Jeffrey L.
Meikle
Into the Fourth Kingdom: Representations
of Plastic Materials, 1920-1950
Plastic became a household material in America—
and thereby a household word—during the years
between the world wars. From the vantage point of
the end of the century, however, it is difficult to
recapture the physical textures of everyday life into
which plastic first emerged as a material presence
during the Depression years. Although plagued by
economic collapse and genuine human miser)', that
era now seems the last capable of supporting a
doggedly optimistic, even Utopian vision innocent of
the horrors of nuclear war, clinically efficient
genocide, and technological self-pollution. A post-
modern or post-progressive failure of nerve has
invested those years with a nostalgia that attains
expression even in the popular medium of film.
Images of that time come filtered through the haze of
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Chinatown (1974); the
troubling future visions of Blade Runner (1982) or
Brazil (1985) extrapolate from gleaming world's
fair pylons and bleak Hoovervilles; the ultimate
urban hell is Batman's Gotham City (1989), where
darkly exaggerated art-deco canyons reminiscent of
Hugh Ferriss enclose stylized interiors whose cold
pastels and unnatural highlights suggest the touch of
the colourizer. However ominous these environ-
ments, they are somehow comfortingly familiar. As
the millennium wanes, the sense of a material past
becomes ever more confused with these pastiches
created from the shards of the century's popular
culture. Few observers can avoid subtle corruption
by such pastiches.' When style and design become
markers of a flawed sense of historicity, it is not
surprising that plastic in turn becomes a near fetish,
its actual history hard to recover. After all, plastic did
emerge during the 1930s as a frankly artificial
substance promoted and exploited by designers self-
consciously intent on defining a style for a 'new
machine age'.
James M. Cain, known for his hardboiled novels of
desire and loss, referred with sarcasm in 1941 to a
radio 'in the bakelite style'.2 Dropped without
further elaboration into a description of a cheaply
Journal of Design History Vol. 5 No. 3 O 1992 The Design History Society
furnished California bungalow, the phrase was
intended to convey something specific to his readers.
Fifty years later, a design-minded reader might
wonder if Cain was referring to a gothic 'cathedral-
ette' of imitation wood, or to a setback 'skycraper
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deco' Air King, or to a sensuously streamlined Fada
or Silvertone. Perhaps to consider style alone is to
obscure the fundamental cultural meaning of plastic
during the inter-war years. Cain and his readers may
in fact have understood 'the bakelite style' as a
category encompassing both cathedralette and Fada.
To group together a random collection of phenolic
plastic mouldings of all shapes, sizes, styles, and
colours from those years is to begin to see just how
much they had in common and how distinct they
were from any previous artefacts. At first glance, in
terms of formal qualities, it is the differences that
stand out A low-slung architectonic cigarette box
with sharp-cut Mayan lines has little in common
with a squat rectangular round-edged soap case. A
vertically oriented, gothic-arched Lincoln electric
clock has little in common with a low, horizontal
Telechron, its ribbed band sweeping up one side,
across the top, and down the other to frame
tumbling digital counters. Nor does a rather
awkward Kodak box camera bear much resemblance
to a sculpturally contoured Bell Telephone hand-
piece cradled on its up-swooping pyramidal base.
But formal eclecticism could not disguise a radical
discontinuity marking these objects as distinct from
other objects of everyday life, as fundamentally new
things made from a fundamentally new material.
Physically and visually, each of these plastic
artefacts seemed to announce its integrity as a single
housing or shell, moulded rather than put together,
created instantaneously in a manner outside the
experience of carpenter, welder, machine-tool opera-
tor, or assembler of cast metal parts.
From that fact came the appeal of alchemical
imagery: out of chemicals, powders, compounds,
raw materials beyond the ken of ordinary folk, each
of these objects had emerged with a single stroke of a
173
hydraulic plunger. No clearly contrived series of
human actions, indeed no human action at all, lay
between conception and final form. Never mind that
moulds had to be designed, cut, and polished, or that
mouldings had to be finished and assembled—flash
ground off, surfaces buffed, works installed, and so
on. Their typical appearance was of seamless unitary
creation. If they aped earlier forms or modes of
construction, they did so only to enable users to
integrate them into the known world. Plastic
contributed to a 'black box' syndrome of ignorance
about technological processes by enclosing them
within smooth irreducible moulded forms of decep-
tive simplicity. A flawless surface, whether geo-
metrically precise or sensuously flowing, implied an
interior state of ideal perfection. Artefacts shaped by
plastic during a self-conscious 'machine age' ironic-
ally indicated a willingness to ignore mechanical
complexities, to abdicate responsibility for under-
standing or directing them, to assume that beneath
these pristine surfaces everything was well under
control.
Much the same unity could be found in the colours
and surfaces of plastic artefacts between the wars. It
would be logical to expect a gulf between objects
whose materials aped the traditional and those
whose materials frankly expressed artificiality. No
such visual gulf existed. Few so-called imitations
actually resembled what they purported to copy.
During the 1920s and 1930s moulders did produce
credible imitations of marbJe—if viewed from a
distance The vast majority of imitative mouldings
were meant to simulate wood, however, and their
solid browns and dark mottles and swirls proved
wholly inadequate to the task. The smooth dark
brown surface of a gothic clock functioned (as did its
architectonic form) as a stylized reminder of what it
formerly would have been. Stylization domesticated
an object by enabling it to blend in with traditional
surroundings but did not disguise its radically
unnatural or non-traditional surfaces. Brown, black,
swirled, mottled—it made little difference. All
evoked the darkness of earth, of oil, of coal, of the
substances from which the publicists said they
came.3 Too smooth and uniform to be products of the
same natural processes that yielded wood's irregular
growth, pattern, and texture, they too suggested an
unprecedented act of instantaneous transformation.
All those dark brown and black phenolics had more
174
in common with the unearthly bright yellows and
reds of cast phenolic, the rich synthetic cream colour
of urea formaldehyde, or the occasional deep arti-
ficial green or blue of moulded phenolic, than with
any natural substances. When viewed against an
irregularly grained surface of oak, worn and polished
with age, a group of typical mouldings of the era
stand out so starkly as unnatural that they might
have borne witness to a quantum mutation in
materials. When viewed on a surface of polished
black Formica, on the other hand, they seem to
emerge smoothly, without interruption, almost
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naturally, as artificial flora of the 'fourth kingdom' of
chemical synthesis.4 If there was in truth no uniform
'bakelite style', the stuff most certainly exuded a
distinctive aura.
All the same, the American 'plastic industry'
between the wars hardly merited definition by such
a unifying phrase. Bakelite and other phenolic
mouldings may have shared a common aura, but the
range of other new materials was too great to
warrant lumping them together. Hard, dark, infus-
ible Bakelite bore little resemblance to bright,
colourful, thermoplastic cellulose acetate, or to soft,
yielding vinyl, or to hard, glass-like, formable
acrylic. Different chemistries—those of cellulose,
coal tar, and petroleum—divided the world of
plastic, so much so that a major US government
review of 'synthetic resins' by definition excluded
cellulose acetate, the material that at the time seemed
most likely to transform the industry by its use in the
new process of injection moulding.^ Different
processing techniques—casting, laminating, com-
pression moulding, extrusion through dies to
produce films or rods, machining by hand of cast
phenolics and acrylics—came from a variety of
industrial traditions. Different applications appealed
to unrelated end-use industries—from manufactur-
ing of radios and automobiles to that of toys, toilet-
ware, furniture, and housewares, each with its own
preferences and ways of doing business. A doll's
head of blow-moulded celluloid had nothing in
common with a distributor cap of compression-
moulded phenolic; a cast acrylic aeroplane wind-
screen had nothing in common with a thimble of
injected-moulded cellulose acetate. Differences in
chemistry, performance specifications, means of
processing, function, appearance, value to consum-
ers, and cultural meaning seemed of more relevance
Jeffrey L Meiklc
than any sense of unity bestowed by the near
accident of convergence on the word 'plastic'. The
common denominator that created an industry was
simply a recognition that those involved were
engaged in transforming the world by means of
radically malleable chemical materials unlike any-
thing known to nature or to tradition.
Plastic owed its practical success as a material of
mass production during the Depression to a
convergence of at least three factors. The economic
benefits that had spurred the advance of plastic from
the days of celluloid combs through those of Bakelite
umbrella handles and gearshift knobs became even
more desirable to manufacturers. An era of economic
scarcity valued the certainty of supply of plastic, its
dimensional precision and stability, its relative light
weight and ease of processing, and above all else the
savings obtained by minimizing labour costs of
assembly and finishing operations. The material also
benefited from heightened public interest in tech-
nological progress as a counterforce capable of
vanquishing economic and social stagnation. Wide-
spread fascination with evidence of advancing mod-
ernity, with radio and electricity, with automobiling
and aviation, with skyscrapers and streamliners,
converged with more practical economic concerns to
invest plastic with a cachet it would not otherwise
have enjoyed. These two factors alone, however,
would not have focused a conception of plastic as a
distinctive machine-age material. A third factor
proved essential to the outcome—the new twentieth-
century culture of modernism whose artists, design-
ers, and visionaries had been engaged for several
decades in articulating the meaning of technical and
industrial modernity. They not only celebrated plas-
tic among other technological wonders of a brave
new world but also offered their own idealized
machine-age design modes.''
Plastic, its forms and colours proliferating at the
very moment the consumer culture was emerging
into consciousness, materially embodied that culture
and visually distinguished it as unique, as 'some-
thing new under the sun'. In the words of a designer
who contributed to shaping machine-age products
and environments, 'new materials' spoke 'in the
vernacular of the twentieth century'.' That ver-
nacular, those forms and colours, actually changed
often as the century progressed. But plastic remained
an emblem of modernity throughout, a focus of
Into the Fourth Kingdom: Representations of Plastic Materials, 1920-1950
praise and blame, an inherently formless substance
whose relatively inexpensive raw materials and
processing techniques enabled continuous expan-
sion in production of consumer goods and defined
the continuously expanding limits of their forms.
Between 1921 and 1937 annual production of
phenolic and other coal-tar resins in the United
States rose from 1.5 million to 141 million pounds.
Urea formaldehyde first appeared in US government
statistics in 1932, when 2 million pounds were
produced; by 1937 production had reached 21
million. In similar fashion cellulose acetate, which
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was not monitored in 1929, climbed from 3 million
pounds in 1933 to 19 million in 1937, overtaking
celluloid." By the end of the era these diverse but
similar materials appeared so clearly as enablers and
revealers of the new consumer culture that some
journalists abandoned 'the Machine Age' as a motto
for the times and instead proclaimed 'the Plastic
Age'."
Surreal Visions
Something of the odd confusion with which
observers confronted plastic even after it had
attained visual prominence in new products surfaced
in an article about the industry published by Fortune
in 1940 as part of its ongoing series of surveys of-
various industries. Despite experience with such
articles, the editors seemed uncertain as to how to
present these new materials to their readership of
business executives, whether to portray plastic as an
extension of natural materials, a benign growth upon
the body of nature, or as an intoxicating, even
explosive disruption of the natural order and of
human reason as historically understood. These
disparate interpretations appeared not so much in
the article's text, which offered admirable clarifica-
tion of complex materials, processes and applica-
tions, as in two illustrations that accompanied the
article, each of them a two-page spread rendered in
full colour—and each so bizarre in its own way, so
visually arresting but rationally unwarranted, as to
suggest their intrusion into consciousness from a site
of unresolved psychological conflict.1"
The more easily grasped of these two illustrations
was a photograph of a relief map of an imaginary
continent called Synthetica |i). Descending from an
isthmus in the northwest, Synthetica resembled
175
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outlines of a stylized armless female torso rendered
in acrylic. Within the body's reflective hollows,
visible through its thick, light-concentrating sur-
faces, exotic goldfish swam and marine plants
floated, one scalloped frond coyly defining the mons
veneris. Outside this otherwise undefined goddess,
suspended about her in an immaterial medium,
appeared the diffuse plastic accoutrements of her
artificially colourful machine-age existence. Three
strands of deep red vinyl wire woven into chains
encircled her neck; the Queen of Diamonds from a
deck of cellulose acetate cards covered her heart. A
white telephone handset rested on her collarbone, its
cord snaking down to a gleaming streamlined set at
the photograph's lower edge. Around her appeared a
score of other objects rendered in rich hues with no
regard for relative size or perspective: dentures,
buttons, dice, sunglasses, steering wheel, trans-
parent umbrella, amber hairbrush, red and white
chessmen, black camera, Hammond organ keyboard,
yellow and green picnic flatware, golf club, luminous
jukebox, chair of crystal Lucite, red saw handle,
nylon-stockinged foot, pink toothbrush, and a
twisting loop of cinema film enclosing the lower field
of her realm—outside of which lay scattered signs of
her male suitors: pens, mechanical pencils, pocket
knives, screwdrivers, an aeroplane's rudder. With
the exception of her own fishy depths, nothing
suggested connection to living nature, nor to
traditional human life. It all implied radical divorce
from the limitations of a drab pre-plastic existence.
More clearly evocative than Synthetica's ponder-
ous geography and perhaps more representative of
emerging reality, the plastic Venus and her realm
required less explanation. After listing a few of the
artefacts 'ris(ing) up from the plastic sea', a brief
caption admitted in provocative language that 'only
surrealism's derangements can capture the limitless
horizons, strange juxtapositions, endless products of
this new world in process of becoming.' With the
exception of a few visual associations, the photo-
montage offered a perception of total disjunction,
both of present from past and of all present pheno-
mena from each other. Objects of plastic seemed
simply to appear from nowhere with an explosive
insistence that defied all reason. Their significance
derived not from any functions they might inadvert-
ently have fulfilled but from their own artificial, near
alien agenda. Witty, playful, catering to the lighter,
178
more transient side of contemporary life, plastic had
at the same time evaded human planning and tran-
scended control. Unlike the map of Synthetica,
which postulated a solid land mass ripe for syste-
matic exploration and exploitation, the plastic Venus
promised an American dream of shifting shapes, an
irrational phantasmagoria of ungrounded, dis-
connected images, all in brilliant synthetic colours, a
carnival of material desire.
Plastic in the Culture of Inflation
Coming at the end of the era and intended for a limited
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audience, neither of these visions reflected popular
understanding of plastic between the wars. Despite
Fortune's exaggerations, however, these two visions
did represent in extreme form two distinct poles of
actual response to plastic. Both of these responses
made much of plastic's Utopian potential as a
substance or group of substances capable of trans-
forming material conditions that had always limited
human life. The first, a conservative vision that
remained dominant through the 1920s and 1930s,
considered plastic as a vehicle of controlled social
stability. Inexpensive plastic provided by organic
chemists from out of common elements would foster
true democratization of society by ending the strife
generated by scarcity of raw materials and bring about
a universal material abundance. Promoters of this
conservative plastic Utopianism seemed to be sug-
gesting getting something from nothing when they
argued for efficient conservation and transformation
of such waste products of nature as coal tar and
petroleum. This synthesizing of human order from
out of nature's wasteful chaos yielded a metaphor that
for Edwin E. Slosson, a science popularizer, exempli-
fied the social meaning of plastic Utopianism. When
discussing Leo Baekeland's taming of the violent
phenol-formaldehyde reaction, the critical step in the
invention of Bakelite, Slosson compared chemical
'polymerization' to the process of a financial 'merger'.
The Bakelite resin formed by condensation of phenol
and formaldehyde was a 'molecular trust' that had
remained 'uncontrollable and contaminating [to]
everything it touched' until Baekeland imposed order
on it. Just as governments had learned to put trusts
and mergers to good use by controlling and chan-
nelling their energy, so too had chemists 'learned
wisdom in recent years'." It was all very well to praise
hifrcy L. Mcikk
the chemist as an 'agent of applied democracy',12 but
Slosson's metaphor suggested that a well-ordered
society would have the inert molecular stability of
Bakelite. This desire for control achieved expression in
Fortune's enigmatic observation that 'a plastic is
anything but plastic, once it has hardened and taken
shape'. 13 The urge for control attained visual expres-
sion in the streamlined forms of consumer products
moulded during the 1930s, their rounded aerody-
namic lines suggesting frictionless motion through
undisturbed currents of time.
At the other pole, a more radical vision considered
plastic as a vehicle of proliferating transformations,
of continuous transcendence of the recent past. More
congruent with a culture of consumption, of waste
and inflation, and with the actual course of the
American century, this vision of endless disruption
did not become dominant until the 1950s and 1960s.
Oddly enough, and perhaps only by coincidence,
this polarization of visions extended even to the
particular plastics typical of each era. Bakelite and
other phenolic and urea resins, by far the most
prominent during the inter-war period, were so-
called 'thermosetting' plastics; that is, their forma-
tion under heat and pressure was an irreversible
process. They became stable, inert, nearly 'immortal'
once the chemical reaction that formed them had run
its course. The most significant post-war synthetics,
on the other hand, were such 'thermoplastics' as
polyethylene and polystyrene. Relatively unstable,
capable of being melted and reshaped an infinite
number of times, they reflected an expansive culture
of impermanence similar to that projected by Fortune
in its surrealistic photomontage, its 'American
Dream of Venus'.
On the eve of the Second World War, other voices
were beginning to abandon the concept of stability
for a plastic Utopianism based on utter lack of limits.
A book written by the director of the Department of
Science at the New York World's Fair of 1939, for
example, claimed that 'the possible varieties [of
plastic] are almost endless'. Already plastic could be
had in 'any color and texture . . . cheaply molded into
any form'.M Not everyone found such a prospect
pleasant to contemplate. As early as 1936, the author
of Fortune's first survey of plastic had recoiled from
bright-coloured Catalin cast phenolic because
'nothing else can match it in potential gaudiness'.
The reader was asked to 'shudder for the future,
Into tlie Fourth Kingdom: Representations oj Plastic Materials, 1920-1950
because the stuff can be made in any color that suits
the designer'. H Under the effervescent influence of
new materials, as the fair's science director con-
ceived it, even architecture would yield to 'present
conditions of mobility and quick change'. Any notion
of building for 'stability and permanence' was 'a relic
of the social outlook of previous centuries'."1 This
increasingly common celebration of impermanence
reached an extreme in the views of Waldemar
Kaempffert, the science editor of the New York
Times, who envisioned a typical house of the future
in which everything would be 'molded, pressed, or
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fashioned out of an appropriate synthetic'. House-
cleaning would become 'a matter of washing every-
thing that can be reached with a hose'. Dirty plastic
dishes would be dissolved in hot water and washed
down the drain. Clothes of synthetic fabrics would
be thrown away when soiled 'In the synthetic world
of tomorrow', he explained, 'it costs more to wash
and iron [than] to buy new ones.' 1 ' This image of
melting or consuming one's possessions in a hot
desire to possess and consume ever more goods
suggests a basic transformation that occurred in
public attitudes toward plastic precisely as it
assumed a significant place in a shifting, ever more
artificial landscape. Formerly conceived as a means
of creating permanent abundance from waste
materials, plastic became a means of creating an
abundance of ephemeral waste. A thermoset world
was melting into thermoplasticity.
A few days before the nuclear explosions over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the
Second World War and ushered in a brief period of
hope for universal peace, a gathering of marketing
experts listened as J. W. McCoy, a vice-president of
Du Pont, discussed conversion to a peacetime
economy. He maintained that business would be
good for a long time owing to 'a great backlog of
unfilled wants in the country'. Satisfying pent-up
desire for consumer goods would yield 'an upward
spiral of productivity, raising the standard of living,
increasing the national income, making more jobs'.
Unlike those conservative Depression-era vision-
aries who had dreamed of a balanced steady-state
Utopia, McCoy believed that 'a satisfied people is a
stagnant people'. It would be necessary 'to see to it
that Americans are never satisfied, to see to it that
the march forward never ceases'."* This goal helped
to fuel a different kind of explosion, less immediately
179
destructive than the atomic bomb but as capable
over time of transforming the conceptual parameters
of a culture. Continuing proliferation of consumer
goods created an inflationary culture, one that
invested ever more of its psychological well-being in
acquiring material things but paradoxically con-
sidered those things, as individual possessions, to be
of such low value as to encourage their displace-
ment, their disposal, their quick and total con-
sumption. Plastic became the material of choice for
this never-ending expansion. The material's virtues
were nearly limitless. Plastic was inexpensive
because derived from an endless supply of petro-
leum. It was less solid or intractable than wood or
steel. It was free of traditional preconceptions
regarding its uses and could be moulded into any
shape that a restless drive for novelty might
conceive. It was, finally, so lightweight and in some
forms so insubstantial as to be discarded without a
second thought. Plastic not only offered a perfect
medium for this material proliferation but also came
to embody it conceptually.
During the late 1940s, before the inflation of
things really got under way, promoters began using
language that implied an acceleration of productive
capacity, a radical discontinuity in the fabric of
everyday life. 'Doubling-Tripling-Expanding: That's
Plastics'—so ran the title of an article that appeared
in 1947 in a special issue of Monsnnto Magazine, a
publication distributed by the chemical company to
its customers. 'The Horn of Plenty Is Mechanized',
announced the title of another of Monsanto's
articles. Referring to a new injection moulding
machine that, as the author reported, 'spews out the
[moulded] articles faster than we can tell you about
it', the title also suggested plastic's larger social
impact. Focusing attention on 'Something Nature
Could Not Supply', another article in the magazine
reported that with plastic 'the possibilities were
staggering—the laboratory was actually creating Here
material'. The image conveyed was of a kind of
spontaneous generation of matter, a continuous
fermentation of stuff that had to be processed and
used if only to prevent it from filling the world.'"
This idea received a further twist in a general survey
distributed in 1946 by the Society of the Plastics
Industry, a trade association formed in 1937 to lobby
for resin suppliers and processors. The survey
included a long quotation from an executive who
180
explained that the new field always seemed 'like
something alive' because 'no one can tell from one
moment to another what is being made from these
materials' Developing his organic conceit, he
declared that 'to me, plastics constitute a sort of
beneficient growth within the body of industry'.2"
From benign growth to malignant tumour was not so
distant as this executive might have imagined. About
fifteen years later Norman Mailer, who was then
emerging as a social critic, first presented his
obsessive vision of plastic spreading through
America 'like the metastases of cancer cells'.21
Less vitriolic was the British design critic John
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Gloag, who as early as 1943 had expressed a fear that
plastic would enable overly imaginative designers to
transgress beyond crude imitation of traditional
forms. His comments in the journal of tJie Royal
Society of Arts reached few Americans but accurately
suggested their situation. Lamenting that it was so
'easy to lose self-control in the matter of imagination
when these synthetic materials are discussed', Gloag
described widespread fascination with plastic as 'not
so much a state of mind as a state of intoxication'.
Most appalling to him was an attitude summarized
in the statement, 'These materials can do anything—
let's do everything.' Gloag predicted that consumers
starved first by the asceticism of the modern
movement and then by the austerity of wartime
would quickly embrace an 'orgy of ornament'.
Because plastic so easily took on any conceivable
form or colour, it seemed likely that post-war
designers would 'create a new rococo period' marked
by extravagance, excess, vulgarity.22
By everyone's account, whether they liked it or
not, that is exactly what happened. The post-war
explosion of amoeboid, boomerang, and saucer
shapes, all easily moulded of plastic, certainly
justified Gloag's fear of a 'new rococo' Tom Wolfe,
for one, made a career of documenting the baroque
life styles and material trappings of an expansive
middle class.2-1 More particularly, two generations of
design critics addressed the very issue that Gloag
had raised. Whether they criticized Americans for
splurging on 'borax and chrome' or became self-
consciously involved in 'learning from Las Vegas',
they confronted a vigorous popular culture that
owed much of its energy and exuberant surrealism to
the unprecedented colour, malleability, and form-
shifting variety of plastic.24 Echoing Gloag's predic-
IcffreyL Meiklc
tion, Thomas Hine's history of the era observed that
post-war America 'went on a baroque bender' by
embracing products 'in a lurid rainbow of colors and
a steadily changing array of styles'. As this prolifera-
tion continued, 'commonplace objects took extra-
ordinary form, and the novel and exotic quickly
turned commonplace.'2"
The Utopian impulse of the 1930s had striven for
static perfection, but that of the 1950s abandoned
perfection in pursuit of an ever-improving flux. Even
so, as new products poured from chemical plants
and moulding machines, they did convey to con-
sumers a comforting sense of control. The very
extravagance of artificial forms depended on syn-
thetic materials that yielded easily to human manip-
ulation. The more novel an object's form became, the
more artificial and thus totally controlled it seemed—
more so than ever before in history. But the process
itself was another matter entirely. Although it too
seemed under control, that perception proved to be
an illusion. Without anyone realizing it, as Hint?
observed, 'the very nature of things had changed' as
people adjusted to 'a disposable world'.2h In so
doing, they lost control of the process in two crucial
but antithetical ways. Neither of them became clear
until much later. In the first place, as material things
became attenuated, images or simulations of things
began to assume a cultural significance nearly equal
to that of objects themselves At the same time, how-
ever, the flood of attenuated things swelled to such
proportions that no matter how disposable each
individual thing might be, taken together they
swamped landfills and threatened to discharge toxic
chemical waste into the air and water on which life
depended. Plastic offered an unprecedented degree
of control over individual things—allowing extravag-
ance of form to coexist with precisely engineered
function. But plastic also accelerated larger processes
that society recognized as out of control only long
after people had become dependent on the comfort
and convenience of plastic. During the last half of the
twentieth century, as plastic became an ever more
visible presence in the material world, its cultural
significance was contained in the words of a sceptical
John Gloag, who had suggested that it be understood
as what happens 'when the artificial becomes the
real'.27
JEFFREY L. MEIKLE
Unnvrsily of Texas at Austin
Into the Fourth Kingdom Representations of Plastic Materials, 1920-1950
Notes
1 For similar thoughts see F Jameson, 'Postmodernism,
or the cultural logic of late capitalism', New Left Review,
no. 146, July/August 1984, pp. 64-71.
2 J. Cain, Mildred Pierce, Vintage, New York, 1978 (orig
1941), p. 6.
3 For a typical example of this publicity see J. Mumford,
Vie Story of Bakelite, Stillson, New York, 1924.
4 A film released by the Bakelite Corporation in 1938
portrayed a new chemical 'kingdom' added to the
traditional realms of animal, vegetable, and mineral.
5 US Tariff Commission, Synthetic Resins and Tlieir Raw
Materials, Government Printing Office, Washington,
DC, 1938
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6 For detailed treatment of these three factors see J.
Meikle, 'Plastic, material of a thousand uses', in J. Corn
(ed.), Imagining Tomorrow. History, Technology, and the
American Future, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass , 1986,
pp. 77-96.
7 P. Frankl, Form and Re-form: A Practical Handbook of
Modern Interiors, Harper, New York, 1930, p. 163.
8 Synthetic Resins and Their Raw Materials, op. cit, p 8;
US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
Biennial Census of Manufactures, 5935, Government
Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1938, p. 634, US
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
Biennial Census of Manufactures, 1937, Part 1, Govern-
ment Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1939, p. 657.
9 For examples see 'Approach of the "Plastic Age",
Literary Digest, vol. 112, 2 January 1932, p 42; W.
Engle, 'This Plastic Age', six-part series, New York
World-Telegram, 12-17 December 1938.
10 'Plastics in 1940', Fortune, vol. 22, October 1940,
pp. 88-9, 92-3.
11 E Slosson, Creative Chemistry, Century, New York,
1919, pp. 135-6.
12 E. Slosson, 'Chemistry in everyday life', Mentor,
vol. 10, April 1922, p. 12.
13 'What man has joined together', Fortune, vol. 13,
March 1936, p 71.
14 G. Wendt, Science for the World of Tomorrow, Norton,
New York, 1939, p. 166 (emphasis mine)
15 'What man has joined together', op. cit., p. 73.
16 Wendt, op cit., p. 266.
17 W. Kaempffert, 'The world has just begun', American
Magazine, vol. 129, January 1940, pp. 42, 129-31.
18 J. McCoy, 'The job ahead presents a direct challenge to
sales and advertising', 2 August 1945,10 pp. TS, Series
II, Part 2, Box 15, E. I. du Pont de Nemours Co.
Archive, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington,
Delaware
19 Monsanto Magazine, vol 26, October 1947, pp. 4, 26, 18,
21.
181
20 Plastics. Tlie Story of an Industry, rev. edn , Society of the
Plastics Industry, New York, 1946, p. 29.
21 N. Mailer, The big bite', Esquire, May 1963, reprinted
in N. Mailer, Tlie Presidential Papers, Berkley Medallion,
New York, 1970, p. 178.
22 J. Gloag, 'The influence of plastics on design', journal of
the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 91, 23 July 1943, pp. 466-
7-
23 T. Wolfe, Tlie Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby, Pocket Books, New York, 1970 (orig. 1965).
182
24 E. Kaufmann Jr., 'Borax, or the chrome-plated calf,
Architectural Revicii', vol. 104, August 1948, pp. 88-93;
R. Venruri, D. Scott Brown, and S. Izenour, Learning
from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1972.
25 T. Hine, Populuxe, Knopf, New York, 1986, p. 3.
26 Hine, op. cit, p. 66.
27 Gloag, op. cit., p. 466.
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Jeffrey L Mcikle