The Age of Class Distinction and Craft Production
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Unknown
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August 10, 2018
The automobile entered American society in the late 19th century, a time of economic crisis and class conflict with which the vehicle was inevitably associated. The auto marked out these increasingly contentious class divisions, for its high price ($600 to $7500) put ownership beyond the reach of all but the high bourgeoisie. These prices were the result of a skilled, craft labor process, in which the aesthetic appearance of these cars was as important as their mechanical function. Their bodies, in particular, were works of the coach-building art, produced in elaborate styles to match the tastes of the upper classes. Not only the production but also the use of these early cars solidified their association with class privilege. In the United States, where freedom had always been conflated with geographic movement, autos gave their wealthy owners the freedom of a rapid, flexible and individual form of mobility, unencumbered by the collective regimentation of railway timetables and itineraries. But these beautiful, expensive vehicles were more often used not for practical transport but for leisure activities and public ostentation. They became an essential accessory of the leisure class, which used them for touring, racing and parading down fashionable boulevards. Consequently, the automobile quickly became defined in American culture as an instrument of freedom and leisure, and a symbol of the wealth that removed an entire class of people from the modern concerns of work and functional effort. The lower classes reacted to this symbolism with hostility and resentment. Farmers resented the ‘freedom’ of wealthy auto owners to intrude into rural communities, not only for the damage they did to land and livestock but also because they symbolized urban big-business interests, whose abuses caused radical agrarian protests during this period. Urban workers also resented bourgeois auto mobilists on city streets, where they disrupted street life and symbolized this class’s arrogant disregard for workers’ lives and livelihoods. At the same time, workers envied this possession of the rich, as indicated by the crowds that were attracted to movie theaters by early films featuring auto races and parades. In 1906 Woodrow Wilson worried about the class-divisive effect of the car, stating: ‘Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles’ (New York Times, 1906: 12). Sean O’Connell (1998: 11–42, 77–111) finds similar meanings of class privilege, leisure and freedom of mobility in the early period of the car in British society. These early cultural meanings of automobility, conditioned by the car’s production and use, are congruent with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of consumption as class distinction, developed in his book Distinction(1984). Building an elegant and subtle structural theory on the simple conception of consumer goods as status symbols, he argues that cultural objects carry socially constructed meanings that testify to an individual’s class position. But the symbolic connection between economic class and cultural taste is not direct but mediated by an embodied habitus, a set of durable predispositions and ways of seeing the world. Thus, for example, the ample economic capital of the bourgeoisie determines a life removed from mundane material needs and the functions of things. This life determines a habitus that inclines members of this class toward cultural goods that reveal this distance from necessity by their formalization and aestheticization. By choosing goods that privilege aesthetic form over material function, the bourgeoisie unconsciously indicates that it has sufficient resources to be unconcerned with mundane functions and needs. The bourgeoisie’s formal-ized culture distinguishes it from the working class, whose consumer goods are focused exclusively on immediate material needs and gratification. Lack of economic capital means that workers have to be constantly concerned with meeting material necessities, which ingrains in them a habitus that inclines them to goods that privilege material function over aesthetic form. Thus, cultural consumption marks off class identity, and consuming the ‘legitimate culture’ of the bourgeoisie brings the additional resource of cultural capital or honorability, which disguises and justifies the economic capital on which the class system rests. Cultural capital testifies to refined tastes and creates the illusion that its upper-class possessors are personally superior to others and thus deserving of their superior economic resources. As Bourdieu puts it, culture symbolizes class, but in such a way as to cause a misrecognition of its real basis. Early automobiles clearly conferred cultural capital on the high bour-geoisie in American society by testifying to its removal from necessity. The beautiful forms of their craft-built bodies made it clear that these expensive vehicles were not merely mundane machines of transportation but also works of art, testifying to refined cultural tastes. And their use in leisure activities testified to a life free from the mundane, material concerns of earning a living. Another fact of this early period of automobility explained by Bourdieu’s theory is the diffusion of ownership. Bourdieu argues that in an attempt to accumulate cultural capital for themselves, members of the petty bourgeoisie or middle class seek to appropriate the prestigious goods of the bourgeoisie. But lacking both the economic means and the cultural habitus of the latter, they settle for cheap imitations, which seem satisfactory to them but give away their inferior resources to their class betters. This process of class imitation explains the diffusion of autos to middle-class professionals and managers by the first decade of the 20th century in the United States. Anxious to mark their own growing prosperity, these petty bourgeois borrowed the automotive symbol of wealth, leisure and freedom. This growing but less prosperous market for cars stimulated automakers to add less expensive models to their product lines. Finding few lower limits to the demand for automobility, a few visionary producers like Ford and Olds were stimulated to pioneer mass production. In 1908 Ford Motor Company introduced its inexpensive Model T, and over the course of the next two decades pioneered a production process of specialized machines and assembly lines that brought the price of the car down within reach of the rising incomes of most of the petite bourgeoisie and even the top strata of the working class. In Britain, however, the advent of mass production seems to have been impeded by a class system more rigid in both economic and cultural boundaries, leading automakers to shun standardized pro-duction for fear it would undermine the distinction of auto ownershipn(O’Connell, 1998: 18–38). Mass-produced American cars were clearly distinguished from the grand luxury makes driven by the rich. But initially these differences did not seem to concern their buyers. Ownership of a car of any kind was still sufficiently rare to constitute a status symbol in itself. But as mass produc-tion spread cars further down the class hierarchy, mere ownership lost its ability to convey distinction. Increasingly the type of car owned conveyed status, and the simple, functional, mass-produced cars were clearly degraded and stigmatized relative to the luxury makes. The latter became the true mark of automotive distinction, testifying to the great wealth and refined tastes of their high-class owners. Their quantitative superiority in size and power immediately marked them off from mass-produced cars. But the refined eye also noticed qualitative differences in aesthetics and mechanics. The luxury classics, because of superior engineering and careful hand-fitting, were mechanically tighter and drove more smoothly. Their engines ran quietly, their transmissions shifted effortlessly and their brakes functioned at a touch, creating a refined, relaxed driving experience befit-ting the ostentatious ease characteristic of the upper-class habitus. The aesthetics of these cars, however, denied and negated their mechanical function in the name of art. Hundreds of hours of craft labor were lavished on their wooden bodies, which were molded into curving, often rococo forms. And their lustrous surfaces were finished with up to twenty coats of slow-drying varnish paint. The resulting cars were unified, elegant works of art, which raised the mundane function of transportation to a formal, aesthetic experience, testifying to the removal from necessity conveyed by great wealth. The mass-produced cars, by contrast, were marked by a mundane concern for function and efficiency, which characterize working-class consumption, according to Bourdieu. The mass-production process was designed to produce simple, functional cars as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and these criteria were painfully obvious in the appearance and operation of its products. Cheap engineering and quick assembly led to loud, rough-running engines, laborious transmissions, and vibrating frames and bodies. These cars required considerable labor to drive, testifying to their owners’ more physical occupations. Their fragmented, unintegrated appearance also testified to a hurried, unskilled labor process that wasted little time on fit and finish. The bodies were rigidly rectilinear and flat, for curved panels created problems for machines. And the drab, unimaginative black finishes, dictated by quick enameling, spoke of a lack of concern for aesthetic variety. Everything about these cars symbolized the immediate concern for cost-cutting efficiency and function that characterized the lives of classes with few resources to waste on luxury. In contrast to the luxury classics, these cars were seen in the 1920s as degraded and stigmatizing. While Ford’s Model T was welcomed in the 1910s as an instrument of democracy, bringing automobility to the masses, by the 1920s it was commonly ridiculed as ugly and poorly built. One contemporary joke asked why a Model T was like a mistress. The answer: because you hate to be seen on the streets with one. In this early period of automobility, qualitative differences in cars symbolized and legitimated not merely the inequality of class but the inequality of gender as well. In both the United States (Scharff, 1991) and Britain (O’Connell, 1998), automobile production and use were influenced by the gender ideology of separate spheres. In general, automobiles were defined as masculine, both because they provided mobility in the public sphere and because they were utilitarian and mechanical objects of produc-tion. Women were supposed to confine themselves to the private, domestic sphere and to the nonutilitarian concerns of consumption and aesthetics.
Consequently, car ownership and operation were considered culturally appropriate mainly for men. However, even when women in this early period gained access to automobility, gender ideology segregated them in a different type of automobile, the electric car. Gasoline-powered cars were said to be too smelly, noisy, powerful, and difficult to operate and maintain for women. Cars driven by electric motors were considered more appropri-ate for women, for they were quieter, cleaner and less mechanical. The major limitation of electric cars – their short range of travel between battery charges was held to be unproblematic for women, since they were forbid-den to stray far from home anyway. When a combination of women’s demands and gas automakers’ self-interest finally brought the death of electric cars, gender ideology was rein-scribed within the market for gas cars. The larger, more luxurious, higher-priced cars, with their concerns for aesthetics and comfort, were defined as more feminine, while the smaller, cheaper, mass-produced cars, with their concerns for utility and efficiency, were defined as masculine (Scharff, 1991: 49–58). So there was a definite superimposition of class and gender connotations in the culture of early automobility. And this was not only because women with more income were more likely to drive than those with less. Bourdieu (1984: 382–3, 402–4) recognizes a cultural basis for this confluence, arguing that class distinctions are naturally gendered. In general, the bourgeoisie is considered more feminine, because both the men and women of this class are removed from the realm of physical production and emphasize aesthetics and form. By contrast, the working class as a whole is defined as more masculine, due to its involvement in physical work and unconcern for beauty. Consequently, during this period the distinction between luxury cars and mass-produced cars served simultaneously as a class and a gender marker, legitimating both inequalities.
