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The Attention Merchants

Page 42

by Tim Wu


  8. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 28.

  9. The Sullivan Ordinance, which prohibited any manager or proprietor of a public space from permitting women to smoke therein, was conceived by “Little Tim” Sullivan, who believed that “the public sentiment [was] with him and that he [could] get away with his ordinance, even if it [did] infringe slightly upon woman’s inherent and constitutional rights.” “Bars Woman Smokers,” Washington Post, January 7, 1908. The ordinance was passed on January 21, 1908. “No Public Smoking by Women Now,” New York Times, January 21, 1908.

  The only reported incident in which a woman was arrested under the Sullivan Ordinance was Katie Mulcahey (twenty years old). She claimed that she’s “got as much right to smoke as you have….No man shall dictate to me.” Nonetheless, Mulcahey was fined $5. “Arrested for Smoking,” New York Times, January 23, 1908. Interestingly, the law was incorrectly applied, as the ordinance was to be applied against managers or proprietors of public spaces, not the women themselves, should they allow women to smoke.

  While the ordinance was in effect for only a short period, there were continued efforts to prohibit women from smoking. For example, New York alderman Peter McGuinness attempted to renew the city ordinance that would prohibit women from smoking in public spaces to protect female morals. This sentiment was mirrored in a Washington Post editorial in 1914. “Women and Smoking Share Checkered History,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2008. As one historian notes, public opinion was still against women smoking: “Between the lips of a woman, a cigarette was regarded as a badge of the stage adventuress, or certainly one inclined ‘to the Bohemian persuasion.’ ” Gerard Petron, The Great Seduction (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1996), 22.

  10. Among those present at the New York Easter Parade on April 1, 1929, were a list of debutantes. Bernays procured these names from the editor of Vogue magazine and convinced the women that their participation in publicly smoking on Fifth Avenue would lead to the expansion of women’s rights. To learn more about Bernays’s use of psychoanalysis and Freudian ideas in advertising and shaping consumer culture, see Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923); and Lisa Held, “Psychoanalysis Shapes Consumer Culture,” American Psychological Association 40 (2009).

  11. For further detail about how Bernays prepared for the event, see Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 85.

  12. One article in the New York Evening World reported that a woman, who had lit a Lucky Strike, “first got the idea for this campaign when a man on the street asked her to extinguish her cigarette because it embarrassed him. ‘I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation.’ ” However, according to Larry Tye, biographer of Bernays, this woman, Bertha Hunt, was the secretary of Bernays and likely was speaking on his behalf. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown, 1998).

  13. Noam Chomsky, “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream,” Z Magazine, October 1997. Chomsky cites Bernays’s Propaganda and overall work as “the main manual of the public relations industry.”

  14. “Easter Sun Finds the Past in Shadow at Modern Parade,” New York Times, April 1, 1929.

  15. Another popular variation of the slogan reads “When tempted—Reach for a Lucky Instead.” It’s possible that this slogan was a variation on a late 1800s advertisement in which Lydia Pinkham urged women to “reach for a vegetable instead of a sweet.”

  16. Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007).

  17. Advertising for Lucky Strike cigarettes increased from $12 million in 1926 to $40 million in 1930. Bob Batchelor, American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009). Comparable percentages of GDP in 1929 include 42 percent personal consumption of goods, 32 percent of personal consumption of services, .05 percent gross private domestic investment of structures, .05 percent gross private domestic investment of equipment and software, .04 percent of residential investment, .1 percent of federal and state government expenditures and gross investments. See Gross Domestic Product—Bureau of Economic Analysis, https://www.bea.gov/​scb/​pdf/​2012/​08%20August/​0812%20gdp-other%20nipa_series.pdf.

  18. By itself, it went from $10.7 million in billings in 1920 to $37.5 million by the end of the decade, of which more than half was billed by the Women’s Editorial Department. The apparent key to its giant billings was this department—as Landsdowne pointed out herself, “The success of the J. Walter Thompson Company had been in large measure due to the fact that we have concentrated and specialized upon products sold to women.” Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

  19. The Ranch, despite its use as a vacation home for the Resors, was a full-time, self-sustaining operation. The Ranch included “sophisticated electrical generating facility, dairy barns, chicken and turkey coops, machine shops, and cattle and horse-related structures.” See “The Snake River Ranch Historic District at the National Register of Historic Places,” http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/​NationalRegister/​Site.aspx?ID=453.

  20. Lasker was Jewish and was therefore unable to attend the local golf club. It is possible for this reason that he created the golf club, among the many other structures, after purchasing the 380 acres of farmland in 1921.

  21. Calvin Coolidge, “Address Before the American Association of Advertising Agencies,” Washington, DC, October 27, 1926, http://memory.loc.gov/​cgi-bin/​query/​r?ammem/​cool:@field(DOCID+@lit(ms221)).

  22. Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (New York: Harper & Publishers, 1917).

  CHAPTER 6: NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WHIMPER

  1. For more details about Schlink’s work in the National Laboratories, see Rexmond C. Cochrane, Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1974).

  2. Stuart Chase and Frederick J. Schlink, Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 258.

  3. Ibid., 260. Chase and Schlink agreed that “Chase would do the writing while Schlink would provide the factual information” for the book, later described as “a blistering attack on U.S. business practices.” Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

  4. Chase and Schlink, Your Money’s Worth. Sammy R. Danna, ed., Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 26. Sociologist Robert S. Lynd first characterized Chase and Schlink’s book as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the abuses of the consumer” in “Democracy’s Third Estate: The Consumer,” Political Science Quarterly 51, no. 4 (December 1936), 497–98. For more about Consumers’ Research Inc., see John McDonough and Karen Egolf, eds., “Consumers’ Research,” in The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2002).

  5. “Consumers Union Puts on Muscle,” BusinessWeek December 23, 1967. See Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 196; Stole, Advertising on Trial.

  6. Theodore F. MacManus, “The Nadir of Nothingness,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1928), 594–608, https://www.unz.org/​Pub/​AtlanticMonthly-1928may-00594. For further discussion on each of the critics, see Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  7. Helen Woodward, Through Many Windows (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926); James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (New York: John Day, 1934), 18, 66–68.

  8. Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Po
wer: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 196–97. The International Advertising Association hired Charles E. Carpenter to defend the advertising industry. Charles E. Carpenter did so in his book, Dollars and Sense (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928). See Sammy R. Danna, ed., Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992); The Tide of Advertising and Marketing (New York: Tide Publishing, 1943); Fred DeArmond, “Consumer Clans Are Gathering,” Nation’s Business (January 1938), https://archive.org/​stream/​Nations-Business-1938-01/​Nations-Business-1938-01_djvu.txt.

  9. “The total annual volume of advertising dropped from $3.4 billion in 1929 to $2.6 billion in 1930 and then to $2.3 billion a year later.” Advertising expenditures bottomed out “at $1.3 billion in 1933, only 38% of the pre-Depression level.” Fox, The Mirror Makers.

  10. For more discussion on the Depression’s effects on the advertising industry, see Stephen R. Fox, “Depression and Reform,” The Mirror Makers. See also Eric W. Boyle, Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013). To access the listed books, see Arthur Kallet and Frederick J. Schlink, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1935); M. C. Phillips, Skin Deep: The Truth About Beauty Aids (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937); Frederick J. Schlink, Eat, Drink and Be Wary (New York: Arno Press, 1935); J. B. Matthews, Guinea Pigs No More (New York: Covinci, Friede, 1936); T. Swann Harding, The Popular Practice of Fraud (New York: Longmans, Green, 1935).

  11. For more discussion, see generally Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan, eds., Major Problems in American Popular Culture (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012).

  12. Edward Chamberlin, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: Macmillan, 1933). See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

  13. These facts were drawn from Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). See also Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007). For a discussion about the interrelationship between the confectionery industry and the cigarette industry, see Wendy A Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  14. U.S. Supreme Court, FTC v. Raladam Co., 283 U.S. 643 (1931). For more discussion on the Hill-Lasker response, see Kluger, Ashes to Ashes. To view the advertisement as originally published, see The Milwaukee Journal, July 8, 1930, 3. https://news.google.com/​newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19300708&id=wYZRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qiEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5016,4850281&hl=en [website is no longer active].

  15. Wallace F. Janssen, “The Story of the Laws Behind the Labels,” FDA Consumer, June 1981, http://www.fda.gov/​AboutFDA/​WhatWeDo/​History/​Overviews/​ucm056044.htm; John E. Lesch, The First Miracle Drugs: How the Sulfa Drugs Transformed Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  16. See Stole, Advertising on Trial.

  17. Eric W. Boyle, Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013); Laurence V. Burton, “What the Food Manufacturer Thinks of S. 1944,” Law and Contemporary Problems 1 (December 1933), 121; Stole, Advertising on Trial; Richard Maxwell, ed., Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). For a newspaper’s critique of the Tugwell Bill, see “The Tugwell Bill,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1934, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/​1934/​02/​16/​page/​12/​article/​the-tugwell-bill.

  18. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act on June 25, 1938. Janssen, “The Story of the Laws Behind the Labels.” The Wheeler-Lea Amendment “extended the FTC’s jurisdiction to protect consumers as well as competitors against injuries resulting from deceptive acts and practices in interstate (but not in local) commerce.” Stole, Advertising on Trial, 157. To read more of Milton Handler’s critique, see Handler, “The Control of False Advertising Under the Wheeler-Lea Act,” Law and Contemporary Problems 6 (Winter 1939), 110.

  19. For a discussion on the effects the Depression had on the advertising industry, see Ronald Marchand, “Depression Advertising as a Shift in Style,” Advertising the American Dream.

  CHAPTER 7: THE INVENTION OF PRIME TIME

  1. Dr. William J. Gies of Columbia University’s Department of Biologic Chemistry began studying the composition of tooth powders in 1909, and undertook an extensive inquiry into the validity of Pepsodent’s advertising claims. James Wynbrandt, The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales and Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 191.

  2. William J. Gies, “Pepsodent,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 68 (April 28, 1917), 1387.

  3. Kerry Segrave, America Brushes Up: The Use and Marketing of Toothpaste and Toothbrushes in the Twentieth Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 65.

  4. Colgate’s ads were featured in many magazines and newspapers in the 1920s. See The National Geographic Magazine 40 (1921) and The Saturday Evening Post 191, nos. 40–43 (1919) for examples.

  5. John Irving Romer, ed., “Radio as an Advertising Medium,” Printer’s Ink 119 (April 27, 1922), 201.

  6. Herbert Hoover, Speech to First Washington Radio Conference, February, 27 1922, in Herbert Hoover, “Reminiscences,” Radio Unit of the Oral History Project, 1950, Columbia University, New York, NY.

  7. Samuel Lionel Rothafel and Raymond Francis Yates, Broadcasting: It’s a New Day (New York: Century, 1925), 156.

  8. Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos ’n’ Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943 Radio Serial (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 40.

  9. Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden, All About Amos and Andy and Their Creators (New York: Rand McNally, 1929), 43.

  10. Hong Kong–based Hawley & Hazel Chemical Company manufactured Darkie toothpaste and sold the product widely in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and other countries in East Asia. Hawley & Hazel was acquired in 1985 by the U.S corporation Colgate-Palmolive, who announced that it would rename Darkie as Darlie and redesign its logo.

  11. “Originality Over the Air Pays Pepsodent,” Broadcasting, April 15, 1933, 9.

  12. Jim Cox, American Radio Networks: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 48.

  13. “Niles Trammell,” Broadcasting, January 1, 1939, 40.

  14. Ultimately, the constant repetition of the slogan has been credited for creating the American habit of twice-yearly dental examinations. Templin also insisted that Hay exclusively read the Pepsodent pitch, ultimately resulting in the public’s association of Hay “as a conservative, sincere, honest representative of the Pepsodent Company, not of NBC.” See Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).

  15. Arthur H. Samuels, “On the Air,” The New Yorker, March 22, 1930, 96.

  16. See Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 68–69. Meyers notes the elements in the advertisement that are typical of “reason-why” advertising “in the repetition of key points (‘cleaning and policing’), the claim of scientific progress (‘Pepsodent laboratories’), use of superlatives (‘new and different,’ ‘new discovery’), and multiple ‘reasons why’ to buy the product.”

  17. Kay Trenholm, “Last Night on WJZ,” New York Sun, August 20, 1929.

  18. Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 19
33, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 230.

  19. For example, in 1920 Westinghouse, a leading manufacturer and seller of radio hardware, established KDKA in order to sell radio through programming. Westinghouse would later have shared ownership with General Electric (GE), another manufacturer and seller of radio hardware, and with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a jointly owned subsidiary of Westinghouse and GE of NBC. It therefore is no surprise that Merlin H. Aylesworth, NBC’s first president, believed that “the main purpose of broadcasting…[was] not to make money” but instead “to give the public such increasingly better programs that people will continue to buy and use radio sets and tubes. And that works to the advantage not only of the manufacturing companies whose money is invested in the National Broadcasting Company, but to all makers of radio equipment, and the general public as well.” Frank P. Stockbridge, “Feeding 13,000,000 Radio Sets,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1929. For more general information about the early history of radio broadcasting, see Thomas H. White, “The Development of Radio Networks (1916–1941),” accessed January 30, 2016, http://earlyradiohistory.us/​sec019.htm.

  20. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 119. Allen quotes Irna Phillips, who created and scripted various soap operas including Painted Dreams, Today’s Children, and Guiding Light, which contained many still popular literary devices, such as the “cliff-hanger” ending. Ultimately, a study in 1932 concluded that “the program sponsor should realize that the housewife in a majority of cases is the member of the family who has the most influence upon family purchases and is the one who spends the greatest amount of time in the home. She is, therefore, the member of the family most easily reached by radio broadcasts.” Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas, 106–7.

 

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