Producing Consumers

"Super highways—Super speed—People have—no time to read."

In a tribute to the Burma Shave company's innovative roadside advertising, the Saturday Evening Post captured a feeling held by advertisers and greeting card manufacturers alike, that greater mobility, both social and geographic, had increased the pace of life and diminished consumers' time to read.¹

At first glance, greeting cards and billboards seem to have little in common, but recent books by Barry Shank and Catherine Gudis work together remarkably well to deepen our understanding of consumer culture and its relationship to mobility. Makers of greeting cards and outdoor advertising created products that fostered quick, visual, and, above all, commercialized forms of communication. The stories of both are located within the larger context of the incorporation of America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Behind the richly decorated, sentimental greeting cards and the explosion of signs along the open road lay two modern industries that adopted the systems of mass production and calculated how they might better produce their market of consumers. Shank examines the growth of the greeting card industry and how modern business culture came to structure the language of emotion and affiliation in America between 1840 and 1960. Gudis charts how outdoor advertisers turned highways into buyways and produced a new generation of mobile consumers across the twentieth century.

Reflecting recent trends in the study of consumer culture, these authors dismantle the production/consumption binary and demonstrate the influence of the marketplace on the fabric of everyday life. Both authors acknowledge the permeable boundaries that distinguish consumers from producers, and explore the fluidity between private and public, personal and commercial expression. According to Susan Strasser, the history of consumption has too often been marred by the reliance on dichotomies that separate private from public, work from leisure, and consumption from production. In contrast, she argues that "the realm of consumption is a domain where dyads merge: an arena of both money and love, both buying and making."² Shank and Gudis skillfully negotiate the dyads of private and public, home and marketplace, and acknowledge the shared territory, the middle ground, between producers and consumers.

There is an undeniable materiality to the history of consumption. Shank and Gudis offer compelling models for merging the study of visual and material culture, and placing artifacts at the center of cultural and social change. If material culture historians worried that the field was losing its salience in the late 1990s, Shank and Gudis have demonstrated that material culture has become integrated into the study of consumption.³ Combining visual and material analysis, these authors move beyond using visual sources as illustrations of past lives. Instead they consider image-objects as agents in the dialogue between producers and consumers.⁴ For instance, Shank explores the efforts of Louis Prang, greeting card manufacturer, to bring art to the masses through chromolithography on cards. Gudis uses extensive work in art history and cultural studies to interrogate how billboard images displaced the natural views along the road and placed consumers in a fictive landscape of advertising. In their work on photographs as objects, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart argue for recognizing the materiality of images. They contend "an approach that acknowledges the centrality of materiality allows one to look at and use images as socially salient objects, as active and reciprocal rather than simply implications of authority."⁵ Greeting cards and billboards mediated, promoted, and constrained social and cultural relationships through both their visual language and their physical presence. Consumers used cards as a form of communication but also as "tokens" of affection that materialized social networks. Billboards, for their part, altered the American landscape. Gudis shows how the signs acted as "physical and conceptual" placeholders for future retail stores (153). Shank and Gudis explore the active and reciprocal roles greeting cards and billboards played in the growth of consumer culture...