"My first real cigarette pleasure . . .": The Development of a Consumer-Oriented Society and the Campaign Against Evangelical Morality

Legitimating Desire

Two women, clearly friends, both stylishly dressed, are sharing confidences in this ad from the late 1920s. The topic of discussion is controversial. "I really don't know if I should smoke . . ." one Chesterfield ad had its female protagonist admit. Women hadn't started smoking until they got the vote, she went on. Of course, that was not a reason to smoke. The reason was the same as that given in the Camels ad, pleasure. Smoking gave her a lot of pleasure. Besides, her boyfriend smoked. So did her brothers, but not, she did not need to say, her mother. Smoking, the Chesterfield ad, suggested was a way to be modern, to claim equality with men, and to participate in the new spirit of the age, the open pursuit of pleasure. The Camels ad made the same appeals but more tersely and with a scarcely disguised hint that the pleasure involved was deeply sensual. Little wonder the conversation is confidential. Your "first time" was something that you could only share with your closest friend.

The years following World War I witnessed the birth of the first consumption-driven economy. Previously, the central economic challenge was to produce enough to meet the basic needs of the population for food, shelter, clothing, and transportation. In the '20s, however, the challenge was to consume enough of the ever-increasing mountain of goods to keep the economy growing. The shift is nicely illustrated in the sagas of Ford and General Motors. Ford's triumph in the 1910s was one of production. The giant River Rouge complex, the largest manufacturing facility in the world, turned out Model Ts in ever greater numbers. Ford's goal was an increasingly more reliable car at an increasingly more affordable price. G.M.'s triumph in the 1920s was in marketing. It became the world's largest industrial concern by offering a "line" of cars from the economical Chevrolet to the luxurious Cadillac. Each Model T looked like every other. You could have it in any color you liked, Henry Ford famously remarked, so long as you liked black. G.M. introduced the "model year." The 1928 Chevy had distinctive look that differentiated it from the 1927 even if the cars were virtually identical under the sheet metal. [See the work of Alfred D. Chandler, particularly Giant enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the automobile industry; sources and readings (Harcourt, Brace, 1964).]

Ford, General Motors, and a host of other car manufacturers could produce automobiles by the millions. Could they sell them? So too with radios, washing machines, refigerators, cigarettes, motion pictures, and innumerable other products. Unsurprisingly, advertising became a major service industry in the 1920s. Buying on credit became common. Buying itself became common.

In earlier decades people bought far less. Consider shoes. Only the rich had more than a few pairs. (See Solemates: The Century in Shoes.) So too with dresses and suits. The daytime uniform for "working girls" prior to the war was a long dark skirt, fitted narrowly at the waist, and a "shirtwaist," a white blouse with billowing sleeves, a high neck, and a narrow waist. Even men in white-collar positions had very limited wardrobes. A man changed his collar and his cuffs, not his shirt. After the war it became fashionable for the middle classes to acquire more in the way of clothing, to change clothes every day, and, with much coaching from soap manufacturers, to feel uncomfortable and dirty, if they had to wear an article of clothing more than once without washing it.

Clothing was just the beginning. Household appliance proliferated. Some, like washing machines, were major purchases. Others, like toasters, were small. But purchasing them became the norm. So too for radios, despite their great expense and the paucity of available programming. Americans embarked upon an unprecedented voyage of consumption. They would have more and better products than had been dreamed of in earlier ages.

Having more required more than mass production, available credit, and omnipresent advertising. It also required a new mentality, an ethos of consumption. Consuming became a way of defining yourself, of measuring your standing in the community. What Thorstein Veblen described as the mores of the elite in The Theory of the Leisure Class became those of the middle class as well. The "leisure class" used consumption as a way of showing off their "pecuniary prowress." The key was "conspicuousness." Your clothes had to attract attention or they could not be fashionable. Your "ability to pay" had to be visible to all. At the end of the nineteenth century, conspicuous consumption was the province of the idle rich. In the 1920s the middle class learned to ape their betters. [Roland Marchand has argued the exact opposite, that the advertising of the '20s offered "visions of classlessness."]

A Lucky Strike ad described this new ethos as a liberation from ancient prejudices by which it meant evangelical morality. "American Intelligence," outfitted in red, white, and blue, unshackles women from "false modesty" in bathing costumes and from the prejudice against smoking. [Click on image for larger version.] It had been considered immodest for a woman to expose her bare legs. But "American Intelligence" proved that a sensible swimsuit promoted both "better health and pure enjoyment." The use of "pure" is cunning. It suggests, as with the term "false modesty," that the old moral prohibitions were simply wrong, "ancient prejudices." The new suit is "pure." It suggests too that the enjoyment is more intense once "false modesty" about the female body is banished. The implication about smoking is clear. Enjoyment is at the heart of the new ethos.

Consider this 1923 ad for Buick. Its new roadster was a "companion" that "all women admire." More than that. Women "ardently desire it." Having it will "immeasurably" enhance a woman's pleasure. Her "gratification" will be "heightened." The admen of the 1920s went Veblen one better. He understood the drive for status and the human desire to feel superior. They added sex. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, this was no longer simply a matter of words. This ad appeared in Redbook magazine in 1932.

"The Newer, the Nuder" trumpeted a Bon Wit Teller (a leading department store) ad. The woman in the Redbook ad may be shopping for lingerie with a woman friend. A saleswoman may be attending to her. But she imagines men looking at her in her chemise. Unlike corset ads which stressed the importance of appearing to have a youthful figure, the slip will not improve, but reveal the woman's figure. The ad implies that the woman will be seen in her slip. And not just by her husband. Or, at the least, that she enjoys imagining that she will be. "This Whole Room Is Swarming With Men!" Her expression suggests something more than confidence at the prospect. Her friend smiles encouragingly.

Learning How

Certain words recur throughout the advertising of the 1920s -- smart, discriminating, discerning. The new abundance of goods presented middle-class consumers with a new challenge. Given all the soaps, watches, shoes, radios, how was one to choose? "Certain fortunate people," a Camels ad observed, "seem to be born with a flair for life . . . an instinct for good clothes, good food, good books, and good friends. . . ." They understood "the art of gracious living." [Click on image for larger version.] Of course, they smoked Camels.

How better to find your way through the bewildering morass of competing products than to follow the lead of these mythic discerning consumers? The November 1926 Ladies Home Journal carried an ad for Woodbury's soap which proclaimed that 102 debutantes in Boston and New York preferred Woodbury's. The manufacturer had interviewed 224 debutantes. 122 "girls scattered their choice over 22 different soaps," an average of five per. But 102, who presumably could buy any soap and who had grown up in the most discriminating households, chose Woodbury's. Yet anyone could afford it. A single bar lasted a month to six weeks and cost pennies. Roland Marchand argued in his essay "Visions of Classness" that such ads promoted a democracy of consumption. Even though the average young woman would not be "coming out" this or any other season, would not be dancing to the seductive strains of the latest jazz music on "polished floors" or receive "sophisticated compliments and delicious invitations all day long . . .," she could afford this one "essential luxury." So runs Marchand's argument. It is correct but not complete. One point of the ad is to encourage a sense of vicarious consumption, though not in the sense Veblen used the term. Veblen had noted that priests and leisure-class wives were both vicarious consumers in that their expensive garb testified not to their own power but to that of their respective masters. Hence the total disregard for the comfort of the wearer. The shopgirl who bought Woodbury's soap was a vicarious consumer in a different sense, according to Marchand's argument. She bought the soap as a way of identifying her own life with the far more glamorous one of the debutante. This is a striking insight but not an argument for "visions of classlessness" since the ad would make no sense in a classless world. And the insight needs to be fleshed out. What the shopgirl bought with the soap was a fantasy.

Another point the ad makes is far less subtle but equally important. How is the consumer to choose among the score or more of soaps available in every drug store? The Camels ad makes this very clear. Only "certain fortunate people" have a flair for "the art of gracious living." The consumer needs this ad precisely because she is not one of the fortunate few.

"That last lingering look in the mirror -- does it show a skin radiant with fresh beauty?" This is the voice of insecurity, not classlessness.

In addition to the proliferation of products, consumers faced another challenge. They might acquire a perfectly serviceable product but still inadvertently call attention to their own lack of discernment. Would a woman choose the right silver? It might be expensive and still be incorrect. She might even choose the wrong toilet paper.

Note the string of descriptives in the ad copy -- elegance, refinement, well-conducted, discriminating, fine old linen, women of intuitive daintiness. The "intuitive" is especially interesting. It reinforces the header -- Women sense it immediately. But, if they did, there would be no need for the ad. It is precisely because the consumer lacks "intuitive daintiness," not to mention elegance, refinement, and discrimination, that she reads, and needs, this ad.

This simple need to learn how to consume -- it was a new practice, after all -- helps explain the endorsement ad. The unnamed debutantes of the Woodbury's ads furnish examples. More usually, however, a celebrity lent her name. Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence, for example, endorsed Elgin watches. Even "her dearest enemy" had to admit that Lawrence was "one of the smartest women to step across a stage or a drawing room." "Naturally," she bought her clothes in Paris, in the salon of her favorite couturier. But she bought her wristwatch in America. Elgin had commissioned the leading Paris designers to come up with a Parisienne collection. Here too is evidence for Marchand's point that, since the watches started at $15, anyone could afford this one essential luxury. However, the prices topped out at $650. This is not classlessness. It is the General Motors approach to marketing. A Chevrolet was a perfectly good car, but it was not a Cadillac, and everyone knew the difference.

Becoming Modern

If "smart" and "discriminating" were words to conjure with in the ad copy of the 1920s, so too was "modern." Indeed it was the word. And, since more than 80% of all purchases were made by women, and since, therefore, more than 80% of all advertisements targeted women, the ads dealt with the modern woman, the modern wife, the flapper. As such they wrestled with a variety of cultural concerns routinely couched in the language of Evangelical moral stricture. This explains why Lucky Strike cigarettes would take sides in the debate that raged over the course of the 1920s over the one-piece bathing costume even though any number of male upholders of traditional ideas of female modesty were smokers and might find the ad insulting.

"Youth demanded simple clothes instead of those fussy, elaborate styles of the 1900's" began the copy of a 1929 advertisement for Ivory Soap. [Click on image for a larger version in which the text is easily readable.] "Youth has taken the artificiality out of American taste." Gone are the "stately mid-Victorian dinners and cotillions!" In their place youth has put "informal suppers and tea-dances." The illustration hammers the contrast home. The "thoroughly modern woman of cultivated taste" differs from her counterpart of the 1900s not only in dress and hair style but in attitude. She stands looking squarely forward, hands in pockets at her hips. The woman of the 1900s stands sideways, gazing down at a flower. Her life was fussy and artificial, totally unlike the modern woman who engages in "a thousand-and-one activities."

This message had little to do with the product, despite the best efforts of the copywriters at the J. Walter Thompson agency. Typically, soap ads featured pictures of the product. Instead of merely praising its "royally lavish" lather, ads would show the look of deep satisfaction on the face of the woman using it. Here, however, the illustration concentrates on clothing, hair styles, and body language. Why? The simplest explanation is that the agency, and the manufacturer, believed that "Youth" would sell. And not just soap. By the late twenties, advertisements for all sorts of products, emphasized not just the "slim, natural grace" of young women but also their sophistication and "cultivated taste." They annointed the "modern young woman" as the arbiter of taste and of behavior. In so doing, the advertisers were promoting, and acclaiming, a deep shift in American culture. After all, the "modern young woman" was the "flapper." Far from being seen as "de-bunking" clothes and living, she initially inspired endless expressions of concern. Something very important was changing.

One way to gauge the deliberate nature of the assault upon evangelical mores and morals is by examining the "Modernizing Mother" campaign the J. Walter Thompson agency created for Modess sanitary napkins.

Episode One set the overall theme. "Mother, don't be quaint." "Millions of daughters," the copy began, "are teasing mothers back to youth—slamming doors on the quaint ways of the nineties. One by one the foolish old drudgeries and discomforts pass." Life, under the leadership of these daughters was becoming "easier, more pleasant—sensibly modern." In episode two, the "modern daughter" has coaxed her mother up onto the ski slopes. The daughter, confident, fearless, happy, "sane of outlook, wholesome" leads the way. Not just mother, but "the world" is having a "hard time" keeping up. "She will not tolerate the traditions and drudgeries that kept her mother in bondage." Each episode followed the same format. The "modern" daughter liberated her mother from the "drudgeries" of the past by teaching her the latest dance steps, or replacing her cotton nightie with silk pajamas, or taking her for a jaunt in a plane. Mother looks a bit frightened or unwilling in several but gamely goes along. She is, she recognizes, a product of those "old-fashioned ways" which "cannot withstand the merry onslaught of the modern girl," as episode nine put it. The daughter's triumph is complete:

Her enthusiasm is so sane and contagious, she is so everlastingly right in refusing the drudgeries and repressions of her mother's girlhood that the whole world is approving her gay philosophy which demands the best and nothing but the best.

Or, as episode eight contends:

Life is so much more fun when one is not afraid. It is her happy courage—the zest with which she welcomes every new delightful freedom which is the charm of the modern girl. What mother can bear to stay in the drab shadows of middle life when such a daughter is beckoning her back to youth.

Youth—which will not tolerate senseless drudgery, the slavery of old-fashioned ways.

As with the Ivory advertisement, the "Modernizing Mother" campaign worked by contrast. On the side of youth was fearlessness, enthusiasm, zest. In contrast was her mother's girlhood, one of drudgery (a word which appeared in each of the episodes), slavery, and tradition. The modern daughter was "so everlastingly right" in welcoming "every new delightful freedom." In the Victorian past a woman was a slave to "old-fashioned ways." Better by far to put aside the "repressions" of the 1890s and adopt the "gay philosophy" of the "modern" young woman. "Don't Fuss, Mother, This Isn't So Fast."

One need only set this ad campaign against the worried reactions to the "flapper" earlier in the decade to see the depth and breadth of the changes being advocated. Consider "Step on it, Mother. This isn't the Polka." Anne Shaw Faulkner, head of the Music Department of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, expressed some of the initial outrage at the way the younger generation was dancing in an article in The Ladies' Home Journal of August 1921 called "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?":

Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.

There is always a revolutionary period of the breaking down of old conventions and customs which follows after every great war; and this rebellion against existing conditions is to be noticed in all life to-day. Unrest, the desire to break the shackles of old ideas and forms are abroad. So it is no wonder that young people should have become so imbued with this spirit that they should express it in every phase of their daily lives. The question is whether this tendency should be demonstrated in jazz — that expression of protest against law and order, that bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.

. . . .

Dancing to Mozart minuets, Strauss waltzes and Sousa two-steps certainly never led to the corset-check room, which now holds sway in hotels, clubs and dance halls. Never would one of the biggest fraternities of a great college then have thought it necessary to print on the cards of invitation to the "Junior Prom" that "a corset check room will be provided." Nor would the girl who wore corsets in those days have been dubbed "old ironsides" and left a disconsolate wallflower in a corner of the ballroom. Now boys and girls of good families brazenly frequent the lowest dives in order to learn new dance steps. Now many jazz dances have words accompanying them which would then never have been allowed to go through the mail. Such music has become an influence for evil.

Nor did one have to be an official of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to disapprove. Dorothy Parker, poet, short story writer, and wit, described "the Playful flapper." John Held's drawings became iconic.

The Playful flapper here we see, The fairest of the fair. She's not what Grandma used to be, —You might say, au contraire. Her girlish ways may make a stir, Her manners cause a scene, But there is no more harm in her Than in a submarine. She nightly knocks for many a goal The usual dancing men. Her speed is great, But her control Is something else again. All spotlights focus on her pranks. All tongues her prowess herald. For which she well may render thanks To God and Scott Fitzgerald. Her golden rule is plain enough — Just get them young and treat them rough.

Yet, by the end of the decade, advertisements treated the matter as settled. The flapper had become the "modern young woman," whose "gay philosophy" shared with Nietzsche's a repudiation of "traditional" or "old-fashioned" ideas as forms of slavery. One can hardly imagine that very many contemporary readers of "Modernizing Mother" caught the allusion to Nietzsche. A much higher percentage would have recognized in the use of "repression" a reference to Freud. But all were supposed to respond to the notion of a "sensible freedom." And all were to appreciate the daughter's essential goodness in sharing her freedom with her formerly repressed mother. There is, in the ad campaign, no explicit reference to sexuality. That had been at the heart of the controversy over the "flapper." But, look again at "Don't Fuss, Mother, This Isn't So Fast." In the parlance of the day, a girl who was "fast," broke the sexual rules. She not only flirted and petted. She went further. Mothers and daughters had for years argued about whether wearing skirts at the knee, rolling stockings below the knee, taking off your corset at a dance, smoking cigarettes, using rouge and lipstick made the daughter look "fast." How many of those daughters had said "Don't Fuss, Mother"? What they wanted to do wasn't "so fast."