its future in paradoxical terms, a complex of social interiority increasingly presented in elemental and seductive imagery. Its “supreme virtue” lay in the powers of a “new truth … [that] delights the single-minded and enchants children.” Assessing the American experiment: “All the children whom I know, reason like Americans when it is a question of money, of pleasure, of glory, of power, and of work.”55 Duhamel’s harsh treatment of Americans surely stems in part from an old-world European snobbery that generally reads as parody. He titled his book America the Menace because its unthinking, brutish and utterly false existence was beckoning the rest of the world to follow. But he was little inclined to examine the subtle methods that made it possible, the power to persuade and manipulate the public.
DEMOCRACY IN THE MARKETPLACE
As prosperity depended increasingly on rising mass consumption, advertising became more consciously duplicitous. One genre of print ads that flourished during the late 1920s and early 1930s was based on parables intended to convey practical and moral lessons in everyday life. These parables, Roland Marchand tells us, resembled those employed in the Old and New Testaments that aimed to dramatize a central message by means of stark contrasts and exaggeration. But there were basic and consequential differences between the two. For example, Jesus sought to stimulate in his listener the need to rethink decisions and behavior that adversely impacted others and act in a manner that might bring him or her closer to salvation. On the other hand, the parables used by advertisers stressed comfort mainly by conveying that the product was indispensable and could easily be incorporated into one’s daily life. While the former focused on the need for restraint, the latter urged that anything was possible. Here were two fundamentally different ideas about human perfection and how to attain it. When Jesus spoke in parables, the core message was that individual existence amounted to nothing without a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of others. In contrast, advertising came up with parables designed to convince each individual that there were no limits to his or her pleasures.56
One of the most effective ads was the parable of the “Democracy of Goods.” Intended as tableaux vivants (living pictures) that highlighted the wonders of mass production and distribution, they aimed to encourage every person to believe that he or she could enjoy society’s most significant pleasure, convenience, or benefit regardless of social standing. In his comprehensive study of American advertising during the interwar period, Marchand discusses one such ad that appeared in the September 1929 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The dominant image is a young lad, Livingston Ludlow Biddle, who is identified as the scion of the wealthy and well-known Biddle family of Philadelphia. With the family coat-of-arms visible in one corner of the ad, the future heir to the family fortune is sitting atop a tricycle with an inquiring and endearing look on his face. Below his image are words carefully chosen by the Cream of Wheat Corporation that focus on the importance of diet in the boy’s daily care, as prescribed by “famous specialists.” But the central message of the ad goes further by emphasizing in the clearest terms that this efficacious product need not be enjoyed by the rich alone. As Marchand writes of the ad, “Every mother can give her youngsters the fun and benefits of a Cream of Wheat breakfast just as do the parents of these boys and girls who have the best that wealth can command.”57
Regardless of the particular product and its benefit, the parable genre remained a fixture of advertising throughout the period. All ads of this type proclaiming that “any woman can” or “every home can afford” were bent on publicizing the idea that fine products in the marketplace were not the sole pleasures of the wealthy and privileged. Quite the contrary, they were constant reminders that life in America was truly democratic because everything was available to all in the marketplace. Just because a rich family used a particular product did not mean that it could not be used by others beneath them. “By implicitly defining ‘democracy’ in terms of equal access to consumer products,” Marchand says, “and then by depicting the everyday functioning of that ‘democracy’ with regard to one product at a time, these tableaux offered Americans an inviting vision of their society as one of incontestable equality.”58
Here perhaps were the powers of persuasion and manipulation at their most sublime. By focusing on one product at a time, advertisers sought to divert attention from the realities of class, power and privilege. The rich and powerful enjoyed any of these products at any time, but this is what the parable was designed to obfuscate. For example, an elegant butler serving Chase and Sanborn Coffee to a wealthy family in a dining room with a high ceiling was intended to remind all who saw it that “compared with the riches of the more fortunate, your way of life may seem modest indeed, yet no one—king, prince, statesman, or capitalist” has any more power to enjoy such fine coffee than a commoner. Another ad for the C. F. Church Manufacturing Company promoted a toilet seat that was “a bathroom luxury everyone can afford.” As the ad stated: “If you lived in one of those palatial apartments on Park Avenue, in New York City, where you have to pay $2,000.00 to $7,500.00 a year rent, you still couldn’t have a better toilet seat in your bathroom than they have—the Church Sani-White Toilet Seat which you can afford to have right now.” As Marchand concluded from both examples, “No discrepancies in wealth could prevent the humblest citizens, provided they chose their purchases wisely, from retiring to a setting in which they could contemplate their essential equality, through possession of an identical product, with the nation’s millionaires.”59
For Marchand, the parable of the Democracy of Goods was not a “concerted conspiracy” by advertisers “to impose a social ideology on the American people.” True, it sought to convince the public that “antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary” because “the best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices.” As such, the most attractive aspect of the parable for advertisers was that it preached “the coming of an equalizing democracy.” Yet the fundamental assumptions of the advertisers themselves were necessarily divisive, and it came out in the parable. On one hand, frequently used terms like “everyone,” “anyone,” “any home,” and the like were aimed at “consumer-citizens” ranked economically by advertisers in the top half of the nation’s population, which amounted to 4 million as opposed to 120 million people. The connection now was between the 400 top families and the 4 million beneath them, the upper echelon of the rising middle class. As Marchand tells us, “The standard antitheses of the Democracy of Goods parables were ‘mansion’ and ‘bungalow.’” But on the other hand, advertising generally ignored anyone who did not live in the cozy confines of the latter. “These millions,” Marchand wrote, “might overhear the promises of consumer democracy in the newspapers or magazines, but advertising leaders felt no obligation to show how their promises to ‘everyone’ would bring equality to those who lived in the nation’s apartment houses and farmhouses without plumbing, let alone those who lived in rural shacks and urban tenements.”60
THE BALLYHOO OF CAPITALISTS AND PRESIDENTS
The parable of the Democracy of Goods in advertising was reinforced by powerful sources in American society, even by its presidents. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in the fall of 1926, Calvin Coolidge asserted that in educating consumers on everything from toothpaste to beautiful clothing, advertisers were cultivating the mind and social graces of consumers in ways that “were harnessing America’s modern industrial system to the uplift of its citizenry.” Coolidge believed this was “molding the human mind” while “ennobling the commercial world.” Bruce Barton’s Jesus called on those around him “to stand upright and look at God face to face” so he could defend family, community, and country. No wonder then that Coolidge defined the work of ad men as nothing short of facilitating “the regeneration and redemption of mankind.”61
The belief that capitalism was finally delivering its long-standing promise of universal prosperity, and that it was occurring only in democratic America, was deepened by its leading capitalists, who were convinced of their own ballyhoo—a word used to describe the promotion of anything that took on a life
