Tender is the Night Read Online Free Page A

cent between 1923 and 1929, corporate profit rose in the same period by 62 per cent, and corporate dividends by 65 per cent. The reason for this may be glossed in two terms, ‘centralization’ and ‘standardization’. Mergers were endemic, particularly in the fields of electricity and banking. Even as the energy that drove industrial capital centralized, so the credit that financed expansion passed into fewer and fewer hands; by 1929, 1 per cent of the banking facilities of the country controlled over 46 per cent of the nation’s banking resources.
    The net effect of centralization was an increasing rationalization of resources, and with it fresh fears of an excess capacity. To ensure continuous and full use of their accumulations firms had to move into new markets and develop new lines. Each expansion put greater strain on the running of production, and a managerialrevolution, coupled with the multiplication of national distribution systems, simply fuelled the cause of standardized and efficient administration.
    By the 1920s ‘administration’ was gargantuan in ambition: as scientific management and technological innovation guaranteed that expanding and incorporating capital could produce cheaply, advertising sought to monitor and create market needs. Indeed, as early as 1843 one New York copywriter claimed:
    Advertising has to deal with the greatest principles underlying the relation of man to man … It is the medium of communication between the world’s greatest forces – demand and supply. It is a more powerful element in human progress than steam or electricity. (Quoted by Frank Presbrey 341).
    By 1920 it was plain that only by controlling desire could corporate capital reproduce itself. As Stuart Ewen puts it, the ‘captain of industry’ had to become the ‘captain of consciousness’ if his accumulations were to survive; between 1900 and 1930 national advertising revenues increased thirteenfold.
    Statistics can indicate the quantity of change but miss the qualitative shift. What one witnesses between 1900 and 1930 is a shift in economic emphasis from ‘accumulation’ to ‘reproduction’ characteristic of the age of late capitalism (Mandel 245). By 1900 the accumulated capital existed; the real issue was reproduction – how to produce sufficient profit to support that accumulation. Neither Taylor’s time and motion studies nor Ford’s flow production in and of themselves offer adequate protection, because high productivity can yield the necessary profit only if the markets are primed to consume what has been produced.
    Arguably, consumers are the most important product of late capitalism: they are the primary machine without which ‘the very play time of the people’ could not be ‘run … into certain moulds’ (Lynd 491):
    Consumption is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is admitted today to be the greatest idea that America has given to the world; the idea that the workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers … Pay them more, sell them more, prospermore is the equation. (Christine Frederick,
Selling Mrs Consumer
(1929), quoted by Ewen 22)
    In the words of Paula Fass, analysing collegiate youth in the twenties, ‘the big sell had become synonymous with America’s contribution to Western Civilization’ (Fass 257). Selling required high levels of advertising and credit.
    All this may seem some distance from the ‘richly incrusted’ niceties of Dick Diver’s mannered spaces. Although his quasi Victorian interiors at the Villa Diana and the clinic certainly manifest conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, they cannot guarantee a high turn-over in consumption, and positively militate against a truly mass market for the items that they contain. Those items are ‘solid’, even as the manners that surround them are