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.