Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

Samuel Haber, a historian, has culled the following insight into “scientifically managed” industry created by Frederick Taylor: One of the most important general principles of Taylor’s system was that the man who did the work could not derive or fully understand its science. The result was a radical separation of thinking from doing. Those who understood were to plan the work and set the procedures; the workmen were simply to carry them into effect.122

They addressed themselves more to the problem of discontent than they did to how to be content. In each case, the recognition of discontent attempted to channel these impulses into an acceptance of corporate solutions. When Filene spoke of teaching people “how to think” and separated this from any of the “class” traditions of thinking, he was confronting a problem broader than the particular historical spectre of bolshevism. He was confronting the problem of people looking amongst themselves for solutions to social ills.

Only in the instance of an individual ad was consumption a question of what to buy. In the broader context of a burgeoning commercial culture, the foremost political imperative was what to dream.

By the end of the 1920s, two-thirds of the national income found its way “across the counters of ... retail establishments” selling goods which less than a century before had been almost totally unrelated to the question of wages, goods which had been part of the daily productive capacity of many homes.4

The wage had emerged, in its exchange capacity, as the dominant conduit to survival.

The rise of the wage system as a dominant mode of survival meant that a “living” was to be bought and that the social function of work was now mediated by an exchange process: selling labor and buying goods.

Divorce between 1870 and the mid-1920s had risen at an unprecedented 35 percent for each ten year period.9 The causes of the divorce increase were often attributed to the aggravations posed for the home by the industrial world.

In the mid-twenties the Bureau of Municipal Research of Philadelphia estimated that $25-30 per week was necessary to maintain a “minimum standard of decency for the family of husband, wife, and three children.” Three in five working men earned less than $25 per week.22

No less an authority than Calvin Coolidge heralded the spiritual ascendency of the business patriarch: “the man who builds a factory builds a temple . . . and it is there, in the shadow of the industrial altar, that worship must shift.”32

Every business day approximately 5,ooo new homes are begun; new “nests” are constructed and new family purchasing units begin operation. . . . The founding and furnishing of new homes is a major industrial circumstance in the United States.36

There’s nothing ahead where he’s at and there’s nothing to do about it. There won’t never be anything for him as long as he stays where he is and I don’t know where else he can go. He’ll never get any better job. He’ll be lucky if they keep him on this one.49

Advertising directed some of its messages directly at children, preferring their “blank slate” characters to those of their parents whose prejudices might be more developed. J. B. Watson, the psychologist/ad man, had given underpinning to such a strategy. If the children were indoctrinated in the “behavioristic freedom” which characterized the modern industrial world, he argued, business might be able to intervene in the values and definitions of family culture. Rejecting the “freedom of the libertine”—as he called attitudes which were not responsible to industrial reality—he spoke for an education of children into the categories of modern life. If this could be done, he felt that children could help to circumvent parental attitudes which were not in step with the exigencies of the industrial process. “Will not these children in turn,” he asked rhetorically, “with their better ways of living and thinking, replace us as society, and in turn bring up” yet more modern children?54

Speaking to the sales force of a large cosmetics firm, Helen Woodward said, “Remember that what we are selling is not beauty—it is youth.” Moreover, she was explicit about what kind of youth—one which was mass-produced and could only be bought. “We are going to sell every artificial thing there is. . . . And above all things it is going to be young—young—young! We make women feel young.”62

This emulation of the child was one that implied unabashed involvement in and commitment to prescribed patterns of consumption. The ideal was one of irrepressible, frantic energy. The flapper, whom Christine Frederick described in 1929 as having evolved into the modern mother, was an expression of such an ideal and was ubiquitous in advertising of the twenties.69 She was pure consumer, busy dancing through the world of modern goods. She was youth, marked by energy not judgment. Her clothes, her vehicles, her entire milieu were mass-produced—and she liked it.

Printers’ Ink, the center of theory for the ad industry, turned often to such a task. The journal reinforced the need to substitute factory-made consumables for many of the products which had been produced traditionally as a part of women’s activities. Speaking of the practice of bread baking in the home, Printers’ Ink writer G. A. Nichols described it as the “greatest impediment to progress” that the biscuit industry confronted. The biscuit campaigns, he asserted, must utilize “antidote” methods, debunking bread baking, while at the same time “it will have to educate the people into using more biscuits.”86

By the mid-thirties, both General Electric (1932) and Westinghouse Electric (1934) had opened special cooking institutes which combined cooking instruction and the use of the all-electric kitchen they were interested in popularizing.111

Explaining her dependency on the movies “as an aid in child-rearing,” she said: “I send my daughter because a girl has to learn the ways of the world somehow and the movies are a good safe way.”114

It was through their children that parents might experience the possible benefits of modern life. An ad in the Ladies’ Home Journal pictured a mother watching her daughter at the piano: FOR HER . . . All the things you wanted . . . everything you hoped to be. Old hopes, old ambitions . . . how they come alive again now! Talents that somehow or other you neglected . . . opportunities you let slip by. ... How eagerly you hope it might be different with her.117

Through consumption, women could procure for their children the kind of life-long security and happiness that was associated with perpetual youth. Protecting and educating children was tantamount to training them from infancy in beneficial patterns of consumption. J. B. Watson’s emphasis on creating new forms of behavior through youth found its propagandistic realization. Colgate’s Dental Cream pictured a beautiful young woman, clearly viable on the sexuo-economic marketplace, embracing her child. Explaining that this mother had captured youth by beginning to use Colgate in 1908, the ad implied that an early introduction of training into beauty, and more importantly into consumption, was essential to the child. After brushing her own way to youthful beauty, “now her Daughter uses the same dental cream.”119

From the field of social psychology, advertising had borrowed the notion of the social self as a prime weapon in its arsenal. Here people defined themselves in terms set by the approval or disapproval of others.

Ads of the 1920s were quite explicit about this narcissistic imperative. They unabashedly used pictures of veiled nudes and women in auto-erotic stances to encourage self-comparison and to remind women of the primacy of their sexuality. A booklet advertising feminine beauty aids had on its cover a picture of a highly scrubbed, powdered and decorated nude. The message of the title was explicit: “Your Masterpiece—Yourself.” Women were being educated to look at themselves as things to be created competitively against other women: painted and sculpted with the aids of the modern market.128

Carl B. Naether, an ad man whose contributions included the most widely-read study of the twenties on how to advertise to women, encouraged the implementation of such tactics in advertising.

As ads documented the transition from the productive-knowledge of traditional home activity to the discipline of industrial capitalism, women’s creative roles were increasingly displaced. The advertised duties of the wife became intertwined with the last home industry—marital sex. Woman’s deep-seated instinct urging her to the use of perfumes is a manifestation of a fundamental law of biology. The first duty of woman is to attract. . . . It does not matter how clever or independent you may be, if you fail to influence the men you meet, consciously or unconsciously, you are not fulfilling your fundamental duty as a woman. . . .133

(The Hidden Persuaders, 1957), Packard

As production changed and as the social character of work became even more routinized and monotonous, the consumer culture presented itself as the realm within which gratification and excitement might be had—an alternative to more radical and anti-authoritarian prescriptions.

It was in the period of postwar boom that the social policies postulated and initiated in the twenties began to make their most effective inroads upon the social landscape of American society. During this period of broad commercialism and suburbanization, the idea of a free world characterized by goods established itself as a pacific social ethic. Yet even then, in the “good times” of the fifties, social discontent remained. Coincident with the pacified imagery of suburban life stood a more traditional and compulsory ethic to enforce it: the strict rule of conformity maintained by the patriotic imperatives of anti-communism, the cold war, and McCarthyism.

Similarly, Harry Braverman, in his recent book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, tells of how the characteristic of the modern era has been the “degradation” of labor. Work, once a repository of skill and social interaction, has become a series of preordained gestures. The power of know-how has become firmly implanted in the safe confines of management, while obedience has become the most desired category that industry expects of its workers.

Advertising, today, whether it sells cars as dream machines for country jaunts or “natural” cereals as a means for transcending the admitted evils of chemically fortified supermarket fare, maintains the same logic—the sense that a product contains the negation of its own corporate origins.

The linking of the marketplace to Utopian ideals, to political and social freedom, to material well-being, and to the realization of fantasy, represents the spectacle of liberation emanating from the bowels of domination and denial.

With the expanded production called for by World War II, the policy of government spending moved from one of being a stopgap measure to being a policy that would “strike oil” for American business. A wide sector of economic activity opened up—never to be demobilized following World War II—in the form of war (“defense”) industries. The ideal of permanent industrial productivity seemed to find its realization in these industries of war. War, programmed obsolescence, stockpiling and the governmental policy of unbelievable expenditure for “defense” all contributed to the notion that here was a sector of industry which could flourish in spite of people’s ability or proclivity to be mass consumers.

The shift of work and commercial activity into arenas of bureaucracy, service and communications further minimized the notion of popular self-sufficiency. The new society was one which distributed culture on a mass scale. This triumph over the locality of people’s lives as a source of nurturement and information is, perhaps, the monumental achievement of twentieth-century capitalism: centralization of the social order.

Combining the social and technological developments of the twenties with the component of economic boom that characterized the fifties, the postwar era was one in which mass consumption erupted, for increasing numbers, into a full-blown style of life. In the suburbs that had sprung up with such marked rapidity, a social sphere had been forged that was removed from the urban-industrial center yet totally dependent upon it for its sustenance;

The virulent anticommunism of the 1950s was, on the surface, an attack on an immoral, highly centralized authoritarian apparatus that found its source in the Soviet Union. But it contained a wider perspective. Under its broad umbrella of conformity lay a general attack on any social perspective which contended that social change came from the people.

The vision of freedom which was being offered to Americans was one which continually relegated people to consumption, passivity and spectatorship. Those who questioned this chain of command were labeled “communist.” Where the impulse toward self-determination took on an artistic or easily isolated form, it was categorically dismissed as “beatnik” or “avant-garde.”

While heralding a world of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, corporations (in concert with the state apparatus) were generating a mode of existence which was increasingly regimented and authoritarian. If consumer culture was a parody of the popular desire for self-determination and meaningful community, its innards revealed the growing standardization of the social terrain and corporate domination over what was to be consumed and experienced.

As resistance has mounted, however, the captains of consciousness have hardly thrown in the towel. Appropriating the lingo and styles of the New Left, the counterculture, feminism, neo-agrarianism, ethnicity, drug-vision and other phenomena, the advertising industry, seeking markets, has generated a mass culture which reflects the spirit but not the cutting edge of this resistance. While advertising of the twenties spoke against the deprivations of scarcity, an increasing amount of today’s advertising and product imagery speak to the deprivations of what has been called “abundance.” Within advertising, the social realm of resistance is reinterpreted, at times colonized, for corporate benefit.

Ads mirror the widespread judgment that mass-produced goods are junky and unhealthy. Products are advertised as if they contain this anticorporate disposition—praised for their organic naturalness and their timeless quality. Modes of anticorporate resistance and sentiment reappear in the ads themselves, miraculously encased within the universal terms of the market. General Mills reinforces corporate hegemony in the name of natural cereals—a harkening to a precorporate, idealized past. The automobile industry offers machines for wish fulfillment—at the same time hoping to contain those wishes within the domain of the cash nexus. From the oil industry comes a more authoritarian image to confront the loci of resistance. Oil industry ads are singular in their ability to say, “We know you don’t like things as they are, but we’re the boss and that’s the way it is!”

As we are confronted by the mass culture, we are offered the idiom of our own criticism as well as its negation—corporate solutions to corporate problems. Until we confront the infiltration of the commodity system into the interstices of our lives, social change itself will be but a product of corporate propaganda.