Chapter XLV: The Advertising Ecstasy

Such was the fate of a magazine which rebelled. As for those which submitted, the answer is writ large on our newsstands. “McClure’s,” “Collier’s,” “Everybody’s,” the “American” have survived, as a woman without virtue, as a man without honor, of whom his friends say that he would better have died. The masters of finance have taken not merely the conscience from them, they have taken the life from them. If there was a man on the editorial staff with red blood in his veins, they turned him out to become a Socialist soap-boxer, and in his place they put a pithed frog. (You know, perhaps, how the scientist takes the nerves out of a frog’s body and puts in pith?)

Not merely have the money-masters stamped their sign upon the contents of the magazines, they have changed the very form to suit their purposes. Time was when you could take the vast bulk of a magazine, and rip off one fourth from the front and two fourths from the back, and in the remaining fourth you had something to read in a form you could enjoy. But the advertising gentry got on to that practice and stopped it. They demanded what they call “full position,” next to reading-matter. One magazine gave way, and then another; until now all popular magazines are cunning traps to bring your mind into subjection to the hawkers of wares. I pick up the current number of the “Literary Digest”; there are a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and the advertising begins on page thirty-five. I pick up the current number of the “Saturday Evening Post”; there are a hundred and fifty-eight pages, and the advertising begins on page twenty-nine. You start an article or a story, and they give you one or two clean pages to lull your suspicions, and then at the bottom you read, “Continued on page 93.” You turn to page ninety-three, and biff—you are hit between the eyes by a powerful gentleman wearing a collar, or swat—you are slapped on the cheek by a lady in a union-suit. You stagger down this narrow column, as one who runs the gauntlet of a band of Indians with clubs; and then you read, “Continued on page 99.” You turn to page ninety-nine, and somebody throws a handful of cigarettes into your face, or maybe a box of candy; or maybe it is the crack of a revolver, or the honk of an automobile-horn that greets you. The theme of the reading-matter may be the importance of war-savings, but before you get to the end of the article you have been tempted by every luxury from a diamond scarf-pin to a private yacht, and have spent in imagination more money than you will earn in the balance of your life-time.

The culmination of this process may be studied in the supreme product of Capitalist Journalism, the “Curtis Publications”; the peerless trilogy of the “Saturday Evening Post,” the “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and the “Country Gentleman.” How many boys in college are making fortunes in their spare time, selling this trilogy to all America? I don’t know, but if you write to the circulation department in Philadelphia, they will tell you, and perhaps let you join the opulent band. One hundred and thirty times every year these Curtis people prepare for their millions of victims a fat bulk of “high-class”—that is to say, high-paying—advertising. As street-urchins gather to scramble for pennies, so gather here all the profit-seekers of the country to compete for your attention; they wheedle and cajole and implore, they shriek and scream, they dance and gesticulate and turn somersaults. I say “they” do it; in reality, of course, they hire others to do it; they take the brains and vitality and eagerness of our youth—they waste in a single week enough writing talent and drawing talent to create an American literature and an American art.

The stake is a colossal one. Writing ten years ago, Hamilton Holt showed that the American people were spending a hundred and forty-five million dollars a year for advertisements in periodicals. Also he stated that one Chicago department-store had spent half a million in advertising to sell fifteen million in goods. At this rate of thirty to one, the public was being persuaded, by means of advertising, to purchase four and a half billion dollars worth of goods. Allowing for the increase in extravagance and in prices today, the expenditure cannot be less than ten or twenty billions. Such is the prize to be scrambled for; and when you realize it, you no longer wonder at the raptures to which our advertisement-writers are impelled, the exhibitions of language-slinging to which they treat us.

What is your literary taste? Are you poetical? Does your temperament run to the flowery and ecstatic? If so, you will be “landed” by the full-page advertisement which I find in my evening newspaper, displaying a spreading peacock and half a dozen peacock-ladies in a whirl of ruffles and frills. “THE RAINBOW OF FASHIONS,” runs the heading, and continues in this fine, careful rapture:

Other than this the impression is inadequate, that glimpse beheld of
this Fashion Salon, this inimitable Third Floor of Goldstein’s.

What but the Rainbow with its inexpressible sunburst of color could be
the source—the inspiration from which Fashion has modeled these
veritable Exquisites—these beautiful new Frocks and Suits and Coats,
these Skirts and Capes—these Blouses and Hats for Milady’s luxury?

Truly the Genii of Fashionery are leading us into glory Fields of
Beauty never before attained, although it seemed for a time that
Artists of Vogue had decided to paint indefinitely upon that picture
of yesterday, with an occasional new tint perhaps to relieve somewhat
the monotonous restrictions both in style and in fabric.

But now—today—at Goldstein’s—the picture is a new one—startling and
irresistible—to be elaborated upon each day—for it is each day that
new thoughts are added as new Express Packages are opened from
Fashiondom.

Come, take a pencil peek with me—and ONLY as a pencil sees them—not at
all as they are—or as you may see them if you come where these
“Pretties” are all assembled—where fashions are wont to congregate at
Goldstein’s.

Or does your taste run to humor? Are you bluff and hearty, a real fellow and a good sport? Then maybe your purse-strings will be loosened by the full-page advertisement which appears in all the magazines for August, 1919, portraying a stout and sensual gentleman with a pipe in his mouth and a wink in both eyes. Cries this gentleman:

SCRUB UP YOUR SMOKEDECKS AND CUT FOR A NEW PIPE DEAL! Say, you’ll have
a streak of smokeluck that’ll put pep-in-YOUR smokemotor, all right,
if you’ll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or the papers and nail some
“Devil’s-dung” for packing!

Just between ourselves, you never will wise-up to high-spot-smoke-joy
until you can call a pipe or a home-rolled cigarette by its first
name, THEN, to hit the peak-of-pleasure you land square on that
two-fisted-man-tobacco, “Devil’s-dung!”

Well, sir, you’ll be so all-fired happy you’ll want to get a
photograph of yourself breezing up the pike with your smokethrottle
wide open! TALK ABOUT SMOKE-SPORT!

And now, stop and consider what proportion of the total energies of the community are devoted to the production of poisonous filth such as this. I do not count the people who read and answer the advertisements; I count only those who write them and sell them, those who set the type and manufacture the paper, those who distribute the publications and keep the accounts of the complicated operations. There cannot be less than a million people thus occupied with the advertising business in America; and all of them buried to the eyes in this poisonous filth, all compelled to absorb it, to believe it, to have their personalities befouled by it! It means, of course, that these people are permanently excluded from the intellectual life. These people cannot know beauty, they cannot know grace and charm, they cannot know dignity, they cannot even know common honesty. To say that they are bound as captives to the chariot-wheels of Mammon is not to indulge in loose metaphor, but to describe precisely their condition. They are bound in body, mind, and soul to vulgarity, banality, avarice and fraud.

You, perhaps, are not connected with the advertising business, so you think you may ignore the fate of these pitiful captives. You are a banker, perhaps; you handle the money of advertisers, and your mind is shaped by the effort to understand them and their ways. Or you are a telegrapher, and send telegrams for the advertising business; or you are a farmer, and raise food for the million advertisement-makers; or you are a steel-worker, and help to make their typewriters, the nails for their shoes, and the rails over which their products are carried.

Or perhaps you are a person of leisure; you dwell alone in an ivory tower of art. Now and then, however, you have to know something about the world in which you live; and competitive commercialism ordains that when you seek to learn this, you shall have the maniac shrieks of advertisers resounding in your brain, you shall have the whirling dervishes of this new cult of Publicity for Profit cavorting about in your ivory tower. More than that, you shall have the intellectual content of everything you read distorted by the advertisements which adjoin them; your most dignified editor, your most aloof, “art for art’s sake” poet will be a parasite upon advertisements, and if he thinks the advertisements have nothing to do with him, it is only because the dignified editor and the aloof, “art for art’s sake” poet are fools.

Take the “American Magazine”; that awful flub-dub I quoted earlier in the book. What can it mean, save that the “American Magazine” had to have advertisements, and to get the advertisements it had to please the sort of people who read advertisements? Or take the “Curtis Publications”; what is the obvious fact about this colossal advertisement-distributing machine? The owner of this machine, needless to say, is not in the business of distributing advertisements for his health. On the contrary, he has lost his health and made eleven million dollars. His price for advertisements is six thousand dollars per page. To carry these advertisements, he must have reading matter, and to select this reading matter he employs a group of men and women called “editors.” These “editors” are, of course, in position to offer prices such as thrill the soul of every hungry author, and cause him to set diligently to work to study the personalities of the “editors,” so as to know what they want. If he doesn’t find out what they want, he doesn’t write for the publications—that is obvious enough. On the other hand, if he _does_ find out what they want, he becomes a new star in America’s literary firmament—and at the cost of pretty nearly all his ideals of truth, humanity and progress.

Take up the “Saturday Evening Post.” Here is Harry Leon Wilson, who used to show signs of brains, telling a story of how a labor union tried to take control of a factory. He exhausts his imagination to make this proposition ridiculous, to pour contempt over these fool workingmen. And here is a short story writer named Patullo, solemnly setting forth that Socialism means dividing up! And here is George Kibbe Turner, who I used to think was one of America’s coming novelists, with a short story, which turns out not to be a short story at all, but a piece of preaching upon the following grave and weighty theme: that the trouble with America is that everybody is spending too much money; that the railroad brotherhoods are proposing to turn robbers and take away the property of their masters; and that a workingman who is so foolish as to buy a piano for his daughter will discover that he has ruined himself to no purpose, because workingmen’s daughters ought not to have pianos—they are too tired to play them when they get through with their work!