The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
the minds of their citizens. The monumental altering and transforming of consciousness required to sustain mass consumption had created a spectacle of abundance that radiated through the magic of advertising. John Blair saw this in the revolutionary power of the advertiser to seize control of the senses. “At night,” he wrote, “we find the streets of any metropolitan area alive with ingenious electrical signs of one type or another, evolving pictures of wheels turning around, small automobiles flashing continuously across the facade of a building, arrows pointing at something or other.”51 But as Blair believed, the dazzling and mesmerizing spectacle had always to be enhanced in order to penetrate the consumer’s jaded psychological shell.
Another observer, from France, who saw the same powers at work was the writer and cultural critic George Duhamel, who toured the United States in the late 1920s and then wrote a scathing attack on America as a civilization constantly being devoured and devalued by advertising and the machinery of publicity. Like Blair, Duhamel saw the flashing lights and incessant movement as a constant assault on the senses. But what Blair soberly theorized as a law or principle at work was for the highly agitated Frenchman the obscenities of a dehumanized and barbarous culture. Reading this European elitist, who was quite taken with his own sense of genius, could exhaust one’s patience. “In the daytime,” he wrote of these monstrous creations of the publicity machine,
the sun makes them powerless, but the night is their own. They have divided among themselves the Kingdom of Darkness. Now here, now there, they begin to awake with the twilight. With the serene persistence of machines, they resume their work of propaganda, of intimidation, in a charivari of light, a riot, a battle, a triumph of disharmony and disorder…. It is the jungle, with all its savagery.52
Beneath the hyperbole was a seminal grasp of the publicity machine’s psychological and sociological impact. “It treats man as if he were the most stupid of the inferior animals,” Duhamel wrote. Moreover, the “flashes, repetitions, and explosions” were the inventions of those who were themselves “apes, who know not what fresh acrobatics to invent to catch the bewildered gaze of the passer-by” and are thus responsible for “titillations” and “burlesque” that resulted in the constant “masturbation of the eye.”53 In the company of his American guide and companion, Duhamel described a visit to a movie theater where people were pushed in and out as part of a continuously moving queue. Even the theater itself, whose “Gargantuan maw,” “imitations of thick Oriental rugs,” and statues on pedestals made of “some plastic and translucent material that seemed intended to remind one of Greek sculpture,” exhibited “the luxury of some big, bourgeois brothel—and industrialized luxury, made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” Everything about the theater and the film struck Duhamel as an imitation of life, to the point where he wondered whether this applied to the moviegoers themselves, a “human multitude that seemed to dream what it saw, and that sometimes stirred unconsciously like a man asleep.” It struck Duhamel that everything around him and including him was false. “I myself was perhaps no longer anything but a simulacrum of a man, an imitation Duhamel.”54
Duhamel was deeply agitated by the false universe that advertising had created in the United States but was even more disturbed by what it held for others. America was a grand social “experiment” that showed the rest of the world its future in paradoxical terms, a complex of social interiority increasingly presented in elemental and seductive imagery. Its “supreme virtue” lay in the powers of a “new truth … [that] delights the single-minded and enchants children.” Assessing the American experiment: “All the children whom I know, reason like Americans when it is a question of money, of pleasure, of glory, of power, and of work.”55 Duhamel’s harsh treatment of Americans surely stems in part from an old-world European snobbery that generally reads as parody. He titled his book America the Menace because its unthinking, brutish and utterly false existence was beckoning the rest of the world to follow. But he was little inclined to examine the subtle methods that made it possible, the power to persuade and manipulate the public.
DEMOCRACY IN THE MARKETPLACE
As prosperity depended increasingly on rising mass consumption, advertising became more consciously duplicitous. One genre of print ads that flourished during the late 1920s and early 1930s was based on parables intended to convey practical and moral lessons in everyday life. These parables, Roland Marchand tells us, resembled those employed in the Old and New Testaments that aimed to dramatize a central message by means of stark contrasts and exaggeration. But there were basic and consequential differences between the two. For example, Jesus sought to stimulate in his listener the need to rethink decisions and behavior that adversely impacted others and act in a manner that might bring him or her closer to salvation. On the other hand, the parables used by advertisers stressed comfort mainly by conveying that the product was indispensable and could easily be incorporated into one’s daily life. While the former focused on the need for restraint, the latter urged that anything was possible. Here were two fundamentally different ideas about human perfection and how to attain it. When Jesus spoke in parables, the core message was that individual existence amounted to nothing without a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of others. In contrast, advertising came up with parables designed to convince each individual that there were no limits to his or her pleasures.56
One of the most effective ads was the parable of the “Democracy of Goods.” Intended as tableaux vivants (living pictures) that highlighted the wonders of mass production and distribution, they aimed to encourage every person to believe that he or she could enjoy society’s most significant pleasure, convenience, or benefit regardless of social standing. In his comprehensive study of American advertising during the interwar period, Marchand discusses one such ad that appeared in the September 1929 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The dominant image is a young lad, Livingston Ludlow Biddle, who is identified as the scion of the wealthy and well-known Biddle family of Philadelphia. With the family coat-of-arms visible in one corner of the ad, the future heir to the family fortune is sitting atop a tricycle with an inquiring and endearing look on his face. Below his image are words carefully chosen by the Cream of Wheat Corporation that focus on the importance of diet in the boy’s daily care, as prescribed by “famous specialists.” But the central message of the ad goes further by emphasizing in the clearest terms that this efficacious product need not be enjoyed by the rich alone. As Marchand writes of the ad, “Every mother can give her youngsters the fun and benefits of a Cream of Wheat breakfast just as do the parents of these boys and girls who have the best that wealth can command.”57
Regardless of the particular product and its benefit, the parable genre remained a fixture of advertising throughout the period. All ads of this type proclaiming that “any woman can” or “every home can afford” were bent on publicizing the idea that fine products in the marketplace were not the sole pleasures of the wealthy and privileged. Quite the contrary, they were constant reminders that life in America was truly democratic because everything was available to all in the marketplace. Just because a rich family used a particular product did not mean that it could not be used by others beneath them. “By implicitly defining ‘democracy’ in terms of equal access to consumer products,” Marchand says, “and then by depicting the everyday functioning of that ‘democracy’ with regard to one product at a time, these tableaux offered Americans an inviting vision of their society as one of incontestable equality.”58
Here perhaps were the powers of persuasion and manipulation at their most sublime. By focusing on one product at a time, advertisers sought to divert attention from the realities of class, power and privilege. The rich and powerful enjoyed any of these products at any time, but this is what the parable was designed to obfuscate. For example, an elegant butler serving Chase and Sanborn Coffee to a wealthy family in a dining room with a high ceiling was intended to remind all who saw it that “compared with the riches of the more fortunate, your way of life may seem modest indeed, yet no one—king, prince, statesman, or capitalist” has any more power to enjoy such fine coffee than a commoner. Another ad for the C. F. Church Manufacturing Company promoted a toilet seat that was “a bathroom luxury everyone can afford.” As the ad stated: “If you lived in one of those palatial apartments on Park Avenue, in New York City, where