Thinking Small (15 page)

Part of who we become often has a great deal to do with the people who inspire us, and at Weintraub, Bill met a man who inspired him immensely: Paul Rand
¹
. Only twenty-seven, Rand’s manner was forward and jarring, but he had dimples and wore glasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, and the combination of it all somehow created a very real charm. By the time Bill met him, Rand was already a striking presence in the fledgling avant-garde media environment of New York, taking his cue from those in Europe who were using visual art within the commercial world. Rand was art directing for edgy magazines like
Esquire
and
Apparel Arts,
designing experimental covers for
Direction
magazine, and creating ads for Weintraub that were more like art posters than commercial pieces. It was unusual work in a time before “graphic design” had become its own vocation, a time when the covers of magazines or the images used to sell a product were considered commercial, a service rather than something to be noticed unto themselves: The image was usually the literal representation of what was being sold, more a sign than a statement, and meant to be more obligatory and information giving than creative or capable of standing on its own.

Paul Rand chose another direction though: He made covers and ads that were the point of the entire piece, rarely showing the item that was to be sold. Words were often superfluous, or were present as implications within the visual work. He was one of the first in America to use ideas of art coming out of Russia (Constructivist) and Germany (the Bauhaus) in the 1920s and ’30s. Rand made the interaction between lines and circles and space into its own visual world, a place very different from the usual ad of the time. Ads in those days might cover the page with a giant car and write:
Spectacularly powered! Attractively priced!
In contrast, Rand’s ads were delicate and often hand-drawn, simple, using basic geometric figures and images to create
a cohesive, gentle, powerful abstract whole; composition was a wakeful kind of work for him. He was not a commercial artist; he was something else: The ad business didn’t quite have a name for him yet.

Rand was aware of artistic developments in Europe at a time when few others in America cared. Heinrich Nordhoff had been moved by the work of Franz Marc, and though Marc had been killed in the war, some of the artists who had been his friends, men like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, had gone on to become part of another movement in Germany in the 1920s, the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus philosophy was a holistic one, and its visual characteristics were simple, colorful, and about as far away from “commercial” as one could get: their very simplicity exuded something more spiritual than physical, more ethereal than abstract. In that sense, looking at Rand’s work was more like standing in front of a work by Kandinsky or Klee than it was like reading an ad. Bill was lucky to have made his acquaintance, and even luckier that meeting Rand was one of his first true experiences in both advertising and art. Because of this particular baptism into the world of ad agencies, Bill’s notions of what made a great ad would remain less tied to commercial ideas and more to the ideas and inspirations associated with wakeful artistic work, images that offered not only information but communion as well.

Rand was also happy to meet Bill, and not only because of the fresh way the upstart saw the world, or because he liked hearing Bernbach’s raspy voice, but also because the two shared another common interest: the world of books. Rand was as avid a reader as Bill, and the two were not afraid to talk of the work they were doing together at Weintraub in a larger context, one that touched on everything from philosophy to the latest novel to the newly translated work of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Rand and Bernbach went for long lunches, walking the bustling streets of Manhattan together, sitting at the deli on 45th Street, talking and brainstorming about all kinds of new possibilities for the combination of image and word. It was a time of
education for Bill, and the interaction thrilled him. Back in the confines of the agency, he could be seen sparkling with excitement, practically running the halls as he told his colleagues that he’d just made
the greatest ad in the world!
It was an energy and an innocence that was too authentic to be made fun of: Bill was inspired.

Bernbach and Rand were in the midst of a new world. Advertising agencies had taken off after the First World War, thanks in large part to the new availability of products like aspirin and automobiles and thanks also to the new emphasis on mass appeal that the war had fostered. As Adam Hochschild writes in
To End All Wars
: “Just as warfare
²
on an industrial scale required the mass production of new weapons like poison gas, so this new kind of conflict required the mass production of public support.” And the social, political, and commercial systems that produced that support carried on after the war. As corporations grew wealthy, they spent more and more money on ads. The rise of national magazines also had a lot to do with it. A survey done in 1950 would find that 62.5 million people in the United States read at least one issue of
Life
magazine every three months. That was more than half the population. To reach all these potential consumers, big companies now sought out specialized firms rather than trying to create the ads in-house. Ad agencies auditioned for the giants of the consumer world, trying to prove they were the best place for the accounts of companies like Procter & Gamble, Marlboro, and GM.

It was a serious endeavor. America was becoming a consumer society. New forms of communication—national magazines, radios, films, and eventually television as well—were taking individual consumer tastes and interests and broadcasting them on a national scale, and the number of consumers was growing as a result. It was all tied to the rise of mass production and its role in that same free market economy described in the 1939 World’s Fair lightbulb ads, one that by the 1950s would be in full swing.
Mass production and mass attraction went together: The more technological progression, the more people and places there were to reach. Companies wanted people to hear their messages, and as the audience size grew, so too did the prestige of the advertising agencies who created those messages. Advertising was becoming a medium of communication between companies and customers, the mirror that reflected and created tastes. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge told these burgeoning agencies that they were playing a part in the “redemption of mankind,” that they were tools of national education, and that industry was directly linked to the magazine advertisements and billboards then becoming so prominent in the average citizen’s life. Coolidge told the advertisers that a great power had been entrusted to their keeping “with the high responsibility
³
of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world.”

In both politics and business, understanding why someone chose to buy a product or to vote in a certain way had become a crucial concern. The pivotal factor was the attempt to understand the psychological motivations behind choice. New forms of psychology were thus developing in natural parallel to the new forms of communication: to reach people, one needed to understand what motivated them. The First World War had made a dramatic point in this sense: The war was a testament to what masses of people could do (both creatively and destructively) when mobilized. But the war had also shown how much violence and unnecessary death can arise when people act irrationally. More and more, people became concerned with how to control their irrational, emotional side. In the years after the war, many Americans began to study and read about psychology, especially the work of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese man who had just given birth to psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s main philosophy was that irrational desires and impulses guide people’s choices and that most of those impulses were subconscious.

The mass, and the idea of the mass, was also a focus of psychological study at the time. Crowd mentality caused people to
act and react differently than they would when alone, and crowds could spur individuals toward dramatic, even violent, behavior.

“There is no one self
⁴
always at work,” the esteemed political writer Walter Lippmann observed soon after the war, suggesting humans are each a variety of “selves” depending on surrounding environments. Men like Lippmann (sincerely) suggested that the masses were a “bewildered herd” that needed direction and strong leadership.

Nations were composed of masses. Immigrants were masses. But consumers were masses too. The success of political slogans such as “making the world safe for democracy” in the First World War made it obvious that these various masses could be swayed by carefully sculpted messages, and not only in the political sphere, but in the economic sphere as well. The success of the wartime media campaigns had meant “high excitement in the booming field
⁵
of peace-time propaganda” once the war had come to an end.

One man behind those pro-democracy slogans during the war was an American named Edward Bernays. The Wilson administration had employed Bernays to promote American war aims in the national and international press. He was the son of Viennese immigrants, and he also happened to be the nephew of Freud. He read his uncle’s books and papers and applied them to his own war work. He saw propaganda as a rational, honest, beneficial enterprise. The point of propaganda, as Bernays understood it, was to marshal the irrationality of the masses toward positive ends.

“When I came back from the war,”
⁶
Bernays would later say, “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” In that spirit, Bernays set up the first public relations firm in the 1920s, a way of expanding the ideas behind propaganda to the commercial world as well as the political one. Bernays continued advising the government (President Calvin Coolidge got an image makeover thanks to his idea to invite celebrities to the White House), but he turned to businesses
as well: How could companies best give the masses what they desired? And how could companies create an attractive image?

When cigarette companies in the 1920s wanted to open the market up to women, for example, Bernays advised that a group of young debutantes stage an event for the press where they pulled cigarettes out from under their skirts and called them “torches of freedom,” and then boldly lit up. It worked. Before the war, a woman who smoked was an outcast. After the war, smoking became a sign of female emancipation. These kinds of campaigns—that appealed to competitive instincts and sexual desires—became the primary drive behind ads, especially ads trying to sell cars out of Detroit. These ads tried to speak to people’s desire for a more exciting or fulfilling life; each product implicitly promised to fill a void: Women moaned when sitting in their new car for the first time, or gazed dreamily at the camera, big-eyed behind the wheel.

Though such tactics may sound malicious in retrospect, that wasn’t the intent. At the time, spending money was equated with doing right by the country, and there was a rather unconscious no-holds-barred approach to consumerism. It was the first time that large groups of people were able to buy things for sheer pleasure rather than for functional reasons alone, and there was a sense of fun and freedom to it all. For a time, it seemed the market economy had only one direction it could go: up.

Thus the stock market crash of 1929 came like a slap, knocking everyone into an unrecognizable new world. Money value simply fell, disappeared overnight. The Great Depression set in, and with it, a sobering shock. After all those years of speeding up and garnering ever-increasing potential, 1930 left many people feeling as if they’d just crashed into an invisible wall. Advertising came under heavy attack for the first time, as people felt they had been tricked, manipulated by propaganda and by the idea of capitalism that had been sold to them. The manic rush of opening banks and the stock market to the public sphere, only to have it all come crashing down on them, produced a
feeling of distrust in Big Business. People felt lost. Things weren’t supposed to be like this. There had been a lot of “dreaming big” (a good thing) but unfortunately alongside those big dreams, people had forgotten that it was also equally essential that they think small. And those small details that had been pushed to the side in the desire for bigness would come back to haunt the market in a very dramatic way.

In the 1930s, very suddenly the country entered an uncomfortable adolescent stage where skepticism seemed the only answer to hard questions. At the same time, people still desperately wanted and needed to believe that something in the world was meaningful and worth working for. A balance had to be found. People did not want to be hoodwinked, but they did want to feel connected and inspired. People did not want to be disappointed, yet they did want to have hope. In that sense, advertising was transforming into a tightrope between power and desire, truth and deceit. Advertising was, after all, the medium between corporations and the people, and there was a great deal of responsibility in that. How could there be fantasy without exploitation? How could one feel connected without feeling subverted into a mass and taken advantage of?

The Depression pervaded all areas of an individual’s life, and that was reflected in the larger life of the country and, to some extent, of the world. Politics, mass communication, transportation, the market economy: These were inherently connected now, and like one wheel turning the next, all these things in one Western country inevitably had their effect on those same things in other Western countries. During and after the First World War, through media, transportation, and the market, the Western hemisphere of the world had become more economically and socially interlinked; 1930 brought that realization into sharp relief.

Germany had many short-term loans from the United States, and when the Depression set in, all those loans were withdrawn. Germany defaulted on its bonds. The country no longer had credit anywhere; it was internationally bankrupt. Within the
country, any signs of progress that had begun to emerge were quickly washed away, and the unemployment rate jumped to one-third of the workforce. Now the democratic Weimar Republic was held responsible not only for the First World War and its grueling aftermath in the 1920s but also for the economic tragedy beginning a whole new decade. For Hitler’s Nazi Party, this was very good news. The world was beginning to look a lot more like the one Hitler had painted, and he was back on the streets and in the halls with his electrifying and manipulative speech. The stock market crash was a failure of democracy, he said, and democracy was linked to capitalism, so it must be a failure of capitalism too. It was exactly what so many were worried over. And for the moment, the evidence seemed to be on Hitler’s side.