Advertising the American dream : making way for modernity, 1920-1940

Book Description: /
"It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising ihe American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses.
As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertisers may only have dimly perceived the profound transformations America was experiencing. However, the advertising they created is a wonderfully graphic record of the underlying assumptions and changing values in American culture. With extensive reference to the popular media — radio broadcasts, confession magazines, and tabloid newspapers — Professor Marchand describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic."
Contents: /
1. Apostles of modernity -- Picking up the tempo -- Practical heroics and versatility -- Erasing the Barnum image -- The advertisement becomes "modern" -- Side by side with the consumer -- Three legends in the making -- Selling satisfactions -- /
2. Men of the people : the new professionals -- Two routes to professionalism -- Ambassadors of the consumer -- Atypical men, and women -- The agency subculture : courtiers and creators -- Competition, craftsmanship, and cynicism -- Benign deceptions -- /
3. Keeping the audience in focus -- Keys to the consumer mind : confessions and tabloids -- The matinee crowd -- The limits of consumer citizenship -- Sizing up the constituency : the feminine masses -- "Oh, what do the simple folk like?" -- "Getting to know them" -- In search of the typical consumer -- Feedback from secondary audiences -- Folk wisdom, uplift, and the irresponsible public -- /
4. Abandoning the great genteel hope : from sponsored radio to the funny papers -- Sponsorship only : radio as cultural uplift -- Super-advertising and the specter of saturation -- Interweaving the commercial -- Crooners and commercials : from intrusion to intimacy -- Entertainment triumphs : the descent into the funny papers -- /
5. The consumption ethic : strategies of art and style -- Advertising and the color explosion -- Uplifted tastes and borrowed atmospheres -- The mystique of the ensemble -- Modern art and advertising dynamics -- Photography as sincerity -- Art and the consumption ethic -- Progressive obsolescence -- The gospel of the full cereal bowl -- /
6. Advertisements as social tableaux -- The concept of a social tableau -- Modern woman as businesswoman : "the little woman, G.P.A." -- Leisure, for what? -- Grotesque moderne -- Anticipations of superwoman : finessing the contradictions of modernity -- The businessman as generic man -- Supporting players -- Social class in advertising tableaux -- Modern maids and atavistic ambitions -- /
7. The great parables -- The parable of the first impression -- The parable of the democracy of goods -- The parable of civilization redeemed -- The parable of the captivated child -- Guideposts to a modern "logic of living" -- /
8. Visual cliches : fantasies and icons -- Fantasies of domain : the office window and the family circle -- Fantasies of dimension : the future and the eternal village -- Visual cliches as icons -- /
9. Advertising in overalls : parables and visual cliches of the depression -- Retrenchment and morale boosting -- The depression as sales argument : some parables revisited -- Parables of the depression : unraised hands and skinny kids -- Depression advertising as a shift in style -- Upstart agencies with that depression touch -- Ballyhoo, organized consumers, and the New Deal -- Medicine man tactics and self-esteem -- Success, advertising men, and the courage quotient -- Economic sunbeams : reassurance and inspiration -- Clenched fists -- /
10. The therapeutics of advertising -- Urbanity and complexity : the problem of scale -- Proliferating choices and the vacuum of advice -- Advertising advice and added values -- Toward a new incompetence -- The "re- personalization" of American life -- Finessing the complexities of scale
aAdvertisingzUnited StatesxHistory