour’s almanacs are among the most colorful, humorous, and informative of the decade. The 1921 issue has colorful pictures and a series of colored cartoons featuring one Spud Murphy, possibly the ancestor of Mr. Potato Head (and an exact contemporary of Mr. Peanut). (It greatly surprised my students, children of the French-Fry generation, to learn that farmers once had to be convinced that potatoes could be a good cash crop.) And as the decade drew to a close, numerous poultry suppliers were promoting the dream of financial independence through raising poultry. (This became such a cliché as to be used as the butt of several P. G. Wodehouse stories of the era.) The M. H. Arndt Manufacturing Company of Trenton, New Jersey, even titled its end-of-decade catalog "Heading for Independence" and showed our favorite, perfect, American family following a straight path toward a rising new day. Un-fortunately, they, like most Americans, were about to meet more obstacles en route to their goals then did Dorothy and her friends on the Yellow Brick Road. Eventually, after many obstacles, they, and others would reach their destination.