You Deserve a Break Today!
Explore 20th-century advertising with BackStory’s Brian Balogh
Leo Burnett, the Chicago ad executive who created iconic characters such as the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger, had this to say about his profession: “The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” These advertisements in vintage issues of University of Virginia Alumni News—what became Virginia Magazine—tell a story about those relationships in the 20th century. As much as these ads tell us about the products they advertise, they also reflect cultural anxieties about war, money and gender roles.
Take a look into the past, with commentary on select ads provided by UVA history professor and BackStory co-host Brian Balogh.
The Roaring ’20s
The 1920s, with its many economic successes, saw the rise of advertising as an important part of corporate strategy. Because businesses were introducing many new consumer products, from cars on a mass scale to packaged cake mix, there was an emphasis among advertisers on creating a personal connection between consumer and product.
In the new age of mass advertising in the ’20s, the emphasis was on how products would make you feel, and how others would regard you, not how the products would perform. The Shaving Stick turns a chore into a game. And not just any game: a game that is associated with the social elite and business success.
Luxenberg, 1924
This advertisement is trying to straddle the old—with an emphasis on “conservative ideas,” and traditional colors and materials—with the new, stylish look, underscored by the Art Deco Background and the latest model car in the background.
For this target audience, the idea of Dad doing the wash was an eye-catcher. Middle-class men did not do this in the 1920s. Note also the appeal to “cost effectiveness,” a big selling point in the ’20s—the Age of Herbert Hoover and engineering efficiency. The real story, however, was that all this time saving was poured back into ever-increasing standards of cleanliness that ended up keeping the stay-at-home mom busier no matter how many time-saving devices the family bought.
Science was not just about saving work or improving productivity. It was also about the arts. GE, through its broadcast stations, was bringing art and knowledge to listeners.
In today’s sports-saturated world, it is easy to forget that the college football season was a scant nine games in 1926. For those who could not get enough, there were col card games that claimed to be based on science! As a kid who grew up playing Strat-O-Matic baseball in the 1960s, a similar col card game, I can report that things had not changed very much in 40 years. Even though there were more real games played every year, especially at the professional levels, things did not change from the col card games of the ’20s until the introduction of video games in the 1970s. Thumbs have never been the same since.
Americans love gadgets. While these gadgets usually save work, this advertisement appeals to the health-improving qualities of this gadget—saving your eyesight and ensuring good posture, thus preserving your vital forces. Is it my imagination, or did the print seem a bit small? Might that convince the wary shopper that his eyes needed more saving than he originally thought?
As one of the consumer product companies most closely identified with science, and one of the first to invest heavily in research, GE was eager to identify science with progress. This advertisement taps into a century-long association between the United States and manifest destiny. But it also sounds, to my ears, a tad bit defensive. World War I, which ended only a decade earlier, shattered many associations between science and progress, as technology was put to use killing more soldiers, in more devastating fashion.
The Great Depression
With the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, many large corporations turned to more defensive strategies. One such strategy was to remind consumers that despite tough times, these companies were their friends. Another was to emphasize the value that their products provided in tough times.
Even after “Black Tuesday,” the great stock market crash of October 1929, it was impossible to imagine the extent of the Great Depression that would follow. Advertisers certainly took a while to adapt their message. In this advertising, science and technology is associated directly with wealth, more happiness, and leisure. Within a few years, science and technology would be blamed by millions for causing unemployment, as machines replaced people. One thing the advertisement got right: leisure, as soon tens of millions of Americans were out of work.
As the Great Depression deepened, advertisers looked for new markets. Women represented a largely untapped market for tobacco at the time. This advertisement appeals to adventurous women, both in style and by reference to the women’s suffrage movement. But it is also appealing to women because in relative terms, women had more disposable income compared to men, because women’s jobs were lower paying and more women worked part time, factors that ironically made for relatively higher job security compared to men.
This advertisement models the “personalized” style that became increasingly prominent in the ’30s: Advertisers tried to create an intimate connection between consumer and product or service. FDR would emulate this approach through his fireside chats, using his avuncular tone to establish a personal-seeming bond to millions of Americans. AT&T had good reason to promote itself as a friend. It was a gigantic business at a time that business was blamed for the Depression. It, like GE, had trumpeted science, technology and research, only to watch many Americans claim that mechanizing portions of the phone system contributed to unemployment. And it provided a service that some viewed as frivolous during hard times, when even pennies were needed to provide food and shelter.
World War II
World War II provided a great opportunity for advertisers to reverse the image of big business, which had suffered during economic hard times. Business and its products were now associated with America’s winning ways and weapons during the war. Scientific expertise was especially credited with this success as increasing emphasis was placed on higher education.
Every company—and just about every American—wanted to be associated with the GI, with American’s fighting men during WWII. Americans pitched in by rationing all kinds of goods and commodities, from gasoline to cloth (by buying men’s suits with just one pocket). In this advertisement, Bell Telephone is wrapping itself in the image of the GI. But it is also explaining why telephone service may not be what some customers have come to expect, and it is appealing to the broad spirit of sacrifice that gripped the country during the war.
Millions of women pitched in to win the war—most in wartime industries, like Rosie the Riveter. But plenty of women enlisted in the military, in noncombat roles. Chesterfield, which had been pitching cigarettes to women for some time, took this opportunity to underscore that women who worked like men should also relax like men—with a Chesterfield.
Post-war and the 1960s
The Cold War dominated American life after World War II. Besides scientific expertise, with the baby boom, the family was now seen as a crucial defense of the American Way. It is worth noting that at the very time that African Americans mobilized to demand full rights as citizens, there is very little representation of this population in the advertisements displayed in mainstream publications. This would not begin to change until the last third of the 20th century.
As the United States settled into its twilight struggle with the Soviet Union, both industry and the government placed a premium on college-educated expertise. Scientists, who before WWII had been seen as brainy but not terribly practical were now associated with winning weapons, starting with the atomic bomb, as well as other wartime developments, from radar to jet engines. Because GE was one of the first large corporations to invest in research and development before World War II, it doubled down on its reputation that associated science with progress after the war.
Three major medical studies linking tobacco to lung cancer were issued in 1950. But what was perhaps more disconcerting to the tobacco industry was that popular magazines like Reader’s Digest began to publicize this link. Tobacco companies fought back with advertisements like these, offering a veneer of transparency and claiming vague proof of their own: “Accessory Organs Not Affected.”
Many middle-class women who went to work during WWII were either forced out of jobs or left voluntarily. Yet either for economic reasons, or out of a taste for earning money for themselves, many of these women soon began to return to the workplace as the economy took off by the early ’50s. In this advertisement, Bell Telephone taps into this trend. But the advertisement does more than this, continuing to emphasize the “family feel” of one of the world’s largest companies and create a personal bond between consumer and company at the very time that Bell was hard at work mechanizing many of the jobs portrayed in the advertisement.
This might be the world’s only “action shot” of a profession that is not typically associated with excitement—insurance sales! The product being featured in this advertisement is a company-sponsored pension plan. These kinds of plans took off after WWII as more companies offered benefits to supplement government-provided Social Security.
Although the GI Bill and a booming economy vastly increased the size and capacity of higher education in the United States by the early 1960s, the post-WWII baby boom, combined with the growing association between a college degree and professional success, led to anxiety among parents about getting their kids into college—especially a good college, when so many kids would soon be applying. GE, long associated with highly educated personnel, offers a helping hand.
Yes, teaching by TV was in many ways the original MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). Unlike today’s MOOCs, the information flowed in only one direction: from the “box” to often-dozing students.
With the publication of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964, the emphasis in advertising slowly shifted from exclusively promoting tobacco products, to claims for products and approaches that could help smokers quit the habit.
About Brian Balogh
Brian Balogh is a professor in UVA’s Corcoran Department of History. He founded the Miller Center National Fellowship and currently chairs that program. He is also the co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show that runs on Public Broadcasting Stations across the country. His most recent book is A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America.
