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Grinding the Gears of Production and Consumption: Representational versus Nonrepresentational Advertising for Automobiles in the Mid-1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Fredrik Chr. Brøgger
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Extract

In 1926, President Coolidge delivered an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in which he acknowledged and praised the role played by advertising in the economic life of the nation. His speech was fraught with cultural contradictions: one moment he affirmed the traditional values of industry and thrift, and the next moment, almost in the same breath, he heralded the idea of increased spending and consumption. The address reflected the small-town ideology of a government leadership trying to remain convinced that modern-day advertising posed no threat to the 19th-century work ethic. The ideological dividedness of Coolidge's speech brings to mind a man happily sawing away at the branch on which he is sitting. Advertising is “not an economic waste”:

[R]ightfully applied, it is the method by which the desire is created for better things. When that once exists, new ambition is developed for the creation and use of wealth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 15 , October 1990 , pp. 197 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

NOTES

1. Merz, Charles, The Great American Band Wagon (New York: John Day, 1928), pp. 147–48.Google Scholar

2. Baudrillard, , For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 38.Google Scholar

3. Parts of this essay were first written and presented as a paper at the Second Tampere American Studies Conference in Finland, April 9–11, 1987. I am indebted to Prof. John D. Hopkins of the University of Tampere for giving me the impetus to start formulating my views on the American advertising of the 1920s.

4. Coolidge, Calvin, “The President of the United States on the Economic Aspects of Advertising,” in Presbrey, Frank, The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), pp. 622–23, 619, 620.Google Scholar

5. The same text (except for the use of personal pronouns) is employed so as to appeal to a woman reader in the Ladies' Home Journal 41 (04 1924): 91Google Scholar. Here the illustration features an elegantly dressed couple at what appears to be an art museum or an exhibition of paintings.

6. Chase, Stuart, Men and Machines (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 13.Google Scholar

7. Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 472.Google Scholar

8. Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 7.Google Scholar

9. Listerine advertisements, Saturday Evening Post 196 (02 9, 1924): 107Google Scholar; and 196 (March 15,1924): 131; and Ladies' Home Journal 41 (10 1924): 66Google Scholar; 41 (March 1924): 125; and 42 (May 1925): 99.

10. See, for instance, Lears, T. J. Jackson, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 3–38Google Scholar. See also Lears, , No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).Google Scholar

11. See Lears, T. J. Jackson's explicit discussion of this in his essay “Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising, 1880–1930,” Prospects 9 (1984): 349–405, esp. pp. 355–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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14. See particularly the two essays by T. J. Jackson Lears in notes 10 and 11 respectively; they give an excellent historical and institutional introduction to the American advertising between 1880 and 1930. The work most directly relevant for the subject of this chapter is, however, Marchand, Advertising the American Dream.

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22. Buick advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (08 30, 1924): 27.Google Scholar

23. Dodge advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (05 2, 1925): 131.Google Scholar

24. Dodge advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 196 (06 7, 1924): 55.Google Scholar

25. Dodge advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 196 (01 19, 1924): 47.Google Scholar

26. Cadillac advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (11 15, 1924): 35.Google Scholar

27. Pierce-Arrow advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (09 20, 1924): 71.Google Scholar

28. Jewett advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (09 27, 1924): 43.Google Scholar

29. Oldsmobile advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 198 (10 31, 1925): 41.Google Scholar

30. Lynds, , Middletown, p. 83.Google Scholar

31. Rickenbacker advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 196 (03 22, 1924): 75.Google Scholar

32. Jewett advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 197 (10 25, 1924): 53.Google Scholar

33. Jordan advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 196 (03 1, 1924): 69.Google Scholar

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37. Dodge advertisement, Saturday Evening Post 198 (08 1, 1925): 47.Google Scholar

38. Buick advertisement, Ladies' Home Journal 41 (01 1924): 56.Google Scholar

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40. Sloan, , My Years with General Motors, p. 150.Google Scholar