Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Stuart Ewen
Read between
May 22 - August 11, 2020
Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which dissected the ways that corporate capitalism infused every aspect of daily life, down to the language we speak,
Considering the quantitative possibilities of mass production, the question of “national markets” became one of qualitatively changing the nature of the American buying public. In response to the exigencies of the productive system of the twentieth century, excessive-ness replaced thrift as a social value. It became imperative to invest the laborer with a financial power and a psychic desire to consume.
Herbert Hoover noted that “High wages [are the] . . . very essence of great production.”25 In 1923, Julius Barnes, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, spoke of the need to prevent the overconcentration of wealth, which threatened the development of a “broad purchasing market necessary to absorb our production.”
While agreeing that “human nature is more difficult to control than material nature,”49 ad men spoke in specific terms of “human instincts” which if properly understood could induce people “to buy a given product if it was scientifically presented. If advertising copy appealed to the right instincts, the urge to buy would surely be excited.”
Linking the theories of “self-consciousness” to the exigencies of capitalism, one writer in Printers’ Ink commented that “advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”63
By transforming the notion of “class” into “mass,” business hoped to create an “individual” who could locate his needs and frustrations in terms of the consumption of goods rather than the quality and content of his life (work).
Often, such ads were geared to make people ashamed of their origins and, consequently, the habits and practices that betrayed them as alien.
The Sherwin Cody School of English advertised that a less-than-perfect mastery of the language was just cause for social ostracism.
Rather than arguing that a knowledge of the language would be helpful in conversation and effective communication, the ad argued that being distinguishable from the fabricated national norm, a part of advertising’s mythologized homogeneity, was a justification for social failure.
The advertising which attempted to create the dependable mass of consumers required by modern industry often did so by playing upon the fears and frustrations evoked by mass society—offering mass produced visions of individualism by which people could extricate themselves from the mass. The rationale was simple. If a person was unhappy within mass industrial society, advertising was attempting to put that unhappiness to work in the name of that society.
As the ads intimated that anything natural about the consumer was worthless or deplorable, and tried to make him schizophrenically self-conscious of that notion, they offered weapons by which even people with bad breath, enlarged nose pores, corned feet and other such maladies could eclipse themselves and “succeed.”
consumption and the advertising that stimulated it must play. Putting aside the buoyant ad rhetoric of progress and beneficence for a moment, Printers’ Ink put the need for social control in the frankest terms: “modern machinery . . . made it not only possible but imperative that the masses should live lives of comfort and leisure; that the future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products.”
Pitkin ordered a campaign for an entire industrial value system, imploring his colleagues “to go beyond institutional advertising to some new kind of philosophy of life advertising.”8
The attempt to create a national, unified culture around the social bond of the consumer market was basically a project of broad “social planning.”10 Industry, Filene argued, could “sell to the masses all that it employs the masses to create,” but such a development would require a selective education which limited the concept of social change and betterment to those commodified answers rolling off American conveyor belts.
Filene presented a vision of education into industrial and social democracy within which the element of conflict was eradicated from the world of knowledge. Education, for Filene, became a task of building a culture on the basis of “fact-finding.” Just looking at the given “facts” about what is being produced rather than questioning the social bases upon which those facts lay was what modern education should be all about.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the contiguity of industrialization and social control came to the fore in the United States and elsewhere. As Max Horkheimer, a social critic from the Frankfurt School, has noted in discussing monopolizing industrialism: “the rule of economy over all personal relationships, the universal control of commodities over the totality of life” must in the face of historical resistance become “a new and naked form of command and obedience.”21
Hammerling did not merely feed ads to the non-English American press. Senate investigations into Hammerling’s activities revealed that he also fed editorials and news material to these papers and required that they be published without the remuneration usually paid for advertising. Functioning as a “press bureau,” the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers was able to forge a political and social direction which was tantamount to almost total corporate control.29
Rorty’s romanticized denunciation of commerce as a world which “is fueled by the organic cultural life which it disintegrates and consumes, but does not restore or replace.”40
of the businessmen the very notion of truth emanated not from any social values or ethics external to their business, but was a product of their business. As such, it is not at all surprising that the Progressive era’s truth in advertising legislation, enacted in various states in the years following 1910, was not a move by irate citizens to clean up the ad business, but part of a public relations campaign which attempted to legitimize the ad industry’s own conception of honesty.
The truth is that the Printers’ Ink statute was rather soft and had few teeth in it. While making unlawful and punishable as a misdemeanor any ad which “contains any assertion, representation or statement of fact which is untrue, deceptive or misleading,” the law was in no way armed to confront the problem of psychological manipulation; nor was it meant to.48
In 1869, Scientific American, a journal which identified with the science of production, spoke ominously of the fate in store for noncooperating immigrant laborers, promising them “a quiet but sure extermination.”58
the Richmond, Virginia, Whig called for a broad educational program in industrial diligence. “[In] educating the industrial morale of the people . . . the work of inculcating industrial ideas and impulses, all proper agencies should be enlisted—family discipline, public school education, pulpit instruction, business standards and requirements, and the power and influence of the workingmen’s associations.”
Helen Woodward, the leading woman copywriter of the 1920s, added that in order to write effective copy, the writer should avoid the productive arena religiously. “If you are advertising any product,” she warned, “never see the factory in which it was made. . . . Don’t watch the people at work. . . . Because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real, inner truth—it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it.”64
The psychological conscription of consumers, said George Phelps, was simply a question of “influencing minds,” or, more pointedly, “the process of getting people to do or think what you want them to do or think.”68 Viewing the potential consumer as a resource of industry, ad men spoke of the need to “reduce the principles of human action to a formula,” adding that such was already integral to political manipulation outside of business.69
Speaking of the seeming purposelessness of American industrial life itself, Nystrom noted that “this lack of purpose in life has an effect on consumption similar to that of having a narrow life interest, that is, in concentrating human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.”
Helen Woodward spoke frankly of consumption as a sublimation of urges that might be dangerous in other form. Admitting that change would be “the most beneficent medicine in the world to most people,” Woodward offered mass consumption as a means of acting out such impulses within a socially controllable context.
Robert and Helen Lynd culled the following ad from the Saturday Evening Post in 1924; an advertisement for the motion picture industry, it lends some credence to Kafka’s blanket indictment of the cinema as an art form which puts the eyes “in uniform”: Go to a motion picture . . . and let yourself go. . . . Before you know it, you are living the story— laughing, loving, hating, struggling, winning! 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.
Here meaningful activity is clearly divorced from the context of daily life. The ad speaks for the fantasy value of the cinema—placing the gratification of emotional needs squarely within the symbolic function of mechanically reproduced, spectatorial culture.
An industrially produced remedy for the discontents of industrial life.
Through the creation of a spectacle of change, frustrations and boredom within the context of industrial society might be mobilized to maintain and sustain that order. Thus the political imperative of legitimizing industry and delegitimizing the individual and the immediate expressions of community as proper realms of authority would be achieved.
“Business men will continue to oppose political revolutions, but not in the negative way in which they have opposed them in the past,” noted Filene. Direct political repression as a policy had peaked a few years before with the “Red Scare,” the Palmer raids, and the massive deportation of immigrant workers; now was the time for a more indirect and positive strategy.
For consumer economist Elizabeth Hoyt, a woman who shared the view of consumption as a democratizing process, the definition of this democratic culture was part of a task by which industry determined “for a people what they consider worth consuming.”85
Education should encourage consumption and an adherence to the pluralism of commodities, noted economist Nystrom. “A democratic system of education,” he added, “. . . is one of the surest ways of creating and greatly extending markets for goods of all kinds and especially those goods in which fashion [“marginal utility”] may play a part.”89
As an alternative for this faulted political system, Filene argued that the process of consumption provided an effective arena for democratic participation. By buying the goods of large industries, and by participating in the economic solvency of these industrial giants, people were electing a government which would constantly be satisfying their needs and desires;
“It is within the structure of business,” contended Filene, that “the wisest and best leadership is actually being chosen by the people.” Consumerism was a process which not only sustained big business economically, but also sustained its ascendency politically. By buying, people were democratically legitimizing the dominant role that industrialists aspired to play in all levels of political life.
Through consumption, he contended, “the masses of America have elected Henry Ford. They have elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company, and Woolworth’s and all the other great industrial and business leaders of the day.”92 By far more democratic than traditional representative government, consumption was not merely a process for people to elect “their industrial government” but was moreover a way of “constantly participating in it.”93
Speaking of the impracticality of popular democracy, Bernays felt that representative government must now be delegated to the wisdom of industry, to the “industrial government” which had been canonized in Filene’s political thought.
Speaking for the nation, Bernays surrendered the realm of political judgment and the definition of the socially possible to the industrialists whom he had faithfully represented as a public relations man. “We have voluntarily agreed,” he began, “to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”95
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society,” he proclaimed. Speaking affirmatively and patriotically of the emergence of the vast media of corporate propaganda, Bernays placed the responsibility for defining the universe of political discourse in the hands of the anonymous inhabitants of Madison Avenue.
One business theorist contended that freedom and equality could be translated into the ability of each person to emulate or aspire to emulate the tastes of the upper classes; “and what could be a better method of doing this [proving equality] than by consumption.”98 The “fashion cycle,” he contended, was an expression of the tastes and values of the wealthy, yet through the mass production of low-priced goods which imitated “high-priced merchandise,” upper-class values might be internalized within the culture of the poor. “Reproduction of high-priced goods into lower-priced goods makes it
...more
For those who might refrain from such participation, the society would provide its own grave consequences. Paul Nystrom warned: There will be quizzical looks, doubtful stares and critical estimates. He will be thought queer. He will be judged as lacking in brain power and, perhaps, as an undesirable person. If he persists [in violating the norms of consumption] . . . he will, if he is an employee, lose his job! He will lose customers if he is a salesman; he will lose votes if he is a politician. He will lose his custom if he is a doctor or a lawyer. He will lose all of his friends.100
Elizabeth Hoyt noted that most of the hostilities toward the various ethnic communities could be clearly connected to these people’s violation of the norms of consumption. “I’d like them better if they didn’t wear such queer clothes,” Hoyt reported, quoting an alleged American housewife “of her foreign neighbors.” Elsewhere, she observed, there were a variety of racial/ethnic epithets—“Frog-eating Frenchmen” and “Mackerel Snappers”—that spoke to the primacy of proper consumption habits among Americans. Accepting such a definition of Americans as those who comment on their foreign neighbors,
...more
An advertisement for the Yale lock company showed a woman lying in bed, blissfully naive, with the shadow of an approaching man shed ominously on her bedroom wall. The caption read as follows: “Night loneliness . . . the sound of stealthy tampering at the door . . . a moment of helpless terror. . . .” As would be expected, the Yale company made no call for better community and social relations, but omnipotently announced, “Yale Banishes Fear! from your home.”
Refining the notion of the effective use of fear in making sales, ad man George Burton Hotchkiss noted: “Fear in itself . . . is paralyzing; it robs one of the power of action. No one buys anything through fear, but rather through the instinct of self-preservation or some other reaction that is almost inseparable from fear.”107
Since time began, Fear has been a regulatory part of humanity—our primitive religion taught the vengeance of the gods, our modern revivalists, like Billy Sunday, frightened people with damnation. Fear of mediocrity drove a little Corsican into becoming Emperor—Europe’s fears drove Napoleon into exile. Fear made Patrick Henry a patriot. Fear stalked with Lincoln from his log cabin to his tomb. It was the spur of such men as Martin Luther, Poe, Peter the Great, Chopin, Julius Caesar, Balzac, John the Baptist. So what’s a little Fear in advertising.110 We’ve a better world with a bit of the
...more
Within the ads, as I have discussed elsewhere, this fear took on the character of presenting a world in which the individual was constantly judged by others, a world in which there was the total absence of positive bonds between people. The individualism which had been at the heart of liberal bourgeois thought throughout the preceding century and a half, had turned rancid, had become the core of uncertainty and social degeneration.
The concept of truth would be limited to the truths surrounding American goods and would reflect an ethical persuasion which might be constantly “outgrown” so as to conform to the overriding “rules for profit making.”120
In the futuristic dreams of the ad men of the twenties, there soon would be a world in which ads would provide a common idiom of expression; language and communication would take on the role of constant selling; and the ongoing discontent with things as they are would seek amelioration according to that idiom. Dream and reality became equated in the world of ideas generated by the marketplace.
The mystification of the production process, the separation of people (both as producers and consumers) from an understanding of this process, may be seen emerging early in the twentieth century. Yet the mystification is not one which limits itself to hiding the mechanics behind a “wondrous shape.” In the productive process itself, one of the characteristics of “scientific management” beyond and perhaps more important than its efficiency, is its separation of the work process from an understanding of what is being made.
