How Life’s WWII Patriotism Helped Reclaim Advertising’s Credibility

As any researcher of magazine text likely knows, content analyses can offer valuable insights to past and present cultural values. And as any researcher of magazine text also likely knows, this methodological approach can produce discussions and conclusions that are questionable at best. However, Monica Brasted’s most recent study about the intersection of media, advertising, and consumer culture is a shining example of what the most thorough and, some might argue, exhaustive approach can yield.

The author deftly expands her research oeuvre by examining how wartime advertisements during World War II recast traditional values to consumer goods in an effort to unify the nation via consumer culture. This approach builds on Brasted’s previous study of patriotic advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post during World War I, which found the reframing of traditional values—specifically service, thrift, and utility—through the rhetoric of consumption. In that case, Brasted suggested that advertisements emphasizing a company’s support of the war effort, concluding that ads promoting consumer goods utilized the rhetoric of thrift, and advertisements featuring products useful to soldiers and the armed service followed the rhetoric of utility.

This preface is necessary to understand Brasted’s current study of magazine advertisements. Building on her earlier work, Brasted’s first chapter provides a necessary historical context explaining the problematic socioeconomics of American society during the Great Depression that weakened advertising’s credibility. As a response to the lagging public opinion, the advertising industry set about recasting itself as a friend to patriotism and the national war effort, and it established the War Advertising Council in 1943. The organization worked directly with the Office of War Information to coordinate “wartime themes into advertising content” (10). This newfound connection with government legitimacy offered the advertising industry ample opportunities to align its consumer products with the traditional American value of patriotism.

Brasted’s choice to use Life magazine in her grounded theory approach is superb, given Life’s enormous reach as a cultural authority (vis-à-vis photography and text) and the well-documented patriotic zeal of the magazine’s owner Henry Luce. The author was able to secure 146 hard copy issues from 1942 to 1946 for a systematic analysis of over 5,400 full-page ads. As in her previous study, Brasted coded the ads for the cultural values of service, thrift, utility, and other. To develop the necessary descriptions, she considered framing devices used in the ads such as metaphors, exemplars, catchphrases, visual images, and depictions. Importantly, Brasted noted the inevitability of interpretive assumptions in her work, but she offered that her goal was “to present plausible interpretations of the data” (18). The resulting two-hundred-plus study involves a year-by-year (1942–45) analysis of the dominant themes in the advertisements corresponding to cultural values and includes copious and detailed examples (241–42).

The book seems to target scholars interested in journalism history, political communication, and consumer culture. Brasted’s tidy analysis offers cross-disciplinary appeal, both in subject and methodology, and fits snugly in the coterie of similar scholarly accomplishments referenced in the book’s bibliography.