investment rose dramatically. By 1929, U.S. industry was producing one-quarter of the world’s goods and 40 percent of all manufactured items.28 Exports increased from $3.9 billion to almost $5.4 billion from 1922 to 1929, as U.S. companies went beyond their traditional European markets to Africa and South America where the increase was roughly 130 percent. Imports also grew from $3.2 billion to $4.5 billion. By and large, the figures show an impressive trade surplus and balance of payments.29
SALESMANSHIP AND ADVERTISING IN THE SPECTACLE OF ABUNDANCE
If the volume of goods produced by American capitalists between 1922 and 1929 was unprecedented, so was the means by which it was marketed. No longer was it sufficient to present an item for sale, promote its usefulness, and then take the order. Salesmen going door to door needed thinkers back in the office, whose mission was to determine how to persuade the consumer to buy even if the item was not needed just so the bosses could stay ahead of the constant worry of too much product in backroom storage or the large warehouse. Market imperatives to sustain profits required a qualitatively new approach. As never before, wrote journalist Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, business in the 1920s had recognized that continuous prosperity depended on the consumer “to buy and buy lavishly”:
The whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super-heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its outlet. The salesman and the advertising man held the key to this outlet. As competition increased their methods became more strenuous. No longer was it considered enough to recommend one’s goods in modest and explicit terms and to place them on the counter in the hope that the ultimate consumer would make up his mind to purchase. The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying,—“to break down consumer resistance.”30
For the salesmen—women were conspicuously absent from their growing ranks—this meant big changes. For one thing, salesmanship now depended on a growing arsenal of marketing tools, from neon signs to slick deliveries aimed at manipulating consumer needs. Psychologists took care of that. Salesmen learned to sell themselves more effectively so they could sell more product. Gadgets and mind-altering messages aimed at convincing the consumer to buy things that made his or her life easier, or to make them more personally appealing, or to make an ordinary man feel like a millionaire altered the mind of the salesman as well. To sell the commodity by selling himself made him a model citizen whose thinking and existence, his self-identity, was supposed to mirror the ideal market he lived for and sustained.
Such was the world of George F. Babbitt, the eponymous protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel whose daily existence as the consummate salesman was as packaged as the world of commodities surrounding him. A real-estate broker who lived and worked in the fictitious midwestern city of Zenith—the literary counterpart to Warren Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio—Babbitt awoke each morning at precisely 7:20 to “the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial.” As a respected businessman in the city, Babbitt lived up to the virtues of his trade “as the servant of society,” finding homes for families and shops for businessmen by demonstrating “steadiness and diligence.” He was honest, experienced in the matters of titles and leases, and had “an excellent memory for prices.” For Babbitt, this was the bottom line. No matter if “his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders.”31 For Babbitt serenely believed that
the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters’ Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker’s Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn’t you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn’t imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn’t jew you down on the asking-price.32
For Stuart Ewen, who has written masterfully on the history of public relations in the United States, George Babbitt was the ultimate foot-soldier of the New Capitalism.33 But he was also its product, as Sinclair Lewis recognized at the time:
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.34
Babbitt’s character was molded in a totalizing marketplace that took root at a time when business trumped politics, businessmen replaced statesmen, and the consumer replaced the citizen. “Business itself was regarded with a new veneration,” observed the writer and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen. While the public’s interest in politics at all levels vanished, the growth of the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs in cities and towns across the country was astounding. In their weekly meetings, members never ceased to praise the “redemptive and regenerative influence of business.” The businessman was idolized as “a builder, a doer of great things, yes, and a dreamer whose imagination was ever seeking out new ways of serving humanity.”35 Salesmen and advertisers were the “agents and evangels” of capitalist enterprise.36
If it took a novelist like Sinclair Lewis to make Babbitt the archetypal salesman, it was the ad writer and executive Bruce Barton who made Jesus the conqueror of the business world. In his 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows, Barton introduced the Nazarene as the creator of modern business enterprise for having “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” To do this required methods that any sound corporate leader would follow. “To create any sort of reception for a new idea or product to-day involves a vast machinery of propaganda and expense,” Barton wrote. “Jesus had no funds and no machinery. His organization was a tiny group of uneducated men, one of whom had already abandoned the cause as hopeless, deserting to the enemy.”37 The key to his success was selling the gospel and this, Barton said, showed no offense to the faith:
Surely no one will consider us lacking in reverence if we say that every one of the “principles of modern salesmanship” on which business men so much pride themselves, are brilliantly exemplified in Jesus’ talk and work. The first of these and perhaps the most important is the necessity for “putting yourself in step with your prospect.”38
To this end, all of Jesus’s parables were “the most powerful advertisements of all time” and “show how instantly he won his audiences.”39
In striking contrast to Christians who pondered the Second Coming as a moment of justice and redemption, Barton claimed that Jesus’s presence was ubiquitous in the Great Boom. Look around, he urged his readers, and you will understand who the real Jesus was in his own day, a sociable and unpretentious fellow more likely to be found in the marketplace rather than at Sunday services and, consequently, “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem.”40 Make no mistake! He was the Founder of Modern Business and the first modern executive who commanded others through personal magnetism to demonstrate how to handle flawed followers with infinite patience. He lived the life of service, and this was his ultimate message
