The Good Old Days
By . Simon and Schuster. $3.75.
PEOPLE may to a great extent be known by what they buy. Their purchases throw a fairly steady light on their tastes and habits, and from these one can make inferences as to the kind of people they are. Our population is still but little less than half rural, agriculture is still our greatest industry, the farmer is still the backbone of the nation, and rural people do their buying largely from mail-order houses. Therefore the mail-order catalogue is probably the best available index to the tastes and habits of something like 47 per cent of our people.
Such seems to be the logic of Mr. Cohn’s idea. He used to work for the Sears-Roebuck concern in Chicago, and has access to their file of catalogues which run back to the opening of their business in 1886. What he has done is to analyze the catalogues covering the period from 1905 to the present, and arrange his findings by decades against a background of events contributing to our national development.
A royal good job he has made of it. Here you can trace practically the whole course of America’s technological progress, and see the social effects produced at successive steps along that course. You can follow the multiplication of gadgets and see how the rural kitchen has been revolutionized, and how the focus of family pride has shifted from the parlor of 1905 to the bathroom of 1940. You can observe the unsuspected effects of a falling birth rate on certain lines ot industry and commerce; how, for instance, Sears’s advertisement of contraceptives will affect the future market for canes, slippers, armchairs, and woolen underwear. You can see the different directions taken by purchasing power in flush times and in depressions; the tall catalogue ot 1915, when the war boom was on, runs coo pages larger than the one of the preceding season. In respect of the arts also, you get an idea, for example, of the rate per annum at which musical people in the rural regions have been converted from performers into listeners; in 1905 the catalogue gave sixty pages to musical instruments, in 1915 twenty-seven, in 1925 twelve, and in 1935 eight pages. You can follow all the amusing changes of taste and style in hats, dress, decoration, pictures, household ornaments, jewelry, watches and clocks. A most interesting comparison also is to be made between the number and quality of books advertised in the catalogue of 1905 and in the catalogue of 1935.
Mr. Cohn writes lucidly and with feeling. He sees the catalogue as ‘a charming, sometimes picturesque, naïve, and often moving, account of how millions of plain folk have lived for five decades.’ This is true; one aspect of ‘the farmer’s wish-book’ reflects a good deal of naive pathos. Because Mr. Cohn sincerely feels and respects this emotional stress, his work has none of the glacial aridity of an orthodox sociological survey. He has an excellent wit and a still more excellent humor; his book is long, but we have not detected an overwritten paragraph, an over-pressed conclusion, or a dull line in it. His obiter dicta are wise, and often they are uncommonly acute. The reason, for instance, which he gives tor our being such inveterate ‘joiners’ without having ever developed a normal group life, is as sound as it is penetrating. He visits a gentle, dry, corrosive irony on various swindles and humbugs, mostly in the way of advertising. His treatment of General Harbord’s flatulent and futile sales talk concerning the radio is highly entertaining, and one notices that Sears’s own copy writers often do not come off any too well. The reader who takes this book in hand will read it more than once, and his interest in it will grow with each reading.