"My first real cigarette pleasure . . .": The Development of a Consumer-Oriented Society in the 1920s

[Note: Most of the images reproduced here come from the archives compiled by Roland Marchand and made available at the University of California, Davis. Although I take issue with Marchand's essay, "Visions of Classlessness," it is important to acknowledge that his work, especially Advertising The American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (University of California Press, 1986) is fundamental to any understanding of the topic. His "Advertisements as Social Tableaux" is available online, courtesy of Project Muse.]

Legitimating Desire

Two women, clearly friends, both stylishly dressed, are sharing confidences in this ad from the late 1920s. The topic of discussion is controversial. "I really don't know if I should smoke . . ." one Chesterfield ad had its female protagonist admit. Women hadn't started smoking until they got the vote, she went on. Of course, that was not a reason to smoke. The reason was the same as that given in the Camels ad, pleasure. Smoking gave her a lot of pleasure. Besides, her boyfriend smoked. So did her brothers, but not, she did not need to say, her mother. Smoking, the Chesterfield ad, suggested was a way to be modern, to claim equality with men, and to participate in the new spirit of the age, the open pursuit of pleasure. The Camels ad made the same appeals but more tersely and with a scarcely disguised hint that the pleasure involved was deeply sensual. Little wonder the conversation is confidential. Your "first time" was a subject you could only share with your closest friend.

The years following World War I witnessed the birth of the first consumption-driven economy. Previously, the central economic challenge was to produce enough to meet the basic needs of the population for food, shelter, clothing, and transportation. In the '20s, however, the challenge was to consume enough of the ever-increasing mountain of goods to keep the economy growing. The shift is nicely illustrated in the sagas of Ford and General Motors. Ford's triumph in the 1910s was one of production. The giant River Rouge complex, the largest manufacturing facility in the world, turned out Model Ts in ever greater numbers. Ford's goal was an increasingly more reliable car at an increasingly more affordable price. G.M.'s triumph in the 1920s was in marketing. It became the world's largest industrial concern by offering a "line" of cars from the economical Chevrolet to the luxurious Cadillac. Each Model T looked like every other. You could have it in any color you liked, Henry Ford famously remarked, so long as you liked black. G.M. introduced the "model year." The 1928 Chevy had distinctive look that differentiated it from the 1927 even if the cars were virtually identical under the sheet metal. [See the work of Alfred D. Chandler, particularly Giant enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the automobile industry; sources and readings (Harcourt, Brace, 1964).]

Ford, General Motors, and a host of other car manufacturers could produce automobiles by the millions. Could they sell them? So too with radios, washing machines, refigerators, cigarettes, motion pictures, and innumerable other products. Unsurprisingly, advertising became a major service industry in the 1920s. Buying on credit became common. Buying itself became common.

In earlier decades people bought far less. Consider shoes. Only the rich had more than a few pairs. (See Solemates: The Century in Shoes.) So too with dresses and suits. The daytime uniform for "working girls" prior to the war was a long dark skirt, fitted narrowly at the waist, and a "shirtwaist," a white blouse with billowing sleeves, a high neck, and a narrow waist. Even men in white-collar positions had very limited wardrobes. A man changed his collar and his cuffs, not his shirt. After the war it became fashionable for the middle classes to acquire more in the way of clothing, to change clothes every day, and, with much coaching from soap manufacturers, to feel uncomfortable, dirty, if they had to wear an article of clothing more than once without washing it.

Clothing was just the beginning. Household appliance proliferated. Some, like washing machines, were major purchases. Others, like toasters, were small. But purchasing them became the norm. So too for radios, despite their great expense and the paucity of available programming. Americans embarked upon an unprecedented voyage of consumption. They would have more and better products than dreamed of in earlier ages.

Having more required more than mass production, available credit, and omnipresent advertising. It also required a new mentality, an ethos of consumption. Consuming became a way of defining yourself, of measuring your standing in the community. What Thorstein Veblen described as the mores of the elite in The Theory of the Leisure Class became those of the middle class as well. The "leisure class" used consumption as a way of showing off their "pecuniary prowress." The key was "conspicuousness." Your clothes had to attract attention or they could not be fashionable. Your "ability to pay" had to be visible to all. At the end of the nineteenth century, conspicuous consumption was the province of the idle rich. In the 1920s the middle class learned to ape their betters. [Roland Marchand has argued the exact opposite, that the advertising of the '20s offered "visions of classlessness."]

A Lucky Strike ad described this new ethos as a liberation from ancient prejudices. "American Intelligence," outfitted in red, white, and blue, unshackles women from "false modesty" in bathing costumes and from the prejudice against smoking. [Click on image for larger version.] It had been considered immodest for a woman to expose her bare legs. But "American Intelligence" proved that a sensible swimsuit promoted both "better health and pure enjoyment." The use of "pure" is cunning. It suggests, as with the term "false modesty," that the old moral prohibitions were simply wrong, "ancient prejudices." The new suit is "pure." It suggests too that the enjoyment is more intense once "false modesty" about the female body is banished. The implication about smoking is clear. Enjoyment is at the heart of the new ethos.

Consider this 1923 ad for Buick. Its new roadster was a "companion" that "all women admire." More than that. Women "ardently desire it." Having it will "immeasurably" enhance a woman's pleasure. Her "gratification" will be "heightened." The admen of the 1920s went Veblen one better. He understood status and the human desire to feel superior. They added sex. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, this was no longer simply a matter of words. This ad appeared in Redbook magazine in 1932:

"The Newer, the Nuder" trumpeted a Bon Wit Teller (a leading department store) ad. The woman in the Redbook ad may be shopping for lingerie with a woman friend. A saleswoman may be attending to her. But she imagines men looking at her in her chemise. Unlike corset ads which stressed the importance of appearing to have a youthful figure, the slip will not improve woman's figure. Unlike the corset, which is not to be seen, the implication of this ad is that the woman will be seen in her slip. And not just by her husband. "This Whole Room Is Swarming With Men!" Her expression suggests something more than confidence at the prospect. Her friend smiles encouragingly.

Learning How

Certain words recur throughout the advertising of the 1920s -- smart, discriminating, discerning. The new abundance of goods presented middle-class consumers with a new challenge. Of all the soaps, watches, shoes, radios, how was one to choose?
"Certain fortunate people," a Camels ad observed, "seem to be born with a flair for life . . . an instinct for good clothes, good food, good books, and good friends. . . ." They understood "the art of gracious living." [Click on image for larger version.] Of course, they smoked Camels.

How better to find your way through the bewildering morass of competing products than to follow the lead of discerning consumers? The November 1926 Ladies Home Journal carried an ad for Woodbury's soap which proclaimed that 102 debutantes in Boston and New York preferred Woodbury's. The manufacturer had interviewed 224 debutantes. 122 "girls scattered their choice over 22 different soaps," an average of five per. But 102, who presumably could buy any soap and who had grown up in the most discriminating households, chose Woodbury's. Yet anyone could afford it. A single bar lasted a month to six weeks and cost pennies.

Roland Marchand argued in his essay, "Visions of Classness," that such ads promoted a democracy of consumption. Even though the average young woman would not be "coming out" this or any other season, would not be dancing to the seductive strains of the latest jazz music on "polished floors" or receive "sophisticated compliments and delicious invitations all day long . . .," she could afford this one "essential luxury," runs Marchand's argument. This is correct but not complete. One point of the ad is to encourage a sense of vicarious consumption, though not in the sense Veblen used the term. Veblen had noted that priests and leisure-class wives were both vicarious consumers in the sense that their expensive garb testified not to their own power but to that of their respective masters. Hence the total disregard for the comfort of the wearer. The shopgirl who bought Woodbury's soap was a vicarious consumer in a different sense, according to Marchand's argument. She bought the soap as a way of identifying her own life with the far more glamorous one of the debutante. This is a striking insight but not an argument for "visions of classlessness" since the ad would make no sense in a classless world.

Another point the ad makes is far less subtle but equally important. How is the consumer to choose among the score or more of soaps available in every drug store? The Camels ad makes this very clear. Only "certain fortunate people" have a flair for "the art of gracious living." The consumer needs this ad precisely because she is not one of the fortunate few.

"That last lingering look in the mirror -- does it show a skin radiant with fresh beauty?" This is the voice of insecurity, not classlessness.

In addition to the proliferation of products, consumers faced another challenge. They might acquire a perfectly serviceable product but still inadvertently call attention to their own lack of discernment. Would a woman choose the right silver? It might be expensive and still be incorrect. She might even choose the wrong toilet paper.

Note the string of descriptives -- elegance, refinement, well-conducted, discriminating, fine old linen, women of intuitive daintiness. The "intuitive" is especially interesting. It reinforces the header -- Women sense it immediately. But, if they did, there would be no need for the ad. It is precisely because the consumer lacks "intuitive daintiness," not to mention elegance, refinement, and discrimination, that she reads this ad.

This simple need to learn how to consume -- it was a new practice, after all -- helps explain the endorsement ad. The unnamed debutantes of the Woodbury's ads furnish examples. More usually, however, a celebrity lends her name. Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence, for example, endorsed Elgin watches. Even "her dearest enemy" would admit that Lawrence was "one of the smartest women to step across a stage or a drawing room." "Naturally," she bought her clothes in Paris, in the salon of her favorite couturier. But she bought her wristwatch in America. Elgin had commissioned the leading Paris designers to come up with a Parisienne collection. Here too is evidence for Marchand's point that, since the watches started at $15, anyone could afford this one essential luxury. However, the prices topped out at $650. This is not classlessness. It is the General Motors approach to marketing. A Chevrolet was a perfectly good car, but it was not a Cadillac, and everyone knew the difference.

Becoming Modern

If "smart" and "discriminating" were words to conjure with in the ad copy of the 1920s, so too was "modern." Indeed it was the word. And, since more than 80% of all purchases were made by women, and since, therefore, more than 80% of all advertisements targetted women, the ads dealt with the modern woman, the modern wife, the flapper. As such they wrestled with a variety of cultural concerns.

Go to Ad*Access at Duke University where you can browse the archives of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. It was perhaps the largest ad agency of the 1920s. Click on Beauty and Hygiene and then upon Feminine Hygiene, 1920s. Take a look at the "Modernizing Mother" ad campaign the agency put together for Modess in 1929. At right is "episode seven." For a larger version, click on the image. Consider these questions

Student notes