| This dissertation concerns American children as cultural agents in the change from a producer culture to a consumer culture. The subject matter is the producing and marketing and designing of toys from 1890 to the present, focusing on toys generally, and to be consistent with distinctions in the industry, omitting costumes, board games, and hobby items from my work. Information is drawn from industrial journals and other standard sources.;The narrative starts with the traditional nineteenth-century toy shop, an institution of the producer culture, emphasizing character. At the beginning, there were two sources of manufactured toys: imports, mostly from Germany, and the productions of traditional toy shop. Increasingly, mass production displaced locally-made toys, and imports were largely replaced by domestic production at the time of World War I. Before the start of the twentieth century, new mass retail institutions--department stores, dime stores, and mail-order distributors--also replaced the traditional toy shop. In these institutions, children played two different cultural roles. First, they themselves were socialized into the consumer culture. Second, they acted as businesspeople's agents in manipulating adults to buy. In this way, they helped to expand the market for toys and homogenize the consumer culture.;National advertisers, too, involved children in their marketing as part of new, more manipulative selling techniques that emphasized personality rather than character. Marketers advertised directly to children. Copywriters also employed emotive images of children and childhood in advertisements geared to adults. As manufacturers found marketing and production considerations more and more difficult to separate, toymakers infused playthings with images of children, using youngsters to create fashionable playthings. The toy world eventually evolved into the television era, when marketing, advertising, production and play were finally completely combined into a functional whole.;Before World War I, businesspeople for the most part reacted to customers, and so consumers took the lead in forming the consumer culture. But by the 1920's, as businesspeople employed increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques, elites played an increasingly important role in shaping the culture. The toy industry provides evidence showing that this connection between marketing--in the form of merchandising, advertising, and design--and children did indeed exist. |
