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

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  company history; it is defensive, even when defense is not called for. On how the BOMC and other popular book clubs re-enforce the mirror effect, see Lee’s conclusion in his final Appendix C: “Publishers’ Weekly’s regular best seller lists show that BOMC titles almost invariably score on its monthly popularity listings. In PW’s annual summaries of the 10 best sellers in fiction and in non-fiction, the Club has registered between 1926 and 1953 the remarkable total of 129 best sellers (exclusive of dividends). Of the 560 titles reported, the Club accounted for 23%. With dividends, the Club score rises to 25½ %.” See also Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “Book Clubs” (R. R. Bowker Memorial Lecture, 1947), interpreting her twenty years’ experience on the selection committee of the BOMC and offering a sensible defense of book clubs as one of many mechanisms “to keep up the book habit” in a democracy. For a sampling of the book clubs and their selections, see Leo M. Hauptman (compiler), “Current Monthly Book Clubs: A Descriptive Review” (mimeographed), compiled for the Research Division of the National Education Association (1944).

  A lively and perceptive examination of the effect of the rise of paperback publishing and of the moviefying of novels on publishing ways and on the contents of books is Albert Van Nostrand, The Denatured Novel (1960), to which I am much indebted. Van Nostrand offers many facts and suggestions on the growing mirror effect in this area. Two classic discussions of the aesthetic and philosophic problems of the relations among art forms are Gotthold E. Lessing, Laokoon (1766) and Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon (1910). The effect on book publishing of accelerating mergers and of putting publishing stock on the open market is explored in R. W. Apple, Jr., “The Gold Rush on Publishers’ Row,” Saturday Review, XLIII (Oct. 8, 1960), 13–15, 47–49, which ought to be required reading for all students of contemporary American literature. Other valuable articles on mid-twentieth-century developments include: Eleanor Blum, “Paperback Book Publishing: A Survey of Content,” Journalism Quarterly, XXXVI (Fall, 1959), 447–454; William Dow Boutwell, “The Coming of the Compact Book,” Library Journal, LXXXV (May 15, 1960), 1859–1862; Frank L. Schick, “The Future of Paperbacks,” Library Journal, LXXXV (May 15, 1960), 1863–1865; Harvey Swados, “Must Writers be Characters?” Saturday Review, XLIII (Oct. 1, 1960), 12–14, 50. Budd Schulberg, “Why Write It When you Can’t Sell It to the Pictures?” Saturday Review, XXXVIII (Sept. 3, 1955), 5–6, 27, explores the peculiar problems of the writer in an age of dissolving forms, through his eloquent account of his experiences with the movie script for (and later the novel) Waterfront. Malcolm Cowley reflects on these and related problems in his The Literary Situation (Compass paperback, 1954), especially, Ch. 6, “Cheap Books for the Millions,” and Ch. 7, “Hardbacks or Paperbacks?”; see also his “The Paperback Title Fight,” The Reporter, XXIII (July 7, 1960), 44–47. The rise of the “non-book” is wittily reported in “The Era of Non-B,” Time, LXXVI (Aug. 22, 1960), 70–71.

  The history of abridgment is an important subject, much in need of treatment. On The Reader’s Digest we do have two useful books, at opposite ends of the critical spectrum. James Playsted Wood, Of Lasting Interest: The Story of The Reader’s Digest (1958) is an “authorized” company history, saccharine and adulatory. But the volume gives much additional information about Digest procedures and internal company history not available elsewhere and I have learned a great deal from it. John Bainbridge, Little Wonder or, The Reader’s Digest and How It Grew (1946), originally a series in The New Yorker, is critical and often snide, but full of useful detail, statistics, and anecdote, including a valuable chapter, “Plant you now, dig you later” on the Digest practice of “planting” articles, and a delightful account of the exploration of the Digest’s headquarters at Chappaqua, by “Nicolai Popkov,” mythical Soviet editor of “Mini-mag.”

  Many books have been written and much reforming energy properly spent advocating the freedom to print and attacking book censorship. See, for example, the reports of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press (Robert M. Hutchins, Chairman): among them, A Free and Responsible Press (1947). But in the United States, as in many western European countries since the rise of popular literacy, censorship has had a much narrower influence than the universal practices of abridging, bowdlerizing, and anthologizing. While censorship is attacked for preventing people from learning the facts of life, abridgment, condensation, abstracts, and anthologies are praised as the necessary tools by which a democratic people can learn the facts of life. More careful study of the rise of these practices and of their effects might make us more aware of and more wary of what we have been doing. An old joke is the report that a successful New York publisher is preparing an anthology of “The World’s Three Best Commandments.”

  The history of techniques of art reproduction, in which André Malraux, in his Voices of Silence: Man and His Art (1953) discovers far-reaching significance, must, for the most part, be dug out of the histories of particular techniques, like Gabor Peterdi, Printmaking, Methods Old and New (1959). Some writer with a knowledge both of the techniques of reproduction and of the history of art could give us an important book on modern technological transformations of our artistic experience. Enticing suggestions are found in Ernest Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960).

  On the interrelations of visual and literary art forms, the importance of new media and of widening audiences, Gilbert Seldes has some interesting general comments and critical insights offered with a professional’s inside knowledge. See his The Seven Lively Arts (1924), The Great Audience (1950), and The Public Arts (1956).

  The literature on the movies is enormous. But the subject has by no means attracted as much writing talent, energy, or industry as it merits from historians. A useful introduction is Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer, The Movies (1957), a pictorial history written out of broad experience and long intimacy with the subject. Leo Rosten, Hollywood (1941) is an admirable sociological study of the movie capital still in its heyday. The atmosphere and preoccupations of Hollywood in the ’40’s and ’50’s are skillfully communicated in Ezra Goodman’s richly anecdotal Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (1961). More specialized studies, especially related to the problems I discuss in this chapter are Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (1939), a perceptive study of movie audiences, full of facts on box-office successes, on who was going to what movies, and on the effects of movie-going on cosmetics, costume, and morality; Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory (1950), a self-consciously anthropological study, with interesting, but sometimes devious interpretations; Dore Schary (as told to Charles Palmer), Case History of a Movie (1950), a detailed account of the making of a single movie; Frank Getlein and Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., Movies, Morals, and Art (1961), a sensible critique from the Catholic point of view. On the star system, see Edgar Morin’s bizarre The Stars: An Account of the Star System in Motion Pictures (translated from the French; Evergreen Profile Book #7, 1960), which collects much valuable detail and many insights around some contrived and occasionally precious concepts of liturgy, dream, etc. The relations between novels and movies are explored in Lester E. Asheim, “From Book to Film: A Comparative Analysis of the Content of Selected Novels and the Motion Pictures Based upon Them,” (1949), an unpublished doctoral dissertation in the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago, which comes to some surprising conclusions, carefully documented; George Bluestone, Novels into Films (1957), which traces the mutations in six specimen adaptations; and Erwin Panofsky’s brilliant brief article, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Transition, XXVI (1937), 121–133.

  On the significance of the technological changes of the last century for musical experience, we still need much research and writing. Paul S. Carpenter, Music, An Art and a Business (1950) looks primarily at the effects on the professions of musician and of musical composer. On Muzak, see Stanley Green’s excellent article, “Music to Hear but Not to Listen To,” Saturday Review, XL (Sept. 28, 1957), 55–56, 118; and the brief item “Omniprese
nt Music,” Musical America, LXXVI (Jan. 15, 1956), 13. Katherine Hamill, “The Record Business—‘It’s Murder,’ ” Fortune, LXIII (May, 1961), pp. 148–151, 178–187, discusses the special problems of making a profit out of mass-circulation records. For the story on the broadcasts of music in Grand Central Terminal, see Time, LV (Jan. 2, 1950), p. 15, and (Jan. 9, 1950), p.14.

  The cataclysmic consequences of the increasing rate of progress of scientific knowledge and the increasing rate of production of printed matter for our very concept of knowledge are only beginning to be studied. Some stimulating suggestions are found in Jacques Barzun’s sprightly and penetrating House of Intellect (1959). See Derek J. de Sola Price, Science Since Babylon (1961), a readable, incisive, and strikingly original book by a distinguished historian of science. This book points to some of the most exciting uncharted territories for students of twentieth-century intellectual history. It raises a number of profoundly disturbing questions about education and research in all areas bordering on the sciences. Francis Bello, “How to Cope with Information,” Fortune, LXII (Sept. 1, 1960), 162–167, 180–92 deals briefly and graphically with some of these questions. A special supplement to The New York Times (April 30, 1961), “The Information Explosion,” by International Business Machines Corporation, gives some intriguing hints of these problems and of how one adventurous company is facing them. See also, International Business Machines, “Language ‘Translator’ Publicly Demonstrated for First Time,” Press Release dated for May 27, 1960, available from IBM in New York City. A full history of IBM would be an important contribution to an understanding of American civilization in the twentieth (and perhaps the twenty-first!) century.

  Chapter 5. From Ideal to Image:

  The Search for Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  AND

  Chapter 6. From the American Dream to American Illusions?

  The Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige

  The great changes in modes of thought are always more easily observed by later ages than by those undergoing them. To describe one’s own way of thinking in one’s own vocabulary is often as difficult as to see the color red through red-colored glasses. We are tempted to speak today, not of our thinking, but of our “image” of our thinking and of ourselves. The usual response of people to a critic who discovers some novelty in current ways of thinking is to say that he does not know his history, because people (at least sane or wise people) always thought just like us. Such acolytes of the familiar avoid recognizing the consequences of their own blindness by saying it is quite normal to be blind. Nowadays nearly everybody talks about images, but very few have yet admitted that this expresses an important change in our way of thinking: Wasn’t Caesar also concerned about his public image? As a result, there is a meager literature about the epistemological and philosophic implications of the Graphic Revolution.

  Almost everybody, strangely enough, likes to believe he is engaged in one of the world’s oldest professions. Hence most histories of advertising begin with a cluster of plausible absurdities about the antiquity of advertising: Jesus, we are told, was the first advertising man; we are told of ancient advertisements for runaway slaves, etc., etc. Similarly, the most common attacks on new institutions, occupations, and techniques take the form of showing how these express the old vices. “Advertising,” we are often told, violates all traditional criteria of honesty, of art, of productivity. In this way popular writers easily enlist the public-spirited interest and excite the tsk-tsk’s of all respectable citizens. They attack Madison Avenue for dealing in untruths (of which it is seldom really guilty), and so distract attention from the deeper, more pervasive (and more disorienting) fact that the rise of advertising has brought a social redefinition of the very notion of truth.

  Much of the material for all the earlier chapters is relevant also to Chapters 5 and 6 and to the general history of the rise of images. Advertising, despite its importance in the American economy and in our daily life, has attracted surprisingly few historians.

  A useful introductory handbook is James Playsted Wood, The Story of Advertising (1958). Some notion of how much the profession and its problems have changed can be seen by comparing a recent textbook like Wood’s with one like Frank Leroy Blanchard, The Essentials of Advertising (1921), which now looks as obsolete as a sixteenth-century introduction to physics. The advertising news in the business section of The New York Times is one of the handiest sources of news of the profession for the general reader. A remarkable piece of objective reporting is Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (1958; Cardinal paperback, 1960) which should be read by anyone with a more than casual interest in the subject. Mayer gives more information and in a fuller context than does Vance Packard’s sensational and debunking Hidden Persuaders (1957). The popularity of Packard’s book (and its numerous imitators) has evidenced the naiveté of the American consuming public and its desperation to find someone to blame.

  An important reflective book, which explores the wider implications of advertising is Otis Pease, The Responsibilities of American Advertising (1958). An unromantic account of the tasks of the advertising agency is Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (1961). On the testimonial endorsement I have made much use of William M. Freeman, The Big Name (1957).

  Trademarks—with a long history in law and commercial practice—can still best be studied through practical handbooks like Clowry Chapman, Trade-Marks (1930); I. E. Lambert, The Public Accepts: Stories behind Famous Trade-Marks, Names and Slogans (1941), which collects facts not easily available elsewhere about the origins of American trademarks and trade slogans; Jessie V. Coles, Standards and Labels for Consumers’ Goods (1949). Trademark Management: A Guide for Businessmen (published by the United States Trademark Association, 1955) is a circumstantial description of the problems of protecting trademarks, and of how “unpoliced” words escape into the language.

  Some clues to the shift in popular attitudes to advertising are found in the contrast between the humor in Ballyhoo, a vulgar magazine of the ’30’s which spoofed advertising by travestying its extravagant claims, and Mad, an advertising-oriented magazine of the ’50’s and ’60’s aimed at a comparable audience, which reaches out to spoof reality itself. Mad’s post-election issue in November, 1961, printed a congratulatory cover (identical except for the picture) at both ends of the magazine: one saying “We were with you all the way, Dick!” the other substituting “Jack” for “Dick.”

  Perhaps the best serious approach to the development of modern advertising is through one or another of the excellent company histories. Especially rich and readable is Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company (1950). Works like this, done with depth and objectivity, admirably free of moralizing, tell us precisely which techniques succeeded or failed in selling particular products. A readable peripheral source on the place of advertising in American social history is Mark Sullivan, Our Times: the United States, 1900–1925 (6 vols., 1926–1936), delightful for its witty and discriminating choice of detail. We have a few histories of advertising agencies, like Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency (Rev. ed., 1949). An indispensable aid for anyone seriously interested in these subjects is Henrietta M. Larson, Guide to Business History (1948).

  Information on the rise of radio and television and their relation to advertising and other topics can be found in Leo Bogart, The Age of Television: A study of viewing habits and the impact of television on American life (2d ed., 1958) and in Sydney W. Head, Broadcasting in America (1956), which in a valuable and astonishing Appendix prints in parallel columns an item-by-item comparison of the three trade association codes of ethics for radio, television, and films. See also Joseph T. Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication: An Analysis of Research … (1960), a guide to the literature. For a specialized study see Everett C. Parker and others, The Television-Radio Audience and Religion (1955), a study supervised by Yale University Divinity School. Stimson Bullitt gives some brilliant suggesti
ons on the significance of the new media for American political life in To Be a Politician (1959), especially Chapter 5.

  Biographies remain among the most authentic and entertaining sources of information on all these topics. One of the best is P. T. Barnum’s autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs (1854) republished in numerous editions, for example under the title Barnum’s Own Story: The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Combined & Condensed from the various Editions published during his lifetime (ed. Waldo R. Browne, 1927). Almost all the other major figures in the history of American advertising lack adequate biographies. John Gunther’s Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (1960) is a disappointing, thin, and pious account of one of the most interesting figures in modern American social history. For the major figures we must still look to the magnificent Dictionary of American Biography (edited by Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, 20 vols. and 2 supplements; 1928–1958) which, with its second supplement, includes prominent persons who died before Jan. 1, 1941; and the later and current volumes of Who’s Who in America.

  The history of public relations and the profession of the public relations counsel is especially elusive because many assignments remain confidential. Some individuals and companies have been as reluctant to confess their techniques of public relations as movie stars are to reveal their cosmetic and plastic surgery secrets. But for reasons I have suggested in this book, we are becoming sophisticated—or at least increasingly curious—about all these matters. For reading on this topic see the suggestions above, under Chapter 1.

  On the history of public opinion polling, much of the knowledgeable writing has been defensive. See, for example, George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy: The Public-Opinion Poll and How It Works (1940). On the other side see Lindsay Rogers, The Pollsters (1949). The roots of interest in opinion polling, and the implications of polling were prophetically suggested in some of the writings of John Dewey, especially The Public and its Problems (1927), and in the early works of Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922), The Phantom Public (1925), later explored in his The Good Society (1937). Mildred Parten, Surveys, Polls, and Samples (1950), though out of date, still introduces the layman to many practical and technical problems of polling. Later developments are described by Leopold J. Shapiro, “The Opinion Poll” (1956), an unpublished doctoral dissertation in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago, which treats the poll as a sociological phenomenon, and explores (with examples) the way people actually initiate, plan, and conduct opinion polls. It suggests some of the consequences, for example, of the intelligence, naiveté, or personal concerns of interviewers. On some of the reflexive problems of the polls, see Eric F. Goldman, “Poll on the Polls,” Public Opinion Quarterly, VIII (Winter, 1944–1945), 461–467, and numerous other valuable articles in that professional journal of opinion polling.