Public Sites Versus Public Sights: The Progressive Response to Outdoor Advertising and the Commercialization of Public Space

This essay examines the controversy over outdoor advertising for what it reveals about Progressive Era conceptions of public space and public culture. Beginning in the 1890s, advertisers began to widely exploit urban public space as a marketing medium. By the turn of the century, outdoor advertising had became a lightning rod for debates over the public value of an emergent mass culture and the subject of significant reform efforts. While most historical accounts of reformers' response to consumer culture emphasize the conflict between genteel and commercial cultural values, this essay focuses instead on their similarities—similarities that ultimately led at least some reformers to accept outdoor advertising as a mode of mass communication superior to genteel forms. Identifying the legitimization of mass culture as a precipitate of both civic and business ideology is one of this essay's most significant insights. While important differences distinguished civic and business conceptions of the public, their mutual promotion of the integrative powers of mass communication and consumption cultivated a common ground where consumerism flourished.