In Our Prime (15 page)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantastically popular debut novel
This Side of Paradise,
published in 1920, captured the sentiments of the young postwar generation. Taking its title from a poem by Rupert Brooke, the British golden boy whose death came to symbolize the war's grotesque bloodiness and waste,
This Side of Paradise
depicted the disillusionment of the younger generation in the person of Amory Blaine, a wealthy Princeton undergraduate. “
Young students try to
believe in older authors,” Amory says, “constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they
can't
.”

In 1924, the critic Edmund
Wilson poked fun at his friend Fitzgerald and the heady pronouncements of youthful superiority in an imagined interview in which Fitzgerald proudly claims to be the man “who has made America Younger-generation conscious.”

Fitzgerald was one of the scores of artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers who fit under the multicolored coat of modernism, the far-flung cultural movement that hit its stride in the early twentieth century.
Modernism reversed the baleful eighteenth-century
connotation of words like “modern,” “novelty,” and “innovation.” “Make It New!” Ezra Pound instructed his fellow artists. The historian Peter Gay explains: “The one thing that all modernists had indisputably in common was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine.” And by extension, the new over the old and youth over experience.

Novelists of all stripes
gave textured life to the idea of middle-age decline. Even though conditions for most Americans in the twenties were improving in substantial ways, writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and T. S. Eliot, created a narrative arc of middle age failure and disappointment that helped establish a set of expectations about how people responded to their middle decades.

No group was more adept at extolling the virtues of youth and progress than advertisers.
They “proudly proclaimed
themselves missionaries of modernity,” the historian Roland Marchand writes in his classic study
Advertising and the American Dream.
“Constantly and unabashedly, they championed . . . the modern against the old-fashioned.”

Bruce Barton was the most famous adman of his era.
Born in 1886, he grew up
in Oak Park, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where Ernest Hemingway was born twelve years later. The Barton family's trajectory reflects that of America itself. Barton's great-great-grandfather came over as a soldier in the British army during the Revolutionary War and, whether through principle or prescience, switched sides and settled in New Jersey after Britain's defeat. By the time Bruce was born, the Bartons had moved farther west. His father, William, a traveling preacher based in Robbins, Tennessee, rode a white horse to visit the mountain churches in his circuit. He had larger ambitions, though, and eventually became the minister of a prominent Congregational church in Oak Park.

In Bruce's childhood, retailers and their customers lived in the same locale. There were no chains or franchises, no easy method of informing consumers at the other end of the country about a product, and no cheap, efficient way to transport goods to distant customers. By the time Barton co-founded an advertising agency in 1919, assembly lines were churning out shiploads of different products, railroad tracks crisscrossed the nation, a new highway system etched lines in the country's plains, and publications reached from one coast to the other. Mass consumer capitalism took off with the force of a steam engine. Whether you brushed your teeth in Philadelphia or scrubbed a sink in San Francisco, the same brands of toothpaste and cleansers were in reach. And the same movie
magazines and weekly journals that showed off the latest hat styles or warned of a common fashion faux pas decorated newsstands in Baltimore and Chicago. Sinclair Lewis captures just how quickly Taylorized mass production standardized materials, tastes, and expectations in his portrait of Floral Heights, George Babbitt's hometown:

 

Two out of three parlors
. . . had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk. . . . Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph. . . . Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.

Creating a mass market—selling an identical item to as many people as possible—was a singularly American innovation. Sales on this scale required a quantum leap in the status and power of marketing. Large companies started spending enormous sums on advertising and public relations to stimulate consumer buying.
In 1900, approximately
$542 million was spent on advertising in the United States, a figure that grew to more than $1.1 billion in 1910 and more than $2.9 billion in 1920.

Advertising's job was to ensure that the economic pump remained a perpetual motion machine by convincing the public to consume. Large-scale factories could spit out acres of goods, but what use was it if there were not enough buyers for them all?
Purchasing a car that was
, as Henry Ford boasted of the Model A, “so strong and so well made that no one ought ever to have to buy a second one,” would soon put Ford out of business. Companies that produced a single product that lasted a lifetime would ultimately find themselves in the position of the Shakers, the fast-disappearing New England sect with a devout belief in celibacy. Planned obsolescence was a firm's way of avoiding extinction. In thousands of small communities across America, citizens raised with a traditional Protestant ethic of hard work and self-denial were enjoined to become consumers and fulfill their desires with the same urgency with which they were once entreated to save their souls. The Lynds witnessed this process in Muncie.
“
The American citizen's first
importance to his country is . . . that of consumer,” a local newspaper editorialized in 1924. “Consumption is a new necessity.”

Throughout the twenties
, businesses conditioned the public to expect a change in style, extending a regular fashion cycle from clothes to cars, telephones and home decor.
When American Telephone and Telegraph
first coordinated the regional Bell systems into a national network in 1900, the telephone was marketed as a business or household necessity. Nearly three decades later, AT&T realized the campaign had been too successful: once an affluent family had one phone, why purchase a second? Company executives switched their sales pitch to portray the telephone as a convenience and a luxury, and extolled the glories of putting phones in every room, including the bathroom. Towel manufacturers used color and patterns to transform this utilitarian item into an object of design and luxury. They came up with the idea of color-coordinated ensembles that had to be regularly updated and urged people to bathe more than once a day, using a different towel set each time.

Bruce Barton captured the significance of advertising's mission to stoke consumption in a wildly popular 1925 book,
The Man Nobody Knows,
in which he envisioned Jesus Christ as a modern business executive (and a hardy outdoorsman with “muscles hard as iron,” in keeping with the era's emphasis on physical culture).
Jesus “picked up twelve men from the bottom
ranks of a business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world,” Barton explained in his thin parable. He described Jesus as a master of advertising who preached in the ancient world's markets; he would understand that in the present day, newspapers and magazines are “a bazaar, filled with products of the world's work. Clothes and clocks and candlesticks; soup and soap and cigarettes; lingerie and limousines—the best of all of them are there, proclaimed by their makers in persuasive tones.”

“He would be a national advertiser today, I am sure, as he was the great advertiser of his own day,” Barton declared of mankind's savior. Carpentry might be all right for first-century Rome, but for 1920s America advertising was akin to a divine calling. Some critics disdained the book as unsophisticated, but the public loved it.

The reverence was understandable. Consumer capitalism created
unimaginable growth and stability in America, which suffered through severe downturns and financial panics in the nineteenth century. It brought affluence, dignity, and cohesiveness, easing social tensions by giving working people a legitimate means of attaining a comfortable and secure life. Social mobility was achievable in a way it had never been in an agricultural society. More than a cadre of greedy business elites were interested in maintaining the economic engine; a wide political consensus developed around the idea that government should promote economic growth as a way of taming the devastating bank panics and slumps that had periodically plagued the nation during the past hundred years.

Consumption, Barton argued, would enrich the nation as well as the individual by helping a man to help himself. Salvation and perfection, once attained by aligning personal will with cosmic forces, was instead achieved by aligning personal will with the market and technology.

Barton's long face and curled pompadour was a familiar sight on the lecture circuit.
In “Creed of the Advertising Man,”
a speech he frequently delivered on advertising's role in capitalism, he said: “Advertising is the spark plug on the cylinder of mass production, and essential to the continuance of the democratic process. Advertising sustains a system that has made us leaders of the free world: The American Way of Life.” President
Calvin Coolidge offered
a similar message to the “Creed.” In a 1926 address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Coolidge told his audience that they were “molding the human mind.” Upon them had been thrust “part of the great work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind.” Namely, turning citizens into consumers.

Aging in a consumption-minded world, however, is fraught. Consumer capitalism, after all, is more than an economic system; it is a way of understanding the world. It is supported by a framework of values which maintains that at the very core of human experience is a desire for what is new, an urge to push beyond familiar habits, conditions, and activities. Marx and Engels memorably captured capitalism's restless nature in
The Communist Manifesto
: “
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”

Individual ads for creams and elixirs may cynically decry middle age by promising to ward off midlife wrinkles, but the system's preference for youth is much more elemental. Capitalism links aging with decline because the ethos of the market demands it. New is better. What is old loses value over time, whether music, fashion, appliances, or experience. Such judgments do not stop at the store's doorway but inevitably seep into the sphere of human relations, demeaning age. Advertising and mass industry did more than reflect youth's growing appeal. They turned what was new, and young, into a moral virtue, an economic necessity, and an essential ingredient of personal success.

The conviction that endless consumption was a necessary component of a stable democracy intensified in the ensuing decades. Throughout the 1930s, policy makers and businessmen believed it was the solution to the misery wrought by the Depression.
After World War II, mass
consumption was elevated to a global ideology, the creator and protector of America's freedoms and the linchpin of American supremacy during the Cold War. In this new “consumer's republic,” shopping was more than an indulgence; it was an obligation and an act of patriotism. That same theme has carried through to the present century.
President George W. Bush, in
his brief address to the nation after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, declared, “The American economy will be open for business,” as a rebuke to the terrorists.
A month later, New York mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani said at a news conference that “freedom to shop is one of the fundamental liberties, what terrorists want to deprive us of.”

In obvious and subtle ways, advertisements in the twenties disparaged midlife and reinforced the link between youth and progress.
Then as now, young people
were assumed to be on the cutting edge, the essence of modernity, and so their actions and styles were celebrated in ads. “It's the younger crowd that sets the standard,” a 1927 ad for Fatima cigarettes declared. “Go to the younger crowd if you want the right word on what to wear or drive or smoke.” A survey of 167 advertisements in popular magazines that same year found “the ever-increasing trend toward dramatization and appealing to youth.”
Helen Woodward, a consumer
advocate and author, recalled a lecture she delivered to the staff of a large cosmetics firm during her days as an advertising copywriter in the early twenties: “Remember that what we are selling is not beauty—it is youth . . . above all things, it is going to be young, young, young!”
In 1928, Paul Nystrom, a marketing
professor at Columbia University, commented: “The tendency for people of all ages is to dress in the manner of youth, to act as young people do, to think as young people do, and to make believe, so far as may be possible, that they are young people.”

Roland Marchand summed up the
impression given by the era's ads: “An observer from another century might well conclude, from studying advertisements alone, that men and women of the 1920s and 1930s lost the power of locomotion and upright stance after the age of 55.”