In 2015 more than twenty million Americans worked in direct selling. ^{Footnote 1} Associated with corporations such as Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay, these men and women engage daily in acts of person-to-person commerce at customers’ homes, at their workplaces, or even at their places of worship. This army of salespeople, commonly referred to as distributors, peddle a wide variety of products that range from soap to nutritional supplements to insurance. One can even host a party to sell stun guns. Distributors often recruit and train their friends and neighbors to enlist in direct selling as well. Direct sellers are the engine of a $36 billion retail channel in the United States today, but they have no employment contract and receive no wages. Rather, today’s direct sellers participate in a curious mode of independent salesmanship that has at once deep roots in the history of American commerce and close connections to the more recent rise of casual labor, permanent contracting, and the “gig” economy.

Direct sales firms use a model of independent labor that can be traced back to the peddlers of the colonial period. In their nineteenth-century incarnation as commercial travelers, direct sellers acted as agents on behalf of the firm. They worked outside the direct supervision of managers and did not adhere to a wage-based model of labor. Peddlers and commercial travelers usually acquired goods from the company on credit. They then sold a product to a customer, repaid any credit due the manufacturer, and retained the balance as profit. With the creation of the New Deal, however, executives in the twentieth century began to recognize the value of such a semiautonomous salesforce as a low-cost source of labor free of many of the financial and regulatory burdens imposed on the employer by the New Deal state. Largely in response to the threat of labor regulations, including the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts, direct sales firms formalized in the 1930s a model of semiattached, casual labor that would become central to the late twentieth-century service economy.

“‘Soap and Hope’: Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America” traces the evolution of direct sales as a commercial sector and as a category of work across the twentieth century. Analyzing the organizational structure of direct sales firms— including the Amway Corporation, Avon Products Inc., and Tupperware, among others—as well as their recruitment and managerial strategies, I show how these firms merged an older tradition of selling and distribution with new forms of corporate organization and ideology in the twentieth century. In so doing, I draw the history of direct sales—which, for the post-World War II period, has tended to focus on the relationship among gender, business, and culture—into a larger historiographical discussion about the history of American capitalism. ^{Footnote 2}

The history of selling and sales work is central to our understanding of American capitalism. Sellers and sales institutions shaped consumer preferences, collected information about markets and customers, and drove the levels of demand necessary to the rise of the modern industrial economy. Marketing and advertising firms, sales and distribution outfits, and sellers themselves—as William Leach, Roland Marchand, Pamela Laird, and Walter Friedman have all shown—were as important to the transition to twentieth-century corporate capitalism as manufacturing firms. ^{Footnote 3} My research shows that the history of sales is equally necessary to understand the subsequent transition away from an industrial economy centered on the production of manufactured goods to one organized around service and knowledge work. My dissertation thus builds on the established literature in the history of sales, and moves in new directions by arguing that the decentralized structure of direct sales; its reliance on casual, often low-pay, and “feminized” labor; its home-based business model; and its emphasis on social networking, in fact, exemplify the trajectory of advanced capitalism in the United States.

In addition to offering a textured, historical account of the making of flexible labor, I probe direct sales for what it can reveal about capitalism as a cultural or intellectual construct, or what Thurman Arnold once called the “folklore of capitalism.” ^{Footnote 4} Influenced by work at the intersection of social and intellectual history and the history of capitalism, I see capitalism as both an economic system as well as an epistemological one; or, in Jeffrey Sklansky’s words, a “form of selfhood or way of being, a system of representation or way of seeing, and a framework of trust and way of believing.” ^{Footnote 5} The history of direct sales, and particularly of direct sellers, allows us to examine capitalism as an amalgam of deeply held cultural beliefs about value and exchange; success and failure; the nature of work; and the meanings of class, consumption, and identity.

This project originated as a study of domestic consumption. After researching the history of firms such as Amway and Mary Kay, however, I quickly discovered that, for direct sellers, the spheres of production and consumption could not be easily separated. Direct sellers purchased goods from the corporation for personal use as well as for resale. They purchased from the corporate office sample kits, sales aids, marketing materials, recruiting literature, motivational guides, as well as corporate letterhead and other office accoutrements. In the case of multilevel or networked direct sales organizations such as Amway, moreover, direct sellers recruited and trained new distributors to sell under them as part of their “downline.” In a networked operation, goods moved from the corporation to a distributor, and then among members of the distributor’s downline before reaching the end user. The distinction between production and consumption and selling and buying in direct sales was often very unclear.

Indeed, direct sellers in the post-1945 period most often saw themselves as engaged in something other than labor. In both corporate rhetoric and sellers’ own words, direct selling has been tightly linked to independent entrepreneurship. Direct selling is described as a republican practice that transcends work: a form of personal fulfillment and self-improvement through free enterprise. At the same time that direct sellers were distributing and consuming goods, they were also consuming and disseminating particular ideas about labor, class, and entrepreneurship. For example, entrepreneurship for direct sellers was not about innovation, the assumption of risk, or even a marker of ownership. Rather, entrepreneurship was a social role and set of personal characteristics that could be performed. Influenced by corporate literature that framed a distributorship as “a business of your own” and a way to be “your own boss,” many were drawn to direct selling as a means through which to refashion themselves in the image of success and independence embodied in the entrepreneur as a cultural figure. ^{Footnote 6}

Analyzing direct sellers’ understandings of themselves and their work, as revealed through legal testimony, corporate newsletters, and the popular press, sheds new light on the stories citizens have told about what work looks like in advanced capitalism. As a durable but changing way of organizing sales, commerce, and labor across the twentieth century, the history of direct sales adds to our understanding of transformations in the structures of capitalism in the United States. As a window into the ways some Americans comprehended and coped with those changes, direct sellers’ perceptions and experiences also enable us to examine the meanings of capitalism on the ground. Put another way, the history of direct sales speaks to both to the epistemological and economic aspects of capitalism.

The dissertation develops over seven chronological and thematic chapters. The first chapter traces the evolution of direct sales from its roots in earlier forms of commercial traveling to its emergence as a legitimate subset of commercial sales in the 1930s. Chapter 1 focuses on the National Association of Direct Selling Companies (NADSC), which was founded in 1910 as the first industry association to represent the interests of direct sales firms, and its role in establishing direct sales as a distinct sector. First in response to antipeddling laws, or “Green River Ordinances,” in the 1920s and 1930s, and then in the face of labor regulations proposed as part of the New Deal, the NADSC used the encroachment of state power in the labor economy to galvanize a once diffuse group of companies into a coherent, and distinct, sector of the economy. ^{Footnote 7}

The chapter features a particularly important moment in the 1930s when the NADSC reclassified all direct sellers as “independent contractors” rather than as employees in order to evade new regulations regarding wages and payroll taxes. Although it appeared merely a trick of semantics, the NADSC’s attempt to position distributors outside the reach of the new labor regulations succeeded because it fit the way the New Deal was centered on the male breadwinner and a particular understanding of work in which “labor” was fundamentally an industrial term. Highlighting the limitations of an overly narrow definition of labor codified in the New Deal, the chapter explores how corporate interests, gendered and racialized conceptions of productive labor, as well as the New Deal state and its methods for measuring and regulating the labor economy rendered only some categories of work recognizable as “labor.”

Building on the infrastructure and sense of legitimacy established in the 1930s, by the late 1950s direct sales was a $2 billion industry. There is very little quantitative historical data available on direct sales before 1974, when the Direct Selling Association (as the NADSC was renamed in 1969) commissioned the first comprehensive statistical study of the industry. Nicole Woolsey Biggart has done the heavy lifting of piecing together various sources to suggest that, by 1964, direct sales was a $3 billion industry made up of approximately 1.5 million distributors, with growth driven by new organizations formed in the immediate post-World War II period. These included Tupperware Home Parties Incorporated in 1951, the Shaklee Corporation in 1956, Home Interiors and Gifts in 1957, Amway in 1959, and Mary Kay in 1963. ^{Footnote 8}

The generation of companies and executives that emerged in the post-World War II period differed from their nineteenth-century, or even prewar, forebears. Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, founders of Amway, popularized the networked direct sales model. Others, including Brownie Wise at Tupperware and Mary Kay Ash at Mary Kay, introduced innovative labor management strategies that relied on corporate culture, ideology, and a blend of affective and material rewards to recruit, retain, and motivate their sales force. Earlier firms, such as Encyclopædia Britannica, took a utilitarian view of direct selling as simply an effective, low-cost strategy to be used in the service of selling products. Drawing on corporate literature, executives’ personal writings, and industry publications, Chapter 2 argues that, by the 1960s, key executives had redefined direct selling as not merely a method of distribution but also as an income-earning opportunity or mode of work that could itself be marketed.

In some ways, by the 1960s, a specific kind of economic opportunity and corporate culture were these firms’ primary offerings. Women-centered firms such as Tupperware and Avon, for example, presented direct selling as an opportunity for women that offered economic independence, but also respected and honored domesticity. At Amway, where most distributors worked with a spouse as part of a sales team, Van Andel and DeVos crafted a potent image of direct selling that celebrated free enterprise; offered a vision of commerce as an extension of sociability, family, and community; and framed direct sales work as a pathway to personal improvement through independent entrepreneurship. In constructing those narratives, the generation of direct sales executives that emerged in the post-World War II period inverted the traditional logic of sales work by rearticulating direct selling as a product in and of itself.

By 1974 direct sales was a $5 billion industry, with nearly two million active participants. ^{Footnote 9} Statistics from individual companies further evidence the success of direct sales in the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1976, Amway’s retail sales more than doubled, from $120 million to $300 million, and its salesforce similarly swelled upward of 200,000 active distributors. ^{Footnote 10} By 1977 Avon was ranked no. 157 on the Fortune 500, in between mega-brands Anheuser-Busch and Del Monte Foods. ^{Footnote 11} Direct sales may have drawn on a tradition of local, domestic commerce, but by the mid-1970s it was also big business. Chapter 3 analyzes corporate literature; statistical data from business analysts, government agencies, and institutions such as the Direct Selling Association; and contemporary scholarship on the state of work and the economy. This analysis shows that direct sales flourished in the 1970s because the temporary, supplemental nature of such work was poised to capitalize on social and economic transformations in that period.

Often harnessing the language and imagery of “crisis” that circulated during the 1970s, Amway, in particular, leveraged the economic recession by marketing direct sales work as an alternative to financial duress, unemployment, and federal aid. Turning the conventional narrative about labor security on its head, direct sales firms reframed their brand of work, which had all the markings of contingent labor, as not only a means to economic survival during the recession but also as a solution to the instability of the labor economy in that decade and beyond. Drawing attention to the success of key sectors during the economic recession, Chapter 3 offers a new angle on deindustrialization by refocusing on temporary manpower agencies, segments of the service economy, and direct sales, for which the 1970s was a period of growth. Seen from that perspective, this period emerges as a moment of simultaneous deindustrialization and reindustrialization.

If direct sales marketing tapped into the changing nature of work in the postwar period, it also registered changes in the ways many Americans thought about the state and its role in regulating the U.S. economy. Chapter 4 examines the ways that direct sales firms, most notably Amway, benefitted from a broad political shift rightward in the postwar period. Analyzing speeches and writings by Amway founders Van Andel and DeVos, and their engagement with conservative and Christian political causes, I show that Amway both reflected the contemporary resurgence of conservatism in America and helped to shape it. The chapter contributes to a growing literature on business conservatism by demonstrating the ways that one corporation and its leaders translated the academic language of conservatism and political economy into commonsense lessons about the merits of free enterprise.

Van Andel and DeVos blended the rhetoric of free enterprise and personal responsibility coming from the political right with concurrent trends in popular psychology and self-help literature (and even some elements of antiauthoritarianism more commonly associated with the counter culture) to present Amway as a form of “do-it-yourself job security,” and even a corporate antipoverty program. ^{Footnote 12} While the practical elements of direct sales work acknowledged structural changes in work and the economy, the culture and rhetoric of firms such as Amway cloaked it in the language of American free enterprise in ways that obscured those very changes. In other words, much of the appeal of direct sales work lay in its ability to render old tropes about American independence and prosperity compatible with the apparent failures of the U.S. industrial economy in the 1970s.

Not all direct sales firms embraced the language of the political right. As a point of comparison, Chapter 5 focuses on Avon Products Inc. and its efforts to negotiate changes in the gendered makeup of the U.S. labor force in the 1970s and 1980s. As women gained access to a greater number and range of economic opportunities, the so-called feminization of the labor force in the postwar period created two key problems for firms such as Avon, which relied on women as both sellers and consumers. As indicated by the slogan “Ding, Dong! Avon Calling!,” the Avon sales model was predicated on an assumption that female consumers were home to be called on. As more women, particularly white middle-class women, entered the full-time paid labor force, Avon had to find new ways to market to and service “the working woman” as an emerging, and highly lucrative, segment of the consumer market.

In addition to the challenge of meeting the needs of working women, which Avon sometimes referred to as the problem of “not-at-homes,” Avon executives struggled to maintain the appeal of direct selling in an age when women had more occupational choices than ever before. ^{Footnote 13} In order to compete in the newly expanded universe of potential employers for women, as well as meet the growing financial needs of women in dual-income families, Avon executives rebranded its breed of part-time, casual work as a well-paid, professional career and a form of female entrepreneurship. Avon marketing executives constructed an image of female entrepreneurship—particularly the ability to conduct a business in one’s home and according to one’s schedule—as a way break the glass ceiling and also to better balance one’s multiple commitments to work and family.

Avon offered private enterprise as a solution that evaded, but made no attempt to dismantle, gender discrimination in the workplace. In the same way that Amway offered direct sales as a corporate alternative to the welfare state, Avon offered a form of do-it-yourself gender equality that privileged private remedies over large-scale structural ones. Comparing Avon and Amway thus tells us much about gendered conceptions of work and entrepreneurship that circulated in the 1970s and 1980s, and also about the ways that the power of ideas about individualism, or what some have called neoliberalism, influenced not only conservative political projects but also left-liberal progressive views on issues such as gender equality in the postwar period.

Corporate literature in the 1970s and early 1980s promised direct sales as a means through which to achieve financial stability and personal fulfilment. For some distributors, direct selling was indeed a crucial strategy through which to cobble together various sources of part-time or temporary income. Legal testimony delivered as part of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into Amway in the mid-1970s reveals numerous cases of workers, especially blue-collar industrial workers, for whom direct selling enabled one to survive intermittent periods of unemployment due to labor strikes, factory closures, and layoffs. For others, direct selling was a source of meager discretionary income at best and a gaping money pit at worst. More telling than the financial and practical benefits of direct sales, however, was the ways that direct sellers described the personal and affective benefits of their own work.

Taking direct sales—and direct sellers—seriously, Chapter 6 demonstrates that direct sellers articulated an alternative understanding of “entrepreneurship” as a personality type, a lifestyle, and an identity that could be performed. They sometimes used the language of personal improvement and self-actualization to justify financial losses, even significant ones. They also called up a more flexible vision that seemed to predict a recent move among academics, particularly sociologists of work, toward a more capacious definition of entrepreneurship. ^{Footnote 14} Direct sellers’ self-perceptions demonstrate the growing purchase of the language of entrepreneurship in the 1970s and early 1980s. They pointed, too, to the ways that the late twentieth-century economy called into question old categories of work, class, and identity and also engendered new ones.

Americans’ widespread embrace of direct sales in the 1970s and 1980s coexisted with a deep sense of skepticism and unease about its pyramid-esque form and its use of intense methods of persuasion. The diffuse nature of direct selling, the lack of immediate contact among participants, the way recruiting tapped into one’s social and familial relationships, and the way direct sales firms skirted many major business regulations had, by the 1970s, created a phenomenon ripe for exploitation. A number of fraudulent investment schemes, such as buying clubs, discount travel agencies, and even old-fashioned chain letters, popped up in the 1970s under the guise of direct selling. As Chapter 7 shows, federal and regulatory bodies had some success addressing the problem of fraudulent pyramid sales, as demonstrated by the indictment of Glenn Turner, the perpetrator of a family of schemes with names such as “Kash Is Best” and “Dare to Be Great.” ^{Footnote 15} Through an investigation of Amway, the FTC was also able to create a clearer definition and set of guidelines whereby to distinguish legal networked sales plans from their scurrilous pyramidal cousins. ^{Footnote 16}

Nevertheless, the kind of ethical questions that networked direct sales raised were ultimately better addressed in the realm of popular culture than in courts of law. Popular sources, including a 60 Minutes segment called “Soap and Hope” (the source of this dissertation’s title), cast network direct sales as a problematic manifestation of what many considered the worst aspects of a particular strain of American culture that celebrated materialism and greed, venerated business, and upheld a brand of individualist free-market principles that bled into all facets of personal and spiritual life. ^{Footnote 17} Direct sales emerged in the 1980s as an easy target for larger popular critiques about the ethics of corporate capitalism and the nature of social life in the late twentieth century.

The direct sales industry, particularly networked direct sales firms such as Amway, never fully shed its negative image as a band of pyramid schemers and overly eager (some have said cultish) distributors pushing soap and hope. ^{Footnote 18} However, in ridiculing Amway and networked direct sales, critics may have missed the point. Popular criticisms, whether from Mike Wallace or lefty filmmaker Michael Moore, often lacked analytical punch, focusing more on direct selling as a cultural phenomenon than an economic or occupational one. ^{Footnote 19} Rather than see the appeal of direct sales as a response to job insecurity and the precarity of economic life in late capitalism, critics focused instead on mocking a generalized Amway “personality.”

Indeed, rather than see the appeal of direct sales work as emblematic of the erosion of economic security in America, popular commentators were, by the 1990s, lauding it as evidence of the continued promise of the proverbial American Dream. By the turn of the century, business analysts, media outlets such as USA Today, and even sitting President Bill Clinton were pointing to direct sales, with its low overhead and seemingly “recession-proof” business strategy, as the wave of the future and a blueprint for twenty-first century capitalism. ^{Footnote 20} However, direct selling was, in fact, a very old way of doing business. If direct sales was a blueprint for the future, it was so not because direct selling transformed to suit the needs of the twenty-first century. Rather, it was because, over the course of the post-World War II period, the mainstream labor economy looked more and more like direct sales. The question then becomes: What is truly new about the new economy? My research shows that as much as the late twentieth century ushered in a new phase in the history of American capitalism, it was a capitalism that also relied on, indeed revived, very old modes of labor and commerce.