Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s

IN 1929, THE PUBLISHERS OF TRUE STORY MAGAZINE RAN FULL-PAGE ADVERtisements in nation's major newspapers celebrating what they called the American Economic Evolution. Claiming be recipient of thousands of personal stories written by American workers for magazine's primarily working-class readership, they felt well placed report that since World War I, shorter working hours, higher pay and easy credit had created an economic millennium. Now that nation's workers enjoyed an equal opportunity consume, capital-labor war which has been going on now for upwards of three hundred had virtually ended. True Story claimed that twenty years ago, Jim Smith, who worked ten twelve hours a day in a factory and then returned home to his hovel and his woman and his brats, was likely resort strikes and violence when times got tough. Not so his modernday counterpart. Today, magazine asserted, Jim Smith drives home suburbs after a seven or eight hour day earning him three seven times as much as before, which helps pay for automobile, house and a myriad of other possessions. Now an upstanding member of middle class, Jim has learned moderation. Mass consumption had tamed his militance.1 Advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company shared True Story Magazine's confidence in homogenizing power of mass culture. In an issue of their own in-house newsletter devoted the New National Market, they too claimed that due standardized merchandise, automobiles, motion