Flapper (29 page)

P
ERSUADING THE AVERAGE
woman to spend absurd sums of money and countless hours to achieve an impossible ideal was no small task. But American advertisers approached it with gusto. And they had both Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson to thank (at least indirectly) for sophisticated new methods of influencing consumer behavior—methods that would go a long way toward making flapper fashion and flapper accessories
necessary
possessions for the discerning New American Woman.

Some of those methods had emerged in the wake of World War I. When President Woodrow Wilson resolved in 1917 that the United States should enter the great conflict then engulfing Europe in a hailstorm of bullets and blood, his closest advisers understood that it would be a tough sell to the American public. Only months before, Wilson had been reelected by the narrowest of margins on the simple platform: “He kept us out of war.”

Shortly after calling the nation to arms, the president considered a proposal by Arthur Bullard, a prominent progressive who had been his student at Princeton, where Wilson taught history before making a second career out of elective politics. Bullard urged the president to “electrify public opinion” in favor of the war by forming an official publicity office. The idea was quickly seconded by Walter Lippmann, the erstwhile progressive writer and influential co-founder of
The New Republic.
¹

Lippmann was deeply interested in a growing field of social psychology that concerned itself with mass opinion and politics. His ideas owed a great deal to Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 work,
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
, which characterized labor unions, mobs, crowds—pretty much any mass assembly of ordinary citizens—as easily subject to demagoguery and “little adapted to reasoning.” As individuals, the idea was, people were still given to rational argument and discourse. But gather them together and they became illogical, responding only to force or manipulation.

With that idea in mind, Lippmann encouraged the president to appoint leading advertising men, publicists, newspaper editors, and film directors to a new propaganda agency that would convince the American public that the war was a necessary step “to make a world that is safe for democracy.” The end result was Executive Order No. 2594, which established the Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the so-called House of Truth—under the direction of George Creel, a well-known progressive journalist.
²

Although the committee’s original mandate was to provide the public with hard facts and information, allowing citizens to reach their own conclusions about the war, it soon gave way to the manipulations of prominent advertising men on staff. Even Creel came gradually to admit that “people do not live by bread alone; they live mostly by slogans.” Realizing that the CPI would have to appeal to raw emotions and sensations, Creel drew together a talented group of communications professionals and artists, including the painter Charles Dana Gibson, who headed the CPI’s Division of Pictorial Publicity, and George Bowles, a Hollywood promoter who had largely masterminded the distribution of
The Birth of a Nation.

The end result was a massive propaganda campaign that included the dissemination of two hundred thousand different slides, stereotypes, and photographs; the enlistment of several hundred thousand “Four Minute Men” who delivered stock pro-war speeches in movie theaters while the film reels were being changed; a massive censorship effort that struck at any visible form of printed or spoken dissent; and, most ominously, posters, broadsides, and flyers that appealed mawkishly
to love of country and more darkly to ever present strains of fear and raw prejudice.

Not everyone involved with the project approved of its unanticipated trajectory, but as Gibson conceded, “One cannot create enthusiasm for the war on the basis of practical appeal. The spirit that will lead a man to put away the things of his accustomed life and go forth to all the hardships of war is not killed by showing him the facts.” No—the only way to compel an unwilling nation to embrace war was to “appeal to the heart.”

Typical CPI posters presented a beleaguered Statue of Liberty collapsing under the strain of German fire, set against a backdrop of a wasted, burning New York City; a giant poisonous spider wearing a German combat helmet, accompanied by a banner that read SPIES
ARE
LISTENING; and a map of the United States, renamed New Prussia, with familiar places bearing new names like Heineapolis, Denverburg, Cape U Boat, and the Gulf of Hate.
³

While many reformers watched with horror as a onetime progressive president turned the United States into a quasi police state, arrested thousands of political dissidents, and used crass propaganda methods to appeal to the public’s basest sentiments, American businessmen basked in the glow of the CPI’s success. Pressed to experiment with new forms of mind control, and endowed with enormous sums of the federal government’s money, advertising and public relations professionals who worked for the CPI in 1917 and 1918 emerged from the war armed with new techniques that could be used to market consumer products.

“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” Roger Babson, a leading business analyst, boasted in 1921.
⁴
“Now when we have anything to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

Even before the war, advertising agencies had been experimenting with new methods of scientific surveying and social psychology. In fact, Madison Avenue enlisted the talents of some of America’s leading psychologists and psychiatrists.
⁵
George Phelps, an ad executive who encouraged the marriage of social science and marketing, argued that the real challenge in advertising was “the process of getting people to do or think what you want them to do or think.”

John B. Watson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and arguably the leading behavioral psychologist in America, led the way in 1922 when he resigned his university post and signed a lucrative contract with the J. Walter Thompson agency. Other prominent academics made the same leap soon after.

Ivy Lee, a preeminent New York adman, spoke for many in his profession when he admitted, “I have found the Freudian theories concerning the psychology of the subconscious mind of great interest.”
⁶
Lee, who once maintained that advertising was nothing more than disseminating facts, came around to the opinion that “publicity is essentially a matter of mass psychology.
⁷
We must remember that people are guided more by sentiment than by mind.”

Who better to consult on this subject than the master himself? If Madison Avenue didn’t enjoy direct access to Sigmund Freud, it had the next best thing: his nephew Edward Bernays—father of the “torches of freedom” display at the 1929 New York Easter parade. Bernays, a Viennese émigré and Freud’s nephew two times over—his mother was Sigmund’s sister; his father’s sister was Sigmund’s wife—was a veteran of George Creel’s CPI and America’s leading “public relations counsel” in the 1920s. With a client roster that included some of the nation’s most lucrative business concerns—the United Fruit Company, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Philco, and Liggett & Myers, among them—Bernays aggressively championed the integration of marketing and psychology.

“Mass psychology is as yet far from being an exact science and the mysteries of human motivation are by no means all revealed,” Bernays conceded. “But at least theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion … by operating a certain mechanism.”

Though business practitioners of psychoanalytic theory badly mangled and conflated the work of Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, John Watson, and other important theorists, there emerged by the early 1920s a popular consensus among advertisers that humans were rarely, in writer Everett Dean Martin’s words, “governed by reason
or consideration.”
⁸
Rather, “instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are maintained.”

With this idea in mind, advertising professionals were particularly successful in changing expectations about personal appearance and thus creating a new set of assumptions about body image and fashion. The flapper was one of their finest creations.

Warnings, they found, were especially effective. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” asserted an ad for Aqua Velva aftershave.
⁹
“Keep your face fresh, firm, fit.”

“The Picture He Carries Away,” another advertisement began. “Will it be an alluring image of charm and freshness, or the pitying recollection of a pretty girl made unattractive by a poor complexion?”

In an urban society that was less personal and more anonymous, where chance encounters were more frequent and where one’s appearance spoke louder than his or her reputation,
first impressions mattered.
A lot. Indeed, everything was at stake.

“It ruins romance,” warned an ad for Listerine.
¹⁰
Beneath a picture of a young, well-groomed couple, each gazing suspiciously at the other, the text wondered: “Did you ever come face to face with a real cause of halitosis (unpleasant breath)? Can you imagine yourself married to a person offending this way?” Another ad delivered this lecture: “You will be amazed to find how many times in one day people glance at your nails.
¹¹
At each glance a judgment is made.… Indeed some people make a practice of basing their estimate of a new acquaintance largely upon this one detail.”

If a mere warning didn’t suffice, advertisers were happy to trot out a cautionary tale. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. … 
¹²
Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married—or about to be.… And as her birthdays crept gradually toward the tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.… Listerine.”

Magazine readers could be forgiven for expressing shock and alarm. They didn’t realize that maladies like halitosis were wholly made-up disorders. When Gerald Lambert, heir to the Lambert
Pharmaceutical fortune, found himself strapped for cash in the wake of the 1921 economic recession, he decided it was time to put the firm’s household and topical antiseptic, Listerine, to better use.

Gerald, whose formative years were marked by unusual privilege—he rode in a chauffeured limousine between classroom buildings at Princeton University—later admitted that he was “quite used to having any material thing I wanted.” He certainly wasn’t about to let a little national recession plunge him into the depths of the upper middle class.

Up until then, Listerine had been used to clean cuts and scrapes. When a member of the Lambert research team happened across the word
halitosis
in a British newspaper, and when the company’s staff scientists confirmed that there was no real health risk in swirling around a small dose of Listerine in one’s mouth, young Gerald—seeing a clear way out of his economic straits—immediately instructed his advertisers to market Listerine as the only proven cure for a serious medical and social disease: bad breath.

“A few years ago,” read a typical Lambert ad, “bad breath was condoned as an unavoidable misfortune.
¹³
Today it is judged one of the gravest social offenses.” Appealing to the anxieties of urban Americans who lived in proximity to one another and experienced the daily angst of anonymity and public scrutiny, the company saw sales of Listerine skyrocket by 33 percent after just one month of the new ad campaign.

So it went with all sorts of new disorders—dandruff, athlete’s foot, body odor, face wrinkles, dry or oily hair, acne, rough skin. Beneath every imperfection lurked a disastrous end—a lost job, a lost love, a missed opportunity. And for every danger, there was a cure—a new face cream, antiseptic, soap, shade of lipstick, or hair tonic to ward off the looming threat of social failure. By the end of the decade, annual sales of toiletries and beauty services had mushroomed, and the volume of advertising for toiletries ranked second only to food.
¹⁴

Magazine ads promised beauty, youth, and success with fetching titles like “I Cured My Pimples—and Became a Bride,” “How a Wife Won Back Her Youth—A Surrender to Ugliness That Nearly Cost a
Husband’s Love,” and “Do you wonder, when you meet a casual friend, whether your nose is too shiny?”
¹⁵

The accompanying pictures—featuring intimate scenes of married life, young love, office politics, random everyday encounters, and job interviews—gave the subtle impression that everywhere one turned there was always a keen eye trained on the most infinitesimal aspects of one’s appearance. For the would-be flapper, this was a powerful message. “Will his eyes confirm what his lips are saying?” wondered an advertisement for Palmolive. “The kindly candles of last night, the tell-tale revealments of noon! Do you fear the contrast they may offer?”

On some level, the modern world did, in fact, lend itself to a more rigorous standard of examination. As recently as the mid–nineteenth century, most mirrors cast back cloudy representations of real life, leading one historian to speculate that “American women and men had only a hazy apprehension of their facial qualities.”
¹⁶
When Maria Lydig Daley gazed on her image in a hotel mirror, she was appalled at how “old and ugly” she appeared. Upon returning home, Daley was reassured by her own looking glass, which offered a more familiar image of youth and beauty. “How few of us have a perfect idea how we look,” remarked an early photographer, “or who we resemble, or look like.”