Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [54]
Stanley Resor, president of the New York advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, was much influenced by the work of the psychologist John Watson in analyzing buying patterns. In blindfold tests Watson showed that smokers could not tell cigarette brands apart—so that although they bought one brand and had brand loyalty, other factors than the taste of the tobacco (despite what they may have thought) were influencing their choice. Advertisers soon learned how to capitalize on these other factors.
Creating and playing on consumer insecurities, advertisers told potential buyers that one key to maintaining beauty, youth, energy and attractiveness was health and personal hygiene. The actress Constance Talmadge, promoting cigarettes, declared, “There’s real health in Lucky Strike . . . For years this has been no secret to those men who keep fit and trim. They know that Luckies steady their nerves and do not harm their physical condition. They know that Lucky Strike is the favorite cigarette of many prominent athletes, who must keep in good shape.” Advertisers’ success in manipulating the gullible buying public became an article of faith. An essay of 1922 on the subject opened with the words, “Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God.”
In the early 1920s Listerine, variously used in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic, a cure for venereal disease and a floor-cleaner, was transformed by advertising into a magical product which would free its user from the dreadful, life-ruining scourge of halitosis—a faux-medical condition invented by the marketing men. Their advertisements showed a downcast girl holding her friend’s bridal bouquet above the caption, “Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” The cause of her loneliness was “chronic halitosis”—which, happily, Listerine (rebranded as a mouthwash) promised to cure. Listerine’s profits soared from $115,000 to $8 million in just seven years.
Advertisers promoted an obsession with cleanliness and good hygiene because it would sell their products; as the historian Stephen Fox puts it, it also “projected a WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] vision of a tasteless, colorless, odorless, sweat-less world” that chimed with the rampant nativism of American politics. The unspoken message was that immigrants could become better Americans by swilling away their garlic breath with Listerine or covering up their spicy body odor with deodorant. The growth of national advertising (and the prosperity that fueled it) fostered a very specific sense of Americanness and patriotism—wholesome, moral, aspirational and conformist—a sliced-white-bread and apple-pie view of the world. Those who did not fit into this mold, or could not afford to, were branded as outcasts.
Many industries boomed in the 1920s, but one stands tall above the rest: the automotive business. “Why on earth do you need to study what’s changing this country?” asked one of the Lynds’ interviewees in Middletown. “I can tell you what’s happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!” In 1920 there were 7.5 million cars in the United States; a decade later that number had soared more than three times to 27 million, or one car for every five people. In mid-1920s Middletown, owning a car had become by 1924 “an accepted essential of normal living,” just as owning a telephone had been at the turn of the century. Half of Middletown’s working-class families owned cars, almost all paid for by installment—although, of that group, a third did not yet have a bathtub.
Cars and the network of roads and suburbs that sprang up in their wake transformed America physically and psychologically. Distances shrank. For the first time people could travel more than five miles to work or school; trips of a hundred miles or more suddenly became a regular occurrence. In 1920 each car would travel 55,000 miles in its lifetime; by 1930 that number had jumped to 200,000 miles. Three million miles of government-coordinated asphalted highways crisscrossed America by 1927,