Session Abstract

Trash and Treasure:

The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950

Our panel explores three different aspects of a commercial realm that deals in things thrown away, given away, sold, lost, and abandoned. Although consumer scholarship covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasizes the influence of novelty and new, mass-produced products, the redistribution of used materials played an enormous and often overlooked role in the cultural and economic changes of this time. Whether transforming social aid, fueling the overall economy, rearranging expectations of domesticity, or molding identities, second-hand commerce was central to shaping modern industrial America. In return, the ways in which the business of used sales was conducted adjusted to a rapidly corporatizing capitalism.

The importance of primary consumerism has been a fruitful topic for historians for decades, but scholars continue to overlook the complex influence of pre-owned items on everything from politics to aesthetics. Only recently have historians such as Susan Strasser brought second-hand consumerism to fresh light. Our papers expand upon this territory, incorporating Strasser’s analyses of waste and re-use and the meanings of old and new into diverse topics. Specifically, this panel furthers nascent theories on the importance of second-hand markets by focusing on how they helped restructure urban racial landscapes, altered the face of American charity, and motivated personal desires.

By using antique and second-hand trades as a lens for understanding the politics and economy of preserving and redistributing American heritage, Alison Isenberg describes the how the recirculation of used goods affected racialized demographic transitions such as the Great Migration. Her work, as do all the papers on this panel to varying extents, focuses on dislodging declension narratives about aging goods while avoiding anachronistic positive values placed on recycling and conservation. Jennifer Le Zotte’s analysis of the origins of Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army shows how Christian-centered charitable organizations were able to commercialize the sale of personal discards and donations. By aligning thrift store services, work, and material goods with Protestant ideals of frugality, cleanliness, industriousness, and mass philanthropy, thrift store advocates compensated for the common association of used goods exchange with immorality, foreignness, and filth. Helen Sheumaker provides a look into how individually meaningful antique collecting was in the middle of the twentieth century by exploring the personal and professional writings, and fan mail of novelist, journalist, and avid collector Mabel Herbert Urner Harper. Fictional and real-life narrative expressions reveal a strong nexus between personal development, antique collecting, and interior design.

Susan Strasser is the ideal chair and commentator for this panel. Her seminal book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash serves as a jumping off point for the matters represented in these papers. Her work on housekeeping, as well as that on used consumerism, began topical approaches to American history that have yet to be exhausted.