A Social History of Creative Work: Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class

Reviewed by Emily Holloway

Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class is, at first gloss, a rigorously detailed labor history of a particular subset of white-collar workers in the 20th century. Clark’s deliberately narrow sectoral focus — industrial design, print media, and advertising — also incorporates the complexities of cultural production under specific intellectual and political conditions. These contextual factors are deftly synthesized with the fitful development of “the creative class.” Rich with a detailed accounting of both the internal political strife within white-collar unions and the pervasive anticommunist anxiety of postwar America, Clark recovers a set of significant accomplishments among white-collar labor activists in mass culture.

The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism
By Shannan Clark
Oxford University Press, 2020
608 pages

The title nods to both E.P. Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class and economist Richard Florida’s once-faddish urban development shibboleth.[1] This juxtaposition provides important insights into the project. The text interweaves the structural constraints of 20th-century American political economy with the formation of a burgeoning white-collar class, replete with play-by-plays of labor struggles and the shifting fortunes of leftist political ideology under the declension of Fordism. Clark’s focus on a very specific subset of white-collar workers deliberately joins labor history to intellectual history. The actual productive output of these industries both reflected and reproduced the changing priorities and values of the middle class, which cultivated new signifiers and practices through consumer capitalism. The nexus of creative practice and commercial primacy rendered this rapidly transforming sector of the middle class politically inchoate.

The selection of this narrow subset of workers allows Clark to intervene at multiple and overlapping levels of historical analysis. In addition to exploring the contested consolidation of white-collar middle-class identity under Fordism, the material output of these individuals offers insight into the complex interplay between mass cultural production and its social impacts, as consumer capitalism is deeply enmeshed in class structure, and thus labor politics. Clark’s ambitious project owes much to Michael Denning’s classic text, The Cultural Front, which recovered the aesthetic and cultural value of the Popular Front. The Making of the American Creative Class, however, focuses on the labor of mass consumer popular culture rather than the unique aesthetic contributions of leftist creatives. The industries investigated run on mass production and consumption to shape consumer capitalism, ones that simultaneously cultivate consumer desire while sedimenting class differentiation.

These sectors operate in a dense ecosystem of circulation. Consumer goods, both durable and non-durable, need to be marketed and sold; advertisements need platforms for dissemination; newspapers rely on ad revenue. Consumer capitalism’s explosive growth in the early 20th century was engendered by the easy availability of consumer credit, increased urban migration, and the emergence of a middle class increasingly defined by the type of salaried or waged work they engaged in. Gains in industrial productivity lowered costs, thus saturating the American market with an unprecedented variety of goods. Technological innovation transformed print media as type-setting and printing became vastly more efficient and mechanized, thus lowering printing costs and increasing the circulation of daily, weekly, and monthly publications. Advertisers capitalized on their increased access to consumer’s eyeballs, driving up the price of advertising space and eventually spending nearly $800 million in 1929. New media forms, such as broadcast radio, created new venues to reach customers. Advertising firms in New York, eager to pinpoint their spending more precisely, began hiring psychologists and statisticians to evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns in specific publications, further stratifying social groups to shape specific consumption habits and desires.

Among the more fascinating pieces of this history is the brief but influential story of the Design Laboratory, open between 1935 and 1939. Originally funded as part of the WPA, the Laboratory shaped a modern aesthetic that emphasized not only functionality and durability, but also a political economic sensibility premised on the value of social, rather than individual, benefits. Students were trained comprehensively in the craft of design, learning not only drafting techniques but also engaging in production using a vast range of media. In addition to vocational and design-oriented training, faculty and students developed a curriculum that included social theorists such as Thorstein Veblen and Lewis Mumford and modern aesthetes such as László Maholy-Nagy and Le Corbusier. The aesthetic premise — what Clark calls “functionalist modernism” — derived originally from the innovations and radical politics of the Bauhaus. But as these practices were taken up by students and faculty, who injected their work and approach with the solidaristic political spirit of the New Deal, industrial design transcended the individualism of the Bauhaus to embrace a broadly social politics. As Clark explains, contests over meaning and utility pitted elite arbiters of taste and culture against a burgeoning movement of cultural producers who were redefining the parameters of modernism. By 1937, once Congress had cut funding for the WPA, a hastily convened coordinating committee, led by William Friedman, brokered a sponsorship for the institution through the recently-founded Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT). This arrangement provided some new pedagogical and budgetary freedoms, but funding and strategic support limited the scope and longevity of the school’s mission. The following year, the school again reimagined itself as an accredited, tuition-charging institution, and administrators and board members worked to revitalize the school’s finances and future. Closed by 1940, the Design Laboratory nevertheless had a profound impact on American material culture. The committee’s announcement to close the school, despite acknowledging that the institution “was ‘technically dead’... much ‘that was most important of the school stays alive.’”[2]

Clark also explores the outsized role of advertising as a mediator between the producers and consumers of mass culture, noting the ways in which conservative business interests held outsized influence over content. Left-wing and even left-sympathetic or liberal publications had a difficult time securing ad placements due to political and ideological friction with corporate sponsors. Advertising agencies set the terms of consumer capitalism by metabolizing signifiers of taste and class into an endless variety of new and reinvented products. As advertisers developed and entrenched these standards of identity and class for a growing market of American consumers, agencies practiced labor arrangements that consistently destabilized their workers. Large firms grew larger, vertically integrating a spectrum of client services, research and focus group teams, and statistical experts while maintaining a staff of clerical and creative workers who were vulnerable to clients’ whims and, more importantly, their capital expenditures. Employee turnover was high, and Clark notes that in 1960, even full-time, salaried employees in advertising were 35% more likely than similar-tier workers in other related fields to have experienced unemployment during the previous year.[3] Even at the upper echelons of the creative class, labor flexibilization — the constriction or expansion of the workforce at a given firm depending on the availability of clients — introduced a measure of precarity and inconsistency for workers.

The intellectuals and social scientists of the postwar era, including C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith, underlined a sense of tentative optimism about the future of work and society in America, crafting facile diagnoses of the social and political character of the emergent white-collar class as a modern (structural) social group. Mass production of goods and culture, a hallmark of Fordism, created assumptions about future cycles of prosperity and stability; these were attractive abstractions for a generation of Americans eager to put the scarcity and uncertainty of the Depression and World War II behind them. Galbraith assumed that class conflict, a central concern for most Americans in the decades leading up to World War II, would be rendered moot by ceaseless and broad prosperity. Mills’ 1951 book White Collar asserted a prescriptive set of identifying social characteristics to white-collar workers, foregrounding a perceived political ambivalence. Society turned inward, and the individual, particularly the professional, office-bound individual, was an ascendent figure of American identity. In many ways, society and culture fragmented into a network of compartmentalized units, an arrangement visible at multiple scales, ranging from the single-family suburban household, to the family automobile, to narrowcasting in radio programs. Twentieth century liberalism’s notions of autonomy and individual rights were crucial to the expansion of consumer capitalism. For creative workers, this influenced the scope of labor solidarity and organizing but also the terms of creativity itself.

Clark’s usage of the “creative class” was what originally caught my eye when I learned of his book. Urbanists may recognize this term from Richard Florida’s widely challenged and ridiculed urban economic development thesis, which urged cities to attract tax-rich human capital — members of the professional-managerial class he coded as “creative workers” — by optimizing the conditions of urban life through access to cultural consumption and a socially liberal milieu. Clark cites Florida in his discussion of the intellectual lineage that defined the postwar creative class, and I find this thread (however unintentional) among the more complex and interesting premises of his book. The tension between individual and group identities among white-collar workers — both in their labor politics and in the work they produced — is contested over time, by different actors in unique historical contexts. Galbraith, Daniel Bell, and Mills vastly overstated the political ambivalence of their subjects as well as the structural resilience of the very terms of postwar prosperity. The stakes of these attitudes come into sharper focus towards the end of the book, as creative industries undergo the same symptoms of neoliberalization and deindustrialization as those in manufacturing: broken up into parts, bought and sold by corporate multinationals with short-term profit horizons; the threat of capital flight; and the application of technological innovations that limited labor’s leverage.

To Clark, the modes of cultural production and the social identity of its producers are inextricable. The unique historical conditions of Fordism — namely, the eponymous scale of mass production and consumption — are inextricable from the formation of class identity in this story. Although the labor history detailed here is a valuable contribution, a more subtle exploration of the intellectual linkages between scholars of the postwar white-collar class, anticommunist liberalism, and eventually, deindustrialization and the ascendence of neoliberalism deserves credit as well. The neoliberal subject — Florida’s creative class representative, the unit of human capital — is the outcome of a social structure that privileges individual creative expression, rewards competitive individualism in the workplace, and jealously guards a precarious social hierarchy to dominate less powerful groups. In their reluctance or inability to recognize the actual political struggles that were underway among the white-collar class, social scientists such as Mills and Galbraith transformed the “mental work” of white-collar industries into a personal identity, one done “for fulfillment and not solely for a wage.”[4] The personal satisfaction derived from engaging in creative mental labors, in addition to the labor-saving efficiencies of new technologies, could transcend the struggle over the means of production and the distribution of wealth, according to Daniel Bell.

Women played an active role in workplace organizing in the culture industries. Despite their numbers in the ranks of office workers, female workers endure greater precarity than even their most expendable male cohorts. In addition to dramatic pay and representation disparities, particularly in senior management roles, overt sexual discrimination and harassment were pervasive. Clark details the formal and informal tactics of pro-union women, which, in addition to picket lines, also included micropolitical dissents such as mass water cooler breaks designed to disrupt the gears of production and challenge the spatial atomization of modern offices. Later efforts at workplace organizing, particularly during the advent of neoliberal restructuring in the 1970s, centered more around the core demands of identitarian second-wave feminism than the complex intermingling of gender, race, and class that characterized midcentury labor organizing. Minorities barely figure into Clark’s analysis, an omission he attributes to their almost total non-representation in major media firms in the postwar era.

The historical accounting Clark provides comes at a particularly apt time. Organizing efforts across media spheres, including both traditional print media outlets such as The New Yorker as well as radio’s 21st century renaissance in podcasting, have shifted into public discourse more visibly over the past year. The history of these industries indicates that these struggles are nothing new. As the structural constraints of cultural production in media, namely the reliance on freelance labor, have become even more acute, Clark’s recovery of the creative class as a nearly coherent labor movement has a renewed salience. Drawing attention, again and again, to concrete instances of social consciousness among white-collar workers, The Making of the American Creative Class provides readers of labor, intellectual, and, to a certain extent, urban histories with a skillful synthesis of the structural and ideological tensions that inflect the media of mass culture.

Emily Holloway is a PhD student in Geography at Clark University. She studies racial capitalism, financialization, and the geographic linkages between the plantation complex and the Brooklyn waterfront.

[1] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

[2] Shannan Clark, The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 311.

[3] Clark, 178.

[4] Clark, 24.