Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel (©2011 by Susan Freinkel). Passage B is adapted from American Plastic: A Cultural History by Jeffrey L. Meikle (©1995 by Jeffrey L. Meikle).

Passage A by Susan Freinkel

Designers were enthralled by the universe of possibility from plastics’ earliest days. They loved the design freedom that synthetics offered and the spirit of modernity the materials embodied. To furniture designer Paul T. Frankl, a material like Bakelite, the world’s first synthetic plastic, spoke “in the vernacular of the twentieth century . . . the language of invention, of synthesis,” and he urged his fellow designers to use their full imaginative powers to explore the new materials’ frank artificiality. As interpreted by Frankl and other designers working with Bakelite in the ‘30s and ‘40s, that was the language of streamlining, a lingo of curves and dashes and teardrop shapes that created a feeling of speed and motion in everyday objects. Streamline a fountain pen and even that stolid item declared: we’re hurtling toward the future here!

There was another reason designers embraced plastics. From the mid-twentieth century on, modern design has been guided by an egalitarian gospel, a belief that good design needn’t cost a lot of money, that even the most mundane items could be things of beauty. “Get the most of the best to the most for the least” was the way Ray and Charles Eames put it in their famous tongue-twisting credo. Plastics were the ideal medium for that mission: malleable, relatively inexpensive, and made for mass manufacture.

Yet, as in any new relationship, there were risks. It was all too easy to exploit plastics’ powers of mimicry to produce the kinds of imitations—pseudo-wood cabinets and faux-leather recliners一that contributed to the growing reputation of plastic as an inferior material. Plastics’ adaptability and glibness undermined their capacity to achieve “dignity” as legitimate materials worthy of being taken seriously, one critic wrote.

This impression was exacerbated by people’s unfortunate experiences with plastics in the immediate postwar years. There were plastic plates that melted in hot water, plastic toys that cracked on Christmas morning, plastic raincoats that grew clammy and fell apart in the rain. Polymer technology improved during the 1950s as manufacturers figured out how to make better plastics and, even more important, how to match the right polymer with the right application. But the damage to plastic’s reputation had been done.

Passage B by Jeffrey L. Meikle

Worrying about the image of plastic made sense in 1945 when unfamiliar new materials confronted wary consumers. By the mid-1950s, however, no one was ignorant of plastic because it surrounded everyone. Sidney Gross, who joined Modern Plastics in 1952 and became editor in 1968, recalled that he had “agitated a lot”over the years to get SPI, the trade association for the plastics industry, to quit trying to convince people “that plastic is not bad.” It was a waste of money because plastic’s image—good or bad—did not really matter. The key to plastic’s success, as he saw it, was always “selling the manufacturer.” Once plastic products filled the stores, people had no choice but to con-sume what they were offered. Most of the time, Gross maintained, after the industry had solved postwar quality problems, plastic objects did work better. Things made of plastic were better designed and lasted longer. People intuitively recognized that fact even if they retained an intellectual notion that plastic was bad or shoddy. In short, nothing succeeded like success.

Often plastic did offer a significant improvement on whatever it replaced. A sleepy householder had to watch only once in disbelief as a polyethylene juice pitcher bounced off the kitchen floor to begin accepting plastic in a practical way no matter how strong the conceptual disdain for it. Even plastic toys, despite the brittle polystyrene items that broke on Christmas morning, proved superior in many ways. A toy soldier of molded polyethylene could not scratch the furniture as readily as an old-fashioned lead soldier. Most people who expressed negative attitudes about plastic used it anyway without thinking about it, either because a particular use had proven itself or because an inexpensive trouble-free alternative no longer existed. AsHouse Beautiful observed in 1955, “The news is not that plastics exist, but [that] they have already been so assimilated into our lives.” The average person was “conditioned to plastics.” They had penetrated so far into the material fabric of everyday life that their presence could not be denied no matter how many people considered them second-rate substitutes or a sad commentary on modern times.