Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

ADVERTISING

Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God. Though, to be sure, in so doing you would be committing less of a crime against the tenets of modern American civilization than in doubting the existence of a power so great that overnight it can raise up in our midst gods, kings, and other potentates, creating a world which for splendour and opulence far surpasses our own poor mortal sphere—a world in which every prospect pleases and only the reluctant spender is vile.

True, we can only catch a fleeting glimpse of its many marvels. True, we have scarcely time to admire a millionth part of the joys and magnificence of one before a new and greatly improved universe floats across the horizon, and, from every corner news-stand, smilingly bids us enter its portals. True, I repeat, our inability to grasp or appreciate the full wonder of these constantly arriving creations, yet even the narrow limitations of our savage and untutored minds can hardly prevent us from acclaiming a miracle we fail to understand.

If it were only given me to live the life led by any one of the fortunate creatures that dwell in these advertising worlds, I should gladly renounce my home, my wife, and my evil ways and become the super-snob of a mock creation. All day long should I stand smartly clad in a perfectly fitting union-suit just for the sport of keeping my obsequious butler waiting painfully for me with my lounging-gown over his exhausted arm. On other days I should be found sitting in mute adoration before a bulging bowl of breakfast food, and, if any one should chance to be listening at the keyhole, they might even catch me in the act of repeating reverently and with an avid smile on my lips, “I can never stir from the table until I have completely crammed myself with Red-Blooded American Shucks,” adding in a mysterious whisper, “To be had at all good grocers.”

There would be other days of course, days when I should ride in a motor of unrivalled power with companions of unrivalled beauty, across canyons of unrivalled depth and mountains of unrivalled height. Then would follow still other days, the most perfect days of all, days when the snow-sheathed earth cracks in the clutches of an appalling winter and only the lower classes stir abroad. This would be the time that I should select for removing the lounging gown from my butler’s arm and bask in the glowing warmth of my perfect heater, with my chair placed in such a position as to enable me to observe the miserable plight of my neighbours across the way as they strive pitifully to keep life in their bodies over the dying embers of an anæmic fire. The sight of the sobbing baby and haggard mother would only serve to intensify my satisfaction in having been so fortunate and far-sighted as to have possessed myself of a Kill Kold Liquid Heat Projector—That Keeps the Family Snug.

What days I should spend! Take the literary days, for instance. Could anything be more edifying than to dip discriminatingly into a six-inch bookshelf with the absolute assurance that a few minutes spent thus each day in dipping would, in due course of time, give me complete mastery of all the best literature of the world—and incidentally gain for me a substantial raise at the office? Nor could any of the literature of the past ages equal my hidden library of books containing Vital Secrets. In this room there would linger a never-failing thrill. Here I should retreat to learn the secret of success, the secret of salesmanship, the secret of vigour, the secret of bull-dozing one’s boss, the secret of spell-binding, the secret of personality and social charm, all bearing a material value measured in dollars and cents. In time I should so seethe with secrets that, unable to bear them any longer, I should break down before my friends and give the whole game away.

But why should I lacerate my heart in the contemplation of happiness I shall never experience? Why should I dwell upon the pipe-filling days, or the days when I should send for samples? Why torture my mind with those exquisitely tailored days when, with a tennis racket in one hand and a varsity crew captain on my shoulder, I should parade across the good old campus in a suit bereft of wrinkles and a hat that destroyed the last shreds of restraint in all beholding women? No, I can go no further.

For when I consider the remarkable characters that so charmingly infest my paradise never found, I cannot help asking myself, “How do they get that way?” How do the men’s legs grow so slim and long and their chins so smooth and square? Why have the women always such perfect limbs and such innocent but alluring smiles? Why are families always happy and children always good? What miracle has banished the petty irritations and deficiencies of life and smoothed out the problems of living? How and why—is there an answer? Can it all be laid at the door of advertising, or do we who read, the great, sweltering mass of us, insist upon such things and demand a world of artificial glamour and perfectly impossible people? The crime is committed by collusion, I am forced to conclude. Advertising, for the most part, makes its appeal to all that is superficial and snobbish in us, and we as a solid phalanx are only too glad to be appealed to in such a manner.

In only the most unscholarly way can I lay my reflections before you, and the first one is this: advertising is America’s crudest and most ruthless sport, religion, or profession, or whatever you choose to call it. With an accurate stroke, but with a perverted intent, it coddles and toys with all that is base and gross in our physical and spiritual compositions. The comforts and happiness it holds out to the reader are for ever contrasted with the misery and misfortune of another. Thus, if I ride in a certain make of motor, I have the satisfaction of knowing that every one who rides in a motor of another make is of a lower caste than myself and will certainly eat dust for the rest of his life. There is a real joy in this knowledge. Again, if I wear a certain advertised brand of underwear, I have the pleasure of knowing that my fellow-men not so fortunately clad are undoubtedly foolish swine who will eventually die of sunstroke, after a life devoted entirely to sweating. Here, too, is a joy of rare order. If I brush my teeth with an advertised tooth paste, my satisfaction is enhanced by the knowledge that all other persons who fail to use this particular paste will in a very short time lose all of their teeth. In this there is a savage, but authentic delight. Even if I select a certain classic from my cherished six-inch bookshelf, I shall have a buoyant feeling in knowing that all men, who, after the fatigue of the day, take comfort in the latest murder or ball-game, are of inferior intellect and will never succeed in the world of business.

This is one of the most successful weapons used in advertising, and there is no denying that a great majority of people take pleasure in being struck by it. It is a pleasure drawn from the same source that feeds so many people’s sense of satisfaction when they attend a funeral, or call on a sick friend, or a friend in misfortune and disgrace. It was the same source of inner satisfaction which made it possible for many loyal citizens to bear not only with fortitude, but with bliss, the sorrows of the late war. It is the instinct of self-preservation, toned down to a spirit of complacent self-congratulation, and it responds most readily to the appeal of selfishness and snobbery. Advertising did not create this instinct, nor did it discover it, but advertising uses it for its own ends. Who is to blame, the reader or the advertiser, hardly enters in at this point. The solid fact to take into consideration is that day in and day out the susceptible public is being worked upon in an unhealthy and neurotic manner which cannot fail to effect harmful results.

At this tragic moment I purpose briefly to digress to the people who create advertisements, before returning to a consideration of the effects of their creations.

To begin with, let it never be forgotten that advertising is a red-blooded, two-fisted occupation, engaged in for the most part by upstanding Americans of the kiss-the-flag or knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out variety. Yet years of contact with the profession compel me for the sake of truth to temper this remark by adding that it also contains, or rather confines, within its mystic circle a group of reluctant and recalcitrant “creatures that once were men,” who, moving through a phantasmagoria of perverted idealism, flabby optimism, and unexamined motives, either deaden their conscience in the twilight of the “Ad. Men’s Club,” or else become so blindly embittered or debauched that their usefulness is lost to all constructive movements.

Generally speaking, however, advertising is the graveyard of literary aspiration in which the spirits of the defeated aspirants, wielding a momentary power over a public that rejected their efforts, blackjack it into buying the most amazing assortment of purely useless and cheaply manufactured commodities that has ever marked the decline of culture and common sense. These men are either caught early after their flight from college, or else recruited from the newspaper world. Some—the most serious and determined—are products of correspondence schools. Others are merely robust spirits whose daily contact with their fellow-men does not give them sufficient opportunity to disgorge themselves of the abundance of misinformation that their imaginations manufacture in wholesale quantities. This advertising brotherhood is composed of a heterogeneous mass of humanity that is rapidly converted into a narrow-minded wedge of fanatics. And this wedge is continually boring into the pocketbook of the public and extracting therefrom a goodly quantity of gold and silver. Have you ever conversed with one of the more successful and important members of this vast body? If so have you been able to quit the conversation with an intelligent impression of its subject-matter? For example: do you happen to know what a visualizer is? If not, you would be completely at the mercy of a true advertising exponent. Returning to my Edisonian method of attack, do you happen to know by any chance what a rough-out man is, or what is the meaning of dealer mortality, quality appeal, class circulation, or institutional copy? Probably not, for there is at bottom very little meaning to them; nevertheless, they are terms that are sacred to a great number of advertising men, and which, if unknown, would render all intelligent communication with them quite impossible.

If you should ever attend a session of these gentlemen in full cry—and may God spare you this—you would return from it with the impression that all was not well with the world. You would have heard speeches on the idealism of meat-packing, and other kindred subjects. The idealism would be transmitted to you through the medium of a hireling of some large packing organization, a live-wire, God-bless-you, hail-fellow type. Assuming that you had been there, you would have witnessed this large fellow with a virile exhalation of cigar-smoke, heave himself from his chair; you would have observed a good-natured smile play across his lips, and then you would have suddenly been taken aback by the tenderly earnest and masterfully restrained expression that transformed our buffoon into a suffering martyr, as, flinging out his arms, he tragically exclaimed, “Gentlemen, you little know the soul of the man who has given the Dreadnought Ham to the world!” From this moment on your sense of guilt would have increased by leaps and bounds until at last you would have broken down completely and agreed with everything the prophet said, as long as he refrained from depriving you of an opportunity to make it up to the god-like man who gave Dreadnought Hams to the world.

The orator would go on to tell you about the happiness and sunlight that flood the slaughter-house in which Dreadnought Hams are made. You would hear about the lovely, whimsical old character, who, one day, when in the act of polishing off a pig, stood in a position of suspended animation with knife poised above the twitching ear of the unfortunate swine, and seizing the hand of the owner as he passed benevolently by, kissed it fervently and left on it a tear of gratitude. Perhaps you would not hear that in the ardour of loyal zeal this lovable old person practically cut the pig to ribbons, thus saving it from a nervous collapse, nor would you be permitted to hear a repetition of the imprecations the old man muttered after the departing back of the owner, for these things should not be heard,—in fact, they do not exist in the world of advertising. Nothing would be said about the red death of the pig, the control of the stock-raiser, the underpaying of the workers, the daughter who visits home when papa is out and the neighbours are not looking, the long years of service and the short shrift of age, the rottenness and hypocrisy of the whole business—no, nothing should be said about such things. But to make up for the omission, you would be told in honied words of the workers who lovingly kiss each ham as it is reverently carried from the plant to receive the patriarchal blessing of the owner before it is offered up as a sacrifice to a grateful but greedy public. The whole affair would suggest to you a sort of Passion Play in which there was neither Judas nor Pilot, but just a great, big happy family of ham producers.

This speech, as I have said, would soon appear in the principal papers of the country. It would be published in installments, each one bearing its message of peace on earth, good-will to men, and the public—always preferring Pollyanna to Blue Beard—would be given an altogether false impression of Dreadnought Hams, and the conditions under which they were produced. But this particular speech would be only a small part of the idealism you would be permitted to absorb. There would also be a patriotic speech about Old Glory, which would somehow become entangled with the necessity for creating a wider demand for a certain brand of socks. There would perhaps be a speech on the sacredness of the home, linked cunningly with the ability of a certain type of talking-machine to keep the family in at nights and thus make the home even more sacred. There would be speeches without end, and idealism without stint, and at last every one would shake hands with every one else and the glorious occasion would come to an end only to be repeated with renewed vigour and replenished optimism on the following Friday.

But the actual work of creating advertisements is seldom done in this rarefied and rose-tinted atmosphere; it is done in the more prosaic atmosphere of the advertising agency. (And let it be said at once that although, even in the case of agencies engaging in “Honest Advertising” campaigns, many such firms indulge in the unscrupulous competitive practice of splitting their regular commission with their clients in order to keep and secure accounts, there are still honest advertising agencies.)

Now there are two important classes of workers in most agencies—the copy-writer and the solicitor—the man who writes the advertisements and the man who gets the business. This latter class contains the wolves of advertising, the restless stalkers through the forests of industry and the fields of trade. They are leather-lunged and full-throated; death alone can save their victims from hearing their stories out. Copywriters, on the other hand, are really not bad at heart; sometimes they even possess a small saving spark of humour, and frequently they attempt to read something other than Printer’s Ink. But the full-fledged solicitor is beyond all hope. Coming in close touch with the client who usually is an industrialist, capitalist, stand-patter, and high-tariff enthusiast, the solicitor gradually becomes a small edition of the man he serves, and reflects his ideas in an even more brutal and unenlightened manner. In their minds there is no room for change, unless it be change to a new kind of automobile they are advertising, for new furniture, unless it be the collapsible table of their latest client, for spring cleaning, unless thereby one is introduced to the virtues of Germ-Destroying Soap. Things must remain as they are and the leaders of commerce and industry must be protected at all costs. To them there are no under-paid workers, no social evil, no subsidized press, no restraint of free speech, no insanitary plants, no child-labour, no infant mortality due to an absence of maternity legislation, no good strikers, and no questionable public utility corporations. Everything is as it should be, and any one who attempts to effect a change is a socialist, and that ends it all.

Advertising is very largely controlled by men of this type. Is it any wonder that it is of a reactionary and artificial nature, and that any irresponsible promoter with money to spend and an article to sell, will find a sympathetic and wily minister to execute his plans for him, regardless of their effect on the economic or social life of the nation?

Turning, for the moment, from the people who create advertisements to advertising as an institution, what is there to be said for or against it? What is there to advance in justification of its existence, or in favour of its suppression? Not knowing on which side the devil’s advocate pleads his case, I shall take the liberty of representing both sides, presenting as impartially as possible the cases for the prosecution and defence and allowing the reader to bring in the verdict in accordance with the evidence.

The first charge—that the low state of the press and the magazine world is due solely to advertising—is not, I believe, wholly fair. There is no use denying that advertising is responsible for the limitation of free utterance and the nonexistence of various independent and amusing publications. However, assuming that advertising were utterly banished from the face of the earth, would the murky atmosphere be cleared thereby? Would the press become free and unafraid, and would the ideal magazine at last draw breath in the full light of day? I think not. Years before advertising had attained the importance it now enjoys, public service corporations and other powerful vested interests had found other and equally effective methods of shaping the news and controlling editorial policies. The fact remains however, and it is a sufficiently black one, that advertising is responsible for much of the corruption of our papers and other publications, as well as for the absence of the type of periodicals that make for the culture of a people and the enjoyment of good literature. When a profiteering owner of a large department store can succeed in keeping the fact of his conviction from appearing in the news, while a number of smaller offenders are held up as horrid examples, it is not difficult to decide whether or not it pays to advertise. When any number of large but loosely conducted corporations upon which the people and the nation depend, can prevent from appearing in the press any information concerning their mismanagement, inefficiency, and extravagance, or any editorial advocating government control, one does not have to ponder deeply to determine the efficacy of advertising. When articles or stories dealing with the unholy conditions existing in certain industries, or touching on the risks of motoring, the dangers of eating canned goods, or the impossibility of receiving a dollar’s value for a dollar spent in a modern department store, are rejected by many publications, regardless of their merit, one does not have to turn to the back pages of the magazine in order to discover the names and products of the advertisers paying for the space. Indeed, one of the most regrettable features of advertising is that it makes so many things possible for editors who will be good, and so many things impossible for editors who are too honest and too independent to tolerate dictation.

Another charge against advertising is that it promotes and encourages the production of a vast quantity of costly articles many of which duplicate themselves, and that this over-production of commodities, many of them of highly questionable value, is injurious to the country and economically unsound. This charge seems to be well founded in fact, and illustrated only too convincingly in the list of our daily purchases. Admitting that a certain amount of competition creates a stimulating and healthy reaction, it still seems hardly reasonable that a nation, to appear with a clean face each morning, should require the services of a dozen producers of safety razors, and several hundred producers of soap, and that the producers of razors and soap should spend millions of dollars each year in advertising in order to remind people to wash and shave. Nor does it seem to be a well-balanced system of production when such commodities as automobiles, sewing machines, face powders, toilet accessories, food products, wearing apparel, candy, paint, furniture, rugs, tonics, machinery, and so on ad infinitum can exist in such lavish abundance. With so many things of the same kind to choose from, there is scarcely any reason to wonder that the purchasing public becomes addle-brained and fickle. The over-production of both the essentials and non-essentials of life is indubitably stimulated by advertising, with the result that whenever business depression threatens the country, much unnecessary unemployment and hardship arises because of an over-burdened market and an industrial world crowded with moribund manufacturing plants. “Give me a strong enough motor and I will make that table fly,” an aviator once remarked. It could be said with equal truth, “Give me money enough to spend in advertising and I will make any product sell.” Flying tables, however, are not nearly so objectionable as a market glutted with useless and over-priced wares, and an army of labour dependent for its existence upon an artificially stimulated demand.

The claim that advertising undermines the habits of thrift of a nation requires no defence. Products are made to be sold and it is the principal function of advertising to sell them regardless of their merits or the requirements of the people. Men and women purchase articles to-day that would have no place in any socially and economically safe civilization. As long as this condition continues, money will be drawn out of the savings accounts of the many and deposited in the commercial accounts of the few—a situation which hardly makes for happy and healthy families.

It has been asserted by many that advertising is injurious to literary style. I am far from convinced that this charge is true. In my belief it has been neither an injurious nor helpful influence. If anything, it has forced a number of writers to say a great deal in a few words, which is not in itself an undesirable accomplishment. Nor do I believe that advertising has recruited to its ranks a number of writers or potential writers who might otherwise have given pearls of faith to the world. However, if it has attracted any first-calibre writers, they have only themselves to blame and there is still an opportunity for them to scale the heights of literary eminence.

The worst has been said of advertising, I feel, when we agree that it has contributed to the corruption of the press, that it does help to endanger the economic safety of the nation, and that, to a great extent, it appeals to the public in a false and unhealthy manner. These charges certainly are sufficiently damaging. For the rest, let us admit that advertising is more or less like all other businesses, subject to the same criticisms and guilty of the same mistakes. Having admitted this, let us assume the rôle of the attorney for the defence and see what we can marshal in favour of our client.

First of all, I submit the fact that advertising has kept many artists alive—not that I am thoroughly convinced that artists should be kept alive, any more than poets or any other un-American breed; but for all that I appeal to your humanitarian instincts when I offer this fact in support of advertising, and I trust you will remember it when considering the evidence.

In the second place, advertising is largely responsible for the remarkable strides we have taken in the art of typography. If you will examine much of the literature produced by advertising, you will find there many excellent examples of what can be done with type. To-day no country in the world is producing more artistic and authentic specimens of typography than America, and this, I repeat, is largely due to the influence of advertising.

We can also advance as an argument in favour of advertising that it has contributed materially to a greater use of the tooth-brush and a more diligent application of soap. Advertising has preached cleanliness, preached frantically, selfishly and for its own ends, no doubt, but nevertheless it has preached convincingly. It matters little what means are used to achieve the end of cleanliness as long as the end is achieved. This, advertising has helped to accomplish. The cleanliness of the body and the cleanliness of the home as desirable virtues are constantly being held up before the readers of papers and magazines. As has been said, there are altogether too many different makes of soap and other sanitary articles, but in this case permit us to modify the statement by adding that it is much better to have too many of such articles than too few. This third point in favour of advertising is no small point to consider. The profession cannot be wholly useless, if it has helped to make teeth white, faces clean, bodies healthy, homes fresh and sanitary, and people more concerned with their bodies and the way they treat them.

The fourth point in favour of advertising is that through the medium of paid space in the papers and magazines certain deserving movements have been able to reach a larger public and thus recruit from it new and valuable members. This example illustrates the value of advertising when applied to worthy ends. In all fairness we are forced to conclude, that, after all, there is much in advertising that is not totally depraved.

Now that we are about to rest the case, let us gaze once more through the magic portals of the advertising world and refresh our eyes with its beauty. On second glance we find there is something strangely pathetic and wistfully human about this World That Never Was. It is a world very much after our own creation, peopled and arranged after our own yearnings and desires. It is a world of well regulated bowels, cornless feet, and unblemished complexions, a world of perfectly fitting clothes, completely equipped kitchens, and always upright and smiling husbands. To this world of splendid country homes, humming motors, and agreeable companions, prisoners on our own poor weary world of reality may escape for a while to live a few short moments of unqualified comfort and happiness. Even if they do return from their flight with pockets empty and arms laden with a number of useless purchases, they have had at least some small reward for their folly. They have dwelt and sported with fascinating people in surroundings of unsurpassed beauty. True, it is not such a world as Rembrandt would have created, but he was a grim old realist, who, when he wanted to paint a picture of a person cutting the nails, selected for his model an old and unscrupulous woman, and cast around her such an atmosphere of reality that one can almost hear the snip of the scissors as it proceeds on its revolting business. How much better it would be done in the advertising world! Here we would be shown a young and beautiful girl sitting gracefully before her mirror and displaying just enough of her body to convince the beholder that she was neither crippled nor chicken-breasted, and all day long for ever and for ever she would sit thus smiling tenderly as she clipped the pink little moon-flecked nails from her pink little pointed fingers.

Yes, I fear it is a world of our own creation. Only a few persons would stand long before Rembrandt’s crude example, while many would dwell with delight on the curves and allurements of the maid in the advertising world. Of course one might forget or never even discover what she was doing, and assuming that one did, one would hardly dwell upon such an unromantic occupation in connection with a creature so fair and refined as this ideal young woman; but for all that, one would at least have had the pleasure of contemplating her loveliness.

So many of us are poor and ill-favoured in this world of ours, so many girls are not honestly able to purchase more than one frock or one hat a year, that the occasion of the purchase takes on an importance far beyond the appreciation of the average well-to-do person. It is fun, therefore, to dwell upon the lines and features of a perfectly gowned woman and to imagine that even though poor and ill-favoured, one might possibly resemble in a modified way, the splendid model, if one could only get an extra fifteen minutes off at lunch-time in order to attend the bargain sale. There are some of us who are so very poor that from a great distance we can enjoy without hope of participation the glory and triumph of others. The advertising world supplies us with just this sort of vicarious enjoyment, and, like all other kinds of fiction, enables us to play for a moment an altogether pleasing rôle in a world of high adventure.

Therefore let us not be too uncharitable to the advertising world. While not forgetting its faults, let us also strive to remember its virtues. Some things we cannot forgive it, some things we would prefer to forget, but there are others which require less toleration and fortitude to accept when once they have been understood.

As long as the printed word is utilized and goods are bought and sold, there will be a place and a reason for advertising—not advertising as we know it to-day, but of a saner and more useful nature. He would be a doughty champion of the limitation of free speech who would deny a man the right to tell the world that he is the manufacturer of monkey-wrenches, and that he has several thousands of these same wrenches on hand, all of which he is extremely anxious to sell.

Advertising, although a precocious child, is but in its infancy. In spite of its rapid development and its robust constitution, it has not yet advanced beyond the savage and bragging age. It will appeal to our instincts of greed as quickly as to our instincts of home-building. It will make friends with the snob that is in us, as readily as it will avail itself of the companionship of our desire to be generous and well-liked. It will frighten and bulldoze us into all sorts of extravagant purchases with the same singleness of purpose that it will plead with our self-respect in urging us to live cleaner and better lives. It will use our pride and vanity for its own ends as coolly as it will use our good nature or community spirit. It will run through the whole gamut of human emotions, selecting therefrom those best suited to its immediate ends. Education alone will make the child behave—not the education of the child so much as the education of the reader.

Advertising thrives to-day in the shadows created by big business, and, as a consequence, if it would retain its master’s favour it must justify his methods, and practise his evil ways. Here it must be added that there are some honest advertising agencies which refuse to accept the business of dishonest concerns. It must also be added that there are some magazines and newspapers which will refuse to accept unscrupulous advertisements. These advertisements must be notoriously unscrupulous, however, before they meet this fate. There are even such creatures as honest manufacturers, but unfortunately for the profession they too rarely advertise. As a whole, advertising is committed to the ways of business, and as the ways of business are seldom straight and narrow, advertising perforce must follow a dubious path. We shall let it rest at that.

We have made no attempt in this article to take up the subject of out-door advertising. There is nothing to say about this branch of the profession save that it is bad beyond expression, and should be removed from sight with all possible haste. In revolting against the sign-board, direct action assumes the dignity of conservatism, and although I do not recommend an immediate assault on all sign-boards, I should be delighted if such an assault took place. Were I a judge sitting on the case of a man apprehended in the act of destroying one of these eyesores, I should give him the key to my private stock, and adjourn the court for a week.

J. Thorne Smith