Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing 1950–1990 (review)

In 1987, Strom Thurmond, the staunchly conservative senator from South Carolina, gave a highly publicized speech in favor of a federal ban on liquor advertising. Surrounded by enlargements of Anheuser Busch beer ads featuring the canine character "Spuds MacKenzie," Thurmond explained why his fervent belief in free market principles had been tempered by concerns about alcohol's deleterious effect on the young. "I am fully cognizant of the free speech rights of the alcohol beverage industry," he said, "but what is the cost to society of this freedom to advocate unlawful teenage drinking?" (p. 5).

In this very fine first book, Pamela E. Pennock puts the so-called new temperance movement of which Strom Thurmond was a part in historical context. Advertising Sin and Sickness chronicles how three generations of activists have tried to get advertising bans on "the two most advertised licit drugs" in America, namely alcohol and tobacco (p. 8). After an overview of Prohibition and its legacies, she begins with an account of a series of congressional hearings held between 1947 and 1958 on the subject of alcohol advertising bans. Having failed to stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol, church-based temperance groups now returned to Washington, D.C., hoping to get government restrictions on its marketing, but they had little success. As Pennock shows, social drinking gained widespread acceptance in the prosperous 1950s, and liquor, beer, and wine makers shrewdly used voluntary advertising codes and public relations campaigns to position their products as a "normal and benign" part of American life (p. 37).

Less than a decade later, a secular coalition of public health experts came before Congress seeking limits on cigarette advertising. Using arguments couched in epidemiology rather than morality, they had greater success, getting Congress to approve first warning labels on cigarette packages, in 1965, and then a ban on television and radio advertising, in 1969. To be sure, many antitobacco advocates viewed both warning labels and media bans as fig-leaf measures that allowed manufacturers to continue selling a life-threatening product. But antialcohol advocates envied these accomplishments, and borrowing from the antitobacco movement's methods, they tried again in the 1980s to get advertising bans on alcohol. Emphasizing health risks rather than moral issues, they achieved a small victory in the form of the 1988 law requiring a warning label on alcohol packaging but failed to get broadcast bans similar to those imposed on tobacco advertising.

As Pennock shows, marketing-control movements have had limited results due both to industry resistance and political ambivalence toward their ends. With alcohol as well as tobacco, temperance advocates have had their greatest success by focusing on the harms presented to underage consumers. Although they are reluctant to deprive adult consumers of their "right" to drink and smoke, politicians have been more willing to enact restrictions on advertising to children and youth. Likewise, manufacturers have learned the public relations cost of appearing to court young consumers too directly. The Spuds MacKenzie story is a case in point. Although the new temperance advocates failed to get their advertising ban, they did put Anheuser Busch on the defensive about the Spuds MacKenzie campaign, which was dropped after 1992.

By comparing several generations of policy debate centered on advertising bans, Pennock illuminates three very important historical problems. First, she tracks the evolution from the old to the new temperance movements, showing how nineteenth-century concerns with morality were gradually displaced by the "rise of secular moralities that valued physical and psychological health" (p. 6). Second, she analyzes the ideological work required to create an exception to the right to free commercial speech. Marketing-control movements obtained what traction they did by appealing to growing concerns about mass consumer culture in general and its impact on the young in particular.

Finally, by comparing...