Apart from the regular bombardment of the senses through advertising and media portrayal of life-as-it-should-be-lived, corporate-government initiatives are undertaken on an enormous scale to shape consumer tastes. One dramatic example is the “Los Angelizing” of the US economy, a huge state-corporate campaign to direct consumer preferences to “suburban sprawl and individualized transportâas opposed to clustered suburbanization compatible with a mix of rail, bus, and motor car transport,” Richard Du Boff observes in his economic history of the United States, a policy that involved “massive destruction of central city capital stock” and “relocating rather than augmenting the supply of housing, commercial structures, and public infrastructure.” The role of the federal government was to provide funds for “complete motorization and the crippling of surface mass transit”; this was the major thrust of the Federal Highway Acts of 1944, 1956, and 1968, implementing a strategy designed by GM chairman Alfred Sloan. Huge sums were spent on interstate highways without interference, as Congress surrendered control to the Bureau of Public Roads; about 1 percent of the sum was devoted to rail transit. The Federal Highway Administration estimated total expenditures at $80 billion by 1981, with another $40 billion planned for the next decade. State and local governments managed the process on the scene.
The private sector operated in parallel: “Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles) to be dismantled and replaced with GM buses...In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in U.S. district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter and fined $5,000.” By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry. The federal spending helped keep the economy afloat. Eisenhower's fears of “another Depression setting in after the Korean War” were allayed, a US Transportation Department official reported. A congressional architect of the highway program, John Blatnik of Minnesota, observed that “It put a nice solid floor across the whole economy in times of recession.” These government programs supplemented the huge subsidy to high technology industry through the military system, which provided the primary stimulus and support needed to sustain the moribund system of private enterprise that had collapsed in the 1930s.
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The general impact on culture and society was immense, apart from the economy itself. Democratic decision-making played little role in this massive project of redesigning the contemporary world, and only in marginal respects was it a reflection of consumer choice. Consumers made choices no doubt, as voters do, within a narrowly determined framework of options designed by those who own the society and manage it with their own interests in mind. The real world bears little resemblance to the dreamy fantasies now fashionable about History converging to an ideal of liberal democracy that is the ultimate realization of Freedom.
The primitive people to whose needs we minister also commonly lack self-awareness, and need a little help to discover what they really want. The efforts of the Jesuits who sought to raise their Amerindian charges from “their natural condition of rudeness and barbarism...were first, and very wisely, directed to the creation of wantsâthe springs of human activity,” in which these creatures were so sorely lacking, Hegel learnedly explained. A century later, the US proconsul in Haiti, Financial Adviser Arthur Millspaugh, observed that “the peasants, living lives which to us seem indolent and shiftless, are enviably carefree and contented; but, if they are to be citizens of an independent self-governing nation, they must acquire, or at least a larger number of them must acquire, a new set of wants”âwhich the advertising industry will be happy to stimulate, and US exporters will generously fulfill.
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Abolition of slavery raised in a sharp form the problem of creating wants, a problem that was addressed over a much longer period as peasants were driven towage labor in the early stages of industrialization. Given the suddenness of the transition in the case of abolition, the problem had to be faced squarely, and with self-awareness. Thomas Holt has an interesting study of the case of Jamaica, where after a slave revolt, the British rulers abolished slavery in 1834. The problem was to ensure that the plantation system would be maintained without essential change. Officials understood that freedmen must be prevented from relapsing “into barbarous indolence.” “Should things be left to their natural course,” Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg observed, “labour would not be attracted to the cultivation of exportable produce,” meaning sugar. He therefore urged a variety of government measures to prevent freed slaves from acquiring the ample fertile lands then available, liberal doctrine notwithstanding. Another colonial official recognized that more is needed: the creation of “artificial wants,” which “become in time real wants.” As abolition was being prepared, a British Parliamentarian observed (1833) that “To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came...to be necessaries. This was the sort of progress the negroes had to go through, and this was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject in their period of probation” after emancipation. Otherwise, “they would hardly have any inducement to labour,” a high-ranking colonial official, Governor Charles Metcalfe, later observed (1840). By such means, another official noted, it would be possible to attain the desired end: “to change a slavish multitude into an orderly and happy peasantry,” performing essentially the same tasks as under slavery, while the “slave driving oligarchy” becomes “a natural upper class.”
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The same problem was faced by the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in its Central American plantations. Under conditions of free labor, workers had to be prevented somehow from retreating to a self-sustaining economy, no simple matter. People chose to work “only when forced to and that was not often, for the land would give them what little they needed,” an UFCO historian wrote in 1929. To overcome the problem, UFCO sought to instill consumer values, recognizing that “The desire for goods...is something that has to be cultivated.” The company was able to “arouse desires by advertising and salesmanship,” the same historian wrote approvingly; this had “its effect in awakening desires,...the same effect as in the United States,” where, as industry knew well, “desires” had to be artificially stimulated and shaped. The newly-awakened desiresâfor silk stockings instead of cotton, expensive Stetson hats and “a flashy silk shirt while their feet were bare,” and so onâcould then be satisfied at UFCO stores. The device was “repeatedly abused” by the company, its official historian concedes, as goods were sold “at outrageous prices to the workersâall too frequently on credit,” driving them on “a straight road to peonage.”
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The problems had been addressed on a different scale in opening China to the West. Again, it was not easy. A British mission was admitted to Beijing in 1793, offering samples of virtually everything Britain could produce. It was “the most elaborate and expensive diplomatic initiative ever undertaken by a British government,” John Keay writes in his history of the East India Company, which held its monopoly on trade with China until well into the 19th century. The Emperor graciously accepted the offerings as “Tribute from the Kingdom of England,” commending the “respectful spirit of submission” of the British emissary. There would be no trade however: “Our celestial empire possesses all things in prolific abundance,” the Emperor informed him, though “I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea.” European merchants made inroads in the south, but were blocked elsewhere by imperial power.
One commodity for which Britain did find a market was Bengali opium. By the early 19th century, the East India Company's revenues from opium sales to China were second only to land revenue, “showing profits high enough both to stifle any moral scruples felt by the British and to negate the prohibitions frequently invoked by the Chinese,” Keay writes. A few years later China sought to halt the flow, now truly offending British moral scruples. Pleading the virtues of free trade, Britain forced China to open its doors to lethal narcotics, exploiting the great superiority in violence that so revived the spirits of British jingoists during the 1991 Gulf War. “It took the construction and despatch of an ironclad steamship, the
Nemesis
, to reduce the Central Kingdom to reason,” military historian Geoffrey Parker comments sardonically: the guns of the
Nemesis
“managed to destroy, in just one day in February 1841, nine war-junks, five forts, two military stations and a shore battery in the Pearl River,” and China was soon able to enjoy the benefits of liberal internationalism. The US sought to match the privileges that Britain gained, also pleading high principle. China's refusal to accept opium from Britain's Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of “love thy neighbor” and “an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations,” while missionaries lauded the “great design of Providence to make the wickedness of men subserve his purposes of mercy toward China, in breaking through her wall of exclusion, and bringing the empire into more immediate contact with western and christian nations.”
In such ways, Britain succeeded in creating new wants in China, much as the US does today as it compels Asian countries, on pain of severe trade sanctions, to admit US-grown lethal narcotics that kill perhaps 50 to 100 times as many people a year as all hard drugs combined in the United States, and to advertise to open new markets, particulary women and children.
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3. Indian Removal and the Vile Maxim
The problem of driving an awareness of their true wants into the heads of “rude barbarians” also beset the US government in the course of its program of Indian removal and annexation. The most striking instance, perhaps, arose in the 1880s, as Washington prepared to rescind the solemn treaties recognizing ownership of Eastern Oklahoma by the Five Civilized Tribes. The Indian Territory had been granted to these nations in perpetuity after they had been brutally expelled from their traditional homes under an 1835 “treaty” that several Indian leaders were forced to accept, recognizing that “they are strong and we are weak”; “We were all opposed to selling our country east,” the signers wrote to Congress, condemning the US government for “making us outcasts and outlaws in our own land, plunging us at the same time into an abyss of moral degradation which was hurling our people to swift destruction.” For the English settlers, peace treaties had a special meaning, explained by the Council of State in Virginia in the 17th century: when the Indians “grow secure uppon the treatie, we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, &: cutt downe theire Corne.” The concept survives to the present.
The 1835 treaty replaced earlier ones, going back to 1785, when the newly liberated colonies forced a treaty on the Cherokees (who had, not surprisingly, supported the British in the revolutionary war), taking lands held by the Cherokees under earlier treaties while stating that Congress “want none of your lands, nor anything else which belongs to you.” This was a “humane and generous act of the United States,” the US representative declared. In 1790, George Washington assured the Cherokees that “In future you cannot be defrauded of your lands”: the new government “will protect you in all your just rights...The United States will be true and faithful to their engagements.” President Jefferson added that “I sincerely wish you may succeed in your laudable endeavors to save the remnant of your nation by adopting industrious occupations, and a government of regular law. In this you may always rely on the counsel and assistance of the United States.” In the years that followed, settlers encroached on Indian territory and new treaties were dictated, imposing further cessions of land. In what remained, a successful agricultural society was established, with textile manufacture from 1800, schools, printing presses, and a well-functioning government that was much admired by outsiders. A report submitted to the War Department in 1825 gave a “glowing description of the Cherokee country and nation at the time,” Helen Jackson writes in her exceptional (in many ways) 19th century history of Indian removal, quoting extensive passages of praise for the advanced civilization that the Cherokees had developed and the “republican principles” on which it was based. Meanwhile, the leading thinkers of Europe lectured on the strange lack of “psychic power” that caused the Indians to “vanish” and “expire as soon as Spirit approached” with the European presence.
However impressive, progress was being made by the wrong people, who once again stood in the way of the advance of “progress” in the Politically Correct sense of the term. Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 was followed by the imposed treaty of 1835, in which the signers relinquished all claims of the Civilized Nations to their lands east of the Mississippi. Jackson was deeply moved by his generosity in “having done my duty to my red children”; “if any failure of my good intention arises, it will be attributable to their want of duty to themselves, not to me.” He was not only granting “these children of the forest” an opportunity “to better their condition in an unknown land” as “our forefathers” did, but even paying “the expense of his removal,” an act of “friendly feeling” that “thousands of our own people would gladly embrace” if only it were extended to them.