The Historical past of Gillette’s Founder, a Utopian Socialist Turned Inventor

“A number of the Gilded Age manufacturing sorts got here up with completely different concepts on learn how to arrange a metropolis to profit the widespread employee,” says Peter Liebhold, a curator of labor and business on the Smithsonian Establishment, whose personal monumental mustache rests formidably on his higher lip.

A very powerful factor to do, wrote Gillette, is to dissolve all business.

In line with Liebhold, Gillette’s ascent occurred because the gorge between America’s rich and America’s everybody else grew all through the 20th century. There was nice public nervousness concerning the arrival of socialism in America and elevated consideration paid to the hole between an organization’s CEO and its lowest-paid employee. “We’ve returned, by way of inequality, to these occasions of Gillette,” says Liebhold. “There was a variety of stress then and there’s more and more stress now.”

KCG abhorred competitors in enterprise. At one level in The Human Drift, he questioned if Devil invented capitalism as a technique to bolster inhabitants numbers in hell. It’s — and he pontificates at size right here — evil. (What Gillette would make of his model’s iron grip on the modern shaving business is, once more, info we can not know, and it is in all probability not value fascinated about anyway.) A very powerful factor to do, wrote Gillette, is dissolve all business over the American populace, giving every citizen kind of the identical inventory choices. Commerce could be comprised not of separate operations however vertically organized industries. One “firm” for eggs, one other for elevators, one other for shoelaces.

The e-book finally transitions from a quasi-socialist manifesto right into a sequence of dreamily painted landscapes of an equitable American future: Gillette described his metropolis, sprawled from Niagara Falls to only exterior of the Finger Lakes, with hyperspecific instruction, together with porcelain-faced brick for his 25-story condominium complexes, round buildings ridged like gears so every unit may obtain equal solar publicity.

And but, simply shy of a decade after The Human Drift was revealed, Gillette filed a patent that might lead to his namesake billion-dollar company. He continued to put in writing dreamily about socialist utopia — and proposed a World Corporation (book three) headquartered in the Arizona Territory, with former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt at its helm — while he built the brand that bears his name. According to the company, KCG’s restless pursuit of shaving efficiency inspired its latest collection, which is luxuriously branded in handsome amber and navy. Liebhold credits the company with some of the first lifestyle branding in history, by associating the concept of shaving with virility and manhood. P&G did something similar with its virginally marketed Ivory soap, which launched a few decades prior to Gillette’s patent.

During an American Enterprise exhibit at the National Museum of American History, Liebhold handled a 1917 razor of Gillette’s design. The blades were sumptuously wrapped in emerald tissue, enclosed with a small photo of KCG. “And I understood, then, the importance of branding,” he says. “It wasn’t a knockoff. It was a Gillette.”

This story originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Allure. Learn how to subscribe here.

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