The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
have right now.” As Marchand concluded from both examples, “No discrepancies in wealth could prevent the humblest citizens, provided they chose their purchases wisely, from retiring to a setting in which they could contemplate their essential equality, through possession of an identical product, with the nation’s millionaires.”59
For Marchand, the parable of the Democracy of Goods was not a “concerted conspiracy” by advertisers “to impose a social ideology on the American people.” True, it sought to convince the public that “antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary” because “the best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices.” As such, the most attractive aspect of the parable for advertisers was that it preached “the coming of an equalizing democracy.” Yet the fundamental assumptions of the advertisers themselves were necessarily divisive, and it came out in the parable. On one hand, frequently used terms like “everyone,” “anyone,” “any home,” and the like were aimed at “consumer-citizens” ranked economically by advertisers in the top half of the nation’s population, which amounted to 4 million as opposed to 120 million people. The connection now was between the 400 top families and the 4 million beneath them, the upper echelon of the rising middle class. As Marchand tells us, “The standard antitheses of the Democracy of Goods parables were ‘mansion’ and ‘bungalow.’” But on the other hand, advertising generally ignored anyone who did not live in the cozy confines of the latter. “These millions,” Marchand wrote, “might overhear the promises of consumer democracy in the newspapers or magazines, but advertising leaders felt no obligation to show how their promises to ‘everyone’ would bring equality to those who lived in the nation’s apartment houses and farmhouses without plumbing, let alone those who lived in rural shacks and urban tenements.”60
THE BALLYHOO OF CAPITALISTS AND PRESIDENTS
The parable of the Democracy of Goods in advertising was reinforced by powerful sources in American society, even by its presidents. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in the fall of 1926, Calvin Coolidge asserted that in educating consumers on everything from toothpaste to beautiful clothing, advertisers were cultivating the mind and social graces of consumers in ways that “were harnessing America’s modern industrial system to the uplift of its citizenry.” Coolidge believed this was “molding the human mind” while “ennobling the commercial world.” Bruce Barton’s Jesus called on those around him “to stand upright and look at God face to face” so he could defend family, community, and country. No wonder then that Coolidge defined the work of ad men as nothing short of facilitating “the regeneration and redemption of mankind.”61
The belief that capitalism was finally delivering its long-standing promise of universal prosperity, and that it was occurring only in democratic America, was deepened by its leading capitalists, who were convinced of their own ballyhoo—a word used to describe the promotion of anything that took on a life bigger than its own through the constant barking and subterfuge of advertising. Prosperity and progress, they claimed, was changing capitalism itself. New principles and laws of capitalist development were now at work. Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York, declared that “a revolution in industry has been taking place that is raising all classes of the population to a more equal participation in the fruits of industry, and thus, by the natural operation of economic law, bringing to a nearer realization the dreams of those utopians who looked to the day when poverty would be banished.” E. A. Filene, the Boston-based tycoon who pioneered bargain-basement department stores, was ebullient in his praise for the new capitalism making possible “the ever-present human desire for greater total profits [that] will lead to the adoption of new principles.” Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men and treasury secretary for Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, was certain that a new set of economic laws had been established as a result of modern industrial organization governed by efficiency and the “greater diffusion of prosperity among all classes.” Such was the bandwagon of rhapsodies about endless prosperity that rose in a crescendo right up until the crash in October 1929. Only months before that fateful event, two more prophets of capitalist progress had written in another widely read book that “the real industrial leaders of present-day America” had realized that their goal was nothing less than “to make everybody rich.” By recognizing the necessity of paying high wages, industrialists were not only generating prosperity but also signaling that the time was coming when “the rule of class will for the first time in human history utterly disappear.”62
These were weighty pronouncements, made even more influential by the political imprimatur of the Republican Party. As the unrivaled champions of private enterprise and laissez-faire government, Republican leaders promoted the arrival of a New Era of American capitalism, which, they claimed, would benefit everyone, while crafting a political agenda that would make the rich even richer. Certainly, Warren Harding played a leading role. Sailing to victory in 1920 from an electoral landslide and the highest popular vote to date, Harding represented everything big business and finance capital required of its leading New Era front man. According to the historian Michael Parrish, Harding
bore a striking resemblance to Sinclair Lewis’s fictional real estate salesman of 1922, George Babbitt. Like Babbitt, Warren Harding always tried to fit in. He was a swell guy. At the Elks Lodge or Rotary Club in Marion, the state capitol in Columbus, or the Senate cloakroom in Washington, Harding spent his time cultivating friendships, not making enemies. He had slapped many a back, played innumerable games of stud poker, and hoisted his share of cocktails…. He was handsome, charming, convivial, and given to the type of florid oratory—he called it “bloviating”—heard throughout the Midwest on the Fourth of July.63
As Harding’s successor in the White House, Calvin Coolidge well understood the role of effective advertising as the consummate promotion of American business. But he lacked Harding’s personality—it was arguable that he even had one—and seemed doomed when he stepped into the White House. While Harding’s drunkenness, infidelities, and other improprieties earned him a pass among Republican elites, Coolidge was considered a boob. Ferdinand Lundberg recalled one story that typified his general ignorance. According to a Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post, Clinton W. Gilbert, Coolidge had confided to his advisers just before entering the White House that he had thought all international trade was paid directly by gold bullion—“so much gold for so much merchandise.”64 Immortalized by his chief biographer, William Allen White, as the “Puritan in Babylon,” Coolidge’s other claim to fame according to critics was his ability to be “silent in five languages.”65
But steeped in his austere and frugal small-town New England ways, Silent Cal, as he was called, surpassed Harding to become “the procurator of capitalist prosperity.”66 Oddly enough, this made the seemingly boorish Coolidge one of the great admirers of “advertising ballyhoo,” wrote Silas Bent in 1927, who revealed that Coolidge could communicate his message with the best of experts. Bent recalled a statement Coolidge made that revealed his positive view of it:
It informs the readers of the existence and nature of commodities by explaining the advantages to be derived from their use, and creates for them a wider demand. It is the most potent influence in adopting (adapting?) and changing the habits and modes of life, affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of the whole nation…. It is not enough that the goods are made; a demand for them must also be made.67
Silent Cal well understood the power of ballyhoo. According to Stuart Ewen, Coolidge’s laissez-faire approach to the operations of the government often “rhapsodized on ways that tax cuts and unencumbered assistance to business enterprises” promoted “a state of well-being that reached, without exception, throughout American society.” As Coolidge put it: “This policy has encouraged enterprise, made possible the highest rate of wages which has ever existed, returned large profits, brought to the homes of the people the greatest economic benefits they ever enjoyed, and given to the country as a whole an unexampled era of prosperity.” It was a most concise statement in unqualified support for the idea that American capitalism in the New Era would deliver all the goods to everyone. And it was a message he never tired of repeating, even in his