More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Far from being the greedy and soulless swine of left-wing caricature, these men, Drucker believed, upheld a corporate moral economy permeated by a refurbished Christian ethic, “a new order and creed.”
Having supplanted the church, the family, and the state as the pivot of American society, the corporation provided the “symbol” and “standard for the way of life and the mode of living.”
“Your run of the mill ad-man,” Rorty observed, “is positively messianic about his profession.” “We advertising writers are privileged to compose a new chapter of civilization,” the esteemed copywriter James Wallen wrote in 1925. “We are second only to statesmen and editors in power for good.”
Merle Thorpe, editor of Nation’s Business, told advertisers and art directors in 1931 that they had been charged with a duty to “direct public taste toward a higher beauty in the material expressions of our civilization.” Their highest responsibility was not to please clients or increase profits but to foster among the American people “a common understanding, common feelings, common reactions”—something akin to the “modern communion” envisioned by Walter Lippmann
Speaking to the Advertising Club in New York in 1927, William Allen White remarked that “the real revolutionist” is not the Bolshevik but “the advertising man. Could I control the advertising publications of this country I would control the entire land.”
Wilson was echoed by Clement Greenberg, who excoriated commercial art in 1939 as “the debased simulacra of genuine culture.”
Many writers, artists, and intellectuals who had worked in the industry shared Greenberg’s loathing for commercial culture. Former adman Sherwood Anderson rued that “thought and poetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants of the new order.”
After a decade working for N. W. Ayer, Rockwell Kent told Margaret Bourke-White in 1936 that he felt soiled and unfaithful.
Although art, he told her, was “the enshrinement of the best in heart and soul that men have in them,” he confessed to having whored with commerce, “the great prostituting patron of the arts.” Toiling in what he considered Bruce Barton’s brothel, Ro...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The dependence of serious art and artists on the pecuniary imperatives of business was conceded by none other Greenberg, who acknowledged that, like earlier forms of genuine, highbrow art, modernism was connected by “an umb...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There was “something strange, incredible, miraculous” about their dedication to advertising, Rorty noted—a hope and faith that resembled religion.
“You do not sell a man tea,” he explained in Printer’s Ink in 1925, “but the magical spell which is brewed nowhere else but in a tea-pot.” While the teleology of commerce remained in force—sell the product—copywriters and artists, Wallen advised, should endow products and their process of manufacturing with an aura appropriate to the Machine Age. If you depict a foundry, he wrote, put “the wonderful miracle of industry” into the picture—not “the hardships of labor.” For Wallen, forsaking pictorial realism was a way not only to obscure the reality of alienation but also to enchant the
...more
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
...more
Although a car dominated the foreground, a large stained glass window was visible in the back, complete with mosaic fluorescence.
It is simply “an error,” he claimed, to think that traditional religious paintings were more beautiful or inspiring than advertisements; indeed, Calkins thought the number of religious works in European and American galleries “appalling.”
Just as technical professionals and managers controlled the means of material production, so artistic experts now possessed the means of loveliness and spiritual enrichment.
“Beauty … must be imposed at the top by fiat,” Calkins bluntly declared. “It cannot be imparted by the workman who has become a machine-tender.”
“A really beautiful factory building,” Calkins mused elsewhere, “is worth more … than a museum full of the choicest art of antiquity.”
Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms”—was
Several of the more popular exhibits displayed an unmistakable ambience of enchantment. General Electric’s House of Magic, for instance, focused on special effects rather than science, presenting radio waves and magnetism as corporate conjuring tricks. (As Nye observes, “visitors left no wiser about electricity than when they had entered.”) Outside the House of Magic, an enormous canvas painted by Rockwell Kent depicted a historical tale of progress from ignorance to enlightenment. Humanity, a brochure explained, traveled from “the superstition and misbeliefs of the Dark Ages” to “the more
...more
A motorized, automated vision of America in 1960, Futurama was the hit of the Fair, and it bore the unmistakable imprint of Geddes, who designed it for GM after first collaborating with Shell Oil.
when the New York Sun described the dark descent into the building as a journey of “pilgrims … bound for some magic shrine,”
The narrator informed them that they were about to embark on a “magic Aladdin-like flight through time and space.” For the next sixteen minutes, they took a simulated flight into and over the United States. After gliding over countryside, they arrived at a technopolis: skyscrapers, wide spaces, and elevated skywalks for pedestrian traffic.
It was surely a technocratic daydream, but as Nye points out, it was also a “realm of pure property”: replete with cars, buildings, and machines, the City of Tomorrow—like Sheeler’s photos of River Rouge—was bereft of identifiable human beings, who were reduced to stick figures navigating a world inhabited by corporate technology.
No vapors from the cars and smokestacks polluted the crisp and salubrious air; no pedestrians or workers exhibited a trace of boredom or discontent.
The pilgrimage to 1960 called for no sacrifice, hardship, or dedication, just the will to believe in a magical journey to the corporate promised land. In its spacious, antiseptic, and automated grandeur, Futurama was the apotheosis of industrial design, a modular fantasia of American longing for a heavenly city of business.
corporate society, Dewey thought, embodied “values that are religious in character”—cooperation,
American preoccupation with prosperity exemplified what Chesterton archly described as “a fine spirituality,” a belief that money and possessions were not worthy in themselves but rather markers of virtue.
the Yankee was a strange kind of “mystic” who thought of life as “a perpetual game of poker.”
Chesterton noted that the romance with capitalism was “also a religion” with a “queer sort of morality attached to it”: a man “making good” is “analogous to a man being good or a man doing good.” If America was, as Chesterton put it, “the nation with the soul of a church,” it remained e...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The American romance with Mammon was on resplendent display in Manhattan, where Chesterton meditated on the visual delights of the “fine spirituality” of Broadway. Strolling at night under “the artificial suns and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare,” Chesterton avowed his enchantment by the incandescent majesty of the modern metropolis, declaring his “rather dark sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night.”
Chesterton attributed the power of these edenic surrogates to the talents of commercial magicians, conjurers busy designing the earliest enchantments of corporate modernism. As hypnotists holding the means of “pyrotechnic violence,” the adman and the financier branded “their commands in heaven with a finger of fire.”
Like earlier tyrants, “the great employer” rules not only by force but also “mostly by fairy tales.” Though “the sight of a millionaire is seldom a enchanting sight,” Chesterton observed, “nevertheless he is in his way an enchanter.” The modern industrialist was “much more than a swindler,” he mused; he was “a mesmerist and a mystagogue,” a “sorcerer” like the one Marx and Engels had accused in The Communist Manifesto. If maladroit in the arts of enchantment, he hires a coven of magicians—otherwise known as advertisers—and pays extravagant fees for the fetishes they conjure. “Even if there is
...more
From Oswald Spengler and Ortega y Gasset to T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence, America was depicted as a land in thrall to what Kate Leslie, the protagonist of Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926), called “the cult of the dollar.”
in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Henry Ford’s famous car provides a religious ornament in the era after “a thing called God”: shorn of any broken or suffering Christs, “all crosses had their tops cut off and became Ts.” The inhabitants of Huxley’s techno-dystopia engage in a weekly “Solidarity Service” at which they consume “dedicated” soma tablets—consecrated eucharistic wafers of the body of “Our Ford,” which leave them with “an expression of rapture … the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation.”
Like Dewey, most progressive or Marxist critics of Fordism maintained that if capitalism could be reformed or abolished, the technological genius and productivity of mass production could finally serve and not enslave humanity. The clouds of industrial smog obscured a golden age of plenty and freedom; the promised land once foretold in religion lay just beyond the technological horizon. But to other opponents, Fordism was not simply an unjust and oppressive system; it was the industrial apparatus of a new Dark Age, an unprecedented assault on the humanity of human beings. Rather than a great
...more
Encouraged by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, Veblen hoped, for a time, that a moment had arrived when the business class was vulnerable. In his last two books, The Engineers and the Price System (1921) and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise (1923), he surveyed the demise of the proprietary credo—a miscellany of “sentimental, religious, or magical truths,” in his view—and beckoned toward a technocratic replacement.
and ensured that the nation’s economic resources remained in the hands of “absentee ownership”—“the substance of things hoped for and the reality of things not seen,” as Veblen described it.
And Americans on the whole remained enchanted by businesspeople, regarding their every platitude as a mite of revelation.
“Technocracy is all the rage,” the Literary Digest reported in December 1932.
Technocracy was always a madcap fusion of quackery, machismo, and utopianism. The hokum of charts, graphs, and jargon usually left audiences both wowed and confused.
Echoing Scott, Loeb also asserted that, unconstrained by capitalist priorities, technology would reach such a level of sophistication and productivity that a 16-hour work week would suffice for all.
Throughout Life in a Technocracy, Loeb referred to capitalism as an established but discredited religion, “the Mysticism of Money,” as he called it repeatedly.
“In America, the fundamental faith is the Mysticism of Money.” “Capitalism has assumed a religious sanctity,” he wrote elsewhere, and “to attack its tenets has become a heresy.”
Defined as belief in “the validity of the money standard” and in the “intrinsic merit of money making,” the Mysticism of Money had its pious disciples; its festive rituals of sports and movies; and its temple edifices, espec...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Loeb enlisted magic and voodoo—sifted, of course, through scientific reason. Since, Loeb argued, men and women had always found the meaning of life in “moments of ecstatic tension” generated by spiritual practices, then scientific study of these experiences could allow citizens of a Technocracy to “attain them at will” through psychological or pharmaceutical techniques.9 Rapture now followed, not prayer or contemplation, but advances in industrial chemistry. A Technocratic culture would ensure an unprecedented efficiency of beatitude; the will to believe would yield to the scientifically
...more
When he told a conference of furniture designers in 1938 that “the world depends on obsolescence and new merchandise,” he uttered what was, in his own mind, a rueful fact, not an ideal.
In “Suburbia,” for instance, a gouache of grassy hills is dominated by a telephone pole, a billboard, a mock-classical colonnade, and tract houses, while underneath Ruth muses on “Bastard architecture. The large billboard of the development company.” “Commercialism” noted two business imperatives: not only “harness men to desks” but also “chop down the forests,” a
Indeed, Humanities features an array of duplicitous and savage gods with “the nimbus of divinity”: nationalism, fascism, racism, imperialism—all tutelary deities of capital.5 A graphic fusion of Metropolis and Brave New World, Ultimo is the most haunting of the folios, relating a post-catastrophic tale of a subterranean metropolis. The overindustrialized society has wrought irreparable havoc on the biosphere, and the earth’s inhabitants are forced to descend into a techno-paradise underground. With a “mild and pleasant temperature equable at all times,” the city is bathed in artificial light,
...more
James noted that the devotion of fans to their favorite stars resembled “the mass cults of more primitive peoples.” The studios’ star system, he observed, was akin to the hierarchy of saints adored by the early Christians.
