1890-2017: Advertising and the Rise of Liberal Judgment

Abstract: I provide a brief overview of the period between 1890-2017 in the United States, focusing specifically on the rise of the advertising/public relations industry and its relation to the production of a uniquely liberal form of political judgment.

Between 1880 and 1900, American companies like Proctor and Gamble and Kodak began to experiment with a novel way to promote their unique products amidst an increasingly competitive corporate environment. Self-consciously propelled by a faith in the free market, P&G and Kodak executives used pitches in newspapers and sketched photos of their products (Ivory Soap, cameras) to directly market to new demographics of consumers; both companies employed the fledging marketing services of J. Walter Thompson, one of the nation’s first marketing firms established in1868. From this relation sprung the seeds of the first major corporate advertising campaigns, which, though still incipient by the first decade of the 20th century, had begun to build associations between free enterprise corporate entities and a burgeoning advertising industry.[1] In terms of the American electorate, the introduction of the Australian Ballot in1888, the requirement for literacy and the ripening automatization of nonpartisan news sources all colluded to structurally promote a new model of the voting democrat: the supposed “informed citizen,” competent in their capacity to judge candidates no longer on strict party lines, but on points of personal merit and policy platform.[2]

The rise of advertising followed in the wake of the decline of a mid-19th century American phenomenon, referred to as “genteelism.” The “genteel tradition,” as George Santayana would call it in 1911, was a worldview associated with a specific type of American intellectual: “The American Will inhabits the skyscraper, the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion.”[3] The bourgeois nature of American intellectualism had set it in contrast to growing strands of corporate, “manly” rhetoric; if Poe, Hawthorne Emerson and the Transcendentalists epitomized some of the early examples of genteel thought, it was Josiah Royce and William James that would come to inhabit the apotheosis of the “movement” itself, complicating some of the early distinctions (James in particular would push for a more “manly” and “aggressive” program of reform[4]) and setting the stage for actors like Teddy Roosevelt. In short, the genteel intellectuals would forge a cauldron of theory in which “Will was deeper than Intellect,”[5] ironically both engaging and setting themselves apart from some of the major discourses of “populism” that itself was a product of a conference held in St. Louis in 1892.[6]

Amidst the trajectory of the genteel reformers, and from P&G and Kodak’s early—and profitable—attempts at product advertising, came the political adaptation of similar theories and techniques. But where the birth of advertising in the corporate/economic sphere came by way of instrumentalizing a new means of persuading the public, its offspring in the political sphere adopted a different modus vivendi. It, too, sought to persuade the public, but to do so through a Progressivist platform that emphasized publicity as a democratically valuable tool.[7] Early 1900 Progressive reformers, employing some of the first muckraking and investigative journalistic practices, used publicity to uncover the corruption of public officials, and saw their efforts as a “bringing to light” of political indiscretions committed in the dark.[8] In an era still dominated by partisan-affiliated newspapers, the emergence of a reformist, independent publication network also brought with it the prototype standards of independent and politically-disassociated career journalism, where the principle objective of the journalistic craft is to present to the public the full range of “facts” regarding salient issues, to be judged and dealt with accordingly.

But the promise of objectively-driven publicity soon succumbed to a new brand of spectacle politics, first developed by the public and charisma-driven performances of Williams Jennings Bryant and Eugene Debs and brought to its first engagement with the media by Teddy Roosevelt and his entourage of communications advisors, such as Gifford Pinchot.[9] It is at this juncture, with the rise of an activist executive, that the pure publicity envisioned by the Progressive reformers was leveraged into the basis of a new method of political campaigning. As Adam Sheingate notes, “Whereas the ideal of publicity promised the discovery of objective truth, the practice of a publicity campaign conveyed a subjective rendering of the political world.”[10] By the advent of Wilson and WWI, political publicity had departed from its reformist origins and migrated closer to the techniques of its corporate lineage; now, as concerns over the use of propaganda and the potential manipulation of the democratic public trailed the war, a new skepticism toward advertising and the still-fledging public relations industry emerged, fueled in part by the popular critiques of public judgment introduced by figures like Walter Lippmann in his Public Opinion (1922), Harold Lasswell in his Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), and Peter Odegard in his The American Public Mind (1930).

To combat this latent suspicion and to reclaim authority in the eyes of the public, 1920s public relations and advertising executives pursued a new method of legitimation, calling on the authorizing functions of the university and academic system to justify its existence and extend its influence. That is, the rise of behavioral sciences in the early 1900s ran parallel to the advertising industry’s research into new polling techniques, consumer interface programs, and accumulation of demographic consumption data. Ad executives like Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee built close relations to the social and behavioral science communities of major universities, supplying statistical data and reaping potential persuasive techniques informed by cutting-edge social research. The manner by which Robert La Follette instrumentalized a burgeoning political “brain trust” viz. government ties to the University of Wisconsin, and the further appropriation of these federal-academic links by Charles McCarthy and the creation of Legislative Reference Service, opened the space for political actors and their growing entourage of consultants and public relations personnel to take advantage of a wellspring of expert knowledge.[11] Not only this, but it was through the interrelation of advertising and academia in this era that the first classes offering studies in marketing sciences germinated in the mid 20s.[12] By the end of the 1920s and the collapse of the American economy, political publicity had fully merged with its advertising counterpart, with both business and politics benefiting from a robust “business of politics” that instrumentalized publicity and therefore transformed it, irretrievably, into a form of democratized propaganda—democratized in its ever-persistent effort to individualize its offered products/services and to direct consumer energy toward those products/services by means of persuasion.

Having successfully saved itself from public scrutiny in the 1920s, a new role was institutionalized for the propaganda industry—the iron triangle which formed between campaign politics, the media, and special interests mediated by public relations firms—in FDR’s New Deal and subsequent War programs. Although Wilson had set up the Committee on Public Information to disseminate propaganda to the American public during WWI, this early entanglement of the executive and the advertising industry was little compared to the policy initiatives and heavy-planning programs envisioned by Tugwell and Roosevelt—what Frank Kent, opponent of Roosevelt’s programs, referred to as an “octopus of political propaganda” that “sold” its message to a gullible public.[13] The collapse of La Follette’s idealized government-academic relation program, and the rise of figures such as Emanuel Philipp, meant that by 1914 a split was occurring once again between politicians and their university counterparts.[14] Technological innovations, such as the radio, offered radically new horizons for political and entrepreneurial opportunists to exploit, and PR firms stabilized their influence through the increasing image of an autonomous professional class that bridged the disconnect between the logics of consumption in the economic sphere and the patterns of election in the political. It is no coincidence that, by 1948 and the Supreme Court decision of Shelley v. Kraemer, a new form of “legal realism,” born to combat the traditional, precedential law of the 19th century, had reached its zenith[15]; this legal reasoning took at as its lodestar a form of judicial “will” that would trump a previous reliance on rules-driven legal analysis. And, while even by 1938 anti-legalists like James Landis saw the need for law’s relation to the growing administrative, bureaucratic state to cede authority to expert-knowledge outside the courts themselves, opponents like Roscoe Pound carved out a legalist perspective that would come to set the agenda for the next generation of jurists and legal scholars.[16]

America’s encounter with the fascism of WWII signaled both the end of progressivism and a version of republican “value politics,” and provided a counterweight to assert a national identity against the imagined image of fascist and totalitarian regimes. Postwar American politics were particularly determined by its encounter with soviet totalitarianism and the inception of the Cold War, inaugurating the juridical concept of “procedural neutrality” that came to define a new valence of the liberal agent—documented and criticized by such theorists as Michael Sandel.[17] Along with the public’s skepticism toward state authority, a new mode of defining the democratic agent emerged in an effort to distance liberal autonomy from totalitarian subjectivity: where the totalitarian subject held dogmatic faith in absolute political truths, the liberal image came to embody an autonomous agent capable of making judgments regarding the nature of competing and at times irresolvable truths—resistant to the possibility of a “closure” of the facts and committed to a regime of open/neutral value pluralism.[18] Behind this agent were a renewed public faith in the mechanisms of free enterprise, the promise of a material consumer culture and a libertarian swing in the academic literature of the early 1950s.[19]

Further, it was between the mid-40s and early 50s that a paradigm shift from behavioral to cognitive sciences occurred in the academic world. As Edward Purcell notes, “The historical result of the intellectual conflict of the thirties resided principally neither in the confused foreign policy debates at the end of that decade nor in the war fought at the beginning of the next. Instead it lay in the conceptual assumptions that came to pervade American thought in general and the social sciences in particular during the twenty-year period after the war.”[20] While theories of social action and stimulated activity were replaced by more rigorous studies of the brain and processes of the neurological system, a new focus on the way people thought developed in two directions: first, under the influence of the natural and social sciences and the war effort these had become an extension of, cognitive science set the stage for the application of the scientific method into the realms of psychiatry, neurology and cognitive physiology[21]; second, under the influence of an incredibly popular resurgence of Freud’s theory of the subconscious among Madison Avenue’s most influential advertising and PR firms. As Lawrence Samuel argues, “If research in the 1930s and 1940s thus focused on the market—how consumers were behaving—more research in the 1950s and 1960s was dedicated to why they behaved in such a way.”[22]

The new focus and integration of the social and psychological sciences, married to a constructed image of liberal “human nature” antithetical to its totalitarian negative,[23] ended the debates surrounding a “general” vs. “liberal” academic curriculum for America’s public schools that had begun in the 1920s. By the end of WWII, a group of social scientists, political consultants and public educators convened at Harvard between 1943-1945 to develop the modern liberal educational curriculum. Displacing alternative proposals that offered set courses with set content to every American student, the envisioned system would promote liberal values of openness, critical judgment and value pluralism through set courses with open content bases.[24] As Jamie Cohen-Cole has observed, the discourse determining the fate of education at this juncture held as its conviction that “the mentality to be molded was not based on knowledge but on intellectual skills. The report envisioned Americans unified through the shared skills of effective thinking, judgment, communication, and the ability to discriminate among values.” Central to this new method of liberal education was the attempt to manufacture the conditions from which an agent who possessed the capacity “to judge specialist competence from a nonspecialist perspective” would be produced.[25]      Alongside the newly-minted educational standard was a similar standardization in popular culture, which came by way of the levelling out of expert knowledge and its sacrifice at the altar of a “common sense” now informed by basic education.

But while the promise of liberal education, developed in the shadow of totalitarianism, offered a compellingly optimistic vision of the democratic future, the inundation of the public sphere with new techniques of “subliminal advertising” and “branding” had made corporate advertising virtually ubiquitous, and the modern political campaign virtually continuous. Alongside this growth in advertising came a decline in the influence of academics on government officials, culminating in the attacks on Adlai Stevenson and his defeat in 1952.[26] The following year witnessed the publication of a scientific study from Sloan-Kettering researchers that implicated the chemical ingredients in cigarettes as carcinogenic. The immediate response from the cigarette industry, employing as it did a host of publically-recognized scientists who had previously worked on the Manhattan Project and who openly defended cigarettes, inaugurated a public relations battle wherein science and the scientific establishment, which had prided itself on its political neutrality following both world wars, was arraigned as yet another extension of partisan interest.[27]  The further fragmentation of value pluralism and the “undoing of the American consensus” came to a point with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 presidential election[28]; the ensuing victory of Johnson and the escalation of the Vietnam War came along with a fully mobilized PR branch of government, with expert consultants now inhabiting positions of presidential council. At the zenith of advertising’s relation to the political, and with the unprecedented breakdown of the authority of the scientific and the advent of value pluralism, the era of the “total lie” finally came to fruition, instigating the “crisis of authenticity” that Arendt so shrewdly analyzed, and which paved the way for the fractured identity politics and corporate expansions of the 80s and 90s.[29]

This expansion was in part catalyzed by the development of mass-media outlets geared toward fomenting opinion-based argument within the public sphere. By the mid-80s, after the fall of such polarizing figures as George Wallace, evolved forms of popular discourse emerged, appropriated by neoconservatives in the guise of Raeganism and leftist politics alike. With the rise of privately-funded organizations like Fox News, a novel principle surfaced in media politics: that “conflict is intrinsically more interesting than consensus”[30] came to define the late-20th century era of American public discourse. Figures like Ross Perot, in his protest campaigns of 1992 and 1996, took advantage on this principle to launch invectives against the Washingtonian “establishment”—a practice that stretched back more than a century, but now disseminated with the power of mass-scale media outlets willing to proliferate messages of anti-establishment campaigns; that Washington was “under the grip of an army of lobbyists” assumed both the mainstay of political lobbying and the importance of challenging those “swamp” politics.[31] The response from the left, beginning in the 1980s, attempted to appropriate a similar populist discourse pioneered by the anti-war “peacers” of the 1960s, but was unable to provide the same organizational offerings. Despite the electoral success of Bill Clinton in the mid-90s, which was largely a matter of the personal charisma of the candidate, “The Democrats’ turn to populism…remained a strategy hatched by candidates and their consultants who sought an honorable and efficacious way to abandon the liberal label. It did respond to mass emotions but was not connected in any organic way to the ‘working men and women’ whose sentiments candidates ritually invoked….Like the copy-writers for Hewlett-Packard and Banana Republic, Democratic campaigners were trying to pitch populism to a broad segment of the national market.”[32]

By the turn of the millennium, the popular discourses adopted by both right and left assumed a distinctly antinomean tone: the left in its commercially-coopted, sellable version of identity politics” and the right in its aggressive stance toward federal edicts and traditional Washington politics. By 2011, after Obama’s considered “failure” to regulate Wall Street and address the grievances of the self-titled “99%,” the Occupy Movement tried once more to adopt a popularly-based discourse of inclusive anti-establishmentarianism, but failed to organize around systematic leadership and was ultimately undone, in part, by its inability to effectively command instrumental forms of public relations.[33] The rise of social networking, which initially helped to form and inaugurate the movement, ultimately proved an unwieldly tool of sustainable political engagement; rather than lending itself conclusively to the policies of the alt-left, it, too, would assume the role of a neutral device fully capable of undoing and challenging leftist activism from a distinctly conservative angle. The same interfaces which would bring protestors to camp in Zuccotti Park would eventually carry and spread the “fake news” articles which marshalled the alt-right populism of Donald Trump.

The period of 1890 to 2017 is most relevant to our analysis of the judging liberal agent insofar as the period witnessed: 1. the birth of modern publicity and its transformation into propaganda alongside a) the growth of 20th century social science, and b) the development of a robust, independent, media-driven public relations and ad industry; 2. America’s encounter with totalitarianism, and the solidification of neutral value politics and free market economics that followed; 3. the displacement of faith in governmental “truth-telling,” matched with the politicization of scientific authority, by the Vietnam era; and 4. the all-out commercialization, through internet culture and social media, of this rejection of epistemic and government-based authority by the mid-90s and beyond. It is against this historical backdrop that I wish to investigate further this idea of a uniquely liberal, uniquely 20th-century version of “judgment.”

[1] See Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion, pp. 9-14. Spring, Dawn. Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941-1961. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2011.

[2] See Michael Schudson, “The Social Construction of the ‘Informed Citizen’, p. 33. Schudson, Michael. “The Social Construction of the ‘Informed Citizen’. In The Good Society, Vol. 9, No.1 (1999); pp. 30-35

[3] George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, p. 4

[4] See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 190-191

[5] George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, p. 9

[6] See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, p. 27

[7] See David Greenberg, Republic of Spin, p. 7. Greenberg, David. Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency. New York, NY: Norton, 2016.

[8] See Adam Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics, p.

[9] For a discussion of Bryant, see Richard Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic Convention. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. For a discussion of Eugene Debs, see ch. 8 in Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Indianapolis, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. For a discussion of Roosevelt’s relation to Pinchot, see Adam Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics, p. 21-23

[10] See Adam Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics, p. 13

[11] See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 198-200

[12] See Adam Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics, p. 40

[13] See Frank Kent, “Washington’s Ballyhoo Brigade,” in American Magazine, Sept. 1937, p. 61.

[14] See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, p. 203

[15] See Morton Horowitz, the Transformation of American Law, p. 207

[16] See Morton Horowitz, the Transformation of American Law, pp. 213-225

[17] See Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent

[18] See Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, pp. 2-4. Cohen-Cole, Jamie. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

[19] See David Cieply, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism, pp. 10-17. Cieply, David. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

[20] Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, p. xi

[21] See Thedore Porter, “Positioning Social Sciences in Cold War America,” p. xii. In Solovey, Mark, and Hamilton Cravens, Eds. Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2012.

[22] See Lawrence Samuel, Freud on Madison Avenue, p. 13. Samuel, Lawrence. Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

[23] For a discussion on the debates of human nature and how they impacted/were impacted by the social sciences in the Cold War era, see ch. 1, 8 in Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

[24] See Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, p.16

[25] See Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, p. 22, 24

[26] See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 221-224

[27] See Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, pp. 14-22

[28] For a relevant discussion of this, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York, NY: Nation Books, 2009; for a more theoretical analysis, see the first three essays in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays.

[29] See, for a discussion of the fallout of this political reality, Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012.

[30] Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room, p. xvi

[31] See John Judis, The Populist Explosion, p. 48

[32] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, p. 279

[33] See John Judis, The Populist Explosion, pp. 59-61