Two out of three parlors . . . had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk. . . . Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph. . . . Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.
Creating a mass market—selling an identical item to as many people as possible—was a singularly American innovation. Sales on this scale required a quantum leap in the status and power of marketing. Large companies started spending enormous sums on advertising and public relations to stimulate consumer buying. In 1900, approximately $542 million was spent on advertising in the United States, a figure that grew to more than $1.1 billion in 1910 and more than $2.9 billion in 1920.
Advertising’s job was to ensure that the economic pump remained a perpetual motion machine by convincing the public to consume. Large-scale factories could spit out acres of goods, but what use was it if there were not enough buyers for them all? Purchasing a car that was, as Henry Ford boasted of the Model A, “so strong and so well made that no one ought ever to have to buy a second one,” would soon put Ford out of business. Companies that produced a single product that lasted a lifetime would ultimately find themselves in the position of the Shakers, the fast-disappearing New England sect with a devout belief in celibacy. Planned obsolescence was a firm’s way of avoiding extinction. In thousands of small communities across America, citizens raised with a traditional Protestant ethic of hard work and self-denial were enjoined to become consumers and fulfill their desires with the same urgency with which they were once entreated to save their souls. The Lynds witnessed this process in Muncie. “The American citizen’s first importance to his country is . . . that of consumer,” a local newspaper editorialized in 1924. “Consumption is a new necessity.”
Throughout the twenties, businesses conditioned the public to expect a change in style, extending a regular fashion cycle from clothes to cars, telephones and home decor. When American Telephone and Telegraph first coordinated the regional Bell systems into a national network in 1900, the telephone was marketed as a business or household necessity. Nearly three decades later, AT&T realized the campaign had been too successful: once an affluent family had one phone, why purchase a second? Company executives switched their sales pitch to portray the telephone as a convenience and a luxury, and extolled the glories of putting phones in every room, including the bathroom. Towel manufacturers used color and patterns to transform this utilitarian item into an object of design and luxury. They came up with the idea of color-coordinated ensembles that had to be regularly updated and urged people to bathe more than once a day, using a different towel set each time.
Bruce Barton captured the significance of advertising’s mission to stoke consumption in a wildly popular 1925 book, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he envisioned Jesus Christ as a modern business executive (and a hardy outdoorsman with “muscles hard as iron,” in keeping with the era’s emphasis on physical culture). Jesus “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of a business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world,” Barton explained in his thin parable. He described Jesus as a master of advertising who preached in the ancient world’s markets; he would understand that in the present day, newspapers and magazines are “a bazaar, filled with products of the world’s work. Clothes and clocks and candlesticks; soup and soap and cigarettes; lingerie and limousines—the best of all of them are there, proclaimed by their makers in persuasive tones.”
“He would be a national advertiser today, I am sure, as he was the great advertiser of his own day,” Barton declared of mankind’s savior. Carpentry might be all right for first-century Rome, but for 1920s America advertising was akin to a divine calling. Some critics disdained the book as unsophisticated, but the public loved it.
The reverence was understandable. Consumer capitalism created unimaginable growth and stability in America, which suffered through severe downturns and financial panics in the nineteenth century. It brought affluence, dignity, and cohesiveness, easing social tensions by giving working people a legitimate means of attaining a comfortable and secure life. Social mobility was achievable in a way it had never been in an agricultural society. More than a cadre of greedy business elites were interested in maintaining the economic engine; a wide political consensus developed around the idea that government should promote economic growth as a way of taming the devastating bank panics and slumps that had periodically plagued the nation during the past hundred years.
Consumption, Barton argued, would enrich the nation as well as the individual by helping a man to help himself. Salvation and perfection, once attained by aligning personal will with cosmic forces, was instead achieved by aligning personal will with the market and technology.
Barton’s long face and curled pompadour was a familiar sight on the lecture circuit. In “Creed of the Advertising Man,” a speech he frequently delivered on advertising’s role in capitalism, he said: “Advertising is the spark plug on the cylinder of mass production, and essential to the continuance of the democratic process. Advertising sustains a system that has made us leaders of the free world: The American Way of Life.” President Calvin Coolidge offered a similar message to the “Creed.” In a 1926 address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Coolidge told his audience that they were “molding the human mind.” Upon them had been thrust “part of the great work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind.” Namely, turning citizens into consumers.
Aging in a consumption-minded world, however, is fraught. Consumer capitalism, after all, is more than an economic system; it is a way of understanding the world. It is supported by a framework of values which maintains that at the very core of human experience is a desire for what is new, an urge to push beyond familiar habits, conditions, and activities. Marx and Engels memorably captured capitalism’s restless nature in The Communist Manifesto: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”
Individual ads for creams and elixirs may cynically decry middle age by promising to ward off midlife wrinkles, but the system’s preference for youth is much more elemental. Capitalism links aging with decline because the ethos of the market demands it. New is better. What is old loses value over time, whether music, fashion, appliances, or experience. Such judgments do not stop at the store’s doorway but inevitably seep into the sphere of human relations, demeaning age. Advertising and mass industry did more than reflect youth’s growing appeal. They turned what was new, and young, into a moral virtue, an economic necessity, and an essential ingredient of personal success.
The conviction that endless consumption was a necessary component of a stable democracy intensified in the ensuing decades. Throughout the 1930s, policy makers and businessmen believed it was the solution to the misery wrought by the Depression. After World War II, mass consumption was elevated to a global ideology, the creator and protector of America’s freedoms and the linchpin of American supremacy during the Cold War. In this new “consumer’s republic,” shopping was more than an indulgence; it was an obligation and an act of patriotism. That same theme has carried through to the present century. President George W. Bush, in his brief address to the nation after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, declared, “The American economy will be open for business,” as a rebuke to the terrorists. A month later, New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said at a news conference that “freedom to shop is one of the fundamental liberties, what terrorists want to deprive us of.”
The Inferiority Complex
In obvious and subtle ways, advertisements in the twenties disparaged midlife and reinforced the link between youth and progress. Then as now, young people were
assumed to be on the cutting edge, the essence of modernity, and so their actions and styles were celebrated in ads. “It’s the younger crowd that sets the standard,” a 1927 ad for Fatima cigarettes declared. “Go to the younger crowd if you want the right word on what to wear or drive or smoke.” A survey of 167 advertisements in popular magazines that same year found “the ever-increasing trend toward dramatization and appealing to youth.” Helen Woodward, a consumer advocate and author, recalled a lecture she delivered to the staff of a large cosmetics firm during her days as an advertising copywriter in the early twenties: “Remember that what we are selling is not beauty—it is youth . . . above all things, it is going to be young, young, young!” In 1928, Paul Nystrom, a marketing professor at Columbia University, commented: “The tendency for people of all ages is to dress in the manner of youth, to act as young people do, to think as young people do, and to make believe, so far as may be possible, that they are young people.”
Roland Marchand summed up the impression given by the era’s ads: “An observer from another century might well conclude, from studying advertisements alone, that men and women of the 1920s and 1930s lost the power of locomotion and upright stance after the age of 55.”
Many businesses forthrightly denigrated the middle decades, knowing that consumers in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who worried about aging were more likely to buy products to slow its effects. From cornflakes to beauty creams to laundry detergents, the goal of looking youthful, or escaping the burden of midlife and old age, was the inspiration.
Advertisers reiterated the message preached by self-help authors like Orison Swett Marden that one’s physical appearance could mean the difference between success and failure. In 1927, the term “inferiority complex” began to circulate. It was coined by the influential psychologist Alfred Adler, a onetime disciple of Freud’s, to refer to a crippling lack of self-worth. William Esty, an account representative at the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, noted in 1930 that the inferiority complex was “a valuable thing in advertising.” Could it be, he wondered, “that this standardized age has made people feel inferior?”
Advertising was both a cause and beneficiary. Activate insecurities about middle age and you create a lifelong customer. As soon as one imperfection is eliminated or repaired, another inevitably pops up to take its place.
During the twenties, more and more advertisers shifted their message from a product’s qualities to consumers’ dreams and anxieties. Unspoken or half-formed fears about becoming outdated or devalued in an industrial society were articulated and confirmed in advertisements. The Laundry Owners Association inflamed women’s disquiet that husbands, now enmeshed in the sophisticated world of modern business and away from home all day, would grow tired of their aging spouses. The 1924 ad promised that with the free time generated by sending out laundry, a wife could make herself more attractive to her husband by setting on a course of self-improvement to keep her “young-minded, fresh and radiant.”
A 1920s ad for Gillette blue blades provided the perfect visualization of these anxieties: a worried man with noticeable stubble is surrounded by a half dozen accusing eyes. The copy read: “I was never so embarrassed in my life!” An ad for Williams Shaving Cream warned: “Critical eyes are sizing you up right now.” Alfred Adler’s term even showed up in the advertising copy for Lux soap: “No Woman need have an Inferiority Complex.”
Divide to Conquer
Ads reinforced the same sort of age-related separations and classifications that were instituted in schools, civic organizations, factories, and governmental institutions. Christine Frederick, the columnist, marketing consultant, and Taylor disciple, was a forerunner of the sophisticated strategists who advocated market segmentation in the 1960s. In the teens and twenties, she advised businesses to divide consumers into three age-related groups: young, middle-aged, and old. She then further sliced the youth category into nine parts. Focus on the youngest tier, she suggested, because middle-aged women are too set in their ways to alter their buying habits.
The J. Walter Thompson agency organized consumers into different social and generational groupings. An internal newsletter circulated in 1924 reminded account executives that female customers fell into different categories: housewives, young girls and flappers, businesswomen, and the newest type, the “club woman,” the middle-aged member of social and volunteer organizations.
Pollsters soon joined the cadres of experts who arranged the population into classifiable categories. George Gallup and Elmo Roper described their work as scientific and used statistics to split the population into subgroups based on education, class, age, and more. Their characterizations of consumers were distilled from national survey responses and treated like drops of rose absolute reduced from thousands of petals. Replacing God and Nature, the “typical American”—as filtered through the pollster’s art—was considered a norm to which people aspired. Members of the public wanted to know what the “typical” middle-aged American was eating, wearing, and driving so that they could eat, wear, and drive it as well.
By the thirties, the very acceptance of surveys was considered to be a marker of youth and modernity. It was “difficult for many oldsters to adjust their thinking to this new instrument,” Gallup remarked, but “few persons under the age of forty (mentally or chronologically) fail to see the value of polls.” As for those over 40? Well, they are middle age.
Noël Coward captured how substantially attitudes toward middle age had shifted in his hit 1924 play The Vortex. The plot involves a middle-aged socialite who fancies younger men and her cocaine-addicted son Nicky (originally played by the 24-year-old Coward). Nicky and his fiancée, Bunty, comment on the reversal in attitudes toward aging:
Bunty: You’re getting older
Nicky: God, yes, isn’t it foul?
Bunty: Hell, my dear.
Nicky: It’s funny how mother’s generation always longed to be old when they were young, and we strain every nerve to keep young.
By consistently using the body as the frame of reference in which to discuss middle age, capitalists, scientists, filmmakers, writers, and admen reinforced the idea that youth was an object of desire and middle age an object of scorn. “In Europe, a woman at forty is just getting to the age where important men take a serious interest in her. But here, she’s a grandmother,” wails Fran, the youth-obsessed 41-year-old wife in Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel Dodsworth.
Amid the nightmarish realities of the Depression, anxieties about middle age deepened. In 1932, a letter writer to the New York Times evoked the “despair and utter hopelessness of many middle aged” who visit the city’s Department of Public Welfare because they had “passed the forty-year deadline.” These men and women are “thrust upon the industrial scrapheap,” he lamented, echoing the worries expressed by laborers in Muncie nearly a decade earlier. “This question ‘After forty—what?’ is without doubt America’s greatest problem.”
Walter Pitkin, a journalism professor at Columbia, defended midlife using an argument similar to one G. Stanley Hall had made in Senescence to a much smaller readership a decade earlier. In his 1932 bestselling book Life Begins at 40, Pitkin blamed the Depression on the premature advancement of young and inexperienced men in business: “How little even our brightest college graduates know about anything in their late twenties and thirties! . . . And this, I feel sure, is one of the chief reasons for our shocking economic collapse. . . . Study the inside records of some of the most tragic bankruptcies and ruined fortunes; you will find a startling number of men under forty at the helm of the derelicts.” The complexities of the modern world require the experience and judgment of the middle-aged. “At forty, in brief, most men have not yet arrived and have not yet found themselves fully. The ablest are just coming into power and self-understanding. But even for them, the peak of achievement is still more than seven years away.”
His arguments did little to ease the discrimination against the middle-aged that continued through the decade. In
1939, the Social Science Research Council put both the middle-aged and physically handicapped in the category of “hard to place” workers, warning that they would remain on permanent relief unless the government employment service did more to find them jobs. Four months after the report appeared, President Roosevelt gave a nationwide address against “an unfounded prejudice based on age alone,” which was preventing men above 40 from participating in the nation’s economic recovery. Mentioning World War I veterans in particular—whose average age was 46—Roosevelt declared April 30 Employment Sunday and the kickoff to Employment Week to highlight the importance of hiring these workers. The unusual proclamation, which the New York Times displayed on the front page, acknowledged widespread discrimination against those in midlife: “It is particularly important that those men and women who have reached the age where their family responsibilities are at the peak receive their fair share of the new jobs and are at least allowed to compete for those openings on the basis of their actual qualifications, freed from the handicap of an unfounded prejudice against age alone.” He noted that a panel of labor and industry leaders had conducted a study and concluded that there was no justification for the bias against workers over 40.
The president appealed to employers, social agencies, labor organizations, and the public to give “special consideration to this problem of the middle-aged worker.” Ministers did their part by extolling the virtues of middle age from the pulpit. “It is glorious to be middle-aged,” the Reverend Elmore M. McKee told his congregation at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan on a winter Sunday in 1939, because “we are in a position to consolidate gain and even to make gains out of all losses and mistakes of the first forty years.”
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