The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.34
Babbitt’s character was molded in a totalizing marketplace that took root at a time when business trumped politics, businessmen replaced statesmen, and the consumer replaced the citizen. “Business itself was regarded with a new veneration,” observed the writer and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen. While the public’s interest in politics at all levels vanished, the growth of the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs in cities and towns across the country was astounding. In their weekly meetings, members never ceased to praise the “redemptive and regenerative influence of business.” The businessman was idolized as “a builder, a doer of great things, yes, and a dreamer whose imagination was ever seeking out new ways of serving humanity.”35 Salesmen and advertisers were the “agents and evangels” of capitalist enterprise.36
If it took a novelist like Sinclair Lewis to make Babbitt the archetypal salesman, it was the ad writer and executive Bruce Barton who made Jesus the conqueror of the business world. In his 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows, Barton introduced the Nazarene as the creator of modern business enterprise for having “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” To do this required methods that any sound corporate leader would follow. “To create any sort of reception for a new idea or product to-day involves a vast machinery of propaganda and expense,” Barton wrote. “Jesus had no funds and no machinery. His organization was a tiny group of uneducated men, one of whom had already abandoned the cause as hopeless, deserting to the enemy.”37 The key to his success was selling the gospel and this, Barton said, showed no offense to the faith:
Surely no one will consider us lacking in reverence if we say that every one of the “principles of modern salesmanship” on which business men so much pride themselves, are brilliantly exemplified in Jesus’ talk and work. The first of these and perhaps the most important is the necessity for “putting yourself in step with your prospect.”38
To this end, all of Jesus’s parables were “the most powerful advertisements of all time” and “show how instantly he won his audiences.”39
In striking contrast to Christians who pondered the Second Coming as a moment of justice and redemption, Barton claimed that Jesus’s presence was ubiquitous in the Great Boom. Look around, he urged his readers, and you will understand who the real Jesus was in his own day, a sociable and unpretentious fellow more likely to be found in the marketplace rather than at Sunday services and, consequently, “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem.”40 Make no mistake! He was the Founder of Modern Business and the first modern executive who commanded others through personal magnetism to demonstrate how to handle flawed followers with infinite patience. He lived the life of service, and this was his ultimate message to the businessman. “We are great because of our service,” as Barton interpreted the parables. His message to the working man: “We will crawl under your car oftener and get our backs dirtier than any of our competitors.” For owners, there was something different. “We put ourselves at your feet and give you everything that you can possibly demand.” No matter what they manufactured, all owners made the same pitch. “Service is what we are here for.” According to Barton, what business leaders were doing had been done by Jesus almost two thousand years ago. Service was central to the “business philosophy” pioneered by Jesus.41
Barton was already a highly successful Madison Avenue executive and a partner in the agency that handled much of the advertising for General Electric and General Motors.42 The Man Nobody Knows instantly became a bestseller. Oddly enough, it placed fourth in total sales for a work of nonfiction in 1925 and first in 1926. Given its eighty-week run on the bestseller list in Publisher’s Weekly, the book was a bigger seller during those two years than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, considered a hallmark of American literature.43 Part of the successful run was due to Barton’s own promotion of the book, asking ministers to use it in Sunday school classes and suggesting to employers that they give a copy to each of their ten most valuable employees for Christmas. Some did. Among others, an executive of the National Mazda Lamp Company in Detroit gave a copy to each of his 125 invited dinner guests. Barton’s success further advanced his career in advertising.44 Perhaps his crowning moment in the business came when he became an adviser to Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who sought Barton’s help in his run for the presidency.45
In a chapter of his 1938 study of the American capitalist economy, John Blair explained how advertising had become central to what he termed the “distributory function” of the national economy. Blair considered not only the spectacular material contributions advertising had made but also the extent to which its functional role had generated conditions which, in theory, created laws and principles governing its operation. Proof was in the numbers. From 1914 to 1929, money spent on advertising in newspapers and magazines rose from $256 million to $1.1 billion. The spending pace quickened in the late 1920s. Newspaper advertising rose from $220 million in 1925 to $260 million in 1929, an increase of over 18 percent, with about the same rate in magazines. This caused Blair to also consider that the material gain that made advertising integral to capitalist enterprise constituted a “law” or “principle.”46 As he explained:
In substance the idea embodied in this “law” is merely that as more and more advertising is utilized to sell a certain product to the consumer, the consumer himself becomes more and more immune to that advertising. That is to say, he develops a sort of psychological shell against the forces of advertising. To break through this shell more and more advertising must be utilized, which, in turn, means that the shell becomes all the harder to crack. And so it goes; more and more advertising means a tougher shell which brings forth more and more advertising which means an even tougher shell … ad infinitum.
As Blair saw it, every ad aimed at selling a product might lead to a successful sale but in the process the consumer becomes jaded, which then calls for a more appealing ad for further sales of that product. While the objective of selling the product was met, the jaded consumer posed a greater challenge because his “psychological shell” had been hardened. In this sense, the “law” or “principle” of advertising reflected the general law of capitalist accumulation. Every new gain or victory set a new benchmark for further success.47
Behind the power of advertising was an even more formidable bulwark of corporate capitalism: the rising complex of public relations and its experts, whose practices and planned propaganda campaigns, writes Stuart Ewen, “grew exponentially” during the 1920s and generated “foundational changes in the American social fabric.” Among others, Ewen cites the work of Harold Laswell, a political scientist and leading expert on the subject who noted that propaganda had quickly become “one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world” aimed at controlling public opinion by means of conscious manipulation. Relying on various forms of social communication—symbols, stories, rumors, reports, pictures, etc.—public relations had given rise to what Laswell termed “a dictatorial habit of mind” in the public domain. This, Ewen writes, was cultivated further by means of an “increasingly sophisticated opinion-molding apparatus” that included the use of polling.48 “By the end of the decade,” Ewen says, “the study of public attitudes was moving beyond the concerns of advertising and marketing per se, to inform a more comprehensive approach to corporate thinking.”49 For Ewen, public relations experts who gathered information by means of conscious, steady polling served to transform the public itself into a “commodity” by packaging and selling its opinions to “the highest bidder.”50
Here perhaps were the true revolutionaries of the New Era. Decades