Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (review)

In her serious yet entertaining study of outdoor advertising, Catherine Gudis has presented us with a wide-ranging study that resists easy classification as business history or as cultural studies. The book offers three interrelated studies of the production of outdoor advertising, the role of billboards in a culture of automobility, and the battles between reformers—the "scenic sisters"—and the "billboard barons." At the heart of her analysis is the commodification of both landscape and motion.

As Gudis shows, the business of outdoor advertising in twentieth-century America had an ancestry that it sometimes wanted to disavow. The billposters and sign painters who coated nineteenth-century cities with notices for circuses and cure-alls were a rowdy and undisciplined bunch. There was no market or other allocation procedure for posters; rivals' battles in Brooklyn turned into a "billposters' war" that sent protagonists to the penitentiary. Rationalization and reform followed the path of other forms of advertising around the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, outdoor advertising companies had established a potent trade association, sought to drive out the freelancers who put up their "snipes" without permission or attention to proper display formats, and had bolstered their public reputation with work for the Committee on Public Information during the Great War.

Automobile travel and tourism reshaped the outdoor advertising business and gave it new tools and broader objectives. Gudis is careful to point out the class and racial barriers to auto travel in the interwar years and includes some fascinating, if upsetting, information about the segregation and exclusion facing African Americans who traveled through the United States. For tens of millions, however, the billboard mediated or obscured the images of America viewed through the windshield. Outdoor advertising for gasoline or tires glamorized the experience of travel. Billboards commodified the landscape, converting highways into "corridors of consumption." The industry promoted an ideology of motion that found expression in many of the modernist visual techniques the billboards employed. In the 1920s, when, as Roland Marchand has shown, advertising professionals expressed low regard for the intelligence and reasoning of their audiences, outdoor advertisers, knowing they would have only fleeting access to their targets, pioneered simplified, nonverbal appeals. Speed determined the styles of billboard ads, and, in turn, billboards advanced an aesthetic of speed.

Gudis contends that outdoor advertising was a key part of a reconfiguration of American space. Automobiles and billboards decentralized markets, divorcing them from central places, and stimulated new ways to analyze traffic flows instead of residential patterns. The architecture of outdoor advertising incorporated three dimensional figures, lighting, and movement to emphasize the new ties between mobility and consumption.

In the final section of Buyways, Gudis finds that the long-running conflicts over outdoor advertising were both more and less than struggles between the partisans of natural beauty and the minions of mammon. Reformers in the tradition of the Progressive "city beautiful" movement in fact had quite a bit in common with their foes in the billboard business. Both sides shared an elitist view of the traveler, and both claimed a mission of education and uplift. The industry claimed to reconfigure and promote commerce. Reformers replied not that commerce was wrong but that billboards could not produce valid trade. Both thought that nature was something to be viewed through a car window. And both claimed to promote a constructive relationship between business and government through appropriate forms of regulation. Although women led the antibillboard movement and employed a gendered rhetoric in their propaganda, the industry could also find women to make the case for billboards and even to infiltrate the reformers' ranks to spy on them.

By the late twentieth century, issues concerning outdoor advertising had become more complex. Feminists fought billboards that stereotyped and demeaned women. African Americans protested campaigns promoting alcohol and tobacco products in their neighborhoods. Culture jammers and media activists sometimes subverted billboards with signs that critiqued...