The End of Civilisation - 25 July 1997

I don’t know which cliché to avoid and which to fall back upon. “The end of an era” – that’s shopworn for centuries.

During the second war, we used to be told, “If we don’t fight Hitler, it will be the end of civilisation as we know it.”

Well, last Friday, the bell tolled and it sounded the end of civilisation as I (and I’m sure many of you) came to know it. In a simple, brutal phrase, last Friday FW Woolworth’s announced it was closing down all its 400 stores in the United States. Whether the paralysis is to spread to Europe, it didn’t say.

For once, some older people may be shocked to notice that I’m able to use a trade name without the risk of a scolding from the powers that be. To younger people, that sentence will probably be double Dutch.

But I went into journalism when – when and for many years thereafter – it was forbidden to use a trade name in an ordinary descriptive piece either in your newspaper, if it was a serious paper and not a rag, or over the air when the BBC was the air.

Once I covered the very rare event of a cricket match got up between Yale and Harvard. There were three spectators in a field until there bounced on to the scene, just to show that some corner of a foreign field is forever England, a parson carrying (it was a chilly spring day) carrying a Thermos. It never crossed my mind that in the very upright (in those days) Manchester Guardian, you could not outrage the readers by writing a trade name. I frankly had forgotten that "Thermos" was one, if I ever knew. But the alert AP Wadsworth, an editor never to be caught napping, saw that it was changed. In the published piece, what the parson was carrying was a "vacuumatic container". I must say my sentence sort of lost its swing.

Another time, I innocently wrote that someone applied (for some good reason) a smear of Vaseline. Old AP was again on the alert. What the man smeared in print was a dollop of "petroleum jelly".

Happily, that austere custom has died. Anyway, I would not be able to do this talk at all if I were forbidden to use trade names. So again, I remark to everybody over, say 45, the bell tolls and it tolls for thee. No more Woolworth’s.

They’re closing those ancient, incomparable discount stores for the most obvious reason: they’ve been losing money for years. Last year they reported an operating loss of $37 million.

Anyway, 117 years was a long life for any institution and, considering the revolution that’s happened to the business of making and marketing household necessities, it’s astounding that Woolworth's survived so long during a half-century in which discount stores were absorbed by larger chains, by shopping malls, by huge stores built not in town (since an actual majority of the population cease to live in cities) but on highways close to thriving suburbs.

And the same thing happened even to Woolworth’s bigger competitors, not to mention what one writer memorably dubs as, ‘hundreds of local chains that have faded into the collective memory of a nation warmly nostalgic for old stores, but not willing to shop in them anymore".

However, this is not to be a nostalgic piece. It’s to recall a special American impulse, of which Woolworth’s was a prime example.

Let’s recall something of the world in the year that Woolworth and several other bright boys started something new: 1879. I’m skipping, if you’ll excuse me, the enormous events recorded by all historians like the war between Chile and Bolivia, the founding of the Irish Land League to campaign for independence from Britain, the founding of Christian Science, the collapse of the Firth of Tay Bridge in a winter storm.

I’m thinking of America only, and of smaller things that would have a bigger influence on more people everywhere. So 1879. A Scottish American immigrant, Robert Gair, a paper bag maker, invented a machine to produce cheap cardboard cartons already cut and creased. It raised Robert Gair’s normal production of 50 paper bags an hour to 7,500 cartons.

A saloonkeeper in Dayton, Ohio, Jake Ritty, took a sea voyage for his health, and he noticed a device on the steamship that recorded the revolutions of the propeller and so gave an accurate daily record of the ship’s speed. Hmm, gave him an idea. He patented this idea as "Ritty’s incomparable cashier", the first cash register to keep a cumulative record of the day’s transactions, which later elevated a plate so both the clerk and the customer could see the figure.

An early electrical engineer thought the telephone shouldn’t remain a company luxury. A multiple switchboard, that would do it. First in Newhaven, Connecticut – it would make the telephone available to small stores, to families, perhaps soon to everybody. In 1879, there were 50,000 American telephones. By 1890, a quarter of a million.

In 1879, Brooklyn, New York, a dairy company delivers milk in bottles instead of measuring it from barrels into housewives’ jugs. Wow! It took over 30 years for the practice to start in England.

In December, one Thomas Edison announces he’s invented a light bulb that will burn for a thousand hours. To the jeers of the gas lighting experts and the intelligentsia, he says electric lighting will become so cheap that only the rich will be able to afford candles.

And in 1879 in a small town in upstate New York, a shop assistant, 27 years old, urged his boss to install a single counter at which all the goods were to be priced at five cents each. To pacify this lunatic, the shopkeeper agreed.

So this young Frank Woolworth borrowed from a businessman the vast sum of $400. He opened his own store in which everything was priced at five cents. It failed.

But the same lender liked Frank’s courage and staked him to a store in a Pennsylvania small town, which would, however, have two divisions of goods: one at five cents, another at ten cents. It was the first of its kind. It worked. Young Mr Woolworth had one ambition: to build a chain of stores where the poor and working people could find open-shelf self-service, everything to buy for a nickel or a dime. It came to be called the Five and Ten. It started with a five-cent fire shovel and went on to egg whips, pie plates, moustache cups, puzzles, clothes, locks and keys, galoshes, a soda fountain, chirping household pets, full meals, everything.

In 1913, Frank built the world’s tallest building, 60 storeys high. He died in 1919, leaving over a thousand Woolworth stores in the United States and hundreds more in other countries. He thought, as everybody did, it would go on forever.

What these half-dozen men had in common was not merely an inventive spirit. What I’d call a common impulse was the idea of enlarging the possessions that working people could afford.

The 35 years after the end of the Civil War – that’s to say, from 1865 to 1900 – was the golden time of American inventiveness; half a million patents granted. But it’s also true to say that many, if not most of them, successful or not, were attempts to do something that half a century later was best summed up in a sentence by a poor boy from Indiana who ran for president and lost against Franklin Roosevelt: Wendell Willkie. “It is the destiny of America,” he said, “to turn the luxuries of the rich into conveniences for the many.”

So George Eastman didn’t want to invent a camera that would make the Germans envious. He wanted to make a cheap family camera, and did it; and everywhere, in many languages, it was known as Ein Kodak. There was Isaac Singer’s cheap home sewing machine.

It’s worth remarking on that most of these what you might call popular inventors were originally poor – a one-room schoolhouse or none. Edison’s total education was three months in an elementary school.

They knew in the flesh what it was like to lack the finer necessities, so there was a special pride in (as Woolworth put it) “applying democracy to human needs and desires.”

Automobiles were for the rich. Is that so? Henry Ford invented the assembly line and made the first Volkswagen. Cheap cars for everybody.

An American clockmaker was just as appreciative as you are of the delicate workmanship of a Swiss watch, but what he wanted to do was to make a dollar watch. “Yes, but does it work?”, facetious Europeans would ask. It did.

Hotels were for the rich. So how about motor courts, later motels? Same with paper napkins. And now, with half the workforce women, frozen dinners, take-out food, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So what were first known as variety stores gave birth to Woolworth’s and then to bigger chains still, and more mail-order catalogues offering more and cheaper goods – cheaper than (if possible) the blessed Sears Roebuck catalogue, another casualty.

And later the deep freeze in every home eventually killed off the beloved soda fountain. You could make your own sundaes, parfaits, milk shakes.

And now the huge shopping malls on the highway are beginning to tremble. Computer systems are leading, at a breathless rate, to computer shopping. Soon tedious grandfathers will bore their kin with tearful memories of the days when they got in the car and drove off to the supermarket on the shopping mall on Highway 58.

In the meantime, there is no pause in the unstoppable movement, as Woolworth said, to “apply democracy to people’s desires”. This is a prospect that doesn’t alarm me. For one, what I’ve called the “American impulse” has lifted more millions out of a threadbare living and given them a better material life than all the generations before them.

So, on the demise of a famous one, I say let’s hear it for Frank Woolworth and Robert Gair and Jake Ritty and George Eastman.

And remember what the teacher said, "Never forget, children, that if it hadn’t been for Thomas Edison, you’d be watching television by candlelight.”

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