All Tuppered out

Not so long ago, the Holy Grail was a plastic cup.

by Jerry Herron
3/22/00

A bedrock faith in the transformative potential of consuming.

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America
By Alison J. Clarke.
Smithsonian Institution Press, $24.95, 241 pp.

Americans. We always think we got to wherever it is we think we are without anybody else having ever done or felt or thought like this before.

"Exceptionalism," it’s called: the idea that we’re the only ones, the exception. And in lots of cases, it’s true, with results both good and ill.

Alexis de Tocqueville – famous French know-it-all – was the first to make a big deal out of this aspect of our national character. He got sent to the United States by the French government, in the 1830s, to investigate our native genius at jail building; we’d already established that our unique exercise of freedom would require us to lock a lot of each other up. Tocqueville dutifully examined the jails, but ended up getting interested in a great deal else. He wouldn’t be the last foreigner to decide there was money to be made by explaining America.

Take Alison Clarke’s Tupperware, for example. Clarke is a tutor at the Royal College of Art in London. She has a great story to tell and, mostly, when sociologizing and low-grade scholarship don’t get in the way, she tells it – at least enough of it to make her book interesting.

The story is about Earl Tupper, who invented Tupperware, and Brownie Wise, who invented the Tupperware home party. A lot went right for those two very different people; and then a lot went wrong. It’s an exceptional, American tale.

Earl Silas Tupper was born in Berlin, N.H., in 1907. From the start, he was set on "Tupperizing" America, through his combination of Protestant evangelism, self-help philosophy and a bedrock faith in the transformative potential of consuming.

But he lacked a proper medium. Not that he didn’t have ideas – for a utopian theme park, a Tupper CO2 bomb, a revolutionary surgical procedure for removing the appendix through the anus. Then, in 1939, a miracle happened; Tupper discovered plastic: "Tupper envisioned a world utterly transformed through the appropriate application of polyethylene."

It would take 10 years to come up with the airtight seal and the familiar shape that made Tupperware a success. By then, the times would be just right for the transformation Tupper dreamed of.

The years after World War II, beginning in 1949 and extending to the economic downturn of the early 1970s, were unprecedented in terms of growth in productivity, wages and the proliferation of new products in the market. Americans had never known such a period before, and haven’t since. Our present boom doesn’t light a candle to that one in terms of proportionate change.

Couple that with the postwar explosion in suburban construction and the newly affluent generation of baby boom housewives, waiting to consume, and the moment was exactly right for Tupper – or almost so.

His products had already won acclaim. In 1949 the Detroit Institute of Arts mounted an "Exhibition for Modern Living" that included several Tupper items; in 1956, New York’s Museum of Modern Art would include Tupperware containers in a show of outstanding 20th century designs, noting their "carefully considered shapes."

But those honors meant nothing to the average housewife, who associated plastic with cheapness and wartime ersatz culture. They were the ones who had to be convinced.

The real story, here, is about how history – our history – always finds the actors it needs to get the job done, and how Brownie Wise – a divorced single mom from Detroit – was just such a person. She got the job done that Tupper needed if his bowls were to find an audience.

As department store items and mail-order commodities, Tupperware had gone nowhere, despite its award-winning designs. Wise figured out how to turn the contradictions of the postwar home into a party, a money-making party, the Tupperware Home Party.

She reconciled the conflict of "thrift and excess" that defined domesticity; and she invented a persona for herself that made the selling of Tupperware seem both ladylike and also liberatory, in addition to providing a lot of prizes to all concerned.

In 1951, Tupper appointed Wise head of home sales; she was 40 years old. She would make the two of them very rich. In April 1954, she became the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week magazine.

Success notwithstanding, she and Earl Tupper never reconciled their differences, much like the differences that exist in our national character, between thrift and excess, piety and partying down. He stuck to New England and colonial-style sobriety; she took off for Florida, where she built a modernist showplace, "Water’s Edge."

Their relationship ended badly.

In tones of moral superiority, Tupper accused Wise of betraying the corporate ethos and endangering the Tupperware reputation; she had been observed, by an unnamed source, using a Tupperware bowl as a dog dish in her glamorous lakeside home.

Tupper fired her in 1958. The same year, he divorced his wife and sold Tupperware to the Rexall Drug Company for $16 million. He was disillusioned with America, he said. Then he moved to Costa Rica and renounced his citizenship. He died, an expatriate, in 1983.

Brownie Wise would work in various direct sales enterprises for the rest of her life, but never so successfully as she had with Tupperware; she died in December 1992.

As to what this all means – it gets back to Tocqueville and exceptionalism, and how we really are different, just like the country we’ve made. We are independent and religious and prosperous, more so than anybody else. But also stingy when it comes to "public" expenditures.

We believe in achievement and mistrust giveaways. We root for the little guy, but want to abolish welfare. A lot of the time, we know so little about ourselves, especially how we got to be this way, that we seem inexplicable, particularly to each other.

Whatever good or bad happens, it seems to have come from nowhere, so we’re alternately optimistic beyond all logic, or else enraged for reasons we don’t understand. If there’s a moral to find, it’s right there in the stories of Earl Tupper and Brownie Wise. And how the two of them needed each other and never could finally get along. That’s us, as they say, to a T.

Jerry Herron is chair of the American Studies program at Wayne State University, and a frequent contributor to Metro Times.