The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Advertising flourished, then, from the effort to produce apparent distinctions. Competing products were now more precisely similar and more unnoticeably different. This was one explanation of why modern advertising first flowered in the marketing of beers, soaps, and cigarettes. Different brands of these commodities could not readily be distinguished from one another by actual shape or function. Each had to be distinguished, therefore, by being attached to, or rather, “fitted into,” a distinctive image. The masters of advertising, men like Albert Lasker, were adept at this. At the same time came the build-up of brand names. The Brand Names Foundation (established in 1943), by 1959 had almost a thousand members—firms manufacturing or promoting nationally advertised products. The Foundation conducted “educational programs” on the benefits and services of brand names and brand advertising. Brand names became household words. They were monuments to American wealth, American democracy, and technological progress in the Age of the Graphic Revolution.

  The obvious next step, so recent it has only begun to enter our dictionaries, was from the “Brand Name” to the “Name Brand.” The use of “brand” as a synonym for trademark had entered the English language as early as 1827. In American usage the expression “brand name” called attention to the private ownership of a certain trademark, to the fact that one firm alone was authorized so to designate its product. But the much newer expression “name brand” makes the name and not the product the center of attention. This is quite a natural way to distinguish commodities in the age of the celebrity and the best seller.

  The fast pace of life and the increasing speed of movement across vast American spaces, well before the beginning of the twentieth century, had begun to put a premium on quickly impressive, attractive images. They were creating a new Iconography of Speed. Competition for attention put a premium on attention-getting. The word “billboard,” which was invented in America, had first come in use about 1851, in the early days of the Graphic Revolution. The rise of the automobile, the improvement of highways in the 1920’s and ’30’s, and the consequent vast spread of billboards were new incentives to produce images that could catch the eye in a flash and remain indelibly imprinted on the memory. The very multiplication and the increasing size of newspapers and magazines were incentives. How to produce images that could not be forgotten even if seen only fleetingly as one leafed the pages? Everything pointed to the invention and perfection of inescapable, unforgettable images, drawing the viewer willy-nilly to a salable product.

  To broadcast and receive these images, devices multiplied: high-speed presses, photography, vast-circulation magazines, movies, radio, television. In everybody’s consciousness, images became important as never before. Man’s power to produce graven images exceeded the most diabolical imagination of Biblical times. And while images multiplied and became more vivid, ideals dissolved.

  Ideals became “corny.” The word “corny,” now commonly used to describe the explicit statement of ideals, came into use about 1935. Derived from “corn-fed,” it applied to music which was hill-billy or out of date. At first it signified the style of pre-1925, but it became slang (gradually being displaced in the ’50’s by “square”) for any trite, banal, or sentimental expression, and was frequently applied to the most familiar formulations of the naive, homely aspirations of the era before the Graphic Revolution. Strong new currents of thought have carried us farther in this direction. Not only particular ideals, but the very notion of ideals, has become corny.

  A whole new vocabulary began to dominate thinking about men’s aims and motives. An example is the new use of the word “rationalization” which appeared in the present century. It came to mean the making of superficially plausible or “rational” explanations, which were only excuses for actions or beliefs. Soon it was a catchall label for everybody’s habit of justifying his behavior by not talking about his real motives. To attack something as a “rationalization” became a kind of philosophic penicillin—a layman’s cure-all for arguments he could not understand or would not take seriously. Under the influence of Karl Marx, in the United States as elsewhere, people came to think philosophies were nothing but smoke screens for economic interests. Our ideals, we were told, were no more than the shibboleths of a retreating bourgeoisie. Sigmund Freud then provided an even subtler apparatus to explain why people did not really believe the reasons they professed. All this spelled the distrust, then the decline of ideals. Intellectuals, even more than others, became apologetic for talking or thinking in ideals. It seemed naive to judge by abstract standards of perfection, rather than by congruence with images.

  We reversed traditional ways of thinking about the relation between images and ideals. Instead of thinking that an image was only a representation of an ideal, we came to see the ideal as a projection or generalization of an image. Our ideal father, we were told, was nothing but our projection of our image of our own father—of what he was or what he was not. We came then to distrust the very concept of an ideal, as an abstraction. We distrusted any standard of perfection toward which all people could strive.

  Ideals had once given form to the study and the writing of history and to the study of society. American historians had once been preoccupied with ideals. Francis Parkman vividly described the conflict between the ideals of Protestantism and the ideals of Catholicism in the Franco-British struggle for colonial empire in the American forests. George Bancroft saw the struggle for independence and for the Constitution as a struggle for the ideals of liberty, of democracy, and of a new nation. Other students of society focused on other ideals: equality, peace, and justice. But in this century, in America perhaps more than elsewhere, the new social sciences collected statistics and interpreted them in norms, modes, medians, and averages. Vast new accumulations of fact and ingenious applications of mathematics to social data brought new patterns of generalization. These bred a deeper, “fact”-founded, distrust of ideals.

  Social scientists no longer focused on the unique event which had fascinated the old humanist-historians. Instead they themselves built up images. These soon dominated the ways in which literate Americans thought about themselves. Americans tried to fit themselves into social science images of the frontier, economic classes, and status. Social scientists built up these images from modal forms. In statistics the “mode” was the most frequently recurring type or form of a phenomenon. The historian conjured up “the frontiersman” (Turner), the “personalty-property owner” (Beard), the status-deprived Progressive reformer (Hofstadter). Sociologists then were able to describe the villager, the suburban housewife (a heroic figure featured on a Time cover), the scientist, the small businessman (who lived in Middletown), or the junior executive. Humanist-historians had aimed at individualized portrait. The new social science historians produced group caricature. Through various means of popularization, such caricature became the image into which an individual was expected (and often tried) to fit.

  Oversimplified sociological concepts—“status,” “other-direction,” etc.—appealed because they were so helpful in building images. These wide-appealing “modes,” expressed in our dominating notions of norms and averages, led us unwittingly to try to imitate ourselves. We have tried to discover what it is really like to be a junior executive or a junior executive’s wife, so we can really be the way we are supposed to be, that is, the way we already are. Naive emphasis on ideals had at worst tempted men to unrealistic pursuit of an abstract standard of perfection; emphasis on modes and images now tempts us to pursue the phantoms of ourselves.

  Every age has its own peculiar circumlocutions that unwittingly show deference to its dominant beliefs. The language of aristocratic ages overflows with terms of rank: milord, milady, goodman, sir, sirrah, etc. Religious ages embroider language with “God be praised!” “God willing!” etc.

  Our age similarly betrays its deference to images. Each of us hopes for a pleasing “personality”—and our personality is the attention-getting image of ourselves, our image of o
ur behavior. Each of the Presidential candidates aims, we say, not to improve what the electorate thinks of him, but rather to improve his public image. Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy Administration, puzzled people when he came into office in early 1961 by his complex and partly-contradictory objectives—(a) his fierce Democratic partisanship and (b) his determination that the Government encourage writers and artists. The Washington correspondent does not put it that way. Instead, he reports that the Secretary is “creating two contradictory reputations,” and the headline reads: “Udall building a Double Image.” At their annual meeting in the summer of 1961, doctors of the American Medical Association are reported to be discussing their concern over the A.M.A.’s public image; they urge “the streamlining of organizational machinery to bolster the image.” The London correspondent of The New York Times explains to us, when Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher retires as Archbishop of Canterbury, that he “has served as the chief ‘image’ of the Anglican Church for sixteen years.” Protestantism in America, a minister tells us, is being “badly presented”: the image of protestantism is not what it should be.

  During the Presidential campaign of 1960 the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer decided to drop the column by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale because of “his approach to the ‘so-called religious issue’ in this political campaign.” They announced on their front page that until then they had regarded Dr. Peale’s weekly article “as a non-sectarian feature, strongly inspirational to men and women of all faiths. To our regret Dr. Peale has impaired this public image” (September 13, 1960). When scholars of the American Studies Association prepare a collection of essays asking what Americans think of themselves, they characterize themselves as “students of the American image, in all its variety.” A distinguished historian, reviewing their volume, observes that “Americans have attempted to hold on to some cohesive image of their land.” Universities, we say, have the wrong “image” of themselves; or the public has an unfortunate “image” of them. The advertising industry itself, we read, is undertaking a program of ads (initiated by Gordon Chelf, publisher of the Philadelphia Daily News) directed to the general public “to improve the image of advertising.”

  The fantastic growth of advertising and public relations together with everybody’s increasing reliance on dealers in pseudo-events and images cannot—contrary to highbrow clichés—accurately be described as a growing superficiality. Rather these things express a world where the image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original. The shadow has become the substance. Advertising men, industrial designers, and packaging engineers are not deceivers of the public. They are simply acolytes of the image. And so are we all. They elaborate the image, not only because the image sells, but also because the image is what people want to buy.

  To men unfamiliar with our way of life, our language would seem strangely circumlocutory. A world where people talk constantly not of things themselves, but of their images! Yet it is by these circumlocutions that we unwittingly express our deepest unspoken beliefs. Belief in the malleability of the world. Belief in the superior vividness of a technicolor representation to a drab original. Our language has the look of being indirect. In our age everybody uses the monstrous cliché, “in terms of” this or that. But not without reason. For in our time the old direct statement has become inaccurate, untrue to our experience. When images have become more vivid than originals, it is only natural that we should commonly prefer to speak of the more vivid copy. More important than what we think of the Presidential candidate is what we think of his “public image.” We vote for him because his is the kind of public image we want to see in the White House. More important than what a Buick really is, is our image of it. We are sold it and we buy it and enjoy it for its image and how we fit into the image. The language of images, then, is not circumlocution at all. It is the only simple way of describing what dominates our experience.

  III

  THE MOMENTOUS sign of the rise of image-thinking, and its displacement of ideals is, of course, the rise of advertising. Nothing has been more widely misunderstood. Daring not to admit we may be our own deceivers, we anxiously seek someone to accuse of deceiving us. “Madison Avenue,” “Public Relations,” “Organization Men,” and similar epithets have given us our whipping boys. We refuse to believe that advertising men are at most our collaborators, helping us make illusions for ourselves. In our moral indignation, our eagerness to find the villains who have created and frustrated our exaggerated expectations, we have underestimated the effect of the rise of advertising. We think it has meant an increase of untruthfulness. In fact it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth.

  Advertising, from its modern American beginnings, was a classic example of the pseudo-event. It was a prototype of “made news.” The modern era in American advertising dates from the epoch when advertisements ceased to be repetitive announcements naively describing services or products for sale and, by being contrived and being given the artificial aroma of news, took on the aspect of other pseudo-events. Modern advertising began when the advertisement was no longer a spontaneous announcement and had become “made news.” James Gordon Bennett (1795–1872), who founded the New York Herald on May 7, 1835, as a one-cent daily paper, and who was one of the pioneers of modern American journalism, inaugurated the new era when he abolished the old “standing ad.” Formerly a commercial announcement would be left standing in type; sometimes it ran unaltered for as long as a year at a time. Such standing ads were in fact the rule in the advertising columns of newspapers. Advertising matter of this kind obviously could offer readers little or nothing of newsworthy interest. Wishing to make the advertisements as newsworthy as everything else in his Herald, Bennett announced in 1847 that he would take no advertisement for more than two weeks’ insertion; then, in 1848, he began the policy of accepting no advertisment for more than one day’s insertion. This required advertisers to change their notices daily. Bennett’s son, who succeeded him as editor of the Herald, showed a similar vigor and ingenuity in devising stunts to advertise the newspaper itself; for example, he sent Stanley to Africa to look for Livingstone (1871).

  The news interest in advertisements has increased with the rising American standard of living, the rising level of expectations, and the growing ingenuity of copy writers. Readers enjoy the sense of being courted, they luxuriate in the knowledge that so much money, time, effort, and art have gone into making all these pseudo-events especially for them. The newspaper PM, launched on its brief life as a self-righteously “adless” daily in 1940, failed in part because readers missed the advertising news to which they had become accustomed. Statistical studies of reader interest made by the Market Research Foundation, 1940–1950, indicated an increased interest in advertising. Readers seemed to find about as much interest in advertising as in regular news and editorial features. It has become a commonplace of American journalism that the most successful (that is, the most appealing) newspapers and magazines are those with the most advertising. The Reader’s Digest had long been an exception. But when in November 1954 inflation and mounting costs made Wallace decide to include advertising in order to avoid raising the price of the magazine, The Digest promised to print only advertising “of unusually high reader interest.” Three years’ experience justified The Digest’s official historian in concluding that “most Americans like advertising. They expect to find it in their magazines. They read it as news. They are conscious of advertising and look to it for excitement and novelty … When The Reader’s Digest began to take advertising in 1955 it added to its value as a complete magazine.” This is not merely a way of saying that nothing succeeds like success. It is also a way of saying what has not always and everywhere been true: that the public enjoys an ever greater abundance of advertising “news.”

  The successful American advertiser knows how to make news. A notorious pioneer was P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), whom advertising textbooks still treat as the first large-s
cale practitioner of many modern publicity techniques. He was a genius at making pseudo-events, although they were often so crude that they could not titillate us today. He made news even by his attitude toward advertising. “I thoroughly understood the art of advertising,” boasted Barnum in his autobiography, “not merely by means of printer’s ink, which I have always used freely, and to which I confess myself much indebted for my success, but by turning every possible circumstance to my account.” In 1835 he exhibited Joice Heth, an aged Negress whom he advertised as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. For a while he made fifteen hundred dollars a week from her. Showing his mastery of the art of compounding pseudo-events, he then increased his publicity by attacking the whole exhibition as a hoax. “The fact is, Joice Heth is not a human being,” he wrote the newspapers, “… simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs ingeniously put together and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator. The operator is a ventriloquist.” An autopsy done at the time of her death indicated that Joice Heth was about eighty years old. Barnum then multiplied publicity by having her buried in his family plot; he wrote a series of articles exposing the fraud and reasserting his own good faith.

  In 1841, Barnum managed to buy Scudder’s American Museum, a private collection of curiosities exhibited for profit. The museum, once well known and profitable, was then losing money. When Barnum told a friend that he intended to buy the museum (the asking price was $15,000), the friend replied in astonishment, “What do you intend buying it with?” “Brass,” retorted Barnum, “for silver and gold have I none.” He increased and diversified the transient attractions, exhibiting, according to his own list, “educated dogs, industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gipsies, Albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope-dancers, live Yankees, pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety, dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; Hannington’s dioramas of the Creation, the Deluge, Fairy Grotto, Storm at Sea; the first English Punch and Judy in this country, Italian Fantoccini, mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines, and other triumphs in the mechanical arts; dissolving views, American Indians who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on the stage—these, among others, were all exceedingly successful.” Barnum’s American Museum soon became one of New York’s major tourist attractions.