Paper Bag Patriotism
What might a 105-year-old a brown paper bag w/a glued-on magazine cover on one side & a red cross on the other tell us about women’s work, propaganda, and fashion magazines in World War I? How might such an investigation shift the standard history of the shopping bag in America — a history written by manufacturers and historians of technology?
As a historian of American everyday life, particularly everyday life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I am all too often confounded by the lack of primary textual evidence about the sorts of things people do but do not record. As a material culture scholar and curator, I work with physical objects that sometimes remain silent about their uses and meanings. To complicate matters, I am attracted to things that show the patina of age, wear, and tear, or were handmade failures lovingly preserved. Such things would not usually be considered “museum quality” or “aesthetically pleasing.”
Perhaps this is the reason I was enchanted with a now-105-year-old Kraft paper bag in the collections of the Michigan State University Museum. This bag — so familiar as “grocery store brown” — has a red cross glued to one broad side and a magazine cover glued to the other broad side. It was manufactured in Walden, Orange County, New York, by the Interstate Bag Company.
I came across this artifact during my tenure at the Museum as its Curator of History and while I was researching and creating an exhibition on World War I propaganda entitled War and Speech: Propaganda, Patriotism, and Dissent in the Great War. The Museum has a deep collection of World War I materials, from weapons and uniforms and other militaria, to maps, letters, postcards, souvenirs, and posters — over 500 posters, as a matter of fact, the majority of which had not been fully accessioned and catalogued. Propaganda posters were collected and exhibited by museums and historical societies during the war. Rare is the collection of home-made objects of patriotism.
The paper bag’s owner, Abigail Rena Bogert Boyce (1871–1954), lived in Kinderhook, Columbia County, New York. Her connection to Michigan State was through her son-in-law, who was a university faculty member. Donated with this bag was a Red Cross uniform. A brief note in the accession record tells us Boyce saved this bag to memorialize her World War I service. At age 47 in 1918, married with children, Boyce had enlisted in what a county historian of the war called the “vast army of women workers” who, under the auspices of the Red Cross, created thousands of garments and hospital goods for the United States Expeditionary Forces and for European refugees. Columbia County’s Red Cross volunteers made “3,665 sleeveless sweaters, 9,592 socks, 710 helmets, 1,443 mufflers, 2,246 wristlets, 105 children’s sweaters, 105 children’s stockings, 25 children’s mufflers, 4,026 refugee garments, 4,144 hospital garments, 1,150 Christmas packets, 1,085 army and navy kits, quantities of hospital supplies and bandages, including over 200,000 surgical dressings” (Home Defense Committee, Columbia County in the World War, 1924) Boyce carried this bag to and from her Red Cross knitting meetings.
I just had to place this humble bag in the exhibition.
The history of the paper shopping bag has been consistently told by historians (and by paper bag manufacturers) as one of technological innovation and business savvy. In 1852, Pennsylvanian Francis Wolle invented a machine to produce envelope-shaped paper bags. In 1870, Margaret Knight (1838–1914), working for the Columbia Paper Bag Company, in Springfield, Massachusetts, created a machine that cut, folded, and glued flat-bottomed bags. In 1883, Charles Stilwell improved Knight’s machine to produce bags with pleated sides — what were called “self-opening sacks.” In 1918, a cash-and-carry grocer, Walter Deubener (1887–1980), in St. Paul, Minnesota, added a string that doubled as a handle and bottom reinforcement of the paper shopping bag.
What this history ignores is staring at us in Rena Boyce’s knitting bag. The illustration on the bag is the cover of the April 1918 Ladies Home Journal, entitled “Her Souvenir” by Frederick Sands Brunner. Had Boyce decorated the bag? Was it the practice of the local Red Cross chapter? Or was it something bigger and in line with the fervent patriotism of the time?
Now, cloth knitting bags were a patriotic THING during World War I. Donated bags were auctioned for women’s war work supplies. Women’s magazines and newspapers offered many designs to be made of available fabrics, especially cretonne. Women could purchase commercially made knitting bags.
Knitting bag costumes for children were a thing. Women’s hats as knitting needle carriers were a thing. Jokes about the ever-growing size of knitting bags were a thing. Manufacturers advertising new household goods and appliances used the knitting bag as a measure of size. Knitting bags grew so large they were banned by some merchants fearful of shoplifting.
It was one thing to knit for the doughboys, but evidence of that work was sent overseas. Cloth knitting bags were stylish or patriotic, and stylishly patriotic, but textile shortages required women to signal their patriotism w/other materials. Answer? Decorated paper bags!
In 1918 a new craze in knitting bags swept the nation. Red Cross chapters and women’s groups began to purchase Kraft paper bags, decorate them w/patriotic imagery, and sell them to raise funds for their war work.
Even Vogue got into the act in August 1918, printing 3,000 more covers of three months’ issues so that women could use several patriotic covers on their paper knitting bags. “Some one has had the amusing idea of pasting these covers on paper-bags and selling them for the benefit of the Red Cross, and we have had many letters telling of their success. These bags may be bought from the Interstate Bag Company (Boyce’s bag’s maker)…; a pot of paste and a pair of scissors will work the transformation from an ordinary paper-bag into a gay and pretty affair in which that continuous grey or brown knitting may be carried.” The editor concluded: “A year or so ago it would have seemed incredible that anything so feminine and frivolous as a Vogue cover could ever become very martial, and yet many of our recent covers have had the great war-time spirit.”
But who had the “amusing idea”? I carried out a newspaper search, and it seems the earliest mention of this activity references Minneapolis or St. Paul, Minnesota — the home of Walter Deubener, he of handled paper shopping bag fame.
Walter Deubener invented the famed handled paper bag, associated mostly with grocery shopping, in 1912. It was Deubener’s wife Lydia who had the idea to glue pictures to paper bags to make them more appealing to customers. This fact gets glossed over in histories of the paper bag. It wasn’t about branding or advertising at first but about American women’s tastes and practices. After all, women were the ones to make shopping bags, or use shopping baskets, or buy leather purses in which to carry their purchases. It’s one thing to invent a cheap paper bag to tote goods. It’s quite another to get shoppers to use them.
In 1927, a Scientific American reporter interviewed Deubener about his paper bag invention. “Mrs. Deubener” is pictured and mentioned. We never learn her first name. We do learn it was her idea to paste lithographs onto the bags.
The caption to this undated Scientific American photograph of the Deubeners’ employees gluing images to the bags reads: “Bags are bought for two reasons — because they hold things and because they look attractive. These girls are applying the second reason to the bags — beautiful lithographs.” The bag was also decorated to imitate leather and basket weave — just like the materials of the containers American women had used for centuries.
What Rena Boyce’s decorated paper bag led me to were overlooked but critical features in the history of the modern, ephemeral, shopping bag: the roles of women, mass-produced fashion and women’s magazines, and the role of the Great War itself. Even shopping bag wars, since Interstate Paper Bag Company — the company that made Boyce’s bag — claimed it was the first to attach handles in 1907. Patriotism during World War I helped to popularize and establish the handled shopping bag as a modern consumption practice. But recognizing women’s roles as shoppers who had, for over a century, made or purchased cloth shopping and work bags means that the the history of the shopping bag needs to start not with the technologies of the paper bag but with the technologies of cloth, needle, and thread.