White-Collar Work, the Culture Industries, and the Origins of the Creative Class

Chapter 1 surveys the growth of the white-collar workforce during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the related development of the culture industries centered in New York. The fundamental relationships that linked advertisers to the media took shape during these years, as manufacturers’ need to reach potential consumers fueled the expansion of existing newspapers and magazines, quickly dominated the new technology of radio, and pushed firms to become more attentive to the design and appearance of products. Even as the culture industries swelled to meet the imperatives of consumer capitalism, economic inequality constrained consumer demand, contributing to the onset of the Great Depression. Although business interests attempted to defend capitalist principles and to maintain their control over the advertising and media enterprises, the severity and duration of the Depression incited radical critiques of both the working conditions within the culture industries and the content that they produced.

Creativity and Consumer Capitalism in the Affluent Society

Chapter 7 explores how the ideal of creativity evolved within the postwar culture industries, with a particular focus on developments in advertising and industrial design. Following the defeat of the Popular Front, many culture workers from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s came to believe that their rising affluence set them in a new realm of freedom beyond necessity. Nonetheless, the ethos of creativity in postwar America clashed with the forces of consumer capitalism that still constrained the autonomy of culture workers. This tension was particularly evident in the creative revolution that swept New York’s advertising industry during the 1960s, but, as the chapter shows, it also influenced the evolution of industrial design theory and practice during the heyday of postwar prosperity.

Epilogue: New York’s Culture Industries in the Twilight of Fordism

The book’s epilogue surveys how the economic dislocations of the 1970s and 1980s resulted in substantial long-term changes for both America’s culture of consumer capitalism and for those who labored in New York to produce it. Inflation and unemployment hobbled the economy, heralding a new age of rising inequality. This crisis in mass purchasing power coincided with the fracturing of the mass market for consumer goods that advertisers and the media had conjured into existence since the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, urban decline, financialization, and an increased hostility to unions by employers and the government added to the difficulties and challenges that culture workers in New York’s television, newspaper, advertising, and book publishing sectors encountered during this transitional phase in the history of consumer capitalism and the history of white-collar labor.

New York’s White-Collar Unions during Wartime and Reconversion

Chapter 5 refocuses the narrative on the experiences of white-collar workers employed within New York’s culture industries between 1941 and 1947. As economic conditions improved rapidly with the mobilization for war, the chronic underemployment and precariousness of work during the Depression gave way to the tightest labor market of the twentieth century. Wartime conditions facilitated union organizing even as they restricted unionists’ range of permissible collective action, leading white-collar unionists to support the social consumerism of the Office of Price Administration. The resurgence of unionism occurred within the context of a seismic shift toward a more equal distribution of income and wealth in the United States, which only intensified the political polarization of white-collar workers. In addition, this chapter also highlights the continued vibrancy of Popular Front labor feminism during the 1940s and women’s profound influence on the surge in white-collar organizing.

The Emergence of White-Collar Unionism in New York’s Culture Industries

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

The Cultural Deindustrialization of New York

Chapter 8 examines New York’s publishing and broadcasting sectors, which underwent significant deindustrialization during the postwar period. Even as intellectuals and social commentators heralded the rising tide of affluence, supposedly epitomized by white-collar workers engaged in cultural production, in fact tens of thousands employed in the city’s culture industries experienced considerable economic insecurity and inequality. The production of primetime television entertainment largely left the city for Southern California during the 1950s, and attempts during the 1960s at revitalizing New York as a production center were unsuccessful. The structural crisis of the city’s print media led to the closing of multiple daily newspapers during the mid-1960s, followed a few years later by major magazines like Life. Although a new wave of feminist activists combatted workplace discrimination as well as sexist media content, the weakened position of unions and the more general economic retrenchment of the 1970s limited their gains.

The Cold War in New York’s Culture Industries

Chapter 6 examines the impact of the domestic Cold War on white-collar workers in New York’s culture industries. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated during the late 1940s, anticommunists’ attacks on the Popular Front and its supporters within the culture industries became more intense and more effective. Changes in labor law targeted unions like the United Office and Professional Workers of America that had procommunists among the leadership, while congressional investigations and blacklisting ruined the careers of numerous writers, artists, and other culture workers who had strongly backed the Popular Front. By the 1950s, the unions in the city’s culture industries were weakened or destroyed from the onslaught, diminishing the options for workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design to fight for improved working conditions and greater creative autonomy.

Challenging the Culture of Consumer Capitalism

Chapter 3 explores the white-collar insurgents’ efforts to create viable alternatives to the culture of consumer capitalism. These impulses found expression in new media ventures that were launched in New York between 1936 and 1940, including Consumers Union, the advertising-free daily tabloid newspaper PM, the weekly newsletter In Fact, and the weekly photo-journalistic magazine Friday. Through these initiatives, radicalized culture workers propagated the Popular Front’s vision of social consumerism by encouraging Americans to purchase union-made goods, participate in consumer cooperatives, harbor deep skepticism toward advertising claims, use graded or generic goods instead of typical branded goods when possible, and demand an increase in the public provisioning of goods and services. In addition, these endeavors also provided writers, artists, and other members of the creative class with opportunities for greater autonomy in their work.

Introduction: The Labor of Culture

This introduction provides an overview of the The Making of the American Creative Class. It opens with a vignette narrating the successful unionization by white-collar workers at the Manhattan headquarters of the CBS network during the mid-1940s, which was exemplary of the larger movement of culture workers in mid-twentieth century New York that organized to challenge both the managerial prerogatives and ideological imperatives of consumer capitalism. The introduction also elucidates the book’s central premise, which is that its historical subjects—New York’s white-collar workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design—were at the intersection of two major trends in the twentieth-century United States: the expanding production and circulation of a pervasive culture of consumer capitalism, and the transformation of the middle class from a social grouping of proprietors and independent professionals to one comprised primarily of salaried employees.

Designing Radicalism: The Popular Front, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Problem of Patronage

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design Laboratory, which opened in 1935 in New York City as the country’s first comprehensive school of modernist design. Initiated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Laboratory attracted left-leaning faculty and students who disapproved of the streamlined style that typified much of the material culture of consumer capitalism at the time. In contrast, they developed a functionalist modernism that reflected their social-democratic ideals of utility, affordability, and sustainability. White-collar unions in New York as well as Consumers Union promoted this aesthetic of social consumerism as well. Public patronage for cultural initiatives like the Design Laboratory proved unreliable, however, especially as the federal government turned its attention from the Great Depression to the Second World War.