Flapper (26 page)

Barton turned to precisely this question when, in a short profile of the automobile magnate Henry Ford, he urged readers of the
American Magazine
to discard “the old fashioned notion that the chief end in life is a steadily growing savings account, and that one must eliminate all pleasures from his vigorous years in order to prepare for possible want in old age.”
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In a new era of mass production and consumption, he argued, “life is meant to live and enjoy as you go along.… If self-denial is necessary, I’ll practice some of it when I’m old and not try to do all of it now. For who knows? I may never be old.”

This ethic of self-indulgence didn’t square with the rock-ribbed values that many Americans had imbibed as children. The challenge was to find a way to invoke 1920s vernacular in a manner that gave consumer culture a stamp of approval from none other than Jesus
Christ. Which was exactly what Barton accomplished in
The Man Nobody Knows.
In a twist on the well-worn question “What would Jesus do?” Barton implicitly invited readers to ask what Jesus might have thought about 1920s American capitalism. The answer, of course, was that Christ would have approved wholeheartedly of the new culture of consumption.

In Barton’s rendering, Christ was a born salesman who “recognized the basic principle that all good advertising is news” and who catered scrupulously to the “marketplace.” “Few of his sermons were delivered in synagogues,” Barton asserted. “For the most part he was in the crowded places, the Temple Court, the city squares, the centers where goods were bought and sold.”

Whereas in Christ’s time the marketplace was, quite literally, a town square where people gathered to buy and sell their wares, “the present day market-place is the newspaper and the magazine. Printed columns are the modern thoroughfares; published advertisements are the cross-roads where the sellers and the buyers meet. Any issue of a national magazine is a world’s fair, a bazaar filled with the products of the new world’s work. Clothes and clocks and candle sticks; soup and soap and cigarettes; lingerie and limousines—the best of all of them are there, proclaimed by their makers in persuasive tones.”

Would Jesus disapprove? Not at all. “He would be a national advertiser today, I am sure, as he was the great advertiser of his own day.”
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As a leading ad executive, Bruce Barton represented a new cadre of elite men and women who enjoyed unprecedented influence over the ways in which Americans envisioned and understood the world around them. They would play a central role in disseminating flapper fashion and style and, even more important, in shaping the contours of femininity, sexuality, and physique in the 1920s.

As recently as the 1890s, advertising agents had served as little more than freelance brokers who purchased newspaper ad space in bulk and sold it back to local businesses at a marginal profit.
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Ads were tucked away discreetly in the back pages of magazines and serials, used small print, and contained only the most essential information. No pictures, no catchphrases, no extra draw. Just the facts.

This status quo couldn’t last. In the several decades following the Civil War, American industry expanded in leaps and bounds, resulting in warehouses virtually overflowing with unsold consumer goods. Businessmen now faced an unforeseen embarrassment of riches. They could produce the goods, but they couldn’t always unload them.

On paper, at least, America seemed ripe for the development of a national market. Since the mid–nineteenth century, armies of itinerant workers had laid down thousands of miles of railroad tracks, half of which were still less than twenty-five years old on the eve of World War I. Telegraph services and telephone lines facilitated an instant flow of information from coast to coast. The potential was there to move ideas, business orders, raw materials, and finished products across vast amounts of space over relatively little time.

Indeed, “the goods must be moved,” cried a merchant in 1912.
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But how? People first needed to be taught how to consume.

It became increasingly popular to view the problem as one of underconsumption rather than overproduction. Though a few left-wing voices like that of Edward Bellamy called on the government to guarantee a minimum income to every family in America—in effect, to impose a massive downward transfer of wealth that would allow the working poor, who were barely scraping by, to enjoy more of the fruits of American prosperity—more conservative voices won the day.

“We are not concerned with the ability to pay,” wrote an early proponent of advertising, “but with the ability to want and choose.” Americans could and would empty the warehouses of their surplus goods, if only they were given the “imagination and emotion to desire.”
“Without imagination, no wants,”
explained another advertising guru in 1899.
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“Without wants, no demand to have them supplied.”

The idea that advertisers should produce desire rather than simply provide information about specific products gained currency in the early years of the twentieth century. “It is all very well to get the sales of things that people want to buy,” argued a speaker at the Nashville Ad Club in 1916, “but that is too small in volume.
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We must make people want many other things, in order to get a big increase in business.”

Between 1900 and 1920, the nature of advertising changed markedly. Leading firms no longer acted as mere brokers but now designed arresting ad copy and artwork that championed new brands. They suggested with varying degrees of subtlety that consumer items were not just luxuries, but
necessities.

Whereas a typical advertising expert
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in the 1890s claimed that “pictures are merely adjuncts to the ad. … When they dominate the ad they weaken it,” within the space of just a few years, industry professionals agreed that “the advertising of the future will be illustrated. There can hardly be a question about that.”

By the early 1920s, the visual focus of ads had moved away from the product itself and toward the image of people enjoying the product. New Age admen weren’t selling soap, automobiles, and clothing. They were selling the happiness and exhilaration that came from buying soap, automobiles, and clothing. Hence, advertisements for Arrow shirts that featured a handsome, sharply chiseled man clad in elegant evening wear, descending a gilded staircase with a tall blonde at his side. Or the 1926 ad for Chesterfields featuring an attractive young couple seated by a secluded oceanfront horizon. The focus wasn’t on the product; it was on the dream that the product held out for its consumers.

The smartest admen understood that in a world where ordinary people were increasingly beholden to the time clock and the company foreman, and where powerful and inaccessible bureaucracies—banks, government agencies, national corporations—enjoyed a disproportionate share of political and economic power, buying an Arrow shirt or a pack of Chesterfields offered the prospect of balance and compensation.

“To those who cannot change their whole lives or occupation,” argued Helen Woodward, a successful ad copywriter in the 1920s, “even a new line in dress is often a relief.
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The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or her job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into a beige.”

It was a short step from longing for the latest dress to compensate for a sense of lost autonomy to using that dress to satisfy a desire for
authenticity. In a world where indoor plumbing, centralized heating, canned foods, carpeting, home insulation, and electric lights removed ordinary people from the dirt, grime, smells, exertion, and discomforts of everyday life, people seemed to crave direct experience, and advertisers turned this yearning to their advantage. As G. Stanley Hall, a leading turn-of-the-century psychologist, argued, “Everyone, especially those who lead the drab life of the modern toiler, needs and craves an occasional ‘good time.’ Indeed, we all need to glow, tingle, and
feel life intensely
now and then.”
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The admen instinctively grasped this idea and offered up consumer culture as a therapeutic answer to the dual crisis of individual autonomy and experiential living. “Go to a motion picture … and let yourself go,” began a typical ad in
The Saturday Evening Post.
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“Before you know it you are
living
the story—laughing, loving, hating, struggling, winning! All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in—Pictures! They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world.… Out of the cage of everyday existence! If only for an afternoon or an evening—escape!”

Though working people might not have enjoyed several crucial benefits of meaningful citizenship—a responsive government, autonomy in the workplace, fair wages, and economic security—at least they could drown their troubles in a sea of consumer plenty. However more subtle today’s advertisements seem by comparison, the same promise of a more authentic, fulfilling life surely permeates American media.

Not everyone shared Madison Avenue’s enthusiasm for the new consumer culture. A few years after the Jazz Age had come and gone, the English critic Denys Thompson complained that “advertising tries to conceal the emptiness and make life feel good.
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It is as if the forces of advertising had decreed that the individual man or woman must not be allowed to develop his or her own potentialities.” This could be all too true of working women, whose economic, social, and (until 1920) political rights were sharply curtailed but who faced a steady barrage of advertisements urging them to find self-definition and freedom in $1.95 “Joan Crawford Hats.”
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If advertisers only had to teach Americans to embrace a more self-indulgent ethos, their task would have been hard enough. But they also had to initiate citizens into an emerging national market in which brand names—a completely new invention—meant something. People who were used to buying soap and sugar out of large vats at the local dry goods store needed to be taught to prefer prepackaged cakes of Ivory and prewrapped packets of Domino sugar. Housewives accustomed to baking their own desserts and growing their own produce required instruction on the virtues of Uneeda biscuits (manufactured by the National Biscuit Company) and White Diamond corn.

In the first years of the twentieth century, brand names sprang by the thousands from the wild imaginations of enterprising businessmen and, with the help of Madison Avenue, the new home of national advertising, were seared into the minds of ordinary Americans. Crisco, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Kodak, Sherwin-Williams, Waterman’s, Jell-O, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Wrigley’s Doublemint chewing gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum … The competition for mind share was fierce.

Thanks to the highly successful efforts of advertising executives, by the eve of World War I, Americans were well on their way to becoming trained consumers, and consumer branding—a new form of intellectual property—was widely recognized as intrinsically valuable. When the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco Company in 1911, it appraised the total worth of its trademarks at $45 million—a sum equal to 20 percent of its total assets.
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By 1920, grocers in Chicago had reported that more than three-quarters of their customers asked for baked beans by the brand name, while a national survey of three hundred men revealed that every last respondent could identify at least one brand name of a watch, soap, and fountain pen.
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Together, they pinpointed thirty-six different brand names of soft drinks.

In their effort to reshape attitudes about spending, advertisers profited from vast changes in the way Americans saw the world around them. Until late in the nineteenth century, representations of reality—photographs, mirrors, paintings, and the like—were primitive
and hard to come by. Only wealthy Americans in the 1840s and 1850s could employ portrait artists, whose work usually captured a rough outline of their subject’s appearance.

It wasn’t until the invention of modern photography in 1839 and, even more so, the popular introduction of ferrotypes and tintypes sometime around the 1860s, that working men and women enjoyed affordable access to
cartes-de-visite—
small trading pictures that could be purchased for 10 cents on the dozen.
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At the same time, new technologies like halftone engraving, which came into wide use in the 1880s and 1890s, made it easier to reproduce photographs, oil paintings, and wash drawings in newspapers, broadsides, books, magazines, and advertisements.

Almost overnight, visual reproduction, once scarcely imaginable, became an everyday convenience for millions of Americans. The effects of this cornucopia of sight and sensation were dramatic.

In the 1880s and 1890s, around the same time that halftones became de rigueur, new printing techniques—particularly the chromolithograph (or chromo)—made it possible to introduce colors into trading cards, product wrappers, advertisements, mass-produced paintings, and even some photographs.
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And not just the primary colors. By the turn of the century, advances in coloration introduced as many as a thousand new tints into the color spectrum. Americans growing up just before World War I learned to recognize heretofore unknown shades like mauve and chrome yellow.

Advertisers were quick to exploit these advances in printing and coloration. In the 1880s, young women became avid collectors of trade cards—a cross between magazine advertisements (which came into wider use after 1890) and baseball cards (which wouldn’t become popular until the 1920s)—that announced the arrival of new household products and brands. In her autobiography,
Little Town on the Prairie
, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of the delight that she took as a child in these collectors items.
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“The cards were the palest green,” she remarked, “and on each was a picture of a bobolink swaying and singing on a spray of goldenrod.”