Why Don't You Buy Foreign?
If I had a dollar for every time someone at Hershey told Robert he doesn't buy foreign, I could have paid for our space. If I had another dollar for every time that same man already had, I could have bought the field.
Every year we walk past the same men, and every year the same men stop Robert. They never say it to me. It almost always starts friendly. Good to see you. Why haven't you sent me anything lately? Then, before he can answer, the addendum: and none of that foreign stuff.
He says it from the seat of a Yamaha golf cart.
On a sharper day, Robert will remind him which country his truck came from. Mostly he just grins and says, "Then send them my way."
I don't say anything. I've had years to learn that the most interesting person in any field is usually the one explaining what he won't buy.
Nobody teases a man about something they're settled on. A collector with no use for a European sign doesn't bring it up; he has nothing to bring up. The ones who stop Robert to say it, who make the same point every October, are circling something. The teasing is the tell.
I've started keeping a quiet inventory.
The golf cart is Japanese. The shoes, more often than you'd guess, are German. The watch, on the men who've done well, is Swiss, and they'll tell you the reference number before you think to ask. Somewhere in the conversation, usually not long after the foreign remark, someone describes a European car he'd give up a kidney to drive.
Nobody hears it. I'm not sure I would either, if it were mine.
On Thursday nights, when the auctions run on Facebook, some of the loudest men in the field bid hardest on Shell.
Shell was born in London and married into the Netherlands. Castrol has been British since its first batch of oil in 1909. Both have been foreign the entire time they've been collecting them. Firestone, at least, was American the day its sign was fired, and it has answered to Tokyo since 1988.
And every so often, Robert sells one of them a Mobil Pegasus off a French station, one without En Vente Ici across the top. The sign never said, and nobody asked. It's the same flying horse. It just came home the long way.
This year, Hershey outdid itself. Cool mornings, sunny afternoons, and leaves just beginning to turn. On the hill, HERSHEY was spelled out in deep plum shrubs against grass so green it looked painted on. I still don't know what they feed it.
Acres of the twentieth century were laid out on folding tables: carburetors and hood ornaments, owner's manuals sealed in plastic sleeves, attendant uniforms with somebody else's name still stitched above the pocket. Every object in that field is a piece of the machine that made the world small, and the machine was never ours to begin with.
Karl Benz patented the automobile in Germany in 1886. The interstate that carried those cars into every county in America, and stretched the signs to fit their speed, was Eisenhower's answer to the autobahn he had watched move German troops across a continent. Even the jeans on nearly everyone in the field are cut from a French fabric with an Italian name, and were made into an American icon by a Bavarian immigrant and a tailor from Riga.
Then there's the town itself. In 1893, a caramel maker from Lancaster kept returning to a German chocolate machine at the Chicago World's Fair, and when the fair closed, two of those machines were shipped home to him. The factory, the town, and the field we park in every October all grew from that purchase. Germany had already spent its years on the machine, so he could spend his on the chocolate.
So we drive to a town a German machine built, to celebrate a German invention, on highways drawn from Germany's, and somewhere in the middle of it, a man in German shoes tells Robert he doesn't buy foreign.
He's parked right in the middle of it.
So where does a belief like that come from, one sturdy enough to survive a man's own shoes?
It's older than any of us. During the First World War, hamburger became "liberty steak," sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage," and German names came off towns. In 1932, William Randolph Hearst ran "Buy American" across his twenty-seven newspapers, and by the following spring it was federal law. In the seventies and eighties, as Japanese cars took Detroit's customers, autoworkers took to smashing them.
It isn't only ours, either. In 1949, as American brands rolled into Europe behind the Marshall Plan, the French Communist press coined a word for it: Coca-colonization. Somewhere in France that year, a man was refusing a foreign sign. It was ours.
It comes in waves, and every wave rides in on fear: a war, a depression, a plant closing. The men who stop Robert in the field came of age in the last big one, and that one was about cars. The same cars, parts, and gas stations they've spent their lives collecting.
It would be easy to call that a conviction. I think it's closer to an echo.
In 1977, three psychologists, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, gave college students lists of true and false statements over several sessions, repeating some and not others. The repeated ones grew more believable each time, whether they were true or not; familiarity did the work. It's called the illusory truth effect, and the research since has found that intelligence doesn't protect you from it, and neither does being warned.
None of these men ever stood a French enamel sign beside an American one, weighed the graphics, the steel, and what each had survived, and chose the American one. The verdict came before the looking. They heard don't buy foreign at a parts counter, on the radio, and again from a father worried about his job, until somewhere along the way it stopped sounding like something they'd heard and started sounding like something they knew.
That isn't a flaw in them. Every mind works this way, mine included.
But it does explain the teasing. A belief you've arrived at, you can defend. A belief you've inherited, you can only repeat, a little louder each year, to the one man in the field you know will just grin.
Mine was a label. For years, "Made in the U.S.A." was my vote against sweatshops. I cast it at every checkout without ever looking into what the label actually promised. I'd heard it enough times that it felt like something I knew.
A label is a few words about geography, and we read them as a promise about quality, or conscience, or loyalty. One of the most trusted labels in the world started out as a warning.
In 1887, Britain passed the Merchandise Marks Act, requiring imports to name their country of origin. It was aimed largely at Germany, whose cheap cast-iron knockoffs were undercutting Sheffield steel, and the label was meant to warn British shoppers away. Then German makers got better. By the early 1900s, the warning was selling the very goods it was written to shame, and some English manufacturers were quietly stamping "Made in Germany" on their own products, because it sold.
The words never changed. What stood behind them did.
A porcelain sign is honest that way. Pick one up and it tells you: the weight of the steel, the shelving at the edge of each color, the maker's mark fired into the face.
The steel will tell you what the label never could.
I don't expect anyone to sell off their Texaco collection, and I wouldn't want them to. American signs are memorials to the gas stations and soda fountains we lost, and they've earned their walls.
But it's worth knowing what the European ones were built for. They came from countries where a brewery, a vineyard, or a shoemaker might count its age in centuries, and the signs were made to keep pace: heavier steel, one color and one kiln pass at a time. A great many still look the way they did the day they cooled. In a market where condition sets most of the price, that durability is simple arithmetic.
A few of the men who used to rib Robert sell European signs themselves now, and do well at it. Nobody made an announcement. They just stopped repeating the line long enough to look at what was moving, and why.
Next October, somebody will pull up beside Robert and say it again, none of that foreign stuff, from the seat of a Japanese golf cart, in a pair of German shoes. Maybe he'll ask: Why not?
He already buys foreign. The only question left is who told him not to.
- Liz Smith
Sources:
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., and Toppino, T. "Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1977. Overview: Illusory Truth Effect
Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism. Summary: "Our History Shows There's a Dark Side to 'Buy American'"
Hershey Community Archives, "I am going to make chocolate"
Levi Strauss & Co., "Jacob Davis: 6 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About the Inventor of the Blue Jean"
Wikipedia, Benz Patent-Motorwagen, DRP 37435
Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, 1967
Barry Popik, "Liberty Steak" and WWI food renaming
German History Intersections, 1902 article on the Merchandise Marks Act
Science Museum Group, C. C. Wakefield and Company (Castrol)
Bridgestone, Firestone history
Robert Smith Studios Library, American vs European Signs
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