European Americans and Advertising

In a Yiddish newspaper of the early twentieth century, the American brand name of Uneeda Biscuit bursts from lines of Hebrew type. In a glossy mid-century magazine, an African American Pullman porter eases the day of a harried, white and middle class traveler. In the 21st century, an Italian peasant woman—a contadina--smiles from a can of tomato paste. Since the late nineteenth century, a changing cast of images and characters has flowed through American advertising. With them, and in reaction to them, European immigrants and their descendants have defined or ignored their ethnicity, established or complicated their standing as white people, and gauged their levels of prosperity or a lack of it.

For all the strength of consumer culture in the United States, its history has been uneven and contradictory. Advertisements in the ethnic press coexisted alongside ads in the mass media. Advertisers tried to turn the complex task of selling to people whose identities were in flux into a profession of persuasion. Foods that originated in ethnic enclaves became mainstream fare. Eventually, a society grounded in mass production, mass consumption and mass advertising gave way to one defined by flexible production, “image tribes,” and niche marketing.

In the 21st century, Americans live—with differences and similarities, knowledge and ignorance, abundance and inequalities--with the consequences of this transition. For all the changes in consumer culture, its fundamental elements emerged early. In the eighteenth century, Americans debated the merits of using consumer goods to establish the meaning and emotional content of their lives. By the mid-nineteenth century, as immigration from Ireland and Germany transformed the populations ofAmerican cities, a visual culture of stereotyping offered ways of identifying and categorizing strangers in print. While U.S. naturalization laws made immigrants from Europe eligible for U.S. citizenship (unlike those from Africa and Asia), cultural belonging in the Unites States was another matter. Foreign-born residents found a distinct —if at times unflattering presence—in popular culture and print media. Irish immigrants, for example, were depicted as violent, apelike characters. Americans of older stock were also depicted visually—the New England Yankee, the country bumpkin, the African American—in ways that reduced complex humanity into a few positive and negative traits. Still, the burden of these conventions fell worst on African Americans--who were depicted as spirited, expressive and childlike characters whose music and dance could be enjoyed but who all white men, native-born and immigrant, could feel superior to.

By the late nineteenth century, older tendencies in consumption and visual culture intersected with new forms of industrial growth and changes in print media to set the stage for a mass-based consumer culture in twentieth century America. Growing production of consumer products, like patent medicines, soaps, and clothing, created a growing abundance of goods. At the same time, newspapers were ever further along in the long process of shedding their old loyalties to political parties and becoming more commercial institutions, dependent for revenues ever more on a broad readership and advertising to cover the costs of production.

Once, when consumer goods were less common, advertisements succeeded largely by announcing an item’s existence and availability. In a new world of proliferating consumer goods, however, an advertisement had to make a product stand out. Equally important, advertisements had to claim space in newspapers that were growing more graphically exciting, more vivid in their writing, and less interested in the affairs of political parties. In cities, newspapers eagerly published news about the day-to- day drama of human existence and sought readers in a growing immigrant population. Small stores catering to local populations with culturally familiar goods defined immigrant neighborhoods before the era of World War I, but increasingly major businesses did not ignore immigrants as potential customers. Corporations and advertisers sought consumers in both mass-circulation newspapers and in the immigrant press. (Jewish immigrants, for example, were seen as eager consumers and at first courted more avidly than Italians, who were seen as reluctant to embrace mass-produced products.)

Even as the culture of visual stereotyping remained strong in song sheets, cartoons, vaudeville, and early motion pictures, in advertising here was a tendency to use flattering or neutral images to sell products to immigrants for fear of alienating potential customers. The apelike Irishman of the 1850s, for example, gave way to the street-smart Irish urbanite of the World War I era, a “Yankee doodle dandy” who was “born on the Fourth of July.” The propaganda efforts of World War I accelerated interest in the arts of persuasion, just as the growth in mass production after the war increased the availability of consumer goods on a grander scale.

By the 1920s, advertisers marketed increasingly not just to immigrants, but also to their children who were more oriented to life in the United States. The result, however, was not an erasure of ethnicity. In an advertising campaign for Crisco vegetable shortening, a product introduced in 1912 that removed the need to use potentially non-kosher animal fats in cooking, advertisements trumpeted the product as the answer to the deepest yearnings of the Jewish people. (Eventually, Crisco distributed a Jewish cookbook complement their product.) Immigrant newspapers could profitably present themselves as partners of corporations, as the Jewish Daily Forward did in the 1920s, when its business stationary read, in English, “Your gateway to the Jewish market.” An Italian family felt more Italian, not less, when it gathered around a Victor Victrola, whose purchase was prompted by an advertisement, to listen to the singing Enrico Caruso.

While the inclusiveness of consumer culture and advertising in the 1920s stand in contrast to the nativism of national politics, their embrace had limits. For all the talk of national prosperity, most immigrant families in the working class lived on the margins of security and far from the abundance depicted in national advertising. Indeed, national advertising rarely depicted anyone who looked like an immigrant, a worker, or a member of an identifiable ethnic group. Instead, ads asserted the presence of a broad, native-born middle class, whose chief burdens were coping with the stresses of modernity and the pursuit of affluence and happiness. Immigrants and their children might see their ambitions reflected in these advertisements, but little of their daily lives. Racial diversity intruded into these consumer dramas only in the form of service workers, like the African American Pullman porters whose jobs (but not their union organizing or political activism) were predicated on sustaining middle class and upper class whites’ comfort and privileges.

If the 1920s saw a greater consolidation of the national market for advertising and media, the Thirties saw the Great Depression that shattered dreams of abundance for all. Unemployment and hardship prompted union organizing and the reforms of the New Deal, but prosperity did not return until the massive spending and economic mobilizationfor World War II. Industrial production was diverted from consumer goods to war material. Consumer spending was restrained to direct money toward the war effort. Advertising remained important, however, in efforts to mobilize support for the war. In propaganda posters and advertisements the children of the immigrants became Americans, united in their diversity and their determination to defeat the Axis powers. (African Americans troops, however, were segregated in the armed forces and sent into service roles for most of the war.) Equally important, consumer culture—with abundance for all—became something of a war aim in itself, a goal to be achieved when GIs returned from fighting. In the decades immediately after the war, the United States became something of a “consumer’s republic,” defined by mass production, mass consumption, mass media, and advertising to knit them together. As in the 1920s, advertising emphasized a broad, generic middle class. Unlike in the 1920s, high wages—above all for white workers— supported the purchase of consumer goods and a substantial standard of living class in the secure working class and middle class.

African Americans fought for recognition as consumers and for their share of prosperity, but throughout the 1950s the commercials in the dramatically growing medium of television delivered an impression of the United States as a white, middle class country with a uniformly high standard of living. This sense prosperity, located at the slippery intersection of advertising, consumer culture and social change, did not last. In African American struggles for civil rights, and related insurgencies mounted by Latinos, economic and political inequality emerged as national issues; in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at what was officially called was officially the “March on Washington For Jobs andFreedom.”

Historians debate the timing of the process by which immigrants and their children became “white,” but by the 1960s it was clear that in public and political contexts, at least in relation to African Americans, the children of European immigrants were no longer descendants of European national groups but “white ethnics.” As important as were the political consequences of this change, it was equally significant for advertising and consumer culture. As early as the 1960s, advertisers had considered how to best match advertisements to likely consumers. One approach to this problem was to look away from mass-based advertising, which spoke to a broad range of potential consumers, and instead emphasize smaller, more focused segments of the public. African Americans had long argued for this as consumers and advertisers. By the 1960s and 1970s, as racial and ethnic differences assumed greater significance in American culture and politics, consumers and advertisers both sought greater recognition of subgroups in advertising.

The impact of this effort was uneven: recognition of white ethnic identities in advertising; stereotyping of Latinos; and a greater recognition of advertising directed to African Americans that was not accompanied by an equal growth in Black-owned advertising firms. Strong technological support for marketing to specific groups emerged in the 1980s with the rise of cable television, which created new demand for ad revenue to support new shows and stations and a technological means for aiming television at clearly defined audiences. Instead of constructing vast national audiences in the manner of the old television networks, the new cable devoted themselves to viewers interested in country music, Black entertainment, sports, shopping, and more. Audiences once herded into one large mass were now entirely separated. One consequence, for example, was thatthe television shows watched most by white Americans did not overlap at all with the television shows watched by Black Americans.

The rise of the Internet, and the decline of mass media----above all newspapers— accelerated the tendency to aim advertising at niche markets. Although the internet was slow to generate advertising revenues on the scale once seen in network television or big city newspapers, it reshaped the media system and set off an unfinished revolution inn communication and advertising. It also accelerated the trend toward niche marketing that was at first a vision in the 1960s. The new system of media and advertising that emerged in the 21st century promoted, in the words of the scholar Joseph Turow, “segment-making media” over “society-making media.” Some of these segments could be ethnic, as in the pursuit of the Latino market, which was founded in the belief that people with ancestries in countries as different as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala Ecuador, and Peru could be effectively served by ads that featuring models with dark hair and olive-colored skin (but not the hint of African ancestry found in large parts of South America and the Caribbean.) Other segments could be grounded not in ethnicity, but in consumer preferences.

Food advertising, for example, can emphasize a sophisticated taste for an international array of goods (Belgian beer, Iberian ham, Italian olive oil) without making a pitch to any single ethnic group. The full consequences of this change are yet to be clear, and assimilation in some realms of culture is compatible with strong identities in other areas. Nevertheless, advertising and consumer culture changed dramatically in the twentieth century. The “consumer’s republic” of the 1950s combined a broad prosperity, mass media and massadvertising with bitter racial exclusion.

In the new media environment of the 21st century, the United States is distinguished by niche markets, inequality, an acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity unimaginable in 1950, and new hybrids in food, music and culture that reflect life in a globalized world. If the old system promoted common dreams of a good life through consumption, the new system continues to emphasize the goal of happiness through consumption, but lives with inequalities of wealth and does less to show how different Americans’ dreams might overlap.

Sources:

Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990)

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in PostwarAmerica (2003)

Arlene Davila, Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (2001)

Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (2000)

Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (1990)

Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999)

T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920- 1940 (1985)

Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (1997)

Viviana A. Zelizer, “Multiple Markets, Multiple Cultures” in Neil J. Smelser and Jefrrey C. Alexander, eds., Diversity and Its Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary American Society (1999)