The scientific inventions and new commercial products of the past twenty years would, in any case, have made their appeal to such classes in the community as could have afforded them, but the complete change in the American mode of life and the consequent cost which has engulfed us all like a tidal wave would not have occurred had it not been for mass production. No one is troubled by not having something of which he has never heard, and he is not greatly so by not being able to have something which no one has whom he is ever likely to know personally. For example, it could not have troubled a college professor or writer in 1890 that he had not an automobile. It does not trouble him today that he cannot have a private five-hundred-foot ocean-going yacht like Vincent Astor. It is not wholly a question of keeping up with the Joneses. Having a $2,000 car when one ought to have only a Ford is sheer ostentation, but having some car in the country is now a necessity unless one is going to cut one’s self and one’s family off from a very large part of social “neighborhood” as well as from the pleasures that all one’s friends, practically without exception, are enjoying. The fact that today “everyone is having everything,” whether they pay for it or not, is due to advertising[Pg 186] and “high-powered salesmanship,” and these are due primarily to mass production which requires mass markets. But even these would not have been sufficient to alter so completely the status and peace of mind of the intellectual worker had it not been for the other effect of mass production mentioned above, that is, the shift in the economic status of the other classes. Formerly, although the intellectual worker occupied a comparatively low position in the economic scale, he was distinctly above the laboring class, and even between him and the successful business man there was no unbridgable gulf. Between the home of the college professor, clergyman, or author and that of the business man there was a difference in degree but not in kind. The intellectual, like his business acquaintance, could have decent living quarters for his family and a maid to relieve his wife of the heaviest household duties, and make his home an expression of himself.