How a 1958 magazine cheered America's slide into installment debt

The July 1958 issue of Argosy Magazine ran "Live Now—Pay Later" by Carlton Brown, capturing the moment America gleefully abandoned its Puritan thrift hangover for installment plans.

By 1958, Brown reports, between 60 and 75 percent of new cars and half of major household appliances were being bought on time, with deferred payments hitting roughly $40 billion — nearly 13 percent of every worker's after-tax income.

He profiles a New Orleans bond clerk who, after his honeymoon, put $1,500 down on a $15,000 house and financed $1,500 of furniture, a $300 TV, a $400 washer-dryer, two air conditioners, a $300 mink jacket for his bride, and a second honeymoon — all on $100 a week. His budgeting secret? They'd given up smoking.

Harvard economist Sumner H. Slichter cheered the trend, calling debt "a stabilizing and stimulating influence" especially good for young married men.

The best moment is an anonymous letter to a collection agency: the writer explains that on the fifth of each month, he and his wife put all their unpaid bills into a hat, blindfold her, and she draws one out to pay. If the dunning letters don't stop, he warns, he'll stop putting the bills in the hat.

The takeaway: the credit-fueled American consumer economy didn't sneak up on anyone. It was openly cheered, professorially endorsed, and already $40 billion deep by 1958.

Argosy began in 1882 as The Golden Argosy, a children's story-paper founded by Frank A. Munsey. It dropped "Golden" in 1888 and is generally credited as the first all-fiction pulp magazine after Munsey switched it to cheap pulp paper in 1896. After decades of adventure fiction from writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Max Brand, it pivoted to a men's lifestyle title in the 1940s — the version that ran Brown's piece — before folding in 1978.

Previously:
• In Kansas's poor, sick places, hospitals and debt collectors send the ailing to debtor's prison
• John Oliver buys and forgives $15M in medical debt, illustrates horrors of America's debt-collectors
• The origins of student debt
• Consumer debt is 'basically optional,' but debt collectors rely on you not knowing that
• US debt hits $31.26 trillion, exceeds annual GDP
• Debt is not a good product
• 'Sixteen Tons': the student debt edition
• 'Your debt is someone else's asset', a short film from The Intercept, Mollie Crabapple and co., and Astra Taylor