What Goes 'Round Comes 'Round: Secondhand Clothing, Furniture, and Tools in Working-Class Lives in the Interwar United States

Working-class family economies in the interwar United States depended heavily on secondhand goods as one of many expedients to stretch insufficient resources.¹ Used items could offer an indirect entry to consumer culture, stretch a tight budget to supply comforts not otherwise available, provide both investment and use value, and enhance wage-earning possibilities. I examine here three main streams of circulation of secondhand goods: of clothing, which was primarily for its direct use; of such household goods as furniture, which served as investment goods; and of tools, which helped in making a living.

The United States entered what is usually regarded as the era of mass consumption in the interwar period, but the working-class majority tasted the joys of consumption in a very limited way. My forthcoming book, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar USA, centers on this contention. I originally set out to write a history of working-class consumption, hoping to find both evidence of working-class immersion in a national culture of abundance and documentation of distinct racial-ethnic patterns of consumption. I found neither. My book argues that, at least in the interwar United States, the glass of consumption was half empty rather than half full. Underemployment and unemployment ate significantly into working-class families' standard of living; insufficient and irregular income made life a difficult and often defeating struggle to supply the basic necessities and the occasional luxury. Far from finding the 1920s a time of prosperity and plenty for working-class families, I found strong threads of continuity between the 1920s and the 1930s. The difference between the two periods was one of degree rather than kind: the wolf may have howled at the door more persistently and loudly in the 1930s, but that howl was heard through the 1920s as well.² Also, I have found very limited evidence of group-specific patterns of household economy; some groups, in some places, turned more to one strategy than to another, but again the difference was one of degree rather than kind, and all drew on a common array of strategies. This finding goes against the grain of recent studies that have emphasized the specificity of the cultures and experiences of different groups, and indeed it confounds my own expectations. But the sources are clear on this point, and I have had to conclude that urban-industrial families throughout the country—at that moment in capitalist development—chose from a similar set of options and framed a similar array of responses. That said, I want to be very clear that I am not arguing that racial-ethnic differences did not matter. Race, especially, matters deeply in the United States, and in my sources I hear some condemn the racism of which they were targets and others spout racist abuse. To leap, however, from an understanding of racism to an assumption that race must shape every aspect of life is to essentialize what is in fact a socially constructed category. African American families, for example, do not forge family strategies based only on their African American-ness, but on the simultaneity of circumstances of race, gender, class, age, place, and time that confront them. During the 1920s and 1930s, proletarianization appears to have embedded European American and African American native-born and European- and Mexican-born immigrant families in material circumstances more similar than they had been in the past or would be again. As a result, they drew on a common and flexible range of strategies in meeting their material needs and wants.³

Working-class consumption was but one aspect of a complicated array of working-class economic activities, including wage earning, household production, market replacement, reciprocity, and market activity. I thus use the broader notion of the working-class family economy, a term that includes the range of decisions families made about earning and spending money as well as their efforts to avoid the money economy through a whole range of nonmarket activities. My concern is neither with absolute levels of...