The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

while another ad for Squibb Pharmaceuticals demonstrated that bottles of liver oil and boxes of soda could be transfigured as if with “a magic wand.” Two years later, Larned lavished accolades on another ad for surrounding electric lamps with a “powdered brilliance” reminiscent of Parrish prints. The illustration showed, he wrote, that talented artists could enhance “industrial subjects with a shimmering halo.”13 Indeed, halos and other emanations of light abounded in corporate modernism. In innumerable advertisements, a mock-heavenly radiance bathed the most lowly and quotidian of commodities. Shafts of light streamed on garbage cans and automobiles; beams that had once favored saints now illuminated Coldspot refrigerators and Hoover vacuum cleaners. One ad for Duco synthetic lacquer, published in the August 1928 issue of Good Housekeeping, blurred the distinction between an automobile showroom and a cathedral.