The Adman's Dilemma: From Barnum to Trump by Paul Rutherford (review)

Paul Rutherford calls his The Adman's Dilemma a "cultural biography" of the adman in recent American history. By its ending, this description will have changed to a "moral biography" of a certain kind of "modern sinner." The distinction is significant, for The Adman's Dilemma is overall a story of how culture accounts for the omnipresence of dishonesty, deceit, and equivocation in American industry. The account that keeps resurfacing is that of a harsh moral judgment and a violation of the public trust. Across six chapters, plus two essays each of prefatory and concluding material, The Adman's Dilemma examines how the adman has been critiqued or defended in an impressive assortment of biographies, novels, non-fiction, journalism, film, and television.

What is the adman's dilemma? It is a "moral condition produced by the practices of deception," in which the better one performs one's job, the more one is compelled to bend the truth. It is a dilemma, not just an occupational problem, because of truth's (mostly) unambiguous social value and because of how much personal fulfillment tends to be tied to one's work. In short, what should elevate the soul winds up corrupting it. If that treatment of work sounds idealistic – or just hokey – the book's early chapter on the circus showman P.T. Barnum makes a compelling case for a specifically American mixture of idealism and sensationalism, a mode of self-fashioning through spectacle. We learn that The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855) was marketed as something between an autobiography and a how-to guide for enterprising businessmen. In reality, it was a kind of narrative circus, a "collection of exotic and amusing exhibits," of digressions and anecdotes, not always about Barnum's own past. The strangeness of the autobiography, its resemblance less to a life than to Barnum's own hoaxes and schemes, illustrates how the market structures the way Barnum narrates his own life.

Rutherford's cultural biography is essentially a story of these market forces and the corresponding futility of the ad maker's struggle for self-definition. Is he a cog in a machine, a social pariah, or a misunderstood genius? He could be all three. He could also be many other things. Because the "adman's dilemma" means something between an occupational hazard and a synonym for a distinctly modern form of alienation, it is sometimes difficult to understand why our focus is restricted to advertising. Early discussions of the huckster and the trickster figure aim to broaden the category. But when commodity production is the only game in town, the players begin to look alike. We learn about the confidence man in Herman Melville's so-named novel, yet midcentury US fiction is full of characters struggling with a version of the dilemma, which they recognize, more capaciously, as a feature constitutive of empire, of modernity, and of capitalism. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), first published in the same year as Barnum's autobiography, celebrates contradiction rather than fretting over it, while also treating contradiction as a fundamental component of American life. (As for confidences, is not "Call me Ishmael" the loudest stage whisper in American literature?)

This definitional struggle is not a problem per se. But insofar as the moral struggle with deception is a practical necessity for those caught up in a capitalist system – Rutherford includes Daniel Boorstin's advice that American capitalism cannot be confronted by confronting its villains – sometimes the morality angle feels beside the point. At the same time, the book undoubtedly achieves something in its attentiveness to such questions over the past century and a half. It is bemusing to think that we are still, in the Trump years, thinking in and with the same concepts as the mid-nineteenth century. Recognizing this stagnation is important in itself.

The book's most interesting sections, accordingly, focus on an era when the "regime of truth" breaks down and...