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seven James at the Helm of US Advertising James O’Shaughnessy came to play a major role in the development of modern US advertising. As a youth in Missouri, he had turned his hand to promoting his father’s footwear business by writing advertisements for it. As managing editor of a newspaper in St. Joseph, Missouri, he subsequently saw at close quarters the relationship between advertising and journalism. The latter depended on the former in almost every case to keep the presses rolling. Advertising agencies in the modern sense were then only beginning to emerge in their own right as a sector of the media economy, and the line between journalism and copywriting was a fluid one. Settled in Chicago as a journalist, James O’Shaughnessy crossed that line and founded his own agency. He embarked on a journey that was to see him acknowledged as a leading force in the sector, particularly in his capacity as chief executive of the new American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA or the 4A’s). It was later said of James O’Shaughnessy, “He was conducting his own advertising agency in Chicago when along came the movement for organizingandharmonizingtheadvertisinginterests .Thiswasjustthemeatfor theeasy-goingbutthorough,smiling,Irish-Missourianwhotalksandthinks advertising in plain, simple and understandable language as a business. ‘Jim’ set out to sell confidence in advertising agencies.”1 When he took up his job at the helm of the 4A’s, he took charge of an organization that was helping to transform the image and behavior of admen. If advertising was publicly scorned as a professional activity in the years leading up to his appointment, it was being publicly praised by US presidents by the time that he quit the association. James at the Helm of US Advertising 117 Advertising Manager O’Shaughnessy’s first significant foray into advertising after leaving St. Joseph and subsequently parting company with Pawnee Bill, for whose wild west show he had undertaken promotional work in Europe, was within the Hearst group of newspapers. Referring to him in 1924, the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World recalled that he had worked as a journalist in Chicago on the Journal, Tribune, News, Times-Herald, Chronicle, and American but that he also became advertising manager of the Chicago Examiner.2 Both the American and the Examiner were owned by Hearst, whose arrival in Illinois shook the Chicago Tribune. Medill McCormick, its assistant editor in chief and part owner who later became a US senator fromIllinois,“decidedthattheTribune couldnolongerdisdainadvertising solicitors, as it had done,” and he reorganized its business and advertising departments. Sole “solicitors” had sold space directly for newspapers, as did Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s fictional Dubliner in Ulysses, and their solitary function was already being superseded by the modern full-service advertising agency.3 E. W. Scripps attempted to buck the advertising beast by running a newspaper that did not depend on advertisements. His tabloid-size Day Book, launched in Chicago in 1911, was ultimately unsuccessful. This polemical newspaper catered to the working person but was unable to sustain its critique on the basis of subscriptions alone and, for this and other reasons, closed down during World War I.4 James O’Shaughnessy had no such fundamental objections to the role of advertising. On the contrary, and perhaps defensively in response to criticism from cultural, political, and religious sources, he was to assert its virtues as a force for economic and social good. A biographical note that he furnished to the Pathfinder in 1931 highlights his work after 1900 as “political editor and writer on business subjects.” It also states that between his acting as advertising manager for a Chicago newspaper and becoming an advertising agent himself, James O’Shaughnessy workedastheadvertisingmanagerfor“oneoftheminormagazines,” but does not identify this title.5 118 An Irish-American Odyssey Marriage and Children During the early years of the twentieth century James became president of theWesternCatholicWriters’Guild.6 Hishonoraryofficeallowedhimgive expressiontohisfaithinapracticalandvocationalway.Atthesametimehe pursued more personal interests. If while in Missouri he had been publicly humiliated as a young man contemplating marriage, as Albert Johnson claimed, in Chicago he found a way to tie the knot. In 1907, when he was forty-two years old, James O’Shaughnessy married a woman considerably younger. This was Mary Hynes “of the Hynes family of Galway,” born to an Irish immigrant father in St. Louis in 1884. The couple intended to have children. Indeed, as Catholics, they were expected if not morally required todoso.7 PerhapspartlybecauseofthiscommitmentJamesdecidedtotake hiscareerinamorelucrativedirection.Itledtohisfoundinghisownadvertising agency.8 A growth in...

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