professor’s wife couldn’t be extravagant, but my sister could toss an old piano shawl around her shoulders and look chic. When I tried that, I looked like a pile of rough-dried laundry pulled straight off the clothesline, and…
Well, to be honest? I just gave up.
By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.
President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”
Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had UNITED STATES crossed out and NEW PRUSSIA scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.
“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”
A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.
If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and
firm
!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a
Vogue
editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”
It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true…
Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with
Well, to be honest? I just gave up.
By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.
President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”
Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had UNITED STATES crossed out and NEW PRUSSIA scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.
“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”
A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.
If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and
firm
!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a
Vogue
editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”
It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true…
Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with
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