Advertising Before the Admen: From Product to Consumer

As the ever increasing addition of new titles on the scholar’s bookshelf shows, these two past decades have witnessed a blossoming of historical research on advertising. Such studies, which deal mostly with the coming of age of the phenomenon from the turn-of-the-century onwards, fall within two main categories, placed at the intersection between business and cultural history. One focuses on advertising agencies as a business enterprise, part of a social, economic, and cultural matrix comprising changing marketing strategies on the part of continuous-process industries, the evolution of the media’s apparatus, and the transformation of the distribution system. A second analytical dimension, that has been enriched of late by groundbreaking work from a gender perspective, deals with the subculture of admen, their complex relations to advertisers, and their connections with the larger cultural thrusts of their times. On this latter point, recently there has appeared an especially ambitious and provocative effort concerning the place of advertising within American and Western culture and the conflicting streams of Protestant tradition shaping such a culture over the past two centuries. ¹ However, even this broader approach shares a tendency with the rest of the literature, namely it does not fully engage the question of what advertising was like before the age of professional admen. Grappling successfully with this issue is one major contribution provided by Pamela Walker Laird’s important book. It traces the process of increasing professionalization of advertising between 1860 and 1920 in a narrative that inventively weaves together discourse and context by keeping constantly its focus on the actual practice of designing, producing, and distributing ads. In doing so Laird bridges the two aforementioned streams of research as she casts on the institutional evolution of the profession the light stemming from a sophisticated cultural analysis and conversely grounds the larger questions concerning the search for social legitimacy into a most concrete web of actors, interests, and investments.

The book is the fruit of an extremely thorough inquiry carried out through many collections including not only the notorious J. Walter Thompson Company Archives already explored by other scholars, but also the much less frequented, at least for this type of study, pictorial and trade collections housed at the Hagley Museum and Library, the Smithsonian, and the Western Reserve Historical Society. As the author explains at the outset, the original thrust for the research came from her early, exploratory perusal of nineteenth-century advertising images filling large posters and small trade cards. These images, comprising mostly the products to be advertised and such industrial scenes as “factories and locomotives . . . the mustached faces of business owners . . . the advertising manufacturers’ mansions,” clashed with Laird’s experience of more recent advertising content. Moreover, adds the author, “nowhere could I find why, if those messages were so important to nineteenth-century manufacturers, did they all but vanish by the 1910s. Why are industrial images so rare now?” (p. xii).

In order to answer this question, Laird sets off on a wide-ranging trip whose ends are well captured by the two illustrations adorning the front and back jackets of the book. At one end, there is one picture from the mid-1880s, promoting a typical herbal remedy by showing an anatomical image in a medicine bottle with a detailed description of which of the several herbs cured ailments of specific organs. Superimposed on this image is the portrait of the manufacturer, along with his business and residential structures. At the other end of this journey lies a soap ad from the 1910s conjuring up an intimate romantic scene between two lovers under the evocative heading “A Skin You Love To Touch.” Between the two images unfolds the far from linear path that Laird reconstructs by weaving her narrative around the related themes of changing marketing problems and marketers’ perception of their role; these two themes, in turn, are tied together by the rhetoric of progress. In fact...