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
BUSINESS
Modern business derives from three passions in this order, namely: The passion for things, the passion for personal grandeur and the passion for power. Things are multiplied in use and possession when people exchange with each other the products of specialized labour. Personal grandeur may be realized in wealth. Gratification of the third passion in this way is new. Only in recent times has business become a means to great power, a kind of substitute for kingship, wherein man may sate his love of conquest, practise private vengeance, and gain dominion over people.
These passions are feeble on the Oriental side of the world, strong in parts of Europe, powerful in America. Hence the character of American business. It is unique, wherein it is so, not in principle but in degree of phenomena. For natural reasons the large objects of business are most attainable in this country. Yet this is not the essential difference. In the pursuit of them there is a characteristic American manner, as to which one may not unreasonably prefer a romantic explanation. No white man lives on this continent who has not himself or in his ancestry the will that makes desire overt and dynamic, the solitary strength to push his dream across seas. Islands had been peopled before by this kind of selection, notably England; never a continent. A reckless, egoistic, experimental spirit governs, betrays, and preserves us still.
The elemental hunger for food, warmth, and refuge gives no direct motive to business. People may live and reproduce without business. Civilization of a sort may exist without its offices. The settler who disappears into the wilderness with a wife, a gun, a few tools, and some pairs of domestic beasts, may create him an idyllic habitation, amid orchards and fields, self-contained in rude plenty; but he is lost to business until he produces a money crop, that is, a surplus of the fruits of husbandry to exchange for fancy hardware, tea, window glass, muslin, china, and luxuries.
The American wilderness swallowed up hundreds of thousands of such hearth-bearers. Business was slow to touch them. What they had to sell was bulky. The cost of transportation was prohibitive. There were no highways, only rivers, for traffic to go upon. Food was cheap, because the earth in a simple way was bounteous; but the things for which food could be exchanged were dear. This would naturally be true in a new country, where craft industry must develop slowly. It was true also for another reason, which was that the Mother Country regarded the New World as a plantation to be exploited for the benefit of its own trade and manufactures.
Great Britain’s claim to proprietary interest in America having been established against European rivals by the end of the 17th century, her struggle with the colonists began. The English wanted (1) raw materials upon which to bestow their high craft labour, (2) an exclusive market for the output of their mills and factories, and (3) a monopoly of the carrying trade. The colonists wanted industrial freedom. As long as they held themselves to chimney-corner industries, making nails, shoes, hats, and coarse cloth for their own use, there was no quarrel. But when labour even in a small way began to devote itself exclusively to handicraft, so that domestic manufactures were offered for sale in competition with imported English goods, that was business—and the British Parliament voted measures to crush it. The weaving of cloth for sale was forbidden, lest the colonists become independent of English fabrics. So was the making of beaver hats; the English were hatters. It was forbidden to set up an iron rolling-mill in America, because the English required pig iron and wished to work it themselves. To all these acts of Parliament the colonists opposed subterfuge until they were strong enough to be defiant. That impatience of legal restraints which is one of the most obstinate traits of American business was then a patriotic virtue.
Meanwhile the New England trader had appeared—that adorable, hymning, unconscious pirate who bought molasses in the French West Indies, swapped it for rum at Salem, Mass., traded the rum for Negroes on the African coast, exchanged the Negroes for tobacco in Virginia, and sold the tobacco for money in Europe, at a profit to be settled with God. This trade brought a great deal of money to the colonies; and they needed money almost more than anything else. Then the British laid a ban on trade with the French West Indies, put a tax upon coastwise traffic between the colonies; and decreed that American tobacco should be exported nowhere but to English ports, although—or because—tobacco prices were higher everywhere else in Europe. The natural consequence of this restrictive British legislation was to make American business utterly lawless. As much as a third of it was notoriously conducted in defiance of law. Smuggling both in domestic and foreign trade became a folk custom. John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a celebrated smuggler.