The Image (30 page)

In 1841, Barnum managed to buy Scudder’s American Museum, a private collection of curiosities exhibited for profit. The museum, once well known and profitable, was then losing money. When Barnum told a friend that he intended to buy the museum (the asking price was $15,000), the friend replied in astonishment, “What do you intend buying
it with?” “Brass,” retorted Barnum, “for silver and gold have I none.” He increased and diversified the transient attractions, exhibiting, according to his own list, “educated dogs, industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gipsies, Albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope-dancers, live Yankees, pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety, dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; Hannington’s dioramas of the Creation, the Deluge, Fairy Grotto, Storm at Sea; the first English Punch and Judy in this country, Italian Fantoccini, mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines, and other triumphs in the mechanical arts; dissolving views, American Indians who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on the stage—these, among others, were all exceedingly successful.” Barnum’s American Museum soon became one of New York’s major tourist attractions.

It was to advertise this museum that he invented his famous “brick man”—a perfect, if somewhat primitive, example of the connection between “pseudo-events” and advertising. Barnum hired a stout, hearty-looking man for $1.50 a day and handed him five bricks. He instructed the man to lay one brick at each of four points which Barnum indicated near the American Museum. The man kept the fifth brick in his hand and marched rapidly from one brick to another, at each point exchanging the one in his hand for the one on the street; he kept this up in a constant circuit. At the end of every hour, however, the brick man entered the American Museum, spent fifteen minutes solemnly surveying all the halls, then left, and resumed his work. Each time, a dozen or more persons would buy tickets and follow him into the museum hoping to learn the purpose of his movements. Their entrance fees more than paid the brick man’s wages. Additional interest was created when a policeman (who had been let in on the trick) objected that the crowds were obstructing traffic, and ordered Barnum to call in his brick man. “This trivial incident,” Barnum recounted, “excited considerable
talk and amusement; it advertised me; and it materially advanced my purpose of making a lively corner near the Museum.”

One of Barnum’s great successes was his mermaid. A painting outside the museum depicted an attractive half woman, half fish about eight feet long. Illustrated handbills portrayed her capture on a Pacific island. The specimen was said to have been purchased by a Dr. Griffith as agent for the Lyceum of Natural History in London. Barnum had this “Dr. Griffith” (who was in fact a Barnum assistant named Lyman) exhibit it before a large meeting of New York scientists in the Concert Hall. Actually what was being exhibited was only the preserved head of a monkey attached to the dried body of a fish. “The public appeared to be satisfied,” Barnum recalled, “but as some persons always
will
take things literally, and make no allowance for poetic license even in mermaids, an occasional visitor, after having seen the large transparency in front of the hall, representing a beautiful creature, half woman and half fish … would be slightly surprised to find that the reality was a black-looking specimen of dried monkey and fish that a boy a few years old could easily run away with under his arm.” Other Barnum triumphs were General Tom Thumb, a five-year-old dwarf who was less than two feet high and weighed sixteen pounds when he was first displayed on Thanksgiving Day, 1842, and who attracted over a hundred thousand people in the first year; and Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale” whose real name was Mme. Otto Goldschmidt. She was advertised as being paid a thousand dollars a concert, all of which she supposedly gave to charity. Barnum first opened “The Greatest Show on Earth” in Brooklyn in 1871. There, and on tour, he displayed countless freaks and monstrosities, among them “Jumbo,” a large, gentle African Elephant advertised as “The Only Mastodon on Earth.”

Contrary to popular belief, Barnum’s great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived. Especially if they
could see how it was being done. They were flattered that anyone would use such ingenuity to entertain them. Barnum argued that his “clap-trap” was perfectly justifiable so long as it was occasionally “mixed up with the great realities which I provide. The titles of ‘humbug,’ and ‘prince of humbugs,’ were first applied to me by myself. I made these titles a part of my ‘stock in trade.’ ” Barnum’s autobiography,
Struggles and Triumphs
(published in 1854, the year of Thoreau’s
Walden
), recounted his exploits with disarming candor and precise detail. It soon became a best seller.

Barnum was perhaps the first modern master of pseudo-events, of contrived occurrences which lent themselves to being widely and vividly reported. When his winter circus quarters burned, he managed to pyramid the news by announcing that insurance had covered only a fraction of the losses. When newspapers disputed him, he remained unconcerned, finding that the insurance controversy itself was a fruitful source of additional publicity. When Jumbo, the African elephant, was killed in a railroad accident, Barnum put out the story that Jumbo died sacrificing himself to save a baby elephant; he then imported “Alice,” whom he billed as Jumbo’s widow, posing her next to the stuffed body of her deceased “husband.” Barnum was a doubly appropriate symbol of the opening of the era of the Graphic Revolution: by making colossal pseudo-events, he himself became a celebrity.

A talent for advertising and a talent for making news have ever since been connected. Albert D. Lasker, an advertising master of the twentieth century, once characterized all good advertising as news.

Advertising, however, contained an ingredient not generally found in the other pseudo-events which were mere “made news.” For while any pseudo-event—an interview, for example—was a happening incited into existence for the purpose of being reported, an advertisement was designed to suggest not merely that something had happened, but also that something was good. An advertisement usually conjured
up an image in order to persuade people that something was worth buying. It combined a pseudo-event with a pseudo-ideal. The pseudo-event must be vividly newsworthy, the pseudo-ideal must be vividly desirable.

Much of the appeal of advertising has actually consisted in its effort, which we all appreciate, to satisfy our extravagant expectations. The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our “deceivers” than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced. The Graphic Revolution has produced new categories of experience. They are no longer simply classifiable by the old common sense tests of true or false.

O
UR FRENETIC
earnestness to attack advertising, our fear of advertising, and our inability to fit advertising into old-time familiar cubbyholes of our experience—all these prevent us from seeing its all-encompassing significance as a touchstone of our changing concept of knowledge and of reality. Our attitude toward advertising is comparable to the eighteenth-century English and American attitude toward insanity and mental disorders. Unable to understand the insane, the sane, respectable people of London saw in them something wicked and diabolical, put them in chains, confined them in Bedlam, punished them with whips. Madmen ceased to be treated as half witch, half criminal only in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century when physicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts helped us see that “madmen” suffered from mental diseases. The great forward steps in public understanding came only when people began to realize that the disorders of the “insane” and the perverted—hysteria, paranoia, schizophrenia, homosexuality, etc.—were only extreme examples of tendencies in each of us “normal” people. The understanding of “insanity” in this way has gradually
led each of us to a better understanding of himself.

Similarly with advertising. Baffled and suspicious, we deride the “witch doctors” of Madison Avenue. It is they, we say, who want to involve us in the figments of their disordered imaginations. They lie to us; they persuade us against our will. Accusing them, we fail to see what their activities can teach us about ourselves. Since the Graphic Revolution, the multiplication of images has had a revolutionary effect on all our imaginations, on our concept of verisimilitude, on what passes for truth in common experience.

This can be summed up as the shift in common experience from an emphasis on “truth” to an emphasis on “credibility.” All of us—not merely the supposed witch doctors of Madison Avenue, but all American citizen-consumers—are daily less interested in whether something is a fact than in whether it is convenient that it should be believed. Today the master of truth is not the master of facts but the practitioner of the arts of self-fulfilling prophecy. What seems important is not truth but verisimilitude. In this new world, where almost anything can be true, the socially rewarded art is that of making things seem true. It is the art not of discovery, but of invention. Finding a fact is easy; making a fact “believed” is slightly more difficult. The greatest effort goes into the realization not of dreams, but of illusions. God makes our dreams come true. Skillful advertising men bring us our illusions, then make them seem true.

The whole American tradition of pragmatism—from Benjamin Franklin, who insisted that it was less important whether any religious belief was true than whether the consequences of the belief were wholesome, down to William James, who explored the consequences of the “Will to Believe” and focused interest on how whatever people believed or wanted to believe overshadowed whatever might be out there in the “real” world—this tradition has expressed a consuming interest in the appearances of things.

One explanation of increasing American interest in credibility
is a simple paradox of the Graphic Revolution. While that Revolution has multiplied and vivified our images of the world, it has by no means generally sharpened or clarified the visible outlines of the world which fill our experience. Quite the contrary. By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs. By sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience. The new images have blurred traditional distinctions.

The broadest of the old distinctions which no longer serve us as they did is the distinction between “true” and “false.” Well-meaning critics (including many in the advertising profession) who say the essential problem is false advertising are firing volleys at an obsolete target. Few advertisers are liars. A strong advertising profession has its own earnest ethic. Lies are not so readily diffused through newspapers and magazines, over radio and television. They are not so eagerly believed. The “evils” of advertising could be easily enough reduced if they came only from lies. The deeper problem is quite different. In some ways it is quite opposite. Advertising befuddles our experience, not because advertisers are liars, but precisely because they are not. Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths. The whole apparatus of the Graphic Revolution has put a new elusiveness, iridescence, and ambiguity into everyday truth in twentieth-century America.

The so-called “Baltimore Truth Declaration,” which was adopted at an early convention of advertising men in 1913, committed them to “Truth in Advertising.” This later became the slogan of the Advertising Federation of America and its local affiliates. Advertisers were welcomed to that historic convention by the word
TRUTH
displayed in the largest electric sign yet erected in Baltimore. On the whole, the advertising profession has since then followed its credo with a dangerously literal persistence. The advertising profession was founded on “Truth,” but it has survived by its power to
give Truth a new meaning.

Several novel appeals have come to characterize the most successful advertising statements. All are both effects and causes of our exaggerated expectations: products and by-products of image-thinking. These first developed in advertising, but have spread out to all our experience. As nature now imitates art, as the geysers in Yellowstone now provide us tourist attractions, more and more of our experience nowadays imitates advertising. The pseudo-event, or that which looks like a pseudo-event, seldom fails to dominate.

(1)
The appeal of the neither-true-nor-false
. The larger proportion of advertising statements subsist in this new limbo. They cannot be parsed in the old grammar of epistemology because modern experience is newly ambiguous. The complexity of new manufacturing processes, the new vagueness that can be designed into vivid images, the new uncertainty of relation between the image and the thing imaged (Is it an actual photograph?)—all these make the simple question, “Is it true?” as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Here, too, the once-simple notion of an “original” has acquired a tantalizing ambiguity bordering on meaninglessness.

The advertiser’s art then consists largely of the art of making persuasive statements which are neither true nor false. He does not violate the old truth-morality. Rather, like the news maker, he evades it. It is not only advertising which has become a tissue of contrivance and illusion. Rather, it is the whole world. The ambiguities and illusions of advertising are only symptoms. Advertising events are no less or more unreal than all other pseudo-events. A few commonplace examples will suffice.

One of the most familiar is the use of the open comparative adjective—“the better beer”—without specifying that with which it is being compared. This can hardly fail to be true of every beer which is not the worst in the world.