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Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
01:10:38
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello everybody. My name is Megan Finn. I'm an Associate professor at American University in the School of Communication and I am speaking today with Caroline Jack, who recently published a wonderful book called Business as How Sponsored Media Sold American capitalism in the 20th century. Caroline is a Associate professor at UCSD in the Communications department and welcome, Caroline.
- [01:38]
C
Thank you so much, Megan. I'm delighted to be here.
- [01:41]
B
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to work on this topic?
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C
Yeah, certainly. So, as you mentioned, I work at the University of California San Diego in the Department of Communication. I'm an associate professor there. I teach and Advise undergraduate and PhD students around topics related to critical studies of promotional and persuasive communication. My own research interests focus on media history and especially histories of persuasive media and promotional culture. So you can think of the category of the promotional as I kind of take Andrew Wernick's definition. Right. So as communication that kind of advances or attempts to advance some kind of self advantaging exchange. That's his phrase, but I find it really useful. Right. So that category of the promotional, of course includes advertising, but also things like marketing, public relations, sales, and if you want to kind of take it even wider, all kinds of sort of persuasive communication. So that's my area of interest. And you also asked how did this bring me to this book? Right?
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B
Yeah.
- [02:51]
C
Okay, great. So I've got kind of a couple of answers to that. So maybe I'll start with what does this book kind of say in relation to some other books that address similar topics? And then maybe a little bit more about how I came to be a person who was interested in things like sponsored media and ephemera and this kind of public communication of economics. So in terms of this book in particular, Business As Usual is about media ephemera, right. So it's things like pamphlets, sponsored films, public service announcements. More often than not these were funded by private companies or trade organizations and designed to sell ordinary people on capitalism itself. Now there's lots of great historical work out there about business interest campaigns against what we might, well, regulatory constraints basically in the 20th century. But a lot of this gets kind of focused on the New Deal. So for example, Elizabeth Phones Wolf's Selling Free Enterprise, Kim Phillips finds Invisible Hands or Inkar Stoll's books on the history of the advertising industry. There are two of them. They're both great advertising on trial and advertising at war. So these, these books kind of like informed, you know, how I was approaching this topic. I'm trying to see media as expressing and shaping social meaning. And when I look at these artifacts, my first impression is often that they seem sort of silly or obviously self serving. But the project of the book is to ask what if we took them seriously and ask questions like how do the people involved in their creation and circulation justify spending time, quite a bit of time and money that something that from the outside looks like just sort of vanity or folly. So I drew from studies of sponsored films as Charles Ackland and Heidi Wasson used this term, useful cinema. Right. This kind of like media that is, yes, like has a sort of self serving purpose but also gives us some evidence of how the people who made or circulated or supported these media artifacts kind of made sense of the world or, or position what they were doing as legitimate or needed. Yeah, so that's the focus for the book, a little bit about how I came to write it. And maybe part of that is sort of how did I come to be a person who was interested in these things. My hunch is that perhaps I was, you know, I grew up in the 80s and 90s and perhaps I was sort of sensitized to an interest in mid century sponsored media. Perhaps part of this is just what I was exposed to. Right. For example, encountering things like infomercials but also things like the displays at a theme park like Epcot Center. Right. These kind of engrossing spectacles, and they really draw you in. But there's this kind of sense, I think, that spectators on these spectacles often get that you're getting a story that sort of prioritizes narrative tidiness and optimism over things like accuracy or complexity. So there's something really interesting about that to me, I think probably also when I was younger, I was noticing pop cultural use of imagery from the 1950s and early 1960s. So things like the John Waters movie Hairspray or Pee Wee's Playhouse or bands like the B52. So were kind of playing with the aesthetics of Populux excess. So perhaps these kind of threads of interest made me more likely to pay attention to ephemeral films when they started becoming sort of coming into view for me. So when I say ephemeral films, I'm thinking about primarily after World War II here. And the kind of golden age for these sponsored films was from the end of World War II through about the 1970s. So you can think of these things as including thinly veiled promotional films, the gory driver's ed film genre, social hygiene films that tell people how to act politely around others. This is all kind of part of this world. And these, they appeared in places like mystery science theater 3000 in the 90s. And also there were some VHS collections of these films circulating. And finally a lot of those ended up Getting digitized through archive.org and Rick Prelinger has been particularly notable in collecting these films. So they become kind of more available over time. But I think perhaps I was sensitized to pay attention to them by some of those things.
- [07:32]
B
Super interesting. And yes, recalls much of my childhood memories of media as well. So you talked a lot about your focus on ephemeral media. Can you talk a little bit more about how this focus shaped your research approach and the sort of problem of research methods when you're looking at things that people might find silly and thus may not be obvious targets for collection?
- [08:06]
C
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. So I would say that part of it is leaning into noticing that you find them silly, but just to talk a bit more about ephemeral media and how I approach it more generally. So you can think of ephemeral media as being media that has kind of a limited time purpose, so it's not necessarily designed to last. And probably is trying to address something that's anticipated to be happening soon in the future or that the people who created it think is happening at the time of its publication. So I think you can think of these types of media artifacts as often having this kind of self serving nature to them that makes them easy to dismiss. But I would say, and I think, you know, many people who study this kind of ephemera would say that like, yes, they are sort of self serving and in some ways seem a little bit unserious in their sort of instrumental goals, but they also reveal something about what their creators thought of themselves and what they thought of the world. So I'm really there's a mid century kind of collector of business artifacts called Isadore Warshaw who talked about what he called the romance of business, what sort of imaginatively fascinating or emotionally things that draw you in and tell stories, that these tend to kind of get thrown away and that his work was to preserve them, which I thought was, you know, really evocative and kind of points to how these throwaway self serving items I think can be seen as sort of traces of a world that their creators or supporters believe was possible in this sort of doorway into things like imagination, narrative, storytelling, et cetera.
- [10:06]
B
That's awesome. And so getting into some of the, you know, moving away from methods and research approach, but getting into some of the arguments in the book, one of the big sort of openings of the book, you talk about what you call the contradictions of sponsored business education. So can you talk a little bit about what the, sorry, sponsored economic education, what these contradictions are specifically, and then maybe sort of a little bit more broadly about what the sponsored economic education sort of broadly might include?
- [10:50]
C
Sure. And if it's okay with you, maybe I'll do the second part first, just to kind of clarify what we're talking about here. So this term economic education, I would caution that it's a term of art that's used by the people that I'm studying in the book. And so perhaps the most direct way to describe it would be to say that economic education is the name that the creators and supporters of these media artifacts gave to this kind of genre of media and this series of projects that probably from my point Vantage pointer best categorizes public relations for managerial capitalism as it was practiced in the US in the 20th century. So people who supported what they called economic education often talked about what they were trying to do was in their words, sell America to Americans or sell private enterprise. And by that they meant to foster public appreciation of private enterprise and assent to it. And just as kind of a footnote this term private enterprise I'm using. There's many terms out there that you can use, right? I'm using this term to refer to not so much a set of concrete practices, but for the people that I'm studying, this was the idea. This was an idea. And it was the idea of a system in which things like market forces, private contracts and privately owned companies were imagined to organize economic life as opposed to, let's say, estate planning or management. When we talk about private enterprise, there are some caveats to be made there about how often the kind of presumptions of being able to, you have things like market forces and contracts. Organized economic life often presumes, you know, the presence of a government to keep the guardrails on it. And Lawrence Glickman's work on free enterprise, his book Free Enterprise covers this in detail. So that's economic education, right? This kind of name that's given to these set of projects that are mostly carried out through media with the goal of like selling private enterprise to US publics. And by that I mean kind of fostering public appreciation. So I'm interested in the media objects themselves, but also kind of the hopes that people tied to them, the audiences they imagined they were speaking to, and also the kind of sense making that allowed them to see what they were doing as education. So with that in mind. So what's the big contradiction here? I would say that the contradiction that's at the heart of the book, and that kind of animates how I went about trying to figure this stuff out, was between education and selling. So an example of this kind of like blurring of the boundaries between education and selling that often happened for proponents of economic education. You can look at somebody like Fred G. Clark, who was the founder of the American Economic Foundation. I found a quote from him in 1952 saying, and I'm quoting him here, economic morality can be sold as surely as soap chips and television sets. So this kind of notion that educating the public that is encouraging them to be appreciative of managerial capitalism is something that can be accomplished through selling. So there's a contradiction here, right? That education kind of implies neutrality or at least a sort of laying out of what's out there in the world and then giving people, you know, tools to navigate that, whereas selling is more about obtaining compliance with a self interested ask. So the question that I think is kind of running how I went about doing these here is how is it that the people who were proponents of these economic education projects, as they called them, how were they able to manage that contradiction? How were they able to resolve this, that contradiction? How was it that they were able to position what they were doing as education and as selling and not see those two things as being contradictory. And there's a couple of underlying interesting assumptions here, right. One of them is this sort of equating business experience and appreciation of capitalism with knowledge of economics. Right. So when proponents of economic education media talked about what they were trying to do, it was often framed in terms of like, oh, no, we want people to be more knowledgeable. But they often assumed that the evidence of people being more knowledgeable would be people having more kind of appreciation for the system. And the logical extension of this is that it equates kind of critique or resistance with ignorance. So one of the signature claims that was part of economic education, this is something that Naomi Oreskes and her Conway talk about in her book the Big Myth. They call it the indivisibility thesis. This kind of idea that the United States is foundationally about a set of interlocking freedoms. This term interlocking comes up a ton, right. So that civic freedoms and the economic imperatives of private enterprise, these are both types of freedom that rely on one another for their continued existence. And this is sort of present in a lot of the sorts of materials that I examined throughout most of the 20th century, or at least up until the point where the book sort of drops off, which is at the beginning of the 1980s. So this claim is often present.
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B
Super interesting. So your book starts off in the 1910s, I think, and as you said, it continues through the 80s. Could you talk a little bit about the sort of beginning, like, what's going on that you decided to start your project in this specific place and what's going on at that time?
- [17:15]
C
Sure. So this actually wasn't where I intended to start. This was one of these kinds of things that sort of unfurls as you start working on something, which is that some of the other scholars whose works inspired me to work on this area talk about the New deal in the 1930s as being this kind of moment in which business interests mobilize in ways that they hadn't in the past. And so that's often kind of the starting point of the story, so to speak. If one must create a starting point for the story, this is the sort of, like, event in which a lot of things kind of came together while I was trying to get my head around my big question that I had going into this project, which was, where did these curious things come from? Where did these films and so forth come from? Who made them and why? And perhaps it would be helpful here to say that, like, one of the things that happened while I was on my way to doing this project was coming across a friend of a friend who had posted an economic education film on Facebook and seeing how people in the 2000s at that moment were praising this particular artifact. And I thought, what an interesting thing. Where did this come from? So just trying to figure out where these things came from. And as I was looking into that around people who were talking about these films and other economic education projects in the 1950s, I kept noticing this particular phrase coming up of selling America to Americans. And so I was interested in figuring out precisely what that meant. Right. So when I'm reading these documents from the 1950s and seeing people talk about selling America to Americans, I think I know what that means. But it was popping up enough that I thought, this seems to be potentially signaling a whole set of meanings, kind of shorthanding or signaling a whole series of meanings. And I can make some assumptions about what those are, but I'd really like to know. And so that's what led to looking at this kind of what ends up being sort of a prehistory of some of this rhetoric that gets eventually mobilized in the corporate crusade and crusading around opposition to the New Deal. So I found the use of this phrase, selling America to Americans in several contexts from the late 1910s through to the late 1930s. It pops up around questions right after World War I. It pops up around kind of questions about what gets called Americanization at the time, and also this sort of notion of managerial ideals of efficient persuasion. So, for example, some Wilson administration officials did a collaboration with the US film industry in 1919. This is during a time when it's kind of like the post war Red Scare moment. So, for example, you see the Interior Secretary at the time, Franklin Knight Lane, announcing a collaboration with Famous Players Lasky, which was a film studio promoting that they're going to do films about, under the name Euro America, about things like labor relations, natural resources and immigrant assimilation. Elsewhere, Lane said that the goal of this was to combat what he called ultra radical tendencies through films about things like labor, management, cooperation and patriotism. And around the same time, the Vice President, Thomas Marshall, made comments linking mass media and particularly the use of film to like, oh, we've seen that this was successful during wartime, and perhaps it can also be used to win America for Americans, as he put it, in peacetime. So there's this kind of interest in sort of patriotism, but also in the sort of effectiveness and efficiency of mass media. So that's one sort of thread that I see emerging. The term also gets used for the promotion of place in the United States. This is mostly in the 1920s. So in terms of sort of promotion of travel and tourism in the Midwest, on the west coast, in various different contexts, right? For speeches to associations of real estate boards, or for travel industry promotion. And so there's this series of meanings that are kind of ready made so that when the New Deal arises as something to sort of be organizing focus for resistance from business interests, there's this term that already has all these kind of meetings in it. So you've got this sense of Americanization, efficient persuasion. In the late 1920s, you start to see groups like the American Hour Broadcasting Committee, which was a fairly kind of hawkish political group, like using radio and using this phrase, selling America to Americans in promoting their own radio show. And so by the time the New Deal, the kind of struggles over the New Deal come up, there's already all this kind of freight contained in this term. So it's there to be used. And I also track through the second half of the 1930s how this term selling America to Americans brings on a couple of other meanings to it, right? So you've got these kind of like meanings related to patriotism and nationalism, economic development, kind of maybe some anxieties about immigration and assimilation and politics. And as you move into the late 1930s, you also start to see this use of selling America to Americans that focuses more on some of the kind of pleasurable aspects of that. So for example, some promotional materials around the 1937 World's Fair Talking about like selling the west through vivid spectacles of indigenous culture. And this one's really interesting to me, this kind of push by the time you get to late 1930s, connecting the notion of selling America to Americans to a sort of demand for optimistic rhetoric. This is one of these threads that I see sort of going throughout the book. And it's something that I call the affirmative style. So this is kind of a mode of promotional political discourse that's pairing celebration and certainty with the sort of refusal to engage with ideological opponents, right? So there's in 1938, the Anheuser Busch Brewing Company has a series of ads that are designed to lift morale with headlines that say things like Doomsday was a fizzle. Right? Like, oh, those naysayers, they'll be proven wrong. They circulated a sponsor film that was titled Reflecting our confidence in the future of America is kind of demands to say why don't we celebrate what's good and turn away from you know, we've heard plenty of criticism, but where's the praise for the system that we have? And even in by the late 1930s, some columnists talking about kind of demanding praise for America's virtues and even saying that Americans who just go through the motions of patriotism are, you know, robotic or have never really felt America and need somebody to sell America to them to make them really feel it. Ordinary checking a $300 head start on checking Ordinary savings high yield savings that grow your money. Ordinary mortgage a mortgage with a rate that drops when the market does. Why settle for With Oregon State Credit Union you get all sorts of welcome to human to human banking Oregon State Credit Union insured by NCUA equal housing lender $25 minimum balance required subject to change terms and conditions this holiday discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start? Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift in store or online. Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season only at K. Super helpful.
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B
Background and the affirmative style is such an intriguing and I think given the way you illustrated in the book and there are sort of lots of great illustrations in the book of a lot of the examples that you've been talking about. It's such a useful concept for social scientists and historians who are studying technology cultures. Another concept that you develop and discuss throughout the book and sort of touched on in your sort of opening discussion of the history is that of promotional nationalism. Can you talk a little bit about what promotional nationalism means and how the work of promotional nationalism shifted throughout the decades that you cover in the book?
- [27:17]
C
Sure. So this promotional nationalism was one of these things where I was like, I just need a phrase to talk about this. So that was the phrase that I came up with to talk about the notion that businesses and their allies have used imagery and ideas that you could put on a spectrum of patriotic to nationalists to promote their own commercial or publicity or policy interests, or the commercial and publicity and policy interests of management and capital. So again, just as a reminder, this term promotional I'm thinking about things which are promotional or things which sort of attempt to put to move forward the offer of some kind of exchange that benefits the speaker. Right. That's coming from Andrew Warnick. So it's an invocation of national imagery, of ideas of patriotism, of what it means to have national identity in Conjunction with trying to advance these kind of self interested goals.
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B
Okay. Another important thread that is throughout the book that pops up in different ways is that of expertise and scientism. I know you write about a lot of different experts throughout the book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the experts that you write about and how they deployed scientism in their work?
- [28:53]
C
Yeah. So there's a really interesting thing that happens in the kind of middle of the 20th century around that where I see reflected in public sponsored communications about what, you know, the people I'm studying often refer to as the American economic system or the American way of life, where there's a shift in expertise claims. And I would argue that this seems to originate with the national association for Manufacturers and its campaigns opposing New Deal regulation and policies. So the national association of Manufacturers is a trade group that had been running public relations since the beginning of the century. Jennifer Dalton has a great book about this. They really amped up their spending to fight fight New Deal policies to the point where half of their budget was going to public communications and other ways of fighting the New Deal. So they have this huge multimedia messaging campaign. So by 1939, the NAM is responsible for billboards all over the country that celebrate the American way. Newsletters, pamphlets, radio shows, sponsored films which they call screen editorials. And they put out a leaflet sort of publicizing all that they've done, called Experts all that emphasizes the NAMS campaign as one of communicative expertise. Right. So they're playing up the expertise of their production people, right. In things like entertainment and news, commentary, copywriting and design, public speaking, cartooning, filmmaking. And this is just a kind of relentless campaign. By 1939, 6,000 newspapers are getting press releases from the NAMM every week. 273 radio stations are airing their syndicated soap opera. The estimation is that 15 million people saw their screen editorial films. So huge amounts of people. And so there's this kind of shift where the goal, the putative goal, the stated goal is to increase people's understanding of how the economic system works. And yet the expertise that's being marshaled and celebrated in is expertise in promotional communication. So this is a really interesting shift for me. And in my view this opens up opportunities for advertising trade groups that are able to then adapt to these rhetorical strategies to position the advertising industry as both experts in public opinion management and defenders of democracy. So for example, you see kind of some shadows of this sort of line of reasoning from some fairly prominent people in the advertising industry in the 1940s. So Bruce Barton in 1940, saying that the FCC shouldn't be investigating advertising because advertising supports the free press. Or a similar argument from the association of National Advertisers President Paul west in 1941. So here you see these kind of claims that the advertising industry is positioned to help the public understand the private enterprise system and that their expertise in public opinion management makes them good people to do so. And you see this pattern kind of go on through many years to come.
- [32:38]
B
Awesome. So you note through the book that the sponsored economic education media was produced, but it was not always received by audiences the way that the people who thought it would be received. It wasn't always received the way they wanted it to be. And in particular during the Cold War era, of course, there were some very interesting efforts and particularly thinking about the work of jcee, which at some points were received well and some points weren't received well. And I think your book really sort of helpfully illustrates the different paths these different programs could take. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the JCEs work during the Cold War and how. How they're sort of not the. The production of the media did not necessarily determine its. Its reception. To use very traditional communication studies language.
- [33:54]
C
Sure, absolutely. And maybe a little setup to connect those two things to each other, please. So this, this kind of claiming of like communicative expertise that I see starting to happen with the advertising trade organization leading up to World War II. I argue that that gets consolidated during World War II from the ways that advertising, the advertising industry and leaders in the advertising industry are sort of involved in messaging efforts to the extent that what at the time is the war Advertising Council ends up sort of establishing jurisdiction over some of the infrastructures of public service messaging because they're involved in doing like, domestic messaging around things like publicizing war bonds sales and things like that. So this ends up with the Advertising Council kind of having this jurisdiction over this messaging infrastructure and also this ability to make claims about their expertise and kind of getting messages across that are in the public interest. This transitions after World War II to some actions that I talk about where these advertising trade groups embark on this big campaign to sort of celebrate and build support for private enterprise. The journalist William White calls this the great free enterprise campaign, which in his assessment, he says is not worth a damn. But a lot of effort goes into it, into these economic education projects. Right. So this is things like national advertising campaigns to mail off for pamphlets, workplace information programs that are designed to change Public opinion on a large scale and also the development of educational and informative materials. So all these kind of public facing actions. So this is done in a tone that really expresses that affirmative style and almost sometimes kind of borders on kind of bombastics. There's a very celebratory American exceptionalism kind of tone to it. And these advertising trade organizations are able to do a lot of the sort of the big advertising campaign that goes off like the way that they had envisioned it, but they struggled more with their ambitions to develop educational programs for schools. Schools and the Joint Council on Economic Education, which was the group that you asked about, the jcee, I would say, succeeds where those advertising trade organizations weren't really able to bring their aspirations to life. And I would argue that part of this is that the JCEE actually had kind of an alternative style of economic education. So less the sort of affirmation, celebration like flag waving, patriotism, and something that's more oriented towards teaching abstract analysis as a style of intellectual and civic reasoning. And so the Joint Council on Economic Education, it's sort of an outgrowth of the Committee for Economic Development, which was organization that sort of positioned itself as politically moderate, favored government management of the post war economy, but still saw freedom as a central value and positioned democracy as the reason for an informed public. Right. If you want to have a strong democracy, the assumption is you need to have a well informed public. So interestingly, right around in the late 1940s, these advertising trade organizations approached the Committee on Economic Development asking them if they would be interested in collaborating. But those trade organizations were. The Committee on Economic Development declined and it appears to be perhaps over concerns about the optics. And the jcee, the Joint Council on Economic Education was founded a few months later. So instead of having a sort of lineage through advertising trade organizations, this ends up being people who are economics academics, teachers, education and academics. And their main focus for the 1940s, JCE's main focus for the first decade or more of their existence is really just on developing teacher training programs. So they're interested in teaching teachers how to teach economics. And I would say that they're still anti communist, but in a different style. Right. So there's less of that sort of unwillingness to engage with the messiness of the different sort of like styles of running an economy, and more of an assumption that teaching students how to think like economists would lead students to both rationally and ethically conclude that private enterprise was the best of the systems available. So there's a sort of playing up a political Neutrality, but still within that, an anti communism. I find Michael Curtin's concept, concept here of scientific anti communism really useful. Right? This sort of mode of ultimately sort of taking a side in the Cold War, but doing so like within this sort of a discourse of analysis, neutrality, and like good reasoning. The fifth chapter of the book talks about this kind of crisis moment for the JCEE. So through the 1950s, they're mostly developed on, mostly focused on developing teacher training materials. The thing that changes this is in late 1957, the Sputnik satellite is launched and also the Department of Education, or I believe it was the Office of Education at the time, puts out a report about comparing education in the United States to education in the Soviet Union. This report finds that children in the Soviet Union are outperforming children in the United States on science and math. And this is. This becomes this, combined with the launch of Sputnik, it becomes this sort of public moment of anxiety around like a potential achievement gap. And this is where we see the JCE start to mobilize, because I think they see an opportunity here. So the JCE, amidst this kind of education crisis in the late 1950s, starts promoting its vision of economic reasoning as this kind of crucial intellectual and civic skill set for democratic citizens. That's also like in line with the sort of Cold War context that they're working in. The JCE ends up forming in 1960 a national task force on economic education, including some pretty high profile economists like Lee Bach and Paul Samuelson. They publish a report called Economic Education in the schools in 1961. Again, sort of saying that economic education is a way of teaching students to reason clearly and objectively in ways that will prepare them for citizenship. But this kind of alternative style, this more analytical style of economic education, led some of their critics to see this approach as being insufficiently freedom minded, let's say. So some of the academics who were involved in this project, like Lee Bach at one point says, like, this will not be just, this will not be like emotional propaganda like we're here to show this like, set of analytical tools, and ends up getting attacked by the Wall Street Journal editorial board who says that the plans that are laid out in this report will only teach students what they call the inadequacy of freedom because it acknowledged flaws in capitalism. And even some members of the Committee on Economic Development mounted similar critiques. So you see, the people who were involved in the JCE's task force were in this kind of difficult situation, right where they were putting forward a particular sort of analytical style that was connected on, like, civic responsibility and reasoning skills, and then getting attacked by other people in the conversation who didn't see that as sufficiently celebratory of capitalism, who were.
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B
Lacking the affirmative style. Yeah. Another concept that you helpfully unpack the promotional campaign around is the. The idea, I guess, of the American, quote, unquote, the American economic system. Can you talk a little bit about where this promotional campaign came from and. And sort of who was involved in pushing the quote, unquote, American economic system approach?
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C
Sure. This is the 1970s campaign.
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B
Yeah.
- [43:57]
C
Yeah. Okay. So, yes, so this is a campaign that's organized by the Advertising Council, which at this point is calling itself the Ad Council. And this campaign takes place in the 1970s. It's sort of oriented around the bicentennial in 1976. And what I think we see here is a call from business interests to, once again, there's this kind of persistent narrative of crisis. Right. We're in a crisis. We must respond to it. We must help people understand how the US Economy works. And so I show in that chapter that there are several sort of contextual points that are important for this, Right? So there's some both generally in terms of how people. The kind of public discourse about the economy, and also advertising in particular, Right. So this is around about the time that Milton Friedman publishes the essay the Social Responsibility of Businesses to Increase its Profits. This is around the time that the Powell memo comes out that sort of lays out strategies for building support for private enterprise amongst the populace. There's also some kind of questions about increased regulation of advertising around this time. And so people in the advertising industry are sort of mounting defenses in this regard. And so I think there's a couple of things that I want to say about this. First of all, this was sort of publicized at the time as being, like, the most monumental and massive campaign that the Ad Council had ever undertaken. And indeed it was. Was pretty big. So from 1976 to 1978, they distributed 11 million copies of a booklet. Then there was a big advertising campaign for it, and so on. So things like being enclosed within newspapers and magazines, library displays, direct requests through the advertisements, and so forth. So I think that one of the things that you see here is this sort of retreading of several things that at this point are economic education tropes, Right. The idea that the public must be uninformed to, you know, see things the way that they do, and that threats to the imperatives of the marketplace are framed as, like, intertwined with threats to Other kinds of freedoms, like expressive freedoms and like the civic freedoms of representative democracy. And so I think what you see here that's interesting is a sense amongst interested parties that this is required and some kind of re articulations of these tropes, but also some changes. So there's still this kind of sense of framing support for managerial capitalism as knowledge, but there's a different set of discourses about fairness and objectivity. So whereas groups like the Joint Council on Economic Education had this kind of analytical approach that was still quite institutional, right? Still interested in saying, okay, people need to understand how the economy works and that will allow them to make better choices. But ultimately people are in charge of this. Our institutions are in charge of this. To what gets expressed in the 1970s American economic system campaign, I would argue is something more in line with the suggestion that the market forces themselves are objective. So that's a pretty interesting change. And this campaign generated quite a bit of resistance. And so, for example, the Congressman, Benjamin Rosenthal was a Democrat from New York, launched an inquiry because part of the funding for this came from. From the federal government. There was a long inquiry. There's some pretty interesting congressional proceedings on it. Ultimately, it was cleared as not being wrongdoing by the General Accounting Office. There were also some kind of grassroots organizations who opposed this campaign on the grounds that it was too biased in one direction and basically attempted to mount counter campaigns in various ways, but weren't able to get the same kind of institutional support that the Ad Council's campaign was.
- [48:49]
B
One of the things that you show in the book is that the advertising industry itself yokes itself to these arguments about freedom and patriotism. Can you describe some of the maneuvers that made this argument possible for the advertising industry to embed itself in these conversations? Conversations about America and capitalism and democracy?
- [49:15]
C
Sure. So I think I mentioned that I think World War II is really a turning point here where people from the advertising industry in the US get involved in domestic messaging in support of the war effort during World War II. And this kind of culminates in a situation where just to draw on a couple of the folks whose work I am indebted to, by the end of World War II, you have a situation in which the advertising industry has benefited from the Office of War Information's decision to focus on building support morale. Inker Stoll mentions that this allows the advertising industry to come out of the war with a much improved public image, which had been pretty tarnished going into World War II. And Wendy Wall says that this kind of set of opportunities through the Office of War Information during the war allows the advertising industry to emerge from the World War II period with considerably more political power and with their opponents in the public discourse all but excluded. And so what this says to me is that, so we're coming out of the war, advertising industry has a better public image and more political power. But what I'm really interested in is how they've also sort of gained control over both the infrastructure for public messaging and this kind of capacity to make claims about working towards the collective good. And so these things I think you see really get enacted during and after World War II. So there's a set of claims that are being made here that are very interesting to me about how the advertising industry is particularly well positioned, right? Some of this is about saying, okay, if you want to reach the right publics with the right messages, who better than the advertising industry? Because they already have all of these kind of infrastructures and expertises around reaching particular people, targeting particular people, and crafting messages that will be persuaded to those people. So there's a kind of expertise claim right there. But there's also a parallel set of claims about how this is connected to patriotism, what's imagined to be like the American way of life, what economic education's supporters call the American economic system, Basically the way that industry was doing things in the United States. And so there's a set of claims around advertising supports a free press. It provides funding to the press. Therefore, advertising is simply by existing as an industry. It is, from this perspective of some of the economic education supporters, it is intrinsically supportive of a free society because it funds a free press. That's the rationale now. And that if one's understanding of the situation coming out of the Second World War is that public support for private enterprise needs to be built up, then the argument is that because of their kind of infrastructural knowledge and also their persuasive of expertise, the advertising industry is in a great place to do it. Some of the things that are really interesting about the dynamics about this, of how it takes place both before and after World War II is this set of claims where advertising trade groups position themselves and the advertising industry as both experts in public opinion management and defenders of democracy and freedom in ways that actually produces the same kinds of insider, outsider knowledge boundaries as trained economists do. So I'm drawing here from Richard Swedberg's work here. It talks about folk economics. What you see here is what I end up calling a kind of folk expertness a sort of enacting of the cultural and institutional dynamics of expertise based on this kind of direct knowledge that people in the advertising industry have. Have. So this kind of undergirds this set of claims that something needs to be done. The advertising industry are the people to do it. It's also good for their public image, which is in their interest because there's often sort of rumblings about tighter regulation on advertising, which gives the advertising industry a built in kind of motivation to do this kind of public image work. Right. To show sometimes they'll say things like we can show that we can do well by doing that advertising is itself not some nefarious thing, but something that can be used for the public benefit.
- [54:30]
B
Awesome. So there are a number of times through the book where you show different resistances to some of these promotional campaigns and to specific sponsored economic media. Do you think you can give an example of how some of these resistances came up and what happened as a result of different groups resisting this ephemeral media?
- [55:04]
C
Yeah, I'd be really happy to and thank you for asking me about it. So there's one of the reasons why I think I'm particularly excited when I come across these kind of moments of disagreement in the historical evidence. Of course conflict is interesting, but also it shows that I think that it pulls me back from any kind of temptation to imagine that this group of people who supported economic education were all completely like minded. They weren't all completely like minded by any means. Right. You've got a lot of different constituencies who are kind of interacting in this space. Often like you'll see that a kind of like vague and malleable term like economic education seems like something that a lot of different folks can sign up to. And when you actually get an to specific projects, that's when sometimes the kind of friction emerges about how different constituencies who are taking part in the project see what it is that they're doing. So one example of this is kind of related to the jcee, the Joint Council on Economic Education, who as we talked about a little bit earlier, is part of the face of this kind of alternative approach to economic education that's less focused on kind of flag waving, patriotic bombast and celebration of the virtues of private enterprise, but is oriented towards this more kind of analytical focus that's still ultimately anti communist, but is premised on this notion that teaching people how to think like economists will enable them to be better citizens because it'll enable them to engage in critical thinking. So there's an example of this from 1969, an ad council campaign that I think illustrates this quite vividly. So this was an unsuccessful campaign that was designed to address kind of limiting inflation. And this was actually a cooperative effort between the Advertising Council and the Joint Council on Economic Education, which I think kind of shows some of the tensions between their different approaches. This ultimately was an unsuccessful campaign. And my sense from the evidence that I've encountered about it is that perhaps partly it's because it got caught up in some political cross currents. Right? So this was an anti inflation campaign at a moment where, where Nixon, who was president at the time, was sort of doing some political jockeying around an income tax surcharge that was broadly seen as a war tax. So not very popular. And what you see in this campaign is this kind of tension, I would say, between the JCEE's focus on institutionalist expertise and the Ag Council's approach, which is much more about sort of making individual level asks to the members of the audience. So what you end up seeing is these contradictory campaign materials. So often it'll be the case that an Advertising council campaign will have like a series of advertisements and then there will be like an invitation in the advertisement to send off for an information relieflet. And so you've got these kind of contradictory campaign materials because the Ad Council ends up generating these consumer facing advertisements that are run around the theme of that, as they say, we could all be a little less piggy. And this features these sort of rather muppet like images of people with the heads of these kind of cartoonish pigs and says if we all could be a little less piggy, we could stop inflation by doing things like being, being circumspect in how much wages we demand for our jobs, cutting back from buying things on credit, not impulse shopping and so forth. So it's this very kind of individual oriented thing, the leaflet that is part of this, where in the advertisements they say, find out more about the problem and what you can do about it with this free booklet prepared by the Joint Council on Economic Education, which is called Inflation can be Stopped. So in contrast to these ads that are saying you individually should stop being stopped contributing to inflation, the leaflet produced by JCEE focuses much more on experts, right? It's much more kind of, it's much more in the nitty gritty of how economic management works and kind of uses this image of the economy as one big machine, right? So it says in the leaflet, look at it this way, our economic system is like a great abundance machine. It's so big that nobody has ever seen all of it, and that it's run by kind of different levers that can be pulled by the government and that people can take part by making their decisions on who to vote for and so forth. So we've got these two kind of very contradictory ideas. One of them's like, you personally can address the problem, and then the leaflet is much more kind of focused on experts. So, okay, a couple of things about this. There are some. Obviously, there's some kind of internal tension here. Here. There's also some criticisms from the public. One member of the public who wrote into a newspaper about this described it. The ads featuring these images of people as pigs, as tasteless and downright stupid. One of the people who was involved in it later described it to a reporter as, and I'm quoting here, a stinkeroo. And so I think that sometimes it can be a vivid story to talk about something that's failed. And this does certainly seem to have failed. They ended up distributing very few leaflets compared to other campaigns that had this structure. But I'm curious as to whether there's another explanation for how this campaign was meaningful, because I think that we can argue that it was proof of doing something, and yet there's this kind of scatteredness to it. And so I think you can read this as an indication that you've got these different constituencies who have different ideas about what's to be done about this problem that they seem to at least generally agree on. And also a sense of kind of shifting tones around what's important. Right. From what had previously been this kind of sense of, like, Cold War contestation between ideologies to more of a focus in the booklet, at least, on kind of management of crisis and preservation of individual and collective wealth.
- [62:26]
B
The pictures in the book of these particular ads are quite something, a little shocking, even, that people thought there would be appropriate or effective ways to convince people to ask for less money, for example.
- [62:47]
C
So.
- [62:47]
B
Thank you so much. I could keep asking you questions about this book. It is really wonderful. There's a ton of great archival detail in it, and if people get a chance to look at it, they can see all of that. I guess, briefly, I wanted to conclude by just asking what you. You're working on now.
- [63:08]
C
Yeah. And maybe I can just give kind of a brief comment, wrapping up the thoughts on the book and how that plays into what I'm working on now.
- [63:20]
B
Yeah, of course.
- [63:21]
C
So ultimately, I really see this story as a story about how the people who supported economic education, media, how they created the people who created this media or circulated it, or supported it, how they depicted themselves in each other, other, in moments of popular resistance, institutional resistance, or both. And something that I really draw on here is this kind of notion of when you start to tell stories about the world, then the pleasures of understanding yourself in particular ways in the world become available. So for the people who supported economic education media, I think that we can read these as imaginings of a world where optimism about a society organized around private enterprise is kind of a matter of neutral fact. And that in this setting, the supporters of economic education media could see themselves as public service minded experts. So if you end up asking, well, how did these things that look kind of obvious or silly or vain get made? I think one of the answers that we can give is that they offer particular meanings and kinds of sense making to some of the audiences of people who supported them. A narrative of public service that is sort of a counter narrative to accusations of exploitation or greed or the manipulation of the advertising industry. An affirmation that advertising was in line with the democratic principles of a free press us and that these could offer kind of a bit of a resolution of that kind of tension and central contradiction between selling and education, because it makes it possible to see these economic education media as public service right around ideas that private enterprise was an essential part of freedom, that media was an efficient way to get this message across and therefore it required people who were experts in public communication. And that there's this kind of style of self assured optimism that goes along with this, right? It becomes this kind of affect of soothing amid critique and the threat of regulation. And so that kind of understanding of looking to how sense making happens and how like narratives kind of position the world and people within it in a particular way. I'm still really interested in that, that. And so as I move forward in my work, there was so much that I wanted to include in this book that I couldn't. And so moving forward, I'm able to sort of explore some of those threads of things. Part of that's about thinking about just how to approach promotional culture and persuasion, right? So things like what's the difference between promotion and persuasion? I've been really interested throughout the course of the book and beyond about looking at how people who either supported or critiqued these campaigns talked about their legitimacy. What were the grounds upon which they said that they were legitimate or not? Many of the critics of various economic education campaigns were less worried about the fact that the ideas and the campaigns were being promoted but that they were being, you know, from the points of view of people like Benjamin Rosenthal was critiquing the ad council's campaigns, was saying that the ad council just had an outsized voice in the public conversation that sort of drowned everybody else out. So that kind of question of how does the relative power of different voices in a conversation, how does that affect people's assessments of legitimacy? What's enduring here in terms of questions about persuasion and influence, have been around for as long as people have been talking, talking to each other. Some of those may be being expressed quite differently as socio technical contexts change. The area that I'm most interested in looking at that for right now is just the notion of the public service advertisement as a media form. So the work on economic education touched on the public service advertisement in several moments. But there's a lot that was sort of outside of the scope of the book that I'm really interested to examine. Right. So what assumptions does, like what makes a PSA a psa and who says, what assumptions does it rest on about the different purposes of public communication of different kinds of ideas, like what counts as being in the public interest? Who gets included in that definition or excluded from it? And what pressures or incentives are introduced when a public service message travels in the form of an advertisement? So those are some of the questions that I'm mulling over as I move forward.
- [68:21]
B
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time and congratulations on the book.
- [68:26]
C
This was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [68:27]
B
Yes, take care.
- [68:28]
C
Bye. Bye.