by Tim Wu
CHAPTER 3: FOR KING AND COUNTRY
1. John Oakes, Kitchener’s Lost Boys: From the Playing Fields to the Killing Fields (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009).
2. Henry D. Davray, Lord Kitchener: His Work and His Prestige (London: T. F. Unwin Limited, 1917), 96; Edmund Burke, The Annual Register, Vol. 158 (London: Longmans, Green, 1917).
3. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 242. See also John Oakes, Kitchener’s Lost Boys: From the Playing Fields to the Killing Fields (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009).
4. Bernard Lewis, Swansea in the Great War (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2014); “Talk: Otto von Bismarck,” last modified July 27, 2015, www.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Otto_von_Bismarck. For more facts about the German army, see Spencer C. Tucker and Priscilla Roberts, eds., The Encyclopedia of World War I (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005).
5. This quote is from Geraldine M. Boylan, “Wilfred Owen’s Response to Propaganda, Patriotism and the Language of War,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 38 (1999). See also Sir George Arthur, Life of Lord Kitchener, Vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1920); and Robert K. Johns, Battle Beneath the Trenches: The Cornish Miners of 251 Tunnelling Company RE (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2015).
6. Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11.
7. Mark C. Miller, “Introduction,” in Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 2005).
8. An image of the recruiting poster and the statistics on the campaign’s success can be found at Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–1916 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2007), 32. For more general discussion on Kitchener’s call to arms, see Sir George Arthur, Life of Lord Kitchener, Vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1920). For statistics on the size of the active American army in 2015, see Jim Tice, “Active Army Drops Below 500,000 Soldiers,” ArmyTimes, February 5, 2015, www.armytimes.com/story/military/careers/army/2015/02/05/active-army-drops-below-500000-soldiers/22922649/.
9. These statistics were drawn from Dr. Spencer C. Tucker, ed., World War I: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection, Vol. 1: A–C (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014); and Alan G. V. Simmonds, Britain and World War One (New York: Routledge, 2012). For descriptions and images of several posters created for the campaign, see John Christopher, British Posters of the First World War (Stroud, UK: Amberley Publishing, 2014).
10. This quote, by Private Thomas McIndoe of 12th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, can be found in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voice of the Great War (London: Random House, 2003), 9. The poster can be found at Britons. Join Your Country’s Army, Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM PST 2734, www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16577.
11. John Allison, World War I and the Origins of Nazi Propaganda, 39 Southern Academic Report (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham-Southern College, 1993).
12. The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1: August–December 1914 (New York: New York Times Co., 1917), 106.
13. Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 60.
14. John R. Currie and Alexander G. Mearns, Manual of Public Health: Hygiene (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1948). These statistics were drawn from Alan Simmonds, Britain and World War One.
15. It should be noted that the effort had some private actors as well. A group known as the “Order of the White Feather,” for instance, organized women to shame un-enlisted men by presenting “slackers” with a white feather as a sign of cowardice.
16. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).
17. The total number of volunteers enlisted in the army between August 1914 and the end of 1915 was higher than the total number of men enlisted by conscription in 1916 and 1917 combined. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army; Jeff Hatwell, No Ordinary Determination: Percy Black and Harry Murray of the First AIF (Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Press, 2014); Michael Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982), 1.
18. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army. For further discussion on the theories behind Lord Kitchener’s death, see Colin Wilson, “The Mystery of Lord Kitchener’s Death: Accident or Murder?,” in The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (New York: Diversion Publishing, 2015). More of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inscription can be found at Henry D. Davray, Lord Kitchener: His Work and His Prestige (London: T. F. Unwin Limited, 1917), 96–97.
19. Creel later went on to chronicle the domestic and overseas activities of the Committee on Public Information in How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), 4.
20. Creel defended President Wilson’s initial stance on the impending war during the 1916 presidential reelection as consistent with prior administrations that “had the courage to hold to the orderly diplomatic procedure of Washington and Adams, eventually winning justice without resort to war.” In Wilson and the Issues (New York: Century Company, 1916).
21. Benito Mussolini, “Fascism,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought, Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 572.
22. George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), 158. In fact, Creel portrayed the purpose of the Committee on Public Information as one of information distribution, and rejected the notion of propaganda as used by the Germans, which “had come to be associated with lies and corruptions. Our effort was educational and informative only, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that only fair presentation of its facts was necessary.” Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920).
23. Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.
24. Creel estimated the total audience members to whom the 505,190 speeches were made in the Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information. Creel calculated a total of 755,190 speeches made from the 505,190 speeches made during the regular campaign, 70,000 speeches made during the early campaigns, and 180,000 speeches in the concluding periods of the campaign. Approximately 202,454,514 audience members attended the regular campaign, with an additional 40,000,000 audience members in the early campaigns and 72,000,000 audience members in the concluding periods of the campaigns, totaling 134,454,514 audience members throughout the campaigns. Creel believed, however, that the numbers were far greater than the total 314,454,514 audience attendance calculated because he assumed that there were a considerable number of communities who did not report audience totals. As a result, Creel claimed that the incomplete or lack of reports “received justifies an estimate of final totals of a million speeches heard by four hundred million individuals.” Though Creel’s estimates were based on incomplete figures, they would not be completely unreasonable given that there had been a total of thirty-six distinct national campaigns and a growing attendance of moviegoers at the time.
25. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 152.
26. When creator James Montgomery Flagg later presented a copy of the poster to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Flagg revealed that he had used himself as a model for the image of Uncle Sam to avoid paying a modeling fee. The real-life inspiration for Uncle Sam, however, is somewhat more ambiguous and still in dispute. One popular theory links the inspiration for the national symbol to Samuel Wilson, a meatpacker from Troy, New York, who during the War of 1812 supplied meat to the American troops. Complying with labeling requirements, Wilson marked each package with “E.A.-U.S.,” which likely stood for Elbert Anderson Jr., Wilson’s contractor, a
nd United States. But local soldiers attributed the U.S. stamp as standing for “Uncle Sam” Wilson.
27. The case, Debs v. U.S., was one of three cases where the Court had upheld the Espionage Act convictions during the war that restricted free speech. In preparing his speech at Canton, Ohio, Debs had been careful to comply with the act and claimed to deliver a speech predominately for the purpose of “Socialism, its growth, and a prophecy of its ultimate success.” Nonetheless, the Court identified parts of the speech, which sympathized and praised individuals convicted for obstructing the enlistment service, and concluded that one could construe such parts as encouragement to those present to act similarly. As such, the Court found that “one purpose of the speech, whether incidental or not…was to oppose not only war in general but this war, and that the opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting.”
28. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 249.
29. The district court decision in the case, Masses Publishing Co. v. Pattern, rested on principles of the First Amendment, which the court reasoned, under certain circumstances, could protect certain seditious speech from government prosecution. The decision was subsequently reversed by the Court of Appeals.
30. In fact, the case, Whitney v. California, would later be explicitly overruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
31. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 1928), 37.
32. Printers’ Ink 105 (New York: Decker Communications, 1918), 44.
CHAPTER 4: DEMAND ENGINEERING, SCIENTIFIC ADVERTISING, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT
1. S. N. Behrman, “The Advertising Man,” The New Republic, August 20, 1919.
2. Cynthia Clark Northrup, The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,2011).
3. Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007), 3.
4. For more information on C. C. Hopkins, see David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (New York: Vintage, 1985).
5. Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 25.
6. For more information on Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins, see Edd Applegate, The Rise of Advertising in the United States: A History of Innovation to 1960 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012).
7. Advertising history is full of the reinvention of things, and some of these approaches and techniques had technically been invented in the late nineteenth century, at least in some form. However, they reached full institutionalization in the 1920s.
8. Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
9. Cruikshank and Schultz, The Man who Sold America.
10. American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition, “The Use and Misuse of Fruit Juice in Pediatrics,” Pediatrics 107, no. 5 (May 2001), 1211–12.
11. Linda S. Watts, Alice L. George, and Scott Beekman, Social History of the United States: The 1920s (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009).
12. James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000).
13. For an example of advertisements for Pepsodent, see “The Film Danger,” advertisement, 1926, Boys’ Life.
14. “Business: Coalition,” Time, June 14, 1926.
15. Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 100; Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (McGraw Hill Professional, 1966).
16. The phrase comes from a speech by John Watson in 1935: “Since the time of the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior.” Tom Farley and Deborah A. Cohen, Prescription for a Healthy Nation: A New Approach to Improving Our Lives by Fixing Our Everyday World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 110.
17. Martin Kornberger, Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53; John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” 20 Psychological Review 158-177 (1913), 249.
18. C. James Goodwin, Research in Psychology: Methods and Design (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
19. Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008), 51; Farley and Cohen, Prescription for a Healthy Nation, 110.
20. John McDonough and Karen Egolf, The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2002); Fox, The Mirror Makers, 73.
21. Theodore F. MacManus, “The Underlying Principles of Good Copy,” in Masters of Advertising Copy (New York: IPL, 2007).
22. Robert E. Ramsay, Effective Direct Advertising: The Principles and Practice of Producing Direct Advertising for Distribution by Mail or Otherwise (New York: D. Appleton, 1921); Lisa Rado, Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009).
23. Linda M. Scott, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
24. Harry Tipper, Advertising, Its Principles and Practice (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1919); Ramsay, Effective Direct Advertising, 554.
25. Denise Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 27.
26. Christine Seifert, Whoppers: History’s Most Outrageous Lies and Liars (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).
27. Kerry Segrave, Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005).
28. Alan Brinkley, The Publisher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
29. Motion Picture, Vol. 27, 1924, 67. For more information about Alva Belmont, see Sylvia D. Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women’s Rights (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012).
30. Ladies’ Home Journal, Vol. 43, Part 2, 1926, 53.
31. Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 31.
CHAPTER 5: A LONG LUCKY RUN
1. Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 115.
2. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper, 1960). While Gunther cites the advertising budget to have been $19 million in 1931, various publications, ranging from Life and Billboard, reporting on George Washington Hill’s death, claimed that Hill had spent as much as $20 million for advertising in 1931.
3. There is some historical dispute about the origin of the “It’s toasted” tagline. A Fortune article seems to suggest that the slogan was first developed by Hopkins when working as a copywriter for Lord & Thomas. “How the Real Don Draper Sold Lucky Strikes,” Fortune, September 19, 2010, http://archive.fortune.com/2010/09/17/news/companies/Mad-Men_Lucky-Strike_Lasker_excerpt.fortune/index.htm. However, the Stanford Research into Tobacco Advertising has an advertisement with the phrase “It’s toasted” dating from 1917, which was long before Lord & Thomas signed on to the Lucky Strike account in 1925. The Stanford Collection of Tobacco advertisements can be found at http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st319.php&token1=fm_img13529.php&theme_file=fm_mt010.php&theme_name=Fresh,%20Pure,%20Natural%20&%20Toasted&subtheme_name=It%27s%20Toasted. Moreover, George Washington Hill recounted in a 1938 issue of Time that his father had created the “It’s toasted” phrase one day when discussing the tobacco cooking process. “ADVERTISING, It’s Toasted,” Time, December 5, 1938, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760432,00.html.
4. The copy is from a February 1931 advertisement in Popular Science.
5. The advertisement featured Helen Jepson, who was the lead soprano with the Metropolitan Opera from 1935 to 1941. She is quoted as saying that a “season of opera and concert means my voice and throat must be consistently in perfect condition. Therefore…it is all important to me that I be careful in choosing my cigarettes. I smoke Luckies…because I feel it is wise for me to choose a light smoke for my voice.” The advertisement goes on to claim that Helen Jepson is one of a wide range of “leading artists of the radio, stage, screen and opera” in which “their voices are their fortunes” and the “throat protection of Luckies—a light smoke, free of certain harsh irritants removed by the exclusive process ‘It’s Toasted’…are gentle on the throat.”
6. Lord & Thomas would send along the cartons to various physicians in the mid-1920s, requesting a response to whether “Lucky Strike Cigarettes…are less irritating to sensitive and tender throat than other cigarettes.” The survey responses were then used to verify their claim that the “toasting process” made Luckies “less irritating.” However there was no substantive proof of the claim. For more information on the relationship between the tobacco industry generally and the medical profession, see Martha N. Gardner and Allan M. Brandt, The Doctors’ Choice Is America’s Choice (American Journal of Public Health, 2006), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470496/.
7. To further strengthen the credibility of the claim that the “toasting process” made Luckies “less irritating,” as verified by the surveyed physicians, the advertisement claimed that “the figures quoted have been checked and certified to by LYBRAND, ROSS BROS AND MONTGOMERY. Accountants and Auditors.” The advertisement, originally published in the Magazine of Wall Street on July 26, 1930, can be viewed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470496/figure/f1/.