Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (review)

If advertising was on trial in the 1930s, as Inger Stole maintains in her closely researched and vigorously argued study, so too was the consumer movement that opposed it. Corporate interests and their allies pursued advertising's critics and fought them on all fronts. Public relations specialists and lobbyists sought to discredit opponents of commercial persuasion and to shape consumer legislation to fit business needs. Stole contends that the battle lines of the Depression era were sharply drawn because conservatives realized that advertising's foes raised fundamental and irrefutable challenges to a capitalist system in crisis.

The book alternates chapters on the consumer movement itself with chapters that focus on struggles over New Deal consumer legislation. Of particular note is the Tugwell bill of the first Roosevelt administration and the measures that ended up as the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, and scathing accounts of industry's efforts to harm critics' reputations and silence their voices.

Maintaining that advertising had never legitimated itself as a valuable or necessary institution, Stole points out that trenchant critiques had forced some reforms during the Progressive Era and had even continued in the allegedly complacent 1920s. The Lynds' Middletown portrayed the malignant impact of commercial persuasion on Middle America. Stuart Chase and Frederick J. Schlink's 1927 best-seller, Your Money's Worth, indicated advertising as part of a wasteful and deceptive system of distribution. They founded the Consumers' Research in 1929, before the Depression took hold, but the economic crisis gave urgency to the problems they grappled with.

Advertising's critics turned to legislative proposals to control false and misleading advertisement. Beyond this, they hoped to curtail nonrational appeals of commercial persuasion and substitute government quality ratings. Debate over proposals in the bill named after Brain Truster, Rexford Guy Tugwell, lasted for almost 2 years but reformers came up short. In FDR's second term, battles for consumer protection got caught in bureaucratic crossfire between the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. In the end, the Wheeler-Lea Amendment and the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, both of 1938, were quite easy for the mainstream manufacturers and advertisers to live with. In both instances, the advertising industry counterposed self-regulation and legislative adjustments to the more sweeping reforms while the President stood on the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the consumer movement itself was dividing. Schlink's high-handed management at Consumers' Research angered employees who wanted to sharpen the attack on corporate marketing practices. Workers went on strike in 1935 and in the aftermath formed Consumers Union. The split opened the door for a new strategy of corporate resistance to reform, redbaiting, a practice that Schlink and his allies used against the more radical consumer activists.

Following in the path of scholars including Stuart Ewen, Roland Marchand, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, and Richard Tedlow, Stole outlines the panoply of public relations ploys the business community used to beat back the consumers' movement. These ranged from establishing what she calls front groups to seize the mantle of consumer protection to combating the hostile atmosphere business sensed on college campuses. Repeated accusations of communist ties suggest support for Ellen Schrecker's argument in Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998) that a prewar red scare foreshadowed the postwar anti-Communist crusade. By the end of the 30s, both sides had moved toward the center. Consumers Union and other activist groups muted their militance; advertising interests recognized that they could live with a moderate consumer movement.

Stole's recognition of this pattern of coexistence conflicts to some degree, with her assertions, that the 30s consumer movement put advertising on trial. Perhaps, there was less radical potential in the movement that met the eyes of anxious Depression-era corporate leaders and some of the would-be radicals themselves. One...